by Smith, Skye
The other woman smiled and drawled out, "You go ahead, honey. You just take as many as ya like. Flyin's a bitch ain' it, specially with all that new security. I almost died of embarrassment when they chose me to be frisked. The nerve. Ah mean, do I look like a terrorist to you? Jiminy, I felt like slapping the woman's face, the places she touched."
Maya just nodded, her mouth full.
"Good ain't they?" smiled the first woman. She looked around because a waitress had arrived. "Hey Annie, another high tea for our friend, here, and run it on our tab." Annie saw Maya nod, and then she hurried away. "She hates me callin' her Annie. Her real name's Anita. Got a funny accent, I mean not English funny. Some other kind of funny. Have another, honey. Don't slow down to be polite. There ain't no queen here today."
Maya finished her mouthful. "Huh?"
"The queen, you know, Betty Two. See on the tower. The flag isn't up. That means the queen ain't home. That's why we're here. When Betty's not home, there are tours of her castle."
Wendy re-entered the room and stood just beyond the table of big women. She looked at the two women and decided not to join them. She motioned to Maya that she was going up to the room and then flashed her fingers to give the room number.
"You mean that the Queen of England lives there?" Maya pointed out the window.
"Sure 'nough. Nice place, but it must cost her a fortune to keep it up. I mean, just keeping the place vacuumed would be a full time job for a dozen maids. I liked it so much today that we are staying another day, so we can do another tour tomorrow. Besides, the high street around the corner has stores that aren't in any of the malls at home."
"Mary is a shopaholic," explained her friend, "and she can't believe that in England she is only a size fourteen. Between you and me, she's just buying the stuff so she can show off the size label when she gets home." They both laughed.
* * * * *
After half a plate of brownies, some cucumber sandwiches without crusts, and two cups of tea with milk and sugar, Maya felt almost human enough to climb the stairs. She didn't like elevators. The kindly, old-homeTexan ladies had already left her, in a flurry of camera bags when a gilded horse carriage had clopped by.
The door to their room was unlocked and she found Wendy sitting at a small table looking out a bay window at the castle. Maya put a napkin down in front of her on the table and opened it to reveal a half dozen small cakes, but no brownies.
"No, thank you, Maya," Wendy said in a tired voice. "I am pushing thirty, so those would go straight to my hips. I must not weaken. Even having one would be my undoing and in two years I would look like your Texan friends. I mean, really. High tea for breakfast. It's no wonder they look like hippos."
"I'll put them in the fridge," Maya said, looking around the room for it. "Uh, where's the fridge?"
"This is England, dear. They do things differently. No fridge in the room, a shower that barely trickles hot water, and light bulbs that aren't bright enough to read by."
"Well, whatever, I'm going to stand under a trickle and then go to bed."
"No, you're not. You are going to stand under a trickle and then come shopping with me. We need to get you some conservative clothes for your school duties." Wendy chuckled to herself. She sounded like the girl's mother. "Besides, the fastest way to get your body over jet lag and onto local time, is not to go to bed until normal bed time."
* * * * *
The blue pinstriped power suit looked good on Maya. The skirt was down to her knee, but had two kick pleats so that she could walk normally. The hem flipped seductively as she walked. The jacket fitted well and made her waist look thinner than it was, and her bust larger. The effect was definitely curvy, hourglass curvy. Maya took her eyes off the mirror and looked down at the price tag. "Three hundred and fifty dollars!" she exclaimed to Wendy. "No way."
"That is three hundred and fifty for the jacket only, and it is pounds, not dollars." Wendy told the sales girl that they would take the suit, and two blouses, one white and businesslike, and the other light blue with a slight ruffle at the neckline. She handed the clerk a Visa card. "Come along, we have to find some conservative shoes to go with it."
"No way, I'm not paying this much for clothes."
"YOU are not paying anything, the company is, so stop making a scene and go and change." God, thought Wendy, I wouldn't have made this fuss at her age if someone had offered to buy me an expensive wardrobe, as Maya moped off to the change room.
The Texans were right, the high street of Windsor did have some fabulous shops. They had a bite to eat at a cafe in an old-fashioned railway station, complete with old-fashioned steam train, and continued their slow walk about. As a first stop on a trip to England, this was really easy to take. So close to Heathrow, and yet so different from Kansas, and very polite and quiet.
Maya didn't make it all the way until bedtime before she fell asleep. Fifteen minutes of English TV had her asleep in her clothes on the bed. She woke up in the pitch dark, and decided she had better get undressed and brush her teeth, only to find out that she was already undressed, and that Wendy was close beside her in the bed. She made a mental note to warn Wendy that the aura could make her feel like she was in love, but it was just the aura.
Tomorrow. For now it felt delicious to be spooned by this sweet-smelling woman. A woman with silky skin and enticing breasts, and gentle breaths, as in, no snoring.
* * * * *
* * * * *
Sir Nigel introduced her to the other members of the interview panel. She had worn some smart dress gloves with her power suit so she did not mind taking their hands as they were offered. The last man was introduced as the History Master, but he looked more like the mad scientist off the movie 'Back to the Future', and he refused her hand with a snort.
"So explain to me again, Nigel, why a girl who looks no older than a senior in our girls' school, is a part of this panel?"
"I thought I made myself clear last month. She is a 'divvy'. She can quickly divine and separate the gifted students from those not so gifted. It will save us and the applicants much time and much paperwork and testing."
"I don't believe ..." the man started but was interrupted.
"It doesn't matter what you believe. This is a proof of concept trial, and if the concept works it will benefit the schools greatly."
"But she is an American. Listen to her colonial drawl. I doubt she speaks any other languages. Girl, what other languages do you speak?"
Maya answered for herself, before Sir Nigel could craft a suitable retort. "Strange that a History Master doesn't realize that we haven't been colonies since the 1600's. My drawl is therefore 'provincial'. As for my other languages," she said, switching into Sanskrit, "I speak only the oldest and most established intellectual language on the planet."
The History Master looked at her and tried to catch the meaning of the gibberish. He looked around at the panel to see if any others had understood. Sir Nigel looked down, read some of Wendy's briefing notes, and then spoke up. "I believe that was Sanskrit, Jacob. Perhaps now we can begin our first interview." He sounded like he was trying not to laugh.
Maya had been rehearsed in her role. She took her gloves off, stood and went to the door and called the name of the first boy. When the boy entered the room, a cute kid with fluffy hair and a nervous smile, she took his hand and led him to a chair and asked him to sit. She shook her head at Sir Nigel. There was no darkness in the boy. Her part of the interview was complete. She sat poised and quiet and waited while the panel grilled him, and then asked for the next boy to be called.
Out of the ten boys interviewed that morning, only three made her shudder. Sir Nigel was not amused. "And you are sure none of the others...?"
"I've said before. I am sure that the three are, umm, gifted. I have never had a false positive before. Of course, I would have no way of knowing if I had a false negative. So if I say a boy is gifted, then he is. If I say that he isn't, he may be."
Sir Nigel stood, an
d the others stood on his lead. "Thank you, Maya. We need to wait for the results of our other psychological tests to see how accurate you were. This interview panel is adjourned until... let's see. Two this afternoon, in this same room. Thank you all."
Maya stayed back thinking that Sir Nigel would wish to speak with her alone, but he hurried quickly out of the room, followed by most of the others. She found herself alone in the room with Jacob, the History Master. It was unfortunate that they had gotten off to such a poor start, because he would be the person in charge of the school's rare book collection.
"I'm sorry I embarrassed you before," said Maya through a pouting smile. "I was so nervous that it came out all wrong." He snorted rudely and tried to push by her, but she held him back with her gloved hand. "I was so hoping that you could tell me something about this ring," She forced the old bog iron ring into the man's hand.
He did not even look at it, and immediately tried to return it to her. "You have wasted enough of my time today, young lady. I will not have you wasting any more." Then he felt the heft of the ring and opened his hand and looked at it. "Oh my God. Where did you get this?"
"It's been in my family for a thousand years, but we don't know much about it. Nothing was ever written down about it. We think it is a signet ring from the Fens region of England and made from bog iron."
"Bog iron? Bog iron, of course it is. Why didn't I think of that?" Jacob said it more to himself than to her.
"Well, because I like, just gave it to you." Maya didn't say more. She had just slipped up and said the 'like' word. She had been practicing speaking in the formal Harvard way of her great-grandmother in hopes of not sounding so vulgar to these intellectual types. One of the hardest things was to give up the 'like' word. It was like, so useful.
"Come with me," said the History Master and almost ran down the hallway and into an office. His office going by the name on the door. She closed the door behind her, while he was opening a safe the size of two filing cabinets. He rummaged in the safe and said "aha" and then swung backwards into the swivel chair behind his desk.
He pulled an old-fashioned stamp pad forward and then pushed her ring into the pad and stamped it onto a blotter. Or was it her ring, because then he did the same thing with another ring that looked just like hers. He inspected the two stamps through a magnifying glass. "They are different."
"Is that bad or good?" she asked, bending closer so she could see.
"Neither, it just is." he replied. "Bog iron. The Fens. Bog iron."
"Yes, you know, the iron that Vikings used on their ships. We think our ancestors were Anglo-Frisians from the Fen lands near to Cambridge." She looked down at the ring. "Ugh, my ring still had old sealing wax stuck to it. That stamp ink won't ruin my chances of having the wax tested for its age, will it?" she asked.
"Oh dear. Ooops. I should have looked more closely at the signet." He started rubbing her ring with a tissue immediately trying to get all the ink off it. "My ring, that is the school's ring, well, I have been trying to prove that it was the signet ring of Hereward the Wake. A difficult task since most of what was written about the man was fiction written centuries after his death. You do know who Hereward was?"
She shook her head. He grimaced and said, "Americans! What do they teach you in school?" She stuck out her tongue at him. He stared at it, and suddenly realized how attractive this young woman was. Comely attractive. Wheat-colored hair, amber skin, sea green eyes with flecks of other colors in them, and the tongue. He tried to take his mind off her lips and tongue. It didn't work.
Maya saw a mask of lust glance across his face and decided to play to it. This man had a brother ring to hers, and had been researching it. She had to find out what he knew. What harm would it do to be nice to him? When a young woman wanted to be nice to an old man, flirting and teasing was always the best start. It made them feel young again, and cost her nothing. It made them be nice back, hoping for more.
"So this Hereward guy, like, that is his crest? Is that how you know it is his ring?"
"Ah, you have delved directly into my biggest problem. No one ever recorded the crests of the Anglo Danish petty nobles. Hereward was a bastard, I mean by birth, so I have never found mention of his signet in all my readings. He was supposedly sworn as a knight to an abbey, yet nothing."
"Do you recognize the crest on my ring?"
"No," he said, as he turned on his computer.
"I suppose it would take years of research to find it or not find it, just like it did for yours."
"To not find it, yes. To find it, no, just a few minutes once I scan the crest into my computer." He took the blotter with the inked signet to an all-in-one printer on a side table and pressed some buttons, and a minute later was looking at the scanned image on his computer screen. He used some software to 'cut out' just her crest and then opened some other software and pasted the image into it. An hourglass popped up.
While they waited she took the opportunity to move around to stand behind where he was seated. This put her breasts at eye height for him. Then she turned his swivel chair a bit and leaned forward into him as if she were reading the screen. He moaned softly to himself.
"Tell me about Hereward," she asked softly.
"How much time do you have? I have been researching him for fifteen years, ever since I was at Cambridge." He looked at the hourglass. Still working. "You must have heard of Robin Hood. Well, Hereward was the original, the real thing. After the Norman invasion, you know, 1066 and all that, William the Conqueror. Normans versus Saxons."
She nodded encouragingly. She had read some stuff on Wikipedia after they had found the ring.
"Well, it soon became obvious that the Normans were out to completely slaughter the Anglo-Danes. The Anglo-Danes were the ruling class that the Normans were replacing. Instead of just making them swear allegiance to William, the Normans were getting rid of them."
"Well, I suppose all of the battles cost a lot of lives." She thought for a moment, chewing her bottom lip. "Wait, you said Anglo-Dane, not Anglo-Saxon. Everything I read talks about Anglo-Saxons."
Jacob brought himself back from gazing at her bottom lip with an effort. "Ah...they are wrong. The ruling class in place before William was mostly Anglo-Danish. Most of the people in the north were also Anglo-Danes. William was paying off his army by creating a lot of wealthy English widows and then marrying his own men to those widows, which gave them a claim to the wealth.
Eventually the Anglo-Danes figured this tactic out and rebelled, so then William changed tactics and instead burned the crops, burned the houses and killed the animals and left the Anglo-Danes to freeze and starve to death and kill each other for food. You see, he wanted serfs, you know, slaves. Anglo-Danes were rebelling against serfdom, so he starved them. Starving men signed their entire families into serfdom."
"Blah, blah, blah," she said, "where was Hereward in all this?"
"He led the rebellion in the Fens near Cambridge, from a village called Ely. It's on an island in the swamps. It was a true peasant rebellion. It scared the 'H' out of the pope because peasant rebellions had a habit of getting really ugly and spreading quickly. I mean, once the peasants realize that they can kill the ruling class, they tend to do a lot of it in a hurry."
The computer went 'bing'. He looked at it and his face grew intent. "No. That isn't possible."
"What isn't possible?" she asked, pushing her breast against his cheek again so she could see the screen.
"It is the crest of Margaret of Scotland. Saint Margaret. Why would her crest be on an iron ring? It makes no sense. She was a queen, a mother of kings and queens. Her rings would have been crafted from gold." He clicked and clicked and opened an image of Margaret's crest and then compared it for himself. There was no mistake. He felt his blood stirring and it wasn't just from the breast brushing against his cheek.
"If I can prove a connection between Queen Margaret and Hereward, then I will be offered a professorship at Cambridge," he said softly, as i
f to himself.
"So you will help me trace my ring?" she asked.
He looked up from her breast and into her eyes. She was staring down at him and her lips were so close to his that he could easily lift his head and kiss them. Women had always confused him. He never knew what they expected. Did she want him to kiss her, or would she slap his face and scream for help? He felt very strange, as if he were about to pass out.
"Just breathe," she whispered gently, "or better yet, yawn." This guy really had no experience with women. He was looking into her eyes and not breathing. He was about to pass out. Her words triggered a response and he breathed again. She took off her right glove and grasped his wrist as if she were taking his pulse. No darkness. He wasn't 'gifted'. "Are you okay?"
"I think so. My heart is fluttering. I have a flakey heart that sometimes races but doesn't pump any blood. For a moment it was as if my whole world stood still. You are very pretty. Maybe that was it." He hoped that was it. He hadn't been back to see the heart specialist since he was told to come in every six months. That was five years ago.
Maya looked up on the clock on the wall. It was one of those ancient ones that had the big hand and the little hand, so she had to think a little to figure out the time. "Are you well enough to escort me to the dining hall? I'm supposed to be there in a few minutes, and I'm not supposed to be around the students without supervision." On that thought, she put her glove back on, and picked her ring up. It fit well enough on her finger if she were wearing a glove.
"Oh, of course, we are all supposed to be dining with the other masters. I completely forgot the time. Come, we must hurry. We can take the tunnels."
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 14 - St Margaret's Memoirs
As Jacob led Maya through a maze of tunnels in what must have been a war bunker under the school grounds, he pointed out the rare book room. She was very thankful that this man wasn't 'gifted'. She saw nobody else in the tunnels, and the thick concrete walls were certainly soundproof, scream proof. When they entered the huge dining hall it was by a small door near the head table, the master tables. They sat in down in the only two vacant places. Maya was between Jacob and Sir Nigel.
