An Argumentation of Historians Read online

  Slowly at first, but with increasingly long swings the tree trunk began to move backwards and forwards until it was scything through the air like something out of Edgar Allan Poe, building up an unstoppable momentum.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said to Peterson.

  ‘Disturbingly similar to “The Pit and the Pendulum”, isn’t it? There will be tears before bedtime.’

  ‘There always are,’ I said, ‘but today, none of them will be ours. Hang on – this next swing should do it.’

  The next swing did do it.

  Urged on by worryingly realistic orc war cries and drum beats, the trunk swung forwards one last time, impacting the barn doors with a massive crash.

  The doors fragmented into a million flying pieces. Together with the surrounding door frames. And the walls. And the roof. Slowly, deafeningly and with surprising dignity, the entire bloody barn fell down. Massive amounts of dust, chaff and God-knows-what mushroomed into the air, enveloping us all.

  ‘Well,’ said Peterson, coughing. ‘What do you know? It appears we can hit a barn door, after all.’

  My first thought was shit – what was I going to tell Dr Bairstow, but as it turned out, destroying the barn was the least of our problems. And there aren’t many establishments where you can say that.

  I fought my way out of a suffocating cloud of pulverised ex-barn just as Markham, staring over my shoulder, shouted, ‘Code Red. Security Section to me. On the double,’ and someone else shouted ‘Behind you, Max.’

  A familiar strong wind stirred my hair.

  I turned around, expecting the worst.

  I got it.

  A twelve-foot-high teapot was standing on the South Lawn.

  Again.

  I stood staring with my mouth open but fortunately, Markham is quite well equipped to deal with this sort of thing. In only a moment, half the Security Section was surrounding the teapot and the other half was racing away for weapons. Although I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be needed. I knew who this was. Adrian and Mikey were back.

  We’d met them a little while ago when they’d turned up at St Mary’s to visit us as if we were some sort of historical curiosity. Or, as Peterson had said afterwards, a major historical event in contemporary time. Anyway, they’re a couple of renegade teenagers – geniuses the pair of them – fleeing up and down time in a homemade pod and getting themselves into all sorts of trouble. Their pod – and feel free to disbelieve me – is teapot-shaped, about twelve feet high, amateurishly sprayed in what are supposed to be woodland camouflage colours, and with a hand-painted Union Jack on the side. They are constantly pursued by the Time Police who will shoot them dead if they ever catch them.

  Dr Bairstow, greatly taken with the awe and reverence with which Adrian and Mikey had regarded him, had allowed us to restock their pod, mend the radiation leak that was slowly killing them and offered them sanctuary in the future should they ever need it. It looked as if that day had come.

  As if in confirmation of this thought, the hatch was thrown open and Adrian’s head appeared. He was crying.

  ‘Help. Please help. It’s Mikey. Help us.’

  Dieter pushed his way through the ring of security guards. ‘Toss down your ladder.’

  Their heavy wooden ladder thudded to the ground. Dieter climbed up and peered inside their pod, shouted, ‘Dr Stone – we have a medical emergency here.’ And climbed back down again.

  Dr Stone, who’d been with us long enough to know he should turn up at one of Professor Rapson’s little jaunts into Practical History with a fully equipped medical team, shot up the ladder and disappeared down into the pod.

  Dr Bairstow appeared at my elbow. ‘What time is it, Dr Maxwell?’

  ‘Just gone half past three, sir.’

  ‘That pod must be out of here by five at the very latest.’

  ‘Understood, sir.’

  Adrian and Mikey were never more than two hours ahead of their pursuers. The Time Police couldn’t catch them, but Adrian and Mikey couldn’t throw them off either. It was a kind of dreadful stalemate that Dr Bairstow had always suspected would end badly and it would appear that, today, it had.

  Mikey was being lifted from the teapot and carefully lowered down the ladder. There was a very great deal of blood, all of it fresh. Adrian, following on their heels, was white-faced and panicking. My heart went out to him. He was so young. And Mikey was even younger.

  They laid her on the grass while Dr Stone and the medical team gathered round. Someone organised a stretcher comprising broken bits of barn and an orc cloak and a few minutes later they were all heading towards Sick Bay at top speed, passing Leon on the way.

  He hobbled towards us at the best speed he could muster. ‘Is this it?’

  I remembered he hadn’t met our lovable scamps before.

  I nodded. ‘Leon, we need to get this pod out of here. The Time Police are less than two hours behind and they’re not a nice bunch.’

  They weren’t. Matthew Ellis is the acceptable face of the Time Police. Most of the rest of them are a bunch of homicidal thugs with the IQ of earwax.

  Dieter was already disappearing into the teapot. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Leon, can you make it up here?’

  ‘I can,’ he said, handing me his stick.

  I knew better than to say, ‘Are you sure?’ or, ‘Be careful,’ contenting myself with, ‘Try not to break anything.’

  He grinned at me, suddenly looking much younger than he had in ages. And people think he’s the respectable one in our marriage.

  Dr Bairstow intervened. ‘Dr Peterson, I would like you to take care of things at this end. Dr Maxwell, see to our young friends, if you please.’

  We both said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I set off for Sick Bay.

  Adrian was pacing up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Wringing his hands. I didn’t know people really did that. Cox and Evans were with him. They were saving their legs by sitting down and watching him pace up and down. Not that Adrian was any threat to anyone at this precise moment.

  ‘Where’s Mikey?’

  They nodded towards a door with a red light over. ‘Prepping for surgery.’

  Adrian surged towards me, his long coat flapping around him. ‘Dr Maxwell, you have to … they shot her. They shot Mikey.’

  ‘We’ll talk about that later,’ I said gently. ‘Right now, we’re a little preoccupied with saving you both from our friends in the Time Police. Mikey’s getting the best treatment there is and we’re hiding your pod. All of us are prepared to lie like stink to the Time Police, so there really is nothing to worry about. Now, I need one or two things from you. Firstly, do they know Mikey’s a girl?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s never come up.’

  Evans was grinning at me.

  ‘Right, you two …’ I turned to our trusty security guards. ‘I’m taking Adrian with me. The Time Police will be here soon and I need the Security Section to buy me time up here. Don’t tell me how you’re going to do it.’

  I called up Markham. ‘I’m going to need you to delay the Time Police for as long as possible.’

  ‘Already on it.’

  ‘Thank you. Mr Dieter?’

  ‘Busy, Max.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘There’s some damage here. Talk later.’ He closed the link.

  I left them to it.

  ‘Dr Peterson?’

  ‘Everything fine here, Max. A lot of barn-related trauma but all minor injuries.’

  ‘What sort of minor injuries?’

  ‘The sort you get when an old barn falls on you.’

  ‘Nothing serious? At all?’

  ‘Not really. Even Bashford’s fine.’

  ‘Good God. Are you sure?’

  ‘I know. Sykes reckons he can’t have been present when the barn collapsed and only joined us afterwards. The thing is, there’s a big patch of blood on the grass where we got Mikey out.’

  ‘Then we need a number of serious casualties to account for all the blood.’
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  ‘And you will have them. Step forward, Mr Bashford.’

  I said, ‘Tim …?’

  ‘And Mr Swanson, sir, if you would be so good.’

  ‘Tim, don’t tell me what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Wasn’t going to,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Talk to you later.’

  I closed the link and said to Adrian, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’

  And Markham thinks I don’t get the cultural references.

  The Time Police were seven minutes late. Peterson tutted. ‘Couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.’

  ‘Don’t forget to tell them that. Especially while they’re holding their guns.’

  Dr Bairstow was nowhere to be seen. He tends to stay back during this sort of thing. I like to think it’s so he can bail us out afterwards, although sometimes I have my doubts.

  I was back outside at the scene of our recent barn catastrophe. When I’d left, there’d been a very large pile of dusty wood, a lot of coughing and recrimination, and one or two minor casualties. I was now present in a war zone.

  The surely much too large to be just our barn heap of wood was partly on fire. Smoke drifted listlessly across a scene of complete devastation. Broken people lay everywhere. Miss Lingoss, Mr Atherton and Mr Lindstrom were half buried under the debris. Miss Lingoss was artistically shrieking with pain. Half her face was smothered in blood. Atherton was ominously white and silent. Miss Sykes was weeping piteously over a felled Bashford who was pumping blood into the ground at an alarming rate.

  ‘If they don’t get a move on we’re going to run out of blood,’ said Peterson, casting nervous glances over his shoulder.

  ‘Dear God …’ I said, appalled at the carnage.

  He grinned. ‘Good, isn’t it. Professor Rapson and Mr Swanson got the casualty make-up out. From our disaster drills. We have broken limbs, fractured skulls, severed arteries, massive internal trauma – the lot. What’s one casualty amongst so many?’

  A trail of injured and moaning people were being helped to their feet and slowly making their way towards Sick Bay.

  And here they came …

  A dramatically large black pod had materialised outside Hawking. The door opened and they poured out. Four of them as usual. I watched them approach, guns at the ready.

  I whispered to Peterson, ‘I gather Leon and Dieter got the pod away?’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘Don’t tell me where.’

  ‘Don’t know where.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Adrian?’

  ‘With Mrs Enderby.’

  He blinked. ‘O … K …’ He turned back to the carnage around us. ‘They’re here, everyone. Let’s go.’ He began to stride about, barking orders, a shining example of a Deputy Director in complete control. It was quite impressive if I do say so myself. ‘Be careful with those timbers, you don’t want to make things any worse. Get those people to Sick Bay. Report to Nurse Hunter. Dr Stone is in surgery. Field medics to Mr Bashford and …’

  ‘Hey,’ said a Time Police officer.

  I spun around. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here.’

  He blinked in surprise. I didn’t blame him.

  I went into overdrive myself. ‘Give us a hand lifting these timbers, would you? Do you have any medpacks on you? Miss Sykes, keep applying pressure to that wound …’

  I strode off, issuing a hail of instructions to those around me.

  What the officer should have done was pull back, let us sort ourselves out and then hit us hard, but he seemed to be experiencing the sort of disorientation frequently suffered by those encountering St Mary’s on one of our more exciting days.

  He chased after me. ‘Just a minute …’

  I turned in exasperation. ‘Look, I don’t know why you’re here but if you’re not going to assist then push off and let me get on with it. As you can see I have other things on my mind at the moment. Tell Captain Ellis …’

  ‘Ellis isn’t here’, he said, allowing himself to be distracted.

  ‘Why not? We always deal with Captain Ellis. Where is he? Don’t stand in that blood.’

  He didn’t move. ‘This is another matter. I have reason to believe …’

  I cut across him. ‘Careful how you move Mr Bashford. He might have internal injuries.’

  You had to hand it to the Time Police. They don’t give up. I felt a slight pang. They’d rescued Leon, Guthrie and Markham from Constantinople for us when we didn’t have a working pod to our name. They’d nursed Leon back to health. They were sheltering Matthew for us. Commander Hay was a decent woman. If they could just stop pursuing two rather engaging teenagers up and down the timeline they’d almost be quite likeable.

  But that was their job. Pursuing those engaging in illegal time travel. The penalty for which was usually death. Mikey and Adrian had been leading them a merry dance for years, for which, I suspected, they would pay heavily. But not if I had anything to do with it. Too many people had died around here recently.

  ‘It is Dr Maxwell, isn’t it?’

  I turned impatiently. ‘Yes, it is. How did you know?’

  ‘Everyone knows,’ he said heavily, and I wasn’t sure about that. ‘Dr Maxwell, I have reason to believe you’re harbouring two fugitives and …’

  ‘We’re not harbouring anyone,’ I said indignantly.

  He carried on anyway ‘… and it’s my duty to search these premises. Immediately.’

  And at that exact moment I heard Mrs Enderby in my ear. ‘Ready when you are, Max.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said to him, ‘but as you can see, we’re a bit busy at the moment. You go on and make a start. I’ll catch you up. I’d leave Wardrobe to last if I were you. They’ve got a bit of a flap on at the moment.’

  ‘More of a flap than this?’ he said, gesturing around at the last of the survivors being scooped up for medical treatment.

  ‘Well,’ I said, in the full knowledge she could hear every word I said. ‘I’m afraid our Mrs Enderby’s a bit of a diva.’

  I’d pay for that later on. My next jump was Persepolis, but I didn’t mind betting she’d get me into a corset and bustle somehow.

  I had no idea how Mikey was faring in Sick Bay, but I reckoned I could leave Dr Stone to sort that out. He wasn’t Helen Foster but he was certainly Captain Devious from Devioustown in Deviousshire.

  They split up – presumably so we couldn’t move the fugitives around the building behind their backs – and searched everywhere. And they were very thorough. I was pleased to see they had to search manually. No one was waving tag readers around. It was obviously the pod they followed, not Adrian and Mikey themselves, and the pod was long gone.

  But they were good. They had a system and they stuck to it. Every painstaking inch of it. They ignored Mrs Mack’s tight-lipped hostility and Professor Rapson’s careful confusion. The Technical Section stood outside each pod, arms folded, following their every move. No one was allowed into the pods but all the locker doors stood open and there was obviously nothing to be concealed. I began to hope they’d lose interest and drift away, but they knew they’d injured Mikey. They suspected the two of them had sought refuge with us and although their pod wasn’t here, there was no reason they themselves shouldn’t be. We were St Mary’s after all. Concealing a couple of known fugitives was just the sort of thing we would do.

  Mikey was actually very easy to conceal because she was in theatre, covered in sterile cloths, with only a tiny area visible. When asked who the patient was, Nurse Fortunata informed them it was Miss Grey, whom they knew, who had collaborated with them in the search for Clive Ronan. She went on to say that she understood they still hadn’t found him, and had they considered how much more a chance they would stand if they put some people on that job instead of faffing around getting under the feet of people who had a real job to do, and that the man standing behind them was Major Guthrie whom they definitely did know, and she didn’t think he’d take kindly to a bunch of idiots wanting to inspect hi
s girlfriend while she was unconscious and undergoing surgery.

  They made a cursory check of the wards which were bulging with casualties suffering barn-related traumas. Ian Guthrie silently and unnervingly watched them every inch of the way and personally escorted them to the door.

  They went over every part of the building, found nothing, and eventually we found ourselves outside Wardrobe, which was buzzing like an overturned beehive. People were rushing around with mouths full of pins. I had a brief attack of Health and Safety. Should they do that? Suppose someone fell over? We’d be picking pins out of their tonsils for days afterwards. Others were whirring away at sewing machines. Lengths of beautiful material hung everywhere.

  Mrs Enderby got up off her knees, dusting French chalk off her hands. ‘Is it urgent, Max? If we don’t get these costumes completed today, Mr Cutter will be invoking the penalty clause in his contract.’ She apparently noticed the Time Policemen standing beside me. ‘What do you want?’

  I was soothing. ‘It won’t take a minute, Mrs Enderby. They think someone’s hiding here and we don’t know it.’

  That wasn’t strictly true, but a little bit of misdirection never does anyone any harm.

  ‘This really isn’t a good time, Max.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, careful not to be too cooperative, ‘but it’s probably easier if we just let them get on with it.’

  She stepped aside. ‘Just don’t touch anything. Anything at all.’

  His squad filed into the room. They began yanking open doors and looking behind screens. No Adrian anywhere. I caught Mrs Enderby’s eye. What the hell had they done with him? She winked at me.

  ‘What’s through there?’ said their leader, pointing through an open archway.

  She said in surprise, ‘Our fitting room, of course. You can’t go in there.’

  He set off.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘wait.’

  He ignored her. I waggled my eyebrows at her and followed him in.

  A pleasant scene met my eyes.

  Late afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows. A number of dummies against the wall showed a range of Tudor costumes, both male and female. In pride of place, however, was a stunning court dress for the upcoming TV series on Elizabeth I from Cutter Cavendish Productions. Mr Cutter’s latest venture into the world of historical fiction involved an apparently thirty-year-old Virgin Queen shagging the Earl of Essex bandy before sallying forth in the Golden Hind to lay into the Armada personally. Don’t ask. There’s History and then there’s Calvin Cutter’s history.