ERASMUS HOBART

and the

GOLDEN ARROW

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Epilogue

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About Authonomy

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Julie, who taught me to love life,

and to the memory of Douglas Adams,

who taught me to laugh at it.

Chapter One

The sun was high in the sky as Erasmus emerged. Blinking in the unexpectedly bright light, he looked back at the privy behind him. Could he return for a pair of sunglasses? No, he couldn’t. Bringing even the simplest of modern technologies into another time could have profound effects on the development of the human species. Sighing with the burden of responsibility, he locked the door to the time machine and pocketed the key before shading his eyes with his hand and examining his surroundings.

He appeared to be in some kind of side street, which implied a relatively large settlement; about a hundred yards ahead of him he could see an open area, probably a marketplace. But he was struck by how quiet it was: mediaeval settlements were supposed to be hives of activity, centres of trade and intrigue. Perhaps it was a holiday. But wouldn’t people be out celebrating and the streets filled with bunting? He looked around at the surrounding buildings, all apparently empty, and shrugged. Perhaps that was one of those historical misconceptions. He walked on.

After ten or twelve yards, he felt himself step in something soft and looked down to see his boot had sunk into a pile of horse manure. Disgusted, he moved his foot and scraped it on the dusty ground; the manure was moist and streaks of it rubbed off on the hard road surface. That was also puzzling: if the manure hadn’t dried enough to flake, then it had to be relatively fresh.

For a moment he thought he caught a hint of movement in the alley to his left. He turned to look, but there was nothing: a row of wooden doors stayed obstinately shut; nobody moved behind the glassless windows.

So where was everyone? It was as if aliens had descended on the town during a busy lunch hour and carted them all off. He chuckled to himself. Aliens. A preposterous idea – the stuff of poor science fiction. He looked back to make sure his time machine didn’t look too out of place then continued towards the square, stopping periodically to scrape more horse dung from his boot.

The area at the end of the street was definitely a marketplace. The buildings surrounding it were all two-storey, timber-framed affairs of the type you would normally associate with rich merchants and their guilds. There was no sign of market activity, but that wasn’t surprising since markets wouldn’t take place every day. What was odd was that even here there was no sign of life.

He looked up at the upper storeys; the windows were all shuttered, preventing him from seeing if there were people inside. Mystified, he continued through the square, looking for some indication of where he was and when. Perhaps the more ostentatious buildings would have a construction date engraved somewhere – that at least would give him some idea.

As he approached the tallest of the buildings surrounding the square – something he presumed to be a town hall – he heard the sound of hooves approaching at a gentle trot from one of the side streets.

He listened carefully: in between the distinctive clops of the horse’s hooves he could just make out the tramp of more solid footsteps – perhaps a man in boots. As long as he was in the right country, the new arrivals should be able to tell him where he was and what was going on. Decided on his course of action, he walked towards the street from which the sound was emanating and, as he turned the corner, stopped in stunned surprise.

In many ways it was probably a fairly ordinary sight for its time: the woman on the horse carried herself with dignity and surveyed her surroundings with a look comprised in equal parts of contempt and arrogance; the two mail-shirted men who flanked her kept their hands on the hilts of their swords and their eyes assiduously on the ground, making no attempt to look at their lady.

And that was clearly what she was: a lady, a member of the ennobled classes. It wasn’t just her bearing, or the fact she was mounted on a chestnut mare, which itself appeared somewhat uninterested in the proceedings; it wasn’t that her long, dark hair showed signs of care and that her finely chiselled looks showed evidence of the lack of hard toil.

No, if Erasmus had been asked to put his finger on the nub of the argument, he would have said it was her apparel: she appeared to have been outfitted – if that was the word – by the same tailor who had provided the emperor with his new clothes. In short, she was completely naked and it was only the horse’s head and the lady’s hair that prevented Erasmus from having a grandstand view of one of the most famous, yet least seen sights in English legend. History, he corrected himself – if he was seeing it, then it had happened. He knew the woman was rich because he knew who she was. This was the woman who, according to the tales, had ridden naked through the streets of Coventry in protest at her husband’s oppressive taxation of the peasants. This was…

‘Lady Godiva.’ He couldn’t help himself and blurted the name out.

The party continued a step or two and, for a split second, Erasmus thought perhaps he hadn’t said anything or that the theorists had been right when they suggested time travel took you into a parallel dimension where you could be neither seen nor heard.

He was just preparing to step aside, in order to prevent the profoundly embarrassing feeling of people passing through him, when the guard on the left looked up, using a hand to blinker one side of his face so he could see who had spoken without committing the heinous crime of seeing whom he had spoken about. The other guard shot him a quick glance and then looked back at the ground. Godiva herself interrupted the appraising of her domain to look at Erasmus. Her expression changed from one of quiet dignity to rage.

‘What are you doing out here?’ she roared. Erasmus stepped back involuntarily, almost tripping over a stone in the road as he did so.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know what day it was.’

‘Didn’t know what day it was! Do you honestly expect me to believe that?’

Erasmus kept quiet. He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth and he wasn’t entirely sure what he could tell her that she would believe. Godiva gave him a scornful look, then turned her head so she could address one of the guards below. ‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said.

‘Yes ma’am,’ said the guard nervously, trying to fight his natural instinct to look at the person who was speaking to him.

‘Seize him, you fool.’

‘Yes ma’am.’ Both guards began to move purposefully towards Erasmus, each drawing their sword as they did so, whilst trying hard not to look back towards their mistress. Erasmus took a few careful paces backwards. Then he turned on his heel and ran.

‘Run after him, you fools,’ yelled Godiva. The two guards picked up the pace and pursued Erasmus as he sped across the marketplace.

Godiva herself pulled on the reins and her horse began to canter steadily. The increase in pace meant the horse sprang between steps and the force of its impact dislodged the braids of hair which had, up till then, been protecting her modesty by covering her breasts. The hair fell in front of her eyes and, intent on her pursuit, Godiva threw the braids over her shoulder, making no further effort to conceal herself as she continued.

‘Phwoaar,’ came a voice from the building to her left. Godiva turned and saw that, amongst the windows of the building, one was unshuttered and a man was staring out at her, his eyes wide.

‘Right, that does it,’ she snapped. She dug her heels into her horse’s sides. The beast wheeled round and brought up its forelegs, lashing out at the side of the building. The man backed away hurriedly, but wasn’t fast enough to prevent his face being bombarded with fragments of wattle from the wall.

‘Ow!’ he screamed, clutching his face. ‘My eyes, my eyes! I can’t see!’

‘Bloody peeping Alfreds,’ Godiva muttered. She guided her horse in the direction in which the guards had run.

Erasmus, meanwhile, had entered the side street. He could see his time machine ahead. His lungs were straining with the unaccustomed effort, but he had the advantage – he wasn’t, after all, encumbered by armour. Godiva’s angry yells were ringing in his ears, but he resisted the urge to look back, concentrating instead on the prize.

And so it was that he almost cannoned into a blurry shape that cut across his path. Refocusing his gaze, he found himself looking at the burly form of a man, rudely dressed and unarmoured, but holding a pitchfork in his hand like a peasant who had more than a spot of gardening in mind. Erasmus almost skidded to a halt, then took a step back and smiled amiably.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I could just get past.’

The man said nothing, but glared fixedly.

‘Only. I’m trying to go over there—’ His words were cut off by an angry cry from behind.

‘Seize him, man.’

The peasant looked up and his expression faltered. Blood rushed to his face and he clamped a hand to his eyes as if to stop it escaping. Taking his chance, Erasmus tried to sidestep him, but with the pitchfork and the narrowness of the street, there was no way past. Erasmus turned to his right, where an alley led away. He couldn’t tell if there was a way through, but it was better than staying where he was. He ran.

The cry of ‘fool’ resonated along the alley, shaking the wattle and daub walls. A door to Erasmus’ right seemed to be shaken partially open. Erasmus paused, contemplating ducking into the building and waiting for his pursuers to pass. Then the door swung wide and three more peasants piled out, each wielding a pitchfork and wearing an angry expression. Suddenly Erasmus found himself wishing the aliens had visited.

He sprinted on, almost tripping over his feet in his haste. He stumbled to one side and put a hand out to steady himself. The wall beside him yielded, but held and he sprang back, his pace barely reduced. Behind him he heard the urgent thudding of heavy soles as his pursuers broke into a run. Their heavy breaths spoke of men used to steady effort rather than sudden bursts of exertion, which filled Erasmus with hope.

Then there was a sudden and heavy-sounding thump, followed by a grunt, a crash and several angry exclamations. Despite the urgency of his situation, Erasmus couldn’t help but turn back. Behind him, he saw the original pitchfork-wielding peasant lying on the floor with a man he assumed to be one of the second batch of pursuers. The other two appeared to have vanished.

Erasmus was just musing on this when he noticed a hole in one of the buildings lining the road. The continued commotion from this direction told its own story. Grinning to himself, he turned and continued his flight. Ahead of him was a junction, where another alley crossed his path left to right. Slowing his pace to a more sustainable jog, he turned left. If he was correct, the simple geography of the place suggested this passage should lead him on to one of the alleys he’d encountered on his arrival. From there it would be only a short flit to his time machine and safety.

The sudden arrival of two hefty peasants in his path ended this latest burst of optimism. From their reddened faces and plaster-covered clothes, Erasmus couldn’t entertain the hope they were just another pair of generic peasants, despite their generic pitchforks. These they levelled to deny him passage, leaving him staring at eight unpleasantly rusty tines. He backed off.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Surely we can talk about this.’

The low growl from the peasant on the left sounded anything but conversational. Either, Erasmus considered, the Stone Age had ended later than people thought, or the people of mediaeval Coventry had poorer than average communication skills. He dodged a lunge from one of the pitchforks, eyeing the corroded metal with concern.

‘You be careful with that,’ he snapped. ‘You could give someone septicaemia.’

The peasant ignored him, his gaze seemingly drawn over his shoulder. The sound of heavy boots from behind trod what was left of Erasmus’ hope into the ground. He raised his hands in surrender, then winced as he felt the point of a pitchfork prodded firmly into his back.

‘So what happens now?’ he demanded.

None of the men spoke.

‘You must be wonderful guests at parties,’ Erasmus muttered. He paused, awaiting a response, but received none. The man to his right avoided his gaze. The man to his left said nothing, but picked his nose with his free hand. Erasmus felt a sudden terrible uncertainty descending on him. What had only moments ago felt like a bit of an adventure suddenly felt much more sinister. Life in the Middle Ages, a memory told him, could be nasty, brutish and short. It was all very well when you saw such a thing written in one of the cheaper textbooks, but that was just words; something to be contemplated in the quiet security of a twenty-first century classroom. This was reality. And the quiet didn’t help. Erasmus felt like screaming for someone to just say something, but some deeply coded message in his DNA told him making a loud, sudden noise when surrounded by men holding pointy things was no way to pass your genetic material on. He settled instead for an unthreatening smile and a slight stretch to raise his hands higher.

‘Take me to your leader?’ he ventured.

Suddenly, the man to his left flushed. He withdrew his finger quickly from his nose and clamped his hand over his eyes. Momentarily distracted by the mucus the man was now smearing over his cheek, Erasmus took a second to realise that the peasant to his right was also doing his best not to look. The teacher glanced over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of two peasants with hands firmly in place and, beyond them, the body of an approaching horse.

There was no better moment. Erasmus looked to the building at his left. It looked solid enough, but then so did the rest of them. Tensing himself, he shoulder charged the wall. There was a sickening crunch as layers of twigs cracked under the impact, then the panel caved in and he tumbled through into the cottage beyond, landing on a pile of old rags. Stumbling to his feet, he took in his surroundings. Cracks of light suggested a door ahead. He took a step towards it and felt a sudden sharp pain on the side of his head. From the corner of his eye he saw a small, dishevelled figure wielding what appeared to be a broom. At least, he considered, it wasn’t a pitchfork. He raised a hand to fend off further attacks and ran. His assailant let out a blood-curdling screech, prompting him to run faster. She managed to land only one more blow on the small of his back before he crashed through the door, but the pain raced through him, spurring him on beyond his physical limits.

Outside, he heard the sound of feet as his pursuers gave chase. Fear lent him speed and he rapidly put distance between them. He came out of the alley into the side street, gratefully finding himself only yards from his privy.

Fumbling with his keys, he ran to the door. The sounds of pursuit rumbled in his ears and made it harder for his shaking fingers to put the key into the lock. Glancing down, he realised this was because it was, in fact, the wrong key. He tried a second and felt it bite just as the sound of boots became a thunder.

Quickly, he unlocked the door, opened it and threw himself into his seat, not even bothering to extract the key from the outside. Instead, he slammed the door and scrabbled for the controls.

Outside in the street, the peasants came to a halt. The guards pushed past them and approached the privy with caution. A few feet from the device, one of the guards paused and tapped his partner’s arm.

‘What is it, Smith?’ snapped the other guard.

‘I’ve just trod in summat, Sarge.’

‘Can’t it wait? We’ve got a man to catch.’

There was an eerie whine from inside the privy. Both guards shivered.

‘He’s not going anywhere, Sarge,’ said Smith. He began casually scraping the manure from his boot using the blade of his sword. His eyes, however, were firmly on the wooden box.

‘We ought to arrest him,’ said the sergeant, although his voice seemed to suggest this was a junior guard’s job.

‘No rush,’ said Smith. ‘We’ll just say we were waiting for her presence. It’s not like he’s escaped.’

Just as he spoke, a gust of hot air blew the dust up from the road. Guards and peasants covered their faces as if an army of naked women stood before them. Then, the sound of a thunderclap came from the direction of the privy and the guards dropped their hands to their sides and gaped. The street where the privy had stood was empty.

For a moment there was silence, then Smith, his wide-open mouth filling with dust, began to choke. They were still thus distracted when the sound of hooves came clopping up behind them.

Godiva forced the peasants aside and brought her horse to a halt next to the guards, narrowly missing Smith’s foot. She stared at them scornfully. The guards closed their mouths and attempted to look businesslike. This was made somewhat difficult by the fact they couldn’t look at Godiva to see her reaction.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘Vanished, ma’am,’ said the sergeant, keeping his eyes trained studiously on the horse’s head. The horse shook its head to dislodge some of the dust that was still drifting through the air and hmmphed scornfully.

‘Vanished?’

‘Into thin air,’ said Smith, trying not to look at either Godiva or the rear end of the horse, which was the part nearest to him. The horse’s tail lashed his nose and he sneezed.

‘He must have been an alchemist, m’lady.’

The horse shook its head as if in disagreement.

‘An alchemist?’ Godiva seemed equally unconvinced.

‘Must have been,’ the sergeant concurred.

Godiva mused on this a moment then wheeled her horse round. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘When we get back we’re going to see about a crackdown on alchemists.’ She started forward and the two guards stepped back to avoid being trampled. The peasants turned to study the nearest wall intently. Godiva ignored them and kept her eyes on the guards.

‘Lead on,’ she said.

The two guards walked on, a few yards ahead of the horse.

‘We got off lightly there,’ said the sergeant.

‘You might have done,’ said Smith.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That bloody horse just crapped on my foot.’

Chapter Two

The room was small, dark and dusty. The scarce amount of moonlight from the skylight revealing its contents to be a desk strewn with papers, two wardrobes, some steel racks and a single, bare light-bulb, currently switched off and hanging from the ceiling. It was also silent, as one would expect from a disused storeroom in a school after the children had long since gone home. A draught from under the door wafted in, toyed with some of the paperwork then left, evidently finding little to occupy its interest. Eventually, even the moon disappeared behind a cloud, as if popping off to find something more significant to illuminate.

It was whilst both wind and moon were absent from their posts that the room came to life: at first it was just a gentle breeze that seemed to blow from every corner of the room at the same time, then as the paperwork began to rise from the desk and distribute itself across the floor there was a sound like a box of firecrackers being dropped into a furnace. As the echoes of the sound died away the paperwork fell to the floor and in the room stood a large, wooden structure where no such item had previously been.

After a few moments, the door to the structure opened and a man dashed out, reached for the light switch and flooded the room with a warm, yellow light. The man was slight of build, but without any suggestion of athleticism. His hair was like a study in chaos conducted by a man who, far from keeping his pencils in size order, rarely kept them in the same place as each other. His face, flushed as it was with recent exertions, was otherwise unobtrusive: youngish, free from the lines of age or scars of experience, but with a glint in the eyes which suggested a man more knowledgeable than his years would usually belie and a warmth suggesting he was comfortable in that knowledge.

Erasmus Hobart, to his understanding the first time traveller in human history (or at least the first to depart – there was no telling where subsequent travellers might arrive), wiped the sweat from his brow and made a half-hearted attempt to gather up some of the scattered paperwork from around the room. Somehow the mundane nature of this task was made all the worse by the fact that what had gone before had been in such stark contrast.

He turned back to the stout, wooden privy that stood conspicuously in the middle of the room. It wasn’t an obvious addition to a teacher’s storeroom – even a school as old as St Cuthbert’s had plumbing – but were any inquisitive soul to guess at the reason for its presence, it was remarkably unlikely that they would have guessed remotely correctly. Erasmus’ experiments in time had remained a secret for almost two years now, from the earliest sending of inanimate objects to a few minutes before or hence, right up to his first personal trips, and the teacher had managed to avoid all questions, even when the topic of conversation moved to the distinct lack of 2B pencils.

He ran his hands over the surface of the time machine: it was warm, but not unduly so. Erasmus had often been concerned about the potential thermal effects of time travel: his early experiments, when he had sent small, unmanned devices a few minutes backwards or forwards in time, had invariably resulted in the machine getting extremely hot, which Erasmus assumed to be due to some kind of temporal friction. The chance occasion on which he had, due to budgetary restraints, made one of his experimental models out of wood he had been pleasantly surprised to find it was entirely unaffected. Pleasantly surprised because not only did it mean he could build a machine which wouldn’t spontaneously combust the moment you went farther than a week from home without having to find some exotic and undoubtedly expensive metal, it also allowed him to build one which wouldn’t appear out of place through most of recorded history. A time machine made from adamantium might well be extremely cool and wonderfully durable, but it would stick out like a sore thumb in the middle of a tenth-century village.

He gave the machine a final pat then let out a violent exclamation as he snagged his thumb on a rough edge, giving himself a splinter. Hurriedly closing the storeroom door, he headed out into the classroom, his thumb in his mouth. He rummaged through the drawers of his desk, looking for something small and sharp to extract the splinter. Eventually, he located a pair of tweezers and was just closing the drawer when a shadow fell across his desk. He looked up into the wrinkled, frowning face of the school’s headmaster.

‘Evening, Clarence,’ Erasmus greeted him politely.

The headmaster bristled visibly: he hadn’t spent thirty years studying, teaching and clambering his way up the greasy pole to be referred to as Clarence. Particularly not by teachers who were barely out of university. Feeling that complaint would achieve little, however, he reserved his indignation for a particularly loud snort.

Erasmus gave a concerned smile. ‘Are you coming down with something?’ he asked.

Clarence chose to ignore the comment. ‘You’re here rather late, Mr Hobart,’ he observed; his manner clipped and deliberately formal like a sergeant major striving to resist a speech impediment.

Erasmus looked up at the clock, which gave the time as a quarter to nine. Time had obviously passed in the present whilst he was in the past, which was interesting. Perhaps there was some kind of chronological concept of now for a given life form? He wondered whether the relationship was a one-to-one affair, or whether he could expect to go away for a week only to find that a year had passed in his own time.

Clarence tapped his foot impatiently until Erasmus regained his concentration and returned his gaze. The teacher looked at the headmaster with curiosity, as if only just aware of his presence.

‘I said, “You’re here rather late,” Mr Hobart.’

‘I know,’ said Erasmus. ‘But you know how it is. You start on the marking and before you know it the kids are back.’

‘And have you been here all the time?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Have you been out?’

Erasmus considered this, then gestured towards the door which separated the classroom from the school beyond. ‘I assure you, Clarence, I have not been through that door all evening,’ he said.

The headmaster’s expression flickered between doubt and satisfaction. Despite his misgivings over Erasmus’ sense of decorum, if the teacher’s claim was true he could only wish the rest of the staff would show the same level of dedication – perhaps then the school would be higher in the league tables. He glanced at the blackboard: it was covered in squiggles which, to his eyes, were an unintelligible mess. He felt no shame at his inability to comprehend the information – after all, he’d studied Latin at university, not this newfangled nonsense.

‘Is that for your history class?’ he said.

Erasmus looked at the board himself, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s physics.’

‘It looks very complicated,’ said the headmaster, caught between trying not to sound ignorant and wondering what Erasmus was doing scribbling physics notes on the blackboard of the history room.

‘Yes. I presume you didn’t come here to compliment me on my level of education, Clarence. What can I do for you?’

‘I was wondering if you’d seen anybody lurking about.’

‘This evening, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyone in particular, or are you just hoping for company?’

The headmaster wrung his hands awkwardly. He wished that, of all his teachers, he could have found someone other than Hobart on the premises. The others might have been less dedicated, but they at least answered questions when prompted. Hobart could be astoundingly vague, and it was never clear if this was an act.

‘It’s just that Botch—’ he stopped himself from using the man’s soubriquet just in time, ‘that Mr Bulcher has reported a burglary.’

Erasmus nodded. The school caretaker, known affectionately to the students as Old Botchit, was a long-standing fixture of the school. Even Mr Salmon, the ancient maths master the students referred to as Guppy, seemed to have no memory of when the man had taken up the brush and cap and begun his duties. But then Guppy couldn’t remember his own arrival either – popular conjecture amongst the children had it he’d been beached when the waters of Noah’s flood had retreated. Botchit lived in a small cottage at the end of the school drive, a property that came with the job, and when the demands of the school were not upon him, he could usually be found tending his vegetable garden.

‘Burglary, you say?’ Erasmus remarked. ‘Have they been at his cabbages again?’

Clarence took a deep breath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken his privy.’

Erasmus scratched his forehead and blinked a few times. ‘His privy,’ he echoed, as if the concept were too fantastic to grasp.

‘Yes. You know – that damned outside toilet of his.’

Erasmus masked his awkwardness with a resigned shrug. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, he does keep saying he wants to get rid of it.’

‘That’s beside the point,’ said Clarence, his voice rising slightly in pitch.

Erasmus toyed with his tweezers then began to pick at the splinter in his thumb. ‘Anything else taken?’

‘Not that we can tell, no.’

‘It’s not really a problem then, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. Bolcher’s been talking about getting rid of it; now it’s gone. Saves him paying the council a tenner to cart it off, doesn’t it?’

The headmaster flushed hotly, but refrained from comment. This argument wasn’t leading anywhere. ‘And you haven’t seen anyone this evening?’ he reiterated firmly.

‘Not as such, no.’

‘As such?’ Clarence could feel his temperature rising again.

‘Well, apart from yourself, that is,’ said Erasmus. ‘Obviously, I’ve seen you now, but I haven’t seen anyone else since the boys left.’ Erasmus told himself this was at least technically true: having travelled back in time, he could not have seen anyone after the boys left – at least not in their time.

Clarence, loosening his tie to allow some air to flow around him, shook his head. ‘If you hear anything, let me know,’ he said.

Erasmus nodded and Clarence turned to leave. A few steps from the desk he paused, then turned back to look at Erasmus. The schoolteacher raised his eyebrows quizzically and the headmaster paused again, balanced on the heel of his foot, then stood up straight and eyed the teacher critically.

‘Just out of interest,’ he said, ‘what is that you’re wearing?’

Erasmus looked down at his outfit. He was still dressed in the garb of a mediaeval peasant, a costume he had thought sensible for his first foray into history. He racked his brains for a suitable explanation.

‘Erm, it’s for the school play,’ he said.

‘What, Robin Hood? But you’re not in it.’

‘No,’ said Erasmus, nodding slowly as he thought, ‘but I thought it might help to engage the children’s enthusiasm for their history lesson if I got into the spirit of the thing.’

Clarence nodded, looking less than satisfied but reluctant to pursue the matter.

‘You spend far too much time here,’ he said, revising his earlier opinion about people who threw themselves into their work. ‘Don’t you have any family?’

‘Not here, no. My sister’s family lives in Australia, but I rarely see them.’

‘No wife? Girlfriend?’

‘No. Should I have?’

Clarence, who was constantly reminded by his wife how lucky he was to have her – despite the evidence to the contrary – decided not to answer the question.

‘I still don’t understand why you spend so much time here,’ he said. ‘You have a home of your own, don’t you?’

‘Of course, but the school canteen does do a wonderful line in tea. In fact, that’s a thought – I might go and get one now.’

Erasmus locked the door that led to the storeroom and strode purposefully towards the main classroom door. Clarence watched him with curiosity.

‘Why did you lock that?’ he said.

‘It’s the storeroom.’

‘Yes, but we haven’t used those since we built the centralised storage facility.’

Erasmus shrugged. ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said. ‘That burglar might want to make off with a shelf next.’

Clarence watched Erasmus’ retreating back as he left the room. There was something very odd about that man. He wished he knew what it was so he could fire him and get someone else.

Chapter Three

Gold and brown were the colours of the driveway of St Cuthbert’s School as it lay beneath the crisp blue sky of another autumn day. A playful breeze dislodged a flurry of leaves from the trees lining the drive, almost smothering Botchit, as he raked the wind’s earlier deposits into a neat pile. He sighed and leant a moment on his rake contemplating the decaying leaves. They were probably symbolic of something, but he couldn’t be bothered working out what.

St Cuthbert’s was one of a dying breed – a state-funded school with a private-school mentality. Once it had been a boy’s grammar, but those days had passed and the school struggled to maintain the prestige it had lost. Botchit was a remnant of those older days – a caretaker with his own cottage in the grounds – but every passing term made him feel slightly less a part of the changing regime.

The sound of a sputtering engine marked the arrival of one part of the new regime. The battered Mini struggling up the drive might have looked like it belonged to one of the old guard, but it was, in fact, the property of one Erasmus Hobart – or as some of the students called him behind his back – Hobbit.

As the vehicle passed, its engine misfired, giving the impression a cannon had gone off. A cloud of acrid black smoke drifted up to obscure the view, leaving Botchit coughing in its wake.

How the vehicle had ever managed to pass its MOT was one of life’s great mysteries. Though pupils would expound on theories involving men in grubby overcoats who exchanged cash-stuffed brown envelopes, none of them really thought that Hobbit would be capable of such dastardly deeds.

All of which was symptomatic of the children’s attitude to the teacher. Although he was young and wasn’t actually disliked, in his short tenure teaching Science and History at St Cuthbert’s he had already become one of them – a member of the other side in the long-entrenched battle of nerves that was the school. He had his nickname. He even had a mythology developing around him.

Already it was rumoured amongst some in the first form – for whom anyone older than fourteen was pensionable – that Hobbit’s history lessons were taken entirely from personal experience. In a few years, when the current first form had been and gone, this would undoubtedly be accepted as fact by one and all.

As the Mini passed along the drive, pupils, alerted by the wheezing engine, hurriedly hid conkers and other health-and-safety-unfriendly possessions, putting on expressions of saint-like innocence until they were sure he was out of sight and that they were safe from discovery. Others were not so quick to react, nor were they as capable of hiding their mischief.

‘Atkinson! Davis! What are you doing with that?’ The voice of Erasmus Hobart was an attribute that made him a firm fixture of school sports days, carrying some distance across the school fields without the need for a megaphone.

‘What, sir?’ Atkinson replied. He attempted to conceal his contraband behind his back and looked at the master with a gaze of attentive innocence. It wasn’t easy: the teacher’s hazel eyes had a way of making your stomach try to hide in a corner. The boy’s eyes watered involuntarily as he tried to retain the teacher’s gaze.

‘That big stick,’ Erasmus persisted.

‘What big stick?’ Atkinson replied, sure that admitting the object’s existence after attempting to hide it would carry far worse penalties than continuing to pretend it wasn’t there.

‘That big stick behind your back.’

‘Big stick, sir? I can’t see a big stick.’

‘You can’t? Well I can. It’s six feet long and sticking above your head. Perhaps I should ask Mr Salmon to give you some remedial lessons. That way you’ll know that six feet is more than four foot five.’

Atkinson, realising when he was beaten, pulled the item in front of him and looked at it in surprise, trying to convey the impression he’d never seen it before.

‘Well?’ Erasmus inquired.

‘Sir?’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a bow, sir.’

‘And?’

‘Sir?’

‘What are you doing with it? I trust you aren’t trying to shoot the school cat?’ In truth, Erasmus wouldn’t have minded this particular activity – he and the school cat had been engaged in a battle of wits since the rabid moggy had attempted to sink its claws into his leg on his first day.

‘No, sir,’ Atkinson protested. ‘It’s for the play. We’re doing Robin Hood, sir.’

‘Not with that you’re not,’ Erasmus told him. ‘Bring it here.’

‘Si-ir,’ Atkinson whined.

‘Here,’ Erasmus repeated, his voice going down in pitch and up in volume. It was a subtle change, but one to which experienced troublemakers had learnt to respond. Atkinson may not have been an experienced troublemaker, but he was still intelligent enough to surrender the bow into the master’s hand.

‘When can I have it back?’ he asked.

‘You can have it at the end of term and not before,’ Erasmus told him and his tone told Atkinson that any argument was about as futile as expecting divine help to part the waters of the Trent in search of a lost ball.

The boy looked down at his feet with a hangdog expression, awaiting whatever fate Hobbit had in store for him. Erasmus smiled at the tousled head. He wasn’t a cruel man – it wasn’t that long since his own scholarly career of mischief had come to an end – and the boy’s antics were scarcely as disruptive as – to take an example at random – creating a build-up of static electricity that separated a teacher from his wig. Since he knew Atkinson wasn’t the type to intend a major disruption, Erasmus decided on clemency. Not immediately, though: he waited until the boy glanced up then gave him a stern look, prompting him to examine his shoes even more minutely. Then, after he had waited for what he felt was an appropriate time, he dismissed the boy. Atkinson, grateful at being spared punishment, nodded politely before turning on his heel and running back to where Davis was waiting.

‘Atkinson!’ Erasmus called out after him.

Atkinson turned.

‘Walk. Don’t run.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Atkinson called back and he then continued his journey at a more sedate pace.

After watching the boy for a few moments, Erasmus examined the bow with interest. It wasn’t the normal bit of twig and string you found attached to teenage boys; it had real tension in it. He tugged it experimentally, considering what it would do for his odds against the school cat. Then, realising he was still blocking the driveway, he tried to bring the bow in through the car window. This proved difficult, since the bow spanned roughly six feet, whilst the car was only about five feet from wing mirror to wing mirror. He eventually managed to wedge one end of the bow in the passenger’s footwell whilst the other end stuck out of the sunroof, giving the impression of a dodgem aerial. Driving carefully so as not to get the bow caught in any low tree branches, he proceeded along the driveway to his parking space, leaving a trail of wide-eyed children, many with their hands held firmly behind their backs.

The bow was cumbersome to carry from the car to the classroom. The passage between the two single-storey buildings which constituted the particular block was narrow, and only by holding the bow upright was progress possible. How the boy had managed to get the thing to school was a mystery.

At the end of the passage, Erasmus found himself faced with a door and a problem. Because this particular block of classrooms had been adapted from service buildings on the former manor, the doors were short and squat – presumably in order to force servants to duck and thus remember their place. The bow was, therefore, a foot taller than the door. Erasmus adjusted his grip on the briefcase in his left hand and reached for the door handle, attempting to manoeuvre the bow with his right hand as he did so. It was an unsuccessful effort: by the time one end was touching the wall behind him, the other was pressed firmly against the lintel above the door. He stared at the weapon thoughtfully, the physicist in him consumed by the interesting problem in three-dimensional geometry this presented. He tried shifting his posture, attempting to bend the bow to his will by careful application of weight. The bow, however, had other ideas and remained stubbornly straight.

And it was as he was so occupied that the door-handle turned purposefully beneath his hand. Erasmus, caught off-balance by the sudden absence of door, nearly fell into the corridor beyond. It was the presence of the petite, blonde woman in the corridor which prompted him to arrest his descent and stumble to an awkward state of balance.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ she said near-simultaneously.

‘What for?’ they said in unison.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Erasmus. ‘I’m afraid I was a bit preoccupied.’

‘Ah,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘What’s her name?’

Erasmus looked at the bow. ‘I don’t think he gave her one,’ he said. ‘One of the boys, you see.’

‘One of the boys?’ The woman’s eyebrows arched slightly as she found herself worrying whether the man was a lunatic. It would be a disappointment if he were, she considered.

‘Yes. I confiscated it from him this morning. Why they bring these things into school, I don’t know.’

‘Oh.’ The relief was palpable in the woman’s voice, but Erasmus didn’t notice it. He did, however, notice the woman as if for the first time – largely because it was the first time.

‘Have we met?’ he asked.

‘No. My name’s Ellen.’ Ellen extended a hand. Erasmus reached out, but was prevented by the bow. Frowning at the weapon, he let it go, gripped and shook before returning to his charge.

Ellen looked at him, but said nothing. She seemed to be waiting for something.

‘Oh,’ said Erasmus. ‘It’s Erasmus.’

‘Your name?’ Ellen wasn’t sure if he wasn’t referring to something else – the species of mould on the lintel, for example. He was clearly a very distracted man.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s an unusual name. Nice.’

‘Thanks. I had unusual parents. At least I presume so – I’ve not made a study. Not my area – psychology.’

‘No? What is?’

‘Physics. And history. Yes, physics and history.’

‘That should make you the best person to work out how to get an ancient weapon into a confined space, then, shouldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it should, yes,’ said Erasmus, taking the statement entirely at face value. ‘I think it might be easier if you go,’ he added on reflection.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If you’re coming through the door. I’ll have more room to turn the bow.’

‘Ah, yes. I suppose I ought to be getting to my classroom anyway. Do you know where they teach geography, by any chance?’

Erasmus frowned. ‘Have you tried asking a geography teacher?’ he asked. ‘I understood there’s a new one starting today.’

‘Yes, I’d heard that. And I suppose if you want to ask someone directions, a geography teacher would be your best bet.’ Ellen moved out of the doorway and stood aside to let Erasmus pass. The teacher looked intently at bow and doorway a moment, then executed a complex twisting motion and slipped the bow into the corridor. Ellen observed the almost childlike smile of triumph on his face as he succeeded. There was a lot for a woman to like in that smile.

‘I’ll be off then,’ she said, her tone hopeful.

‘OK,’ said Erasmus, studiously pushing his briefcase against the door to hold it in place whilst he manoeuvred the bow. ‘Good luck finding your geography teacher.’

Ellen watched him disappearing into the building. Her face would have made an interesting study had there been a psychology teacher to observe it. Perhaps fortunately, psychology had no place on the curriculum.

The classroom was a dark one; the north-facing windows, set just below ceiling height, allowed little natural light to penetrate and a number of electric strip lights struggled bravely to illuminate the dark and cobwebby corners. For Erasmus, however, this was a home away from home. Without the intrusion of sunlight, there was no difference from one season to another, no time except that which he marked with the staccato sound of chalk on blackboard and no distractions to draw the pupils’ attentions away from their studies.

This was a room in which a teacher could set the class an essay question then sit and peacefully while away the hours with a mug of coffee and a pile of books to mark. He had to use a different room for science lessons, of course: the school wasn’t so well equipped as to allow the laboratories to be tied up with his history lessons, but science lessons tended to be in the afternoons when most of the youthful energies had been expended on the playing field, and the pupils always seemed more docile when they were armed with a piece of Veroboard and a power-pack. True, it was probably because they were working out how to electrify Harrison’s pencil case whilst he was out of the room on one of his frequent trips to the lavatory, but Erasmus firmly believed a few electrical shocks were acceptable in the pursuit of knowledge.

For the moment, however, the room was devoid of pupils as Erasmus kept himself occupied working through a series of torturously complex equations on his blackboard. Soon the nine o’clock bell would ring, signifying the end of registration and the beginning of the slow exodus to the first lesson of the morning.

Turning briefly from his calculations, he glanced at the pile of books on his desk; form 3A first this morning – hopefully Atkinson wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about his bow. He looked at the weapon, propped up next to his umbrella in the corner of the room. Where the boy had acquired such an article was a mystery – he hadn’t seen anywhere selling them and Mr Gaunt certainly wouldn’t have got the pupils to make one in woodwork. He shrugged: small boys seemed to have a natural ability to locate destructive implements, no matter how hard they were to acquire. If the UN had had the foresight to send a squad of thirteen-year-old boys into countries suspected of harbouring weapons of mass destruction, you could guarantee they’d locate any nuclear arsenal in a matter of hours. True, they’d probably set off a few bombs just to see what they could do, but at least you’d know where they were and could take the appropriate action.

The sound of youthful conversation drifted through the door and returned the teacher’s attention to the real world. Erasmus checked his watch: it was three minutes past nine – obviously the tannoy still wasn’t working. He checked the volume control on the wall-mounted speaker: it wouldn’t surprise him to find that a pupil had adjusted it – he’d heard Mr Alesage complain they’d put his clock forward in order to get out of double French early. Erasmus glanced at the clock over the board, but not with any particular interest: unlike Mr Alesage, he never relied on school equipment – experience had taught him to wear a watch to work instead.

Hearing the conversation outside was getting louder, Erasmus put down his chalk and began to wind the crank which turned the blackboards on their rollers and gave him a clean surface on which to write. A loud thump outside the door disturbed him and, realising he couldn’t put the moment off any longer, he strode to the door and opened it.

‘What was that noise?’ he demanded of the straggle of boys who were lined along the wall.

‘It wasn’t me, sir,’ Kirkby protested.

‘I asked what the noise was, not who wasn’t responsible. Have you got a guilty conscience or have you just neglected to wash your ears out this morning?’

Kirkby didn’t answer – he couldn’t see what the right answer was.

‘Well?’ Erasmus directed his gaze over the whole class.

‘Please, sir.’ Harrison’s unbroken voice rang out like the song of a lark that had just undergone an intensive interrogation.

‘Yes, Harrison,’ Erasmus prompted.

‘It was my sandwiches, sir.’

‘Your sandwiches? What have you got in them – gunpowder?’

‘No, sir,’ Harrison objected. ‘Barnstaple threw them at the door.’

There was a chorus of ‘sneak’ from the back of the queue. Erasmus took a discreet look and noted Barnstaple and his usual bunch of cronies. He felt sorry for Harrison: he admired the child’s sense of duty and fair play, but sometimes he felt it would be better if the boy just kept his mouth shut. He looked down at his feet and found a small packet of sandwiches, so tightly wrapped in cling-film you felt that Harrison’s mother was trying to suffocate the contents and make sure they were dead. He motioned to the boy at the front of the queue, who obediently bent down, picked up the package and passed it to the master.

Erasmus looked sternly at Barnstaple. ‘Why did you throw this?’ he asked.

Barnstaple maintained a sullen silence.

‘We’ll stand here until someone tells me,’ Erasmus informed them, ‘and you know what that means, don’t you?’

Some of the smaller boys nodded. Erasmus’ system of punishment basically involved adding up the minutes for which his lesson was disrupted and claiming the time back in a detention. It wasn’t an entirely fair system, since the whole class were punished for the fault of a handful of troublemakers but, as Erasmus himself pointed out, his detentions weren’t about punishing people, but about making sure they came out of school with the right amount of education. British education might be going to the dogs, but there was no way this teacher was going to turn his school into just another kennel.

Barnstaple, knowing Erasmus wouldn’t back down and unwilling to undergo an entire hour’s detention, held up a small wooden device.

‘I was testing this,’ he admitted.

‘Bring it here,’ Erasmus demanded. Barnstaple made his way to the front, the line of boys leaning against the wall to let him pass, whilst simultaneously staring curiously at the contraption. Erasmus took the device from the boy and examined it closely.

‘It’s a catapult,’ Barnstaple explained.

‘I can see that,’ Erasmus told him. ‘More accurately, of course, you should call it a trebuchet. Now what are you doing throwing people’s sandwiches with a piece of siege artillery?’

‘I thought they might want to use it in the play.’

‘I see. This would be the famous production of Robin Hood, would it?’

Barnstaple nodded.

‘And where in the legends does it say that the outlaws fired sandwiches from trebuchets, hmm?’

Barnstaple shrugged. ‘They had them back then,’ he managed.

‘Trebuchets, yes,’ Erasmus agreed. ‘However, I believe they were somewhat short of sandwiches and, even if they weren’t, I doubt it would ever have occurred to them to use them as ammunition.’

‘The French used to throw animals over castle walls,’ someone contributed. ‘Perhaps the English just used to throw their lunch.’

Erasmus looked up, trying to find the source of the comment, one eyebrow raised quizzically. He identified the source of the comment as Atkinson and looked at him levelly. ‘Do you understand why the French threw cows over castle walls?’ he asked.

‘Because they had BSE?’ Atkinson suggested.

‘In the thirteenth century,’ Barnstaple sneered.

Erasmus looked at Barnstaple sternly and the boy fell silent. ‘Believe it or not, Atkinson,’ Erasmus continued, looking back towards the boy, ‘you’re actually thinking in the right area. It was common in siege warfare to hurl diseased animals into besieged castles – the idea was that the disease would spread amongst the inhabitants and lead to an early surrender. However, I fail to see what relevance this has to Robin Hood.’ He looked down at Barnstaple once more.

‘I was just getting into it,’ said Barnstaple. ‘You know, history and all that.’

Erasmus pushed back the classroom door and ushered the pupils to their seats. He handed Harrison his sandwiches as he passed. Once the last few pupils had filtered past, he closed the door and made his way to his desk.

‘Taking an interest in history is very commendable,’ he told the class as they stood quietly behind their desks, ‘but plays about Robin Hood actually say very little about the history of this country. In fact, there are significant elements of the plays which flatly contradict history as we know it.’

He motioned for the class to sit and, as they complied, he surveyed them: there did seem to be a spark of genuine interest, even if it had initially revolved around a practical interest in siege weaponry.

He waited for the noises of scraping chairs and low murmuring to subside, then addressed the class. ‘Can anyone give me an example of a historically dubious aspect of the Robin Hood legend?’ he asked.

Harrison raised his hand, eager to be the first to answer. Erasmus decided not to choose the boy: he’d already embarrassed Barnstaple once this morning and it wouldn’t do to let him draw too much attention to himself – not with double physics after lunch, anyway.

‘Heathfield,’ he called out, noticing the child was holding his left arm up and supporting it with his right as if it were becoming burdensome.

‘Marian, sir,’ Heathfield said.

‘What about Marian?’

‘My dad says she didn’t exist, sir.’

‘Does he now? And what makes him say that?’

‘He says that women knew their place in the Middle Ages, sir, and that they didn’t go out partying with their friends to all hours of the night.’

Erasmus tried hard not to smile: Heathfield Senior’s remarks often said more about the insecurities of twenty-first century man than they did about the position of twelfth- or thirteenth-century woman. He noticed Harrison had put his sandwiches on the edge of the desk – should he tell the boy to put them away? He didn’t understand why Harrison had to wave his sandwiches around like that anyway – did he think they’d run away if he left them in his bag?

‘I was told the French made her up,’ Atkinson contributed. ‘She wasn’t in the early legends and the French added her in.’

‘Why would the French do that?’ Barnstaple challenged.

‘Hufter,’ Atkinson sneered. ‘We were all French back then anyway – that’s just like saying we made it up.’

‘If we were French, why were they called Normans, then?’

‘Everyone was called Norman, that’s why they invented surnames – ’cos it got too confusing.’

Erasmus banged on the desk with his board rubber. ‘Can we have a little order?’ he asked. The room fell silent, except for a few murmurings from Barnstaple, still seething at being insulted.

‘Now,’ Erasmus continued. ‘The example I had in mind is the return of King Richard – that’s been a part of the legend for as long as we can trace it back. Historically, it seems extremely unlikely. Richard spent most of his time out of the country and there’s plenty of evidence he didn’t care about the place in the slightest. Even if we allow for the possibility that Robin could have met the King during the siege of Nottingham Castle, it seems unlikely that standing up for the rights of English peasants would have pleased Richard. Marian is an interesting one, though. It’s widely held she was, as Atkinson pointed out, added by French-inspired romantics at roughly the same time that Guinevere was added to the legend of King Arthur, but a new school of thought has it that Marian was part of the original legends and was removed by chroniclers of the day, possibly because they shared the opinions of Heathfield’s father.’

There were a few chuckles around the room and Heathfield’s face flushed red.

‘Please, sir,’ Harrison held his arm so high Erasmus wondered at how he didn’t dislocate it.

‘Yes, Harrison,’ Erasmus prompted, expecting one of Harrison’s regular requests for the lavatory.

‘Did Robin Hood really exist?’ Harrison asked.

Erasmus sat down on the edge of his desk. ‘That’s difficult to say,’ he admitted. ‘It’s usually true that legends have at least some historical basis, but it’s very hard to tell how much of the legend is attributable to a real person.’

‘Can’t you just look up his birth certificate?’

Erasmus smiled. ‘They hadn’t started keeping them back then,’ he said. ‘But there are Robin Hoods in the records.’ He noted Harrison’s sudden look of enthusiasm. ‘They’re all years later,’ he said.

‘What about going back to the earliest version of the legend?’ Atkinson asked.

Erasmus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The trouble with legends like Robin Hood is that they usually begin as an oral tradition. The first written stories of Robin appear at least a hundred years after the time of King John and it’s possible these left out elements, like Marian, which were added by later writers who knew some of the oral traditions. It’s also possible the original writers added some of the political material of their own time to the message.

‘Robin, we are told, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but this was supposed to happen at a time when we’re told money wasn’t in wide circulation. Peasants were living off the land and they paid for the rights to that land by working the lands of their masters. Their masters mostly earned their keep by means of military service.’

‘So where did all the robbing come from?’ asked Atkinson.

‘Possibly from when the stories were written down. By then, the feudal system had been devastated by the Black Death, labourers were being paid to farm, and King Edward the Third was expecting to live just us as well in a country where thirty per cent of the population had died in a few short years.

‘Robin Hood was the perfect tale to carry the sentiments of the people of that time, which might explain why King John is given such a poor portrayal. King Richard, by contrast, is portrayed as a great king even though he was hardly ever in the country.’

‘Sir,’ Harrison asked. ‘What’s the feudal system?’

‘I’m glad you asked that,’ Erasmus told him, ‘because that’s what we were supposed to be studying today. Now, if you’ll all turn to page one hundred and thirty in your textbooks, we’ll have a look at what life was like in the Middle Ages.’

There was a general rustling of pages and Erasmus drank deeply from his lukewarm tea. In a way he was grateful for the school play – he’d never have been able to get the pupils interested in the Barons’ Revolt and Magna Carta if they weren’t already thinking about the period. That was the trouble with the curriculum, history was expected to be a dry repetition of facts: there was no real understanding to go with it. If you could put the class into one of those reconstruction villages for a week, like a mediaeval version of Big Brother, now that might help them to understand what it was like.

He opened his own battered copy of the textbook to the relevant page – oh well, time to get on with the lesson. He noticed Barnstaple was leaning over towards Harrison’s desk, his eyes intent on the smaller boy’s sandwiches. Almost unconsciously, the teacher picked up his board rubber and hurled it across the room. The projectile hit the desk within an inch of Barnstaple’s hand and bounced off towards the back of the room; the sound of the impact made both boys jump and Barnstaple, already in an imbalanced position, fell from his chair with a crash. A ripple of laughter spread across the class as Barnstaple picked himself up, his face red with embarrassment and one hand clutching his forehead.

‘Now what’s the matter?’ Erasmus asked.

‘I hit my head,’ Barnstaple replied. Erasmus summoned the boy to his desk and inspected the purple swelling just above his eye. It was nothing serious but, if it meant he could rid the class of a disruptive influence for long enough to get the other boys settled into some work, then it was an opportunity worth taking.

‘Go and see the nurse,’ he instructed the boy, ‘and don’t be too long, you’ll be making the time up tomorrow evening.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Barnstaple, thoroughly cowed, then made his way out of the classroom door. The other pupils watched him go then looked expectantly at their teacher.

‘Right,’ said Erasmus in a businesslike tone. ‘What we’re going to do today is to read the chapter on Magna Carta and then I want you to write a thousand words on what effect you think the document had on the common man. Heathfield, you can come here and distribute the exercise books.’

The ginger-haired boy made his way unhurriedly to the front of the class and took the pile of books from his teacher. Erasmus watched as each child accepted his book and turned to see what mark they had received for their homework. Atkinson was staring wistfully into the corner of the room and Erasmus followed his gaze, which was trained somewhere just above his confiscated bow.

‘We’ll never know, will we sir?’ Atkinson asked.

‘Know what?’

‘Whether Robin Hood really existed.’

‘Perhaps we will one day,’ said Erasmus and he shot a glance at the equations, just visible at the top of the board. ‘Perhaps we will.’

Chapter Four

The end of the school day came, as it always did, as something of a relief. Despite having a passion for teaching, Erasmus always felt the school day was at least half an hour too long and that the hours of eight-thirty until four o’clock had been arrived at with more consideration to the children’s parents than to the children themselves. He retrieved his board rubber from the back of the room for the third time that day, then sat down at his desk and finished his mug of tea, before rolling the blackboard round to the squiggles that had so confused Clarence the previous night.

Ciphered in the impenetrable scrawl was the key to time, an equation so elegant it was almost a work of art, yet so simple it should scarcely have taxed a remedial student and yet – and yet – it was he, Erasmus Hobart, who had discovered that equation, who had realised it could be applied to create a machine that could travel in what had once been naively cast as the fourth dimension. There, described in a thin layer of chalk dust, was a summation of the quantum nature of time, a description of how all times were superposed in one space and how, far from accepting the universe as observed, a traveller could spin the quantum universe until he had selected the time at which he wished to observe it. The full ramifications of interacting with a different quantum state of the universe weren’t entirely certain, but then nothing was when you were dealing with quantum physics.

Erasmus adjusted a couple of figures based on the voyage of the night before, then tossed the board rubber in his hand as he basked in the glory of his achievement.

Where should he go tonight? Should he try to solve some great mystery, like what exactly happened on the Marie Celeste, or try to meet one of history’s great statesmen for an interview? Perhaps, he considered, he could try to find the truth of the Robin Hood legend. It was certainly an interesting proposition.

He pocketed the board rubber and picked up his mediaeval costume, which he had washed at home the previous night. Then, mindful of Clarence’s intrusion after his previous outing, he locked the door to the corridor before unlocking the storeroom. Inside the small room, the privy stood, silent and expectant. Erasmus ignored it for the moment and turned his attention to the wardrobes, opening the door to the first and revealing a rack of clothing, with plastic hangings dividing it into sections. Each section was labelled with a range of dates for the era to which the clothes belonged, with sections like the 1500s, where fashion had changed on an almost weekly basis, being contrasted with those of earlier centuries, where advances in clothing had been seen as secondary to the continual struggle to survive.

Erasmus hung his clean clothing in the 1000s section, then rifled through the other clothes in the same era, looking for something more likely to blend in with forest surroundings. He finally settled on a brown tunic with matching cloak and trousers, which he complemented with a leather belt, a pouch and a pair of calfskin thigh boots.

He dressed hurriedly, then checked his appearance in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. Perfect – except for one detail. He rummaged in a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled out a small, cloth bag, inside which were a pair of contact lenses. He disliked wearing lenses, but his glasses were a product of a later era. Although he had no way of knowing how much impact introducing advanced technology into the ancient world would have, he didn’t want to be the man who went down in history for ruining it.

Having assured the authenticity of his costume, Erasmus examined himself in the mirror once more. He was probably a little clean for a mediaeval peasant, but that should go unnoticed for long enough for him to attract a little dirt. He practised a few mediaeval expressions, greeting himself as if he had just unaccountably run into his exact doppelganger in a village street. Then, satisfied he would pass muster, he picked up his modern clothes from where they lay on the floor and hung them up in the second wardrobe.

As he turned his jacket up the right way, the board rubber fell from its pocket and, distractedly, Erasmus attempted to put the implement back. It wasn’t so easy to insert the rubber into the pocket of a jacket he wasn’t wearing, however, and after failing on his first attempt, he popped it into the pouch he wore on his belt. He closed the wardrobe doors, then a thought occurred to him and he returned to the classroom.

Standing in the corner of the room was the bow he had confiscated from Atkinson. Erasmus picked it up and tested the string once more. He’d never fired a bow before, but it was unlikely anyone else would guess that, so carrying one would probably be a sensible measure to discourage anyone from attacking him. Finally, satisfied that he was ready to depart, Erasmus re-entered the storeroom, locking the door behind him, then turned his attention to the privy.

The interior of the privy was not what one might have expected from such a primitive device. Although the essential seat was present and correct, it was covered with a padded leather cushion, firmly fastened into place with brass studs. The walls, far from being bare wood, were covered with a mass of wires and small, blinking lights and a periscope hung from the centre of the ceiling, its brass glinting in the light from the outside world.

Erasmus sat down on the cushion, adjusted his posture to make himself comfortable, then pulled at a wooden panel that was almost flush with the wall on his right. The panel swung on smoothly oiled joints until it hung over Erasmus’ lap like one of the old-fashioned school desks in which chair and writing surface were one combined piece of furniture. The surface of this desk, however, contained something more than an inkwell, with a series of lights and liquid crystal displays, all connected to each other with lengths of rainbow-striped ribbon cable. In the centre of the panel was a series of buttons, a small keyboard, a joystick with a big red button on top and a throttle, all cobbled together from bits of old computer equipment, and these were labelled, using the black and white embossed stickers from a label maker Erasmus had confiscated from a troublesome first former. The joystick was labelled ‘where’ and the throttle was labelled ‘when’.

Erasmus flicked a switch on the side of the board and the privy hummed into life, with lights streaming along translucent wires, LEDs flicking on and off in what appeared to be random sequences and the displays on the control panel blinking a couple of times before settling down. A series of numbers appeared, the co-ordinates of Erasmus’ previous jaunt, with a prompt for a label displayed in flashing capitals beneath. The schoolteacher entered in a date and location – his research had placed Lady Godiva’s ride in Coventry somewhere between 1038 and 1051 – then pressed the button to store the information. It wasn’t, he had to admit, a very precise fix, but it was a start. He’d be able to improve on that when he’d made a few more trips.

Erasmus surveyed the control panel before him and breathed deeply. Last night had been an experiment – he had had no real destination in mind – now he was going to put his machine to the purpose he had always intended – the pursuit of historical truth. It was true he would never be able to tell anyone what he discovered – he was less than willing that his machine should fall into the hands of the authorities – but he could finally find the answers to all those questions that had nagged him throughout his life: he could finally know what really happened. He placed his hands on the joystick and the throttle, moved them carefully until he was satisfied with the contents of the display, then closed his eyes and pressed the red button.

Chapter Five

The Middle Ages was once said to be a time when England was covered in an impenetrable forest, when a squirrel could cross from one end of the country to the other without once setting foot on the ground. This is now known to be untrue, though it may have been possible for squirrels that had mastered the art of hitchhiking or stowing away on carts.

For a squirrel to cross a shorter distance, say from one part of Sherwood Forest to another, was much simpler and would have been particularly easy deep in the heart of the forest where the upper branches of the trees grew so close as to blanket out the sun. Here all was suffused in a strange green light, filtering through the leaves to the ground below and this, so the peasants held, was where the spirits were said to walk and where the night came faster and deeper than in any other part of England. Here the common man feared to tread.

Guy of Gisburne was not a common man. He didn’t believe in phantoms and fairies and knew the only thing that went bump in the night was the door of the privy when the plague was in town. For him, Sherwood Forest held no ghostly fears – the only threats were outlaws. You had more chance of an arrow in your back than of having your soul stolen by whatever demons lurked in the ancient wood.

He rode quietly through the heart of the forest, or at least as close to it as he could get whilst wearing scale-mail armour and mounted on a horse. Despite his lack of supernaturally induced fear, his eyes betrayed a certain nervous tension and his feelings were somehow transmitted to his horse, which was behaving a little skittishly. A resounding clang on his helmet made him look up – above him in the trees he saw the small form of a creature scurrying away through the branches. Bloody squirrels. He hadn’t come into the woods to hunt squirrels, he’d come to hunt outlaws. Outlaws who were stealing the King’s deer and waylaying merchants whose taxes would fund his wars in the Holy Land.

The root of the problem was that Prince John was an unreasonable man: to him, being robbed didn’t constitute a tax deductible expense. Because it was much harder to extract money from a merchant when they’d already lost it, he had decided on a policy of punishing those who were insufficiently careful with their or rather, as the Prince saw it, his money. Such merchants were, in future, to be regarded as de facto thieves.

Unfortunately, this didn’t have the desired effect. Convictions for theft increased vastly, but most of the convicted were those who had been robbed. Since this provided little money for King Richard’s war chest, John was forced to think again.

His next brainwave was vastly more effective. Instead of blaming the victims of crime, he decided, instead, to blame those officials whose lands were havens for cutthroats and whose thoroughfares were most often used to waylay wealthy travellers.

Hunting outlaws was proving to be an infuriating pastime: even with the Sheriff, Gisburne himself and ten men-at-arms combing the forest, the demands of Prince John on behalf of his brother were proving intractable. The outlaws knew the forest well – too well – and seemed to be able to melt away into the trees at will. Gisburne was all for letting them stay in their damned forest, but he knew that, though his and the Sheriff’s heads would be of as little use to Richard as the merchant’s hands, that wouldn’t stop John from appropriating them if they were less than totally successful.

The knight steered his frightened horse with his knees and turned it southward down yet another leaf-covered pathway. A low branch hung across the path a few yards ahead and he had just ducked under this when the air was rent by an ear-splitting crash, something like a thunderclap. His horse, startled by the sound, bolted and the branch caught the top of his helmet and threw him from his saddle.

He landed on his back in the pathway. For a few moments, he just lay there, catching his breath. As the sound of his horse receded, the world seemed strangely peaceful: he could hear birdsong, scurrying animals in the undergrowth and the chattering of the squirrels in the trees. He could have lain, listening to the calming sounds for the rest of the day, but something, whether it was his sense of duty or a strong suspicion that the squirrels were laughing at him, prevented him. He sat up and looked around him for his helmet. As he did so he became aware of a much louder noise, the trampling of leaves and twigs by an animal that was larger and considerably less careful where it put its feet.

Worried there might be a wolf approaching, Gisburne pulled himself painfully to his feet, picked up his dented helmet and drew his sword from his scabbard. He looked around him, trying to work out from which direction the sound was coming. Presently he saw the undergrowth parting to reveal a man, dressed in brown-coloured peasant attire and carrying a bow. Gisburne’s fear dissipated, leaving a sense of embarrassment which then rapidly turned to rage. He threw down his helmet and charged at the man, roaring and with his sword upraised.

Erasmus, taking a single look at the red-faced, armoured man, turned and fled through the forest, stumbling back in the direction of his time machine. This obviously wasn’t the kind of pursuer who would take his time to stop and scrape off horse manure – he doubted that he would stop to wipe his entrails from his sword. As the teacher ran, he removed his keys from his pouch and glanced down to make sure the right one was to hand so he could open the time machine as soon as he arrived. This was beginning to become a habit, he mused. Perhaps he should code the keys with some kind of bump pattern.

Gisburne charged blindly after the man. He smashed through the thicket so loudly that he masked the sounds of his quarry, but the odd glimpse of brown guided him on. After a few minutes, he emerged into a clearing and was startled to find himself faced with some kind of wooden privy. He stopped and lowered his sword: it seemed a strange place for such an object and the naturally suspicious knight suspected some kind of trap. Tentatively, he extended his weapon and gave the privy an experimental prod. Nothing happened. No net fell from the trees and no arrow thudded into the forest floor next to his foot. Reassured, he decided it was safe to approach.

The moment he took a step, a storm of leaves whirled up from the floor. He put up an arm to shield his face, then staggered back under the onslaught and fell over a tree root, landing heavily in a pile of leaves. There was another thunderclap and then there was silence. Gisburne raised his head groggily from the floor. The privy was gone. For a moment he stared in amazement at the empty clearing, then a shower of acorns bounced off his head and he blacked out.

The now-familiar whine of travelling inside the time machine faded away and Erasmus took a moment to catch his breath. So far, he reflected, life in the past seemed to comprise of running from people with swords. He checked the readout on his control board; he hadn’t come very far in time or space this time – probably only a couple of years forward and a few miles south. It was probably a good place to start: his pursuer had seemed to be of the right era, anyway.

Although he hadn’t had much chance to calibrate the machine, Erasmus was beginning to get an intuitive feel for the controls. It was, he considered, a reasonable assumption that he wasn’t that far from Nottingham. He was also beginning to get an intuitive feel for the nature of history, so he thought it prudent to check what was outside before he ventured out again. He swung the periscope around to give him a view of his surroundings. Everything seemed quiet enough: he was in an enclosed area with high, stone walls and a number of low, wooden buildings. At a guess, he figured it was probably the outer bailey of a castle or the inside of a fort. The low levels of activity led him to believe he had landed in peacetime, when most of the activity would be carrying on in whatever settlement lay outside of the walls.

There was nothing to tell him exactly where he was, but it was a fair chance that this was Nottingham Castle and the state of repair appeared to indicate it was during the castle’s heyday, so he was probably in the twelfth or thirteenth century. He turned the periscope through a slow circle, making sure that nobody was hiding behind the privy with a sword in hand, then, satisfied he was safe, he stowed the controls, unlocked the door and stepped out into mediaeval England.

The time was probably somewhere after four in the afternoon by Erasmus’ reckoning as he locked the privy door and buried the key in his pouch. The sun was beginning to move towards the west and glinting off the whitewashed stone of the surrounding walls. Erasmus stepped out into the centre of the yard so he could get a better look at his surroundings. Above him towered the castle keep, an imposing structure whose presence positively oppressed the low hovels below it.

Despite the warmth of the sun, several of the wooden outbuildings had smoke pouring through holes in their roofs, indicating that fires were blazing within them. Erasmus felt like the last tourist of the afternoon, just getting a chance to look around after the swarms of foreign students had left and before the custodian came to usher him out of the building.

He strolled casually around the bailey, walking a lazy circuit of the keep and drinking in the atmosphere which, as he had expected, contained a strong perfume of horse manure, given a musky edge by the drifting smoke. He passed the gatehouse, keeping a wary eye out for soldiers – his presence inside the castle might be somewhat hard to explain to the military mind – and continued on past the stables and the small, wooden chapel which butted up against the stone walls. Eventually, he found himself back more or less where he had started: there was his time machine and there, before it, was a familiar looking man.

Erasmus halted several feet away. The man’s face wasn’t as red as before and there was a new scar across his left cheek, but it was quite clearly the same man who had just pursued him to his time machine. It was somewhat disconcerting, especially when the man now stood between him and his only means of escape. Perhaps it would be all right – it must have been a couple of years in this man’s time and he may well have forgotten the previous encounter.

Erasmus backed away slightly to what he hoped was a safe distance, watching as the armoured man examined the privy. He seemed very cautious about what, to his eyes, must have seemed like a simple, wooden box and he prodded at it with his sword tentatively. The machine, naturally, did nothing and Gisburne was emboldened by this small victory. Passing his sword to his left hand, he tried to pull on the door. It didn’t open and he struck out at the machine with his fist in exasperation. Erasmus, unnerved by the sudden, violent action, took a further step backwards and his foot came into contact with a metal bucket, which resounded like a bell. Gisburne spun on his heel and his eyes bulged as he recognised the occupant of the mysterious privy.

‘You,’ he yelled, raising his sword and moving forward.

Erasmus tried to back away further, but he was now right up against the wall. In desperation, he took Atkinson’s bow from his shoulder and tried to wield it like a staff. Gisburne swung at the weapon with his sword and the bow was smashed in a single blow. Pausing only to reflect that Atkinson wouldn’t be pleased, Erasmus turned and fled around the bailey, accidentally charging through a chicken coop and sending squawking poultry flying in all directions.

Gisburne pursued him, kicking one of the chickens that crossed his path. At a steady run, Erasmus soon found himself passing the gatehouse and he realised there was no way he could get far enough ahead of Gisburne that he could unlock and enter his time machine before he was caught.

He looked around him, desperate for a direction in which he could escape. He briefly considered running out of the gate, but there could be an entire army camped outside for all he knew. He ran on. Gisburne, not far behind him, called out as he passed the gatehouse and two guards hurried over to join him in the pursuit.

Twenty seconds later, Erasmus rounded the bailey and found himself back at the privy, with Gisburne and the two guards hot on his heels. Unable to think of any alternative, he began another lap. Behind him, Gisburne instructed one of the guards to go around the other way and head him off.

Erasmus ran, the repetition of the scenery reminding him of the tiresome distance races on sports day when the boys just ran around a short circuit until they either finished the race or lost count of how many laps they had done. He tried to regulate his breathing, to pace himself and stop treating the run as a sprint, but he still found the exertion painful.

There had to be a way out. As he passed the gatehouse again, he glanced up and saw a guard running towards him in the other direction. He looked left, but there was another guard standing in the archway with sword in hand. He looked right – there was yet another wooden building. He ran in.

The first thought that struck Erasmus as he blinked in the darkened interior of the building was how inefficient the chimneys were: despite the sheer volume of smoke pouring out of the roof, the inside was still filled with an acrid vapour, most of which seemed to be pouring from a forge by the wall. The armourer, a solid-looking man whose bare arms appeared to be one hundred per cent muscle, looked up briefly from working a piece of metal on his anvil then, apparently uninterested, went back to his hammering. Erasmus looked around him for a place to hide – there didn’t seem to be one. Then his eyes fell on a rack of swords and he dived for the nearest weapon.

The armourer looked up. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What you doing with that?’

‘I’ll bring it back,’ said Erasmus.

‘You can’t take them, they’re not finished.’

Erasmus wanted to explain, but Gisburne chose that moment to run in and Erasmus, ignoring the armourer’s protests, lifted the sword from the rack and swung it in a wide arc. As he did so, the blade, not yet secured into the hilt, detached and hurled across the room like a steel missile. Gisburne flinched as the blade passed startlingly close to his cheek and embedded itself in the wall next to him, then he began to approach Erasmus slowly, keeping his sword arm extended.

Erasmus looked disbelievingly at the hilt in his hand, then threw it at Gisburne, who deflected it with his sword and kept coming. Erasmus grasped another sword from the rack. This time the hilt came off in his hand. He dropped the useless weapon to the floor and stepped back, groping his way along the wooden table to his right until his hands closed on something metal. Glancing down, he found he had discovered a small pile of horseshoes. He picked one up and threw it at the knight. Taken by surprise, Gisburne fended off the missile with his sword, the resounding clang echoing around the room, but he was forced to step back. The armourer, disturbed by the sound, looked over to where Erasmus stood, already holding another horseshoe. Annoyed with the disrespect being shown for his work, he shook his head before returning to his hammering with increased vigour.

Erasmus and Gisburne faced each other across the smoky room. Gisburne held his sword in both hands, like an upraised cricket-bat, and Erasmus hefted his horseshoe, turning it in his hands and trying to get a feel for its balance. Neither man spoke, each waiting to see what the other would do.

It was Erasmus who acted first: he threw the horseshoe to Gisburne’s right in an attempt to put him off-balance. Gisburne dealt the horseshoe a blow and it crashed into the forge in a shower of sparks, earning him a scowl from the armourer.

Erasmus’ second shot went wide of Gisburne’s left, bouncing off one of the posts which held up the roof, and Gisburne was forced to parry the ricochet.

Now Erasmus tried two shots in rapid succession, but Gisburne had expected this and deflected both in a quick one-two action. Erasmus glanced down at the bench – he had two horseshoes left. Cautiously, he picked both up, passing one to his left hand. Gisburne, glancing quickly at Erasmus’ hands, put his left foot back to steady himself and held his sword in front of him. Erasmus turned the two shoes in his hands; they were quite heavy and his arms were beginning to tire. He banged one shoe against the bench, causing a vibration to resonate along it and Gisburne, distracted by the sound of vibrating nails on his left hand side, took his eyes off Erasmus. Quickly, Erasmus hurled both shoes at the same time. The first came so close to hitting the knight that he was forced to duck, there being no time to parry; unfortunately, Erasmus was less capable with his left hand and the second shoe went hurtling across the room and nearly hit the armourer. Scowling at the teacher, the muscleman put down his hammer and backed away to a corner of the room where he proceeded to wipe the sweat from his hands and view the proceedings with a combination of annoyance and interest.

Erasmus used the momentary confusion to his advantage and backed quickly around the room until he stood next to the forge. As Gisburne circled around him, the teacher picked up a pair of tongs, extracted a piece of white-hot metal from the coals and brandished it at the knight. Gisburne tried to parry, but, even at arm’s length, he could feel the heat of the metal. He took a step backwards.

‘Now come on,’ he said in what he hoped was a placating manner. ‘Put down the weapon and we’ll talk about this like civilised people.’

Erasmus wasn’t fooled. ‘You mean discuss it over some hot irons, do you?’ he said. He swung the makeshift weapon in a wide arc. Gisburne leant back to avoid being scorched, then moved his right foot back to balance himself.

‘You’re only making it worse for yourself,’ said Gisburne.

Erasmus wondered briefly at how bad it had been to start with, but the advantage now seemed to be his and he took a step forward and waved his hot metal dangerously close to the knight’s face. Gisburne took another step backwards, tripped over the anvil and fell, catching his head on the edge of the bench. Erasmus knelt down and examined his foe – he appeared to be unconscious. Smiling, he rose and turned to the door, only to find the way blocked by two armed guards. He waved his hot iron in front of him and was just beginning to advance when the armourer, having returned to his forge whilst Erasmus’ back was turned, threw a bucket of water over him. Erasmus stood for a moment, blinking and watching the steam rising from his now-useless weapon then, knowing he was beaten, he let it drop to the floor.

Chapter Six

Erasmus examined his surroundings with disdain. If he’d been asked to rate the dungeon he was in he wouldn’t have given it five stars – three rats would have been more appropriate. This was not because he thought it was fairly average for mediaeval accommodation, but because that’s how many rats he’d counted in the first few minutes of his confinement. The straw didn’t show any obvious evidence of housekeeping and, with the only light coming through the grille of the trapdoor above, the view was little to write home about. What made it worse was the fact he had to share: there were at least half a dozen prisoners in the pit and, going by the smell, some of them had been there for some time.

An old man with an unkempt beard sat in a corner staring at the wall. After a while he began to argue with it, and two other men, sitting quietly together in a corner, shook their heads with sad familiarity.

Erasmus himself was sat in the middle of the room where he had landed. He was still winded from the fall but, surprisingly, his arms and legs seemed intact. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the first thing he noticed was that the dungeon probably merited a higher rating on his rat scale and the second was that the straw seemed somewhat unevenly distributed, with a greater part of it piled underneath the trapdoor. Obviously, somebody had moved the straw into place in order to spare any subsequent unfortunates the same pains they themselves had experienced.

He looked around the dungeon, trying to identify a likely candidate for his mysterious benefactor. There was a young man sitting in one corner, mending his boots with something that appeared to be rat-gut and a needle improvised from a bone; a surly, bearded man who glared at everything – rats, people and walls – but made no attempt to argue with anything and, surprisingly, a young woman, who sat patiently at one side of the room, with a smile which spoke of someone who knew something nobody else did. Feeling that a bit of conversation that wasn’t punctuated with sword-thrusts might be nice and that he probably ought to get away from the trapdoor before the next arrival, Erasmus stood up, made a show of tidying the straw for the next visitor then, still limping slightly from the impact, joined the woman by the wall.

‘Afternoon,’ he greeted her casually. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘It don’t look like I’ve got much choice,’ said the woman, ‘us being stuck in the same ’ole an’ all.’

‘I can sit over there if you’d prefer,’ said Erasmus, pointing to where the old man was crouching by the opposite wall. Having had no satisfaction in his argument, he was now picking up loose pieces of straw and making a little mound next to his feet.

‘Sit where you bleeding like,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t give a tinker’s cuss.’ Erasmus suspected the woman probably wasn’t responsible for the impromptu crash-mat.

‘Have you been here long?’ he said.

‘That’s an old one. Why didn’t you start with “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”’

‘That’s an old one where I come from too,’ said Erasmus. ‘Sorry, I’m not trying to…’ He searched his mind for a mediaeval equivalent for ‘chat you up’.

‘Get in me britches?’ the woman provided.

‘I was going for something a little more polite.’

‘Polite,’ the woman laughed. ‘You’re a posh ’un, aren’t you? What they stick you in ’ere for – you eat with one of them new-fangled fork things?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Erasmus was genuinely confused.

‘They ’ung a man for that a few months back,’ the woman continued. ‘Only things made by God should touch ’is bounty they said. ’Course, ’e was eating the King’s deer at the time, so that might ’ave ’ad something to do with it. Personally, I don’t see what’s wrong with ’em.’

‘With what? Deer?’

‘Forks, of course. I mean you eat your pottage with a spoon, don’t you – you aren’t expected to scoop it up with your fingers and I’d love to see the man who could cut a loaf of bread without a knife.’

‘There are some,’ said Erasmus, unable to resist the automatic urge to educate people.

‘You what? You’re pulling my leg.’

‘In China,’ said Erasmus. ‘They focus all their energy into the edge of their hand and use the force to split logs.’

‘China? That in foreign?’

Erasmus tried to think what the woman would recognise as a name for China. ‘Cathay?’ he hazarded – she shook her head. ‘Yes, it’s foreign,’ he said.

‘Know a bit about foreign, do you?’

‘We travel a lot where I come from.’

‘Well you ain’t gonna get much travelling done in ’ere. You ever seen a cell like this?’

‘Not from the inside, no,’ said Erasmus. ‘We’re a bit more civilised where I come from.’

‘Sounds like you chose to come to the wrong country. Mind you, it’s not all bad.’

‘No?’

‘No, sometimes the pottage ’as fresh carrot in it.’

‘Oh,’ said Erasmus.

The woman looked him up and down appraisingly.

‘You know, you can get in me britches if you want,’ she said quietly. ‘I reckon a woman ought to be glad to ’ave a civilised man like you. Better than the rough sort you get round ’ere, anyway.’

Erasmus flushed red and, although he was sure it was too dark for the woman to tell, she seemed somehow aware of his embarrassment.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘is a woman offering ’erself not done where you come from?’

Erasmus thought briefly of the culture of twenty-first-century England where some women would probably dance naked if it got them on Big Brother. He thought about trying to explain that they simply didn’t offer themselves to poor teachers with no prospect of fame and fortune, but decided against it. ‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Fair enough,’ said the woman. ‘What are you in for? My name’s Maude, by the way.’

‘Erasmus,’ said Erasmus.

‘Is that a name or a crime?’

‘It’s my name. I’m in for…’ Erasmus paused; he wasn’t exactly sure why he was in a dungeon. ‘I think I embarrassed a knight,’ he continued.

‘Embarrassment, eh! Telling bawdy jokes, were you?’

‘No. I think it’s because I made him fall off of his horse – must be a couple of years ago.’

‘And you’ve been locked up for that? God, they’ll put you away for anything now. Who was it?’

‘I don’t know his name. Tallish chap, though, well built.’

‘They all look like that – built like towers with brains to match.’

‘He had blonde hair and a scar on his cheek – that was the second time I saw him, anyway.’

‘What? ’Is hair changed colour?’

Erasmus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The scar was new. Looked like he’d been slashed across the cheek.’

Maude looked at him thoughtfully. ‘That’s Gisburne, that is,’ she said. ‘You get on the wrong side of ’im he won’t forget it. They call ’im Guy the Gamekeeper.’

‘Gamekeeper?’

‘He kills poachers for sport. Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret, m’duck, any enemy of Gisburne is a friend o’ mine and I think friends ought to ’elp each other, don’t you?’

Erasmus nodded. ‘Quite,’ he said.

‘Well, I’m going to be busted out of ’ere in a few ’ours – I might be able to get you out as well.’

Erasmus’ eyebrows raised in curiosity. The name Gisburne had rung a bell.

‘Who’s coming?’ he said. ‘Is it Robin Hood?’

‘Robin ’ood?’ Maude chuckled, a sound not dissimilar to the clucking of a broody hen.

‘He does exist, doesn’t he?’ said Erasmus – it would be a dreadful disappointment to find that Robin was a legend even now.

‘Oh, ’e exists,’ said Maude. ‘I just don’t think ’e’s the kind of person you want to rescue you.’ She ignored Erasmus’ attempts to interrupt with questions and continued. ‘Now, when the girls get ’ere, try not to say too much – ’specially to Alice – and I might be able to bring you along.’

‘Alice?’

‘One of the girls, but she’s a little enthusiastic with ’er dagger when there’s men around. You keep quiet and she’ll probably let you get away with your balls.’

‘Ah,’ said Erasmus, nodding. ‘So what’s Robin Hood like?’

‘What is this obsession with Robin ’ood?’

‘He’s a legend where I come from.’

‘Well he isn’t a legend ’ere and, if you don’t want a nice ’igh singing voice, I wouldn’t mention’is name when Alice is around.’

‘Why?’

‘Ask a lot of questions, don’t you? I don’t know what it’s like in foreign, but over ’ere that can shorten your life.’

‘Shorten it?’

‘By about a ’ead’s’eight. Now, d’you say it was afternoon when you got ’ere?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we got a couple of’ours then. You sure you don’t want to…’

‘Thanks, but not right now.’

‘Suit yourself. Guess I’ll get a bit of kip then.’

Erasmus leant back against the wall and breathed deeply. He was definitely in the right time, but things weren’t turning out quite the way he’d planned. As he closed his eyes, the old man picked up his little collection of straw, wiped up some rat-droppings with it, then walked over to the middle of the room and dumped it on the pile.

Chapter Seven

Erasmus lay back against the wall of the dungeon, deep in thought. As a tourist in his own time, he’d visited the shells of many castles and seen their ruined dungeons, but nothing had really prepared him for the psychological impact of being imprisoned in one.

He’d heard the stories, of course: he knew well the tale of how prisoners in Carlisle Castle had been compelled to lick the walls to quench their thirst; he’d seen the waxworks that filled the dungeons of Warwick, hanging around in manacles or tied on racks. The trouble was that such images were so different to anything in his experience that it was hard to relate to them. You could understand the pain of torture as prisoners were interrogated; you could even try to comprehend the deprivations of an inadequate diet whilst they awaited their fate – something familiar to many poor university students – but what was difficult to handle was the simple torture of imprisonment itself. The greatest terror a dungeon could bring was not the application of thumbscrews to extract a confession, or even the cheerful banter of the hangman as he came to measure you up for your scaffold, it was the horrifying tricks the mind of an incarcerated man could play when there was nothing to do but think. And for someone who did a lot of thinking it could take a lot less time for the effects to kick in.

Oubliette. The word ran through Erasmus Hobart’s brain looking for a reason. Place of forgetting – oubliette. Forgetting what? Surely you only forget things when you’re preoccupied. If all I’ve got to do is think, I ought to have an eidetic memory by now. The time. What’s the time? See, you’ve forgotten that. No, I remember what the time was when I saw it last, I just don’t know how long ago it was. That’s not the same as forgetting. Is it day or night? How can you tell? It never changes in here. It can’t have been more than four or five hours, but what time did I arrive? Oubliette.

The distant sound of a grunt roused Erasmus from his thoughts and he looked around the room. Most of the prisoners were asleep, so perhaps mediaeval people had some internal body clock that told them whether it was day or night in the outside world. The old man wasn’t asleep, though, he seemed to be continuing his earlier argument with the wall, but even he was keeping his voice down.

Oubliette. Why did they call it that? Did they forget they’d shoved you in it perhaps? No, it couldn’t be that – they’d be popping round to have a look every five minutes, just to see what was there. Perhaps forgetting was a crime? Perhaps you could get locked up for forgetting. That wouldn’t go down very well back at school – every time someone handed their homework in late, they’d be struggling for an excuse other than ‘I forgot’. ‘The dog ate it’, ‘it got flushed down the toilet’, ‘Mulder and Scully came round and confiscated it because the FBI didn’t want it published’ – he’d heard some excuses since he’d started, but ‘I forgot’ was still the original and classic. Oubliette. Why oubliette?

There was a grating noise from above and the trapdoor slid back to reveal several hooded figures. For a moment, Erasmus thought the Oubliette Squad had come to take him, leaving him as just a memory in the minds of people who hadn’t been born yet. Maude, however, seemed less than worried and looked up expectantly.

‘There you are,’ said one of the hooded figures – Erasmus noted the voice was female. ‘I bet you thought we’d forgotten you.’

The corridors above the dungeon were in darkness and Erasmus concluded it was night. He wanted to ask the exact time, but Maude had told him not to speak unnecessarily and, besides, they didn’t have accurate clocks in these days. It had almost been tempting to keep his watch on, but it wouldn’t have helped – he had no way of getting the right time in the first place.

He looked at his rescuers: a small group of women, each wrapped in a black cloak, beneath which Erasmus could catch the occasional glimpse of green cloth or brown leather. The women paid little attention to him: once Maude had persuaded the aggressive, short-haired woman (Alice, Erasmus presumed) that Erasmus was from foreign and was, therefore, not the same as other men, they had reluctantly let him out, but they showed no interest in talking to him. Instead, Alice issued orders to her companions in hushed tones, and the three of them began to pull up the ladder from the dungeon floor. Alice busied herself with an unconscious guard in the corner, trying to make his posture look natural, so that people would assume he was asleep on duty. As she turned to pick up his helmet, she noticed one of the other male prisoners trying to climb out on the ladder.

‘Is he from foreign too?’ Alice asked Maude.

‘Don’t think so,’ said Maude.

Alice hefted the guard’s helmet and used it to hit the prisoner on the head. He gave a single, startled yelp then fell back into the dungeon with a thud. Maude and the other two women made a redoubled effort to pull up the ladder, then closed the trapdoor and locked it. Erasmus could do nothing except watch as Alice, apparently uninterested in the fate of the man she had brained, returned to her efforts with the guard, casually slitting his throat to make sure he didn’t wake up and spoil the effect. Erasmus wondered whether he really wanted to be rescued by these people: he might have been safer in the pit.

Once the trapdoor was closed, Alice led the way through the maze of passages that ran away from the dungeon. Erasmus looked around him in wonder – he’d known about the Nottingham caves, of course, but he hadn’t realised how extensive they were. With all the twists and turns he rapidly lost all sense of direction. Had Maude not been dragging him along by the arm, he could easily have become separated from the women. Just as he was beginning to wonder if he was going to find himself at the centre of the Earth, he found himself being bustled up some rough steps, hewn from the rock itself, and the party emerged through a door in the foot of the castle and into the outer bailey.

The night sky was scattered with wispy clouds and the light waxed and waned as drifts of cirrus passed across the face of the moon. They made their way across the bailey, keeping to the shadows of the outbuildings. As they passed the time machine, Erasmus felt a sudden desire to run, to get into it and go back to the safety of his own century. He paused and Maude looked at him questioningly.

‘What is it?’ she hissed.

‘He does exist, doesn’t he?’ said Erasmus.

‘Who?’

‘Robin Hood.’

Maude gave him a puzzled look. ‘Of course ’e does. Why are you asking me that now?’

Erasmus took one last look at the time machine and sighed. ‘I was just thinking about home,’ he said.

‘You’ll never get there if the guards catch you wandering round ’ere. Come on.’

Erasmus let himself be dragged along by the arm, noticing as they passed through the outer gatehouse that the two, apparently slumbering, guards seemed to have small puddles of blood forming on their tunics. Alice obviously took a lot of pride in her work.

The town of Nottingham was a far cry from the lively city of Erasmus’ experience. A clutch of primitive, timber-framed buildings huddled against the castle rock as if for protection, their whitewashed walls appearing faintly blue in the moonlight. There were no lights in the windows and the only sounds that could be heard were the occasional bleats of sheep, penned near the perimeter wall of the town.

Erasmus let the women guide him through the streets. Maude still held his arm tightly, despite the fact that the risk of getting lost had subsided as soon as they reached the surface. Nevertheless, he made no attempt to disentangle himself and quietly followed the group, catching the occasional glimpse of Alice as she slipped in and out of shadows further along the street. Had the cover been continuous, or had Erasmus not known she was there, he probably wouldn’t have seen her creeping along. He found that thought rather disquieting.

As they approached the gates of the town, the party came to an abrupt halt and Erasmus found himself staring at the back of Maude’s head. He craned his neck to see past and to find out why they had stopped.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Maude, letting go of his arm as she did so.

‘Why have we stopped?’ said Erasmus.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.