A Trail Through Time (The Chronicles of St Mary's) by Jodi Taylor Read Free Book Online

the whole new life thing, which probably wasn’t proceeding along the lines envisaged by Mrs Partridge when she dumped me on his carpet yesterday. Was it really only yesterday?
    Then there was this Time Police thing. Who they were and what they wanted seemed fairly obvious. They wanted me – a stranger in a strange world – and, if they’d already successfully sorted out some sort of international time-travelling crisis, I couldn’t imagine that one small, ginger historian was going to cause them a lot of trouble. But how had they known about me? Not twenty-four hours after I’d arrived in this world, they’d come after me. I’d had less than one day in Rushford before they’d come crashing through the gate and it had been very apparent from the start that they knew who they wanted and where I was.
    We’d jumped to Skaxos. We’d sat for a while, talking, and then started to set up camp. Less than an hour later, there they were again.
    We’d jumped immediately – at random – and yet, a couple of hours later – they’d found us again. Spatially and temporally, bang on target. I know they were from the future and had some cool kit, but even so – this was amazing. When St Mary’s mounted search parties for lost historians, it could sometimes take weeks to find us, even when they knew when and where to look.
    Finally, of course, there was the question of Leon and me and that was when my thoughts skidded away and shot off in all directions. I’d have to come back to that.
    At some point, he fell asleep. I sat and watched the screen, listened to his slow breathing, and sipped my tea.
    Perhaps because my future looked so bleak and my present so uncertain, my thoughts turned to the past. To the place where I’d always been happy. To St Mary’s. Memories crowded thick and fast. Who could forget the day when Markham set himself on fire during the Icarus Experiment? Racing across the field, frantically beating out the flames and not – being Markham – looking where he was going in any way at all, he’d run slap bang into a horse’s bottom and knocked himself out cold. I could still see him, toppling slowly backwards like a felled tree, while Mr Strong chased away old Turk, who was trying to stand on him in revenge. He survived, of course. He had to. Who wants ‘Fatal Impact with Horse’s Arse’ on their death certificate?
    I looked over at Leon, still lying quietly in the corner, and heard voices from the past. A certain annual performance appraisal … and, for that one, I had been fairly optimistic.
    ‘A nice programme,’ he said, eventually. ‘Well thought out, creative and, as always, imaginatively presented.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said, beaming.
    ‘Well executed and with correct adherence to protocols, but not slavishly so. Never underestimate the benefits of improvisation.’
    ‘No, Chief.’
    ‘There are still one or two areas in which you should strive for more co-ordination. Enthusiasm has its place, but remember, lower back pain is no joke.’
    ‘Yes, Chief.’
    ‘Otherwise, not bad at all. Can you pass me my trousers please?’
    Or the time we had a heavy snowfall and the History department decided to stage an impromptu re-enactment of the escape of Queen Mathilda from Oxford Castle in 1142, when she and a couple of knights lowered themselves from the walls in the dark and crawled away through the snow, supposedly invisible in white nightshirts.
    The party consisted of Messrs Clerk, Markham (who else?), and Roberts, and let’s face it, if you lumped those three together and excavated with a JCB you still wouldn’t be able to find even a single brain cell.
    The plan was that they’d lower themselves from an upstairs window and wriggle through the snow down to the lake. Evans would head a small team from Security who would play the part of soldiers trying to intercept them. The whole thing would be observed and adjudicated by Professor Rapson.
    What could possibly go wrong?
    Well, for a