Cressida gave him a cheeky grin. “We can only hope. Legend in my own lifetime!”
“This isn’t your lifetime.”
The village was a tiny gathering of shabby wooden buildings further down the muddy slope. Boswell could see a stone well, and several thatched roofs.
Now he paid attention, he noticed slightly fewer trees than in the previous century. That was human progress for you.
“They’re going to love my opera helmet,” said Cressida happily. “Come on, let’s see how many turnips we can trade for it.” She set out for the village with great strides of enthusiasm.
“This is why humans used to burn witches,” Boswell muttered into his whiskers.
Kettwic, The Kingdom of the East Angles, 812 CE
“They’ve been going at this forest again,” remarked Boswell while Cressida wrote on the back of a postcard featuring an Egyptian sphinx carved from black basalt.
Wish you were here.
“Some of it looks a little scorched around the edges,” Cressida agreed. Was that the Mercians, do you reckon?”
“Hmm.”
“I can’t believe the Dean confiscated my helmet between hops,” Cressida added, now wearing a very dull looking headscarf with no horns attached. “We hadn’t even got to the Vikings.”
“I rather think that was the point,” said Boswell. “You were clearly trying to anachronise.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Testing Time’s ability to prevent paradox is not anachronising, Boz. It’s our job, more or less.”
“All I know is that the hoop home didn’t open for us last time until after you went back to re-trade those turnips and get your helmet back. You’re lucky we made it home at all.”
“I can’t believe Time is such a sour old crone she won’t even let us prank archaeologists. Ooh look, Boz.” Cressida bounced up on her toes. “They’ve built a whopping great hall up on the cleared bit of forest over there. Exactly there. Isn’t that awesome?”
“I suppose it will come in handy when the Vikings invade,” Boswell said dubiously. “They can use it for their council meetings, the Allthing.”
“Ugh! You are sadly lacking in observation skills,” Cressida said in frustration. “I swear you’re doing this deliberately!”
Fenthorp Manor, Kettlewick, Norfolk, England, 1512
“Where the fuck did that wall come from?” yowled Boswell as he hopped through the time hoop, finding a tall brick edifice only a metre or so from his face.
“What the hell?” exclaimed Cressida. “This isn’t the tenth century. We missed the Vikings!” She pulled out the next postcard (Alaskan mountain goats) and wrote carefully on it: WTF. Amateurs. We skipped half a millennium.
“This is rather more civilised,” Boswell noted. He prowled around the corner of the new building to peer down the road that now wound in the direction of the village — still the same village, by the looks of things, though the cottages were all stone now, and the thatching technology had come a long way. “Early fifteen hundreds, do you think?”
“Six centuries off target, that’s embarrassing for Control,” complained Cressida. “Can you at least see where we are now, Boz? This has been the most dragged out surprise since I filled Monterey’s coat pockets with fake spiders just before he retired his winter wardrobe.”
Boswell went for a long, slow walk away from the building so as to turn and examine it with dignity. He did not like encouraging Cressida in these games, but neither did he like to lose.
It looked like a very fancy manor house — or at least as fancy as you could get in an era before flushing toilets had been invented.
“You have to imagine the gardens,” Cressida called after him. “They’re getting started on the planting over there. Squint up at the house and imagine all that red brick covered up with mathematical tile. Corinthian pillars added to the front there, they won’t do that for another two centuries. And the Long Library, of course. That wing won’t be added for…”
Boswell looked, and then he saw, and then he rolled his eyes so hard that his opal registered a bleep of medical distress. “Cressida Spanish Armada Church. We could have done this exercise anywhere. Did Control ask you to pick the site?”
“I mean, they didn’t ask,” she said. “I might have made a teeny suggestion. As a treat.”
“You have been bouncing around like a maniac all afternoon because you tricked our bosses into doing a deep dive into the secret origin of the location of your favourite TV show?”
It was quite obvious once you knew what to look for. It was — or at least, it was the skeleton of a building that would one day be —Cramberleigh.
It was not Cramberleigh yet. This was a sixteenth century manor that would eventually be called Fenthorp: a stately home dripping in wealth, privilege and hot and cold running butlers, until the post-war slump of the twentieth century when the estate would be hired out to film crews so that the Hepple family’s descendants could afford to pay the heating bill.
“If you two are quite finished,” called an impatient voice through the time hoop that, Boswell realised belatedly, had been sparkling actively for several minutes now. “I figured out the glitch with the tenth century,” reported their Control tech. “I reckon we can manage a couple more hops before we knock off for the day.”
Cressida dragged her feet. “But I wanted to wander the grounds a little,” she whined. “Maybe convince one of the lords of the manor to fall in love with me and paint my portrait so that I end up hanging mysteriously on a wall they just happen to use for a background shot in Season 3…”
“Church,” said Boswell, feeling both grumpy and old. “If you come with me right now to finish this mission, you might get to meet a Viking.”
His human partner hesitated, and then her face broke into a wide grin. Humans really were so easily distracted. “You had me at Vikings,” she decided. “Let’s go, Boz! 912, here we come!” She scampered through the hoop at top speed.
Boswell proceeded behind her at a more leisurely gait. Cressida must never know that he himself was genuinely excited to meet a Viking. He would never hear the end of it.
1 The under-funded Props arm of the Costume Department tried developing sleeves to make the postcards look more appropriate to the relevant century, with options including leather-bound journals, wax tablets, clay potsherds and illuminated manuscripts, but the project stalled when it turned out that most travellers were deeply committed to the writing of ironic twentieth century style postcards regardless of which century they were in.
2 There were never any witnesses. Time would not allow it. The hoops would not activate unless there was zero possibility of the travellers being seen during the two minutes it took for the hoops to deliver them to their destination, with all the associated bright swirling lights and sound effects. Control referred to setting up a new hop as ‘fishing’ because of how many tries it took to ‘catch’ an unoccupied piece of ground. It is for this reason that no active time traveller has ever managed to visit Tokyo or New York in the twentieth century, except by hopping a great distance from the city in question and commuting by train.
Part Two
The Cramberleigh Job
