The space nun took a step towards him. Lovelace hissed — properly hissed, teeth bared and hackles raised.
The nun stepped back. “We will find the jade pineapple,” she warned him. “The Judicial Administrator will be informed that you failed to assist us.”
Monterey nodded solemnly. “Sounds fair.”
Clicking her tongue with an impatient sound, the space nun pushed her way past him. Lovelace took a swipe at her robes as she went.
“Jade pineapple,” Monterey murmured. “More Anachronaut bullshit?”
“They have been recruiting,” said Lovelace. “But this doesn’t seem like their style.”
“We’ve got trouble,” said Oxford, lurching up at them from the crowd. He and Fenella were half-carrying Cressida, who looked… well, no. Not pale.
Monterey could see through her. Cressida’s hands glistened like rainwater, like air. Utterly translucent.
“Oh,” she whispered. “I thought I’d have more time.”
1 Boswell and Monterey had never agreed so fiercely on anything as they had agreed on how much they hated the Cressida Church statue in the quad. The design was awful — it barely even looked like her — and the fact of its existence was awful. They had both agreed to boycott the ceremony.
Monterey meant it, too. To this day, he didn’t remember what changed his mind. He had no idea what Melusine, or Dean Pennyworth (or his parents, probably) had said to get him up on that podium, making the speech on behalf of the Chronos College and the Founders.
He could barely look Lovelace in the eye afterwards. She had been horrendously kind to him about what he had done. Boswell had never forgiven him. What followed was seven years of being stared at blankly by a furious marmalade tabby whenever their paths crossed.
Monterey had deserved every single blank stare.
2 Season 11 of Cramberleigh, also known as The Season With The Time Travellers, introduced several time travelling historical personages who were later revealed to have been drawn to the house by Sir Victor Wildegreen’s experiments with ‘time crystals’. Characters who wandered through time aisles into this season of classic television included Rasputin of Russia, Cassandra of Troy, Sir Galahad of Camelot and Empress Sisi of Austria, along with Boudicca. A homeless man believing himself to be Guy Fawkes was then partly responsible for the explosion at the end of the season, which killed off a large number of the regular characters, setting Cramberleigh up for a contemporary spy reboot the following year. (Sir Victor’s time crystals were also blamed for the explosion, because 1970s fictional narratives were capable of blaming literally anything on crystals.)
3 To the general public of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Britt Manning (1952-2043) was famous for three reasons: 1) an iconic photograph in 1976 of the actress/activist naked and hugging a tree to raise awareness for environmental concerns, 2) Manning’s arrest for defiling a police officer’s helmet during the Greenham Common protest in 1982, 3) the false but beloved rumours that she was about to be cast to play the lead character in Doctor Who in 1996 and again in 2029. She was also briefly in Neighbours.
4 Honey Gale was a budget film star of the 70s, famous for the Yes, Miss films about a pretty school teacher who kept getting into saucy scrapes with her co-workers. Ms Gale was later famous as the inventor of the digital sandwich press.
Thirty-Three
1923 party like it’s…
Ruthven was not sure why Boswell had chosen to follow this apparently-not-Cressida, but he had spent far too long in the Professor’s lectures not to obey when he grumbled a command.
The three of them ran through Cleopatra’s glorious red-walled palace, skidding around corners and down highly decorated hallways.
It was probably embarrassing that Boswell could run faster than Ruthven. Wasn’t it? Or was that normal for cat vs. human?
Cressida flung herself into a room full of cats. So many cats. They were arranged shelf by shelf in order of height, painted in lush colours and giltwork.
In the far corner, there was an enormous human-sized sarcophagus, decorated to look like a gold cat with a disturbingly cheerful expression on its face.
“Oh no,” growled Boswell. “Don’t tell me that’s the next cupboard.”
Cressida gave him a bright, hopeful grin. “You love me, really.”
“Don’t push it.”
She unlatched the sarcophagus and held it open. Inside, another of those long, narrow, creepily white time aisles.
“And where is this one going?” Boswell asked dangerously.
“Paris.”
That threw him. “Paris.”
“Home of all the best runny cheeses,” Cressida said in an enticing voice.
“Fine.”
Neither Cressida, nor Boswell, asked Ruthven about his thoughts on runny cheeses or Paris, but he knew his place — several steps behind them both.
In the winter of 1923, on an enormous barge floating on the Seine River in Paris, something beautiful happened. In celebration of the opening night of brand new ballet Les Noches, the charismatic socialite couple Gerald and Sara Murphy hosted the afterparty to end all afterparties.1
There were no flowers to be purchased in Paris because it was a Sunday, so Sara Murphy decorated their long refreshment table with pyramids of children’s toys: racing cars, fire engines, clown dolls and stuffed animals, for the adults to play with. Champagne cocktails were plentiful. The guest list included Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau.
Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer responsible for the ballet, was at the centre of it all; a dour man in a dark suit and spectacles who was thoroughly uninterested in the Bohemian cavorting that surrounded him.
According to history, this was an epic night which exploded into unforgettable scenes of merriment, hijinks, and champagne.
A night like this was catnip to time travellers.
Ruthven did not generally enjoy parties. Standing awkwardly in the corner of this epic, glamorous event felt like sneaking into one of Monterey’s parties back on campus. Worse — he knew fewer people than usual and couldn’t even look forward to a friendly word from Oxford.
