It was Melusine from Admin. Oxford’s mum. Founder of Chronos College.
Ruthven crouched so that Boswell could climb on to his shoulders without having to jump. Neither of them spoke. This was too serious for snark and banter.
What was she doing here?
No, that was obvious. Ruthven’s task was to find out who was meeting covertly with Fleur Shropshire. Unless this particular party was a hub for time travellers making assignations, this had to be the person they were looking for.4
Ruthven made his way through the crowd, making sure to keep at least three ballerinas between himself and Melusine at any time. This wasn’t especially difficult, as the party kept sprouting more ballerinas as the night wore on. No firefighter in the world would approve of the tulle-to-human ratio on this barge.
Boswell hissed in Ruthven’s ear, and Ruthven stopped still.
Melusine sat at a small table along the deck, ignoring the arrangement of porcelain clowns and glove puppets in the centre of said table. A passing server placed a brimming champagne saucer in front of her.
Melusine’s back was to the party, and so she did not see the Anachronauts approach her. At least, Ruthven guessed that was who they were. A tall, androgynous person with glittery eyelashes and an Yves Saint Laurent suit strode through the party with, quite blatantly, a black cat resting on one of their shoulders. Bit of a giveaway.
“Zephyr and Abydos,” Boswell whispered in his ear.
That made sense. Ruthven had never met either of them, but he heard their names whispered around campus. Anachronauts.
Beside them — well, it was Lady Ann Wildegreen. It had only been a few days, relative time, since Ruthven watched those fragments of footage from the unaired pilot: Fleur Shropshire was charming and adorable as the new Lady Wildegreen, aetherial in the small-waisted, large-hatted Edwardian fashions whether she was listening at doors, falling with a gasp upon her swooning couch, or being walled up in secret passages by the villain of the week.
Fleur Shropshire had never worn 1920s clothes in the show — her character was long dead on the Titanic by the time the Roaring 20s reached Cramberleigh. She was making up for it tonight, wearing a glittering blue butterfly gown with matching headdress, every inch the fashionable flapper.
Boswell clawed Ruthven gently. “Are you having a moment?”
Ruthven shook himself. “We’ve got what we came for. Should get back to Cressida before someone points out that there are two people wearing cats at the same party.”
Boswell leaped into the air and ran lightly through the crowd, away from Melusine and her co-conspirators.
Ruthven took longer to cross the deck, because he was human-sized and incapable of bumping into people without apologising about it. He managed an awkward, uneven path towards the cupboard door which would lead him into the time aisle.
At the last moment, he almost crashed into a woman, only to startle back. “I’m so sorry,” he sputtered anyway. “Excuse me…”
“Oh,” said a surprised voice. “It’s you.”
Ruthven stared. The woman looked familiar, but her presence was incomprehensible to him, much as when you spot your class teacher at the supermarket, or your family doctor at a nightclub.
She had a pale complexion. She was in her mid-thirties. She had dark hair pulled back from a high forehead into a braided knot. If not for her hair, she looked every inch the 1920s socialite, wearing a black fringed dress, a string of pearls and a harsh, dark red lipstick.
She looked very much like a person cosplaying the 1920s with the least amount of effort. Her boots, Ruthven noticed as his gaze slid lower, were classic Doc Martens.
This woman was a traveller. She had to be, really. Not because of the boots.
He’d first met her in 1526.
Anne Boleyn looked Ruthven up and down with careful scrutiny. “Where’s your cat?” she inquired in a perfectly polite voice. “I rather liked her.”
“Sorry, must dash,” Ruthven said idiotically. He lurched around the Tudor Queen, accidentally knocking over several champagne-sozzled ballerinas and a teetering stack of upsettingly racist soft toys.
When he looked back, Anne Boleyn was gone.
1 The Murphys were a popular, wealthy It couple of the social set known as Bright Young Things in the 1920s. They were later immortalised (or as they would describe it: libelled) in the novel Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2 Tragically for Ruthven, sitting around awkwardly was his best party trick, and he had never flirted with anyone except by accident.
3 Ruthven had done excellently at the Intro to Costume elective. For his final exam, he assembled a trench coat out of recyclable tote bags.
4 Discretion was not taught at Chronos College, and if it was taught it was hard to imagine any of the current crop of travellers would have passed those exams.
Thirty-Four
48 BCE Lovelace Smells Something Fishy
Lovelace liked to follow her nose. Her nose was excellent at many things, such as guessing what year it was, spotting the difference between seventeenth century French and Spanish footwear (when you were a cat, you spent a lot of time near human feet), and finding the last salmon-flavoured soy ball in a bowl full of party snacks.
She hated these glaring white time aisles. They smelled of nothing. Places weren’t supposed to smell of nothing. They should carry the footprints of every person or animal who had ever passed through them.
There were no footprints here, literal or olfactory. Every time Lovelace set paw into a time aisle, it was as if she was doing it for the first time. This might not be the same one they had stepped out of earlier. It looked exactly the same, but Lovelace could not detect her own recent presence.
Still, the time aisle had saved Cressida’s life. You couldn’t see through the woman anymore; her skin was as fleshy and solid as it should be.
“Look at you,” said Monterey gently. “Run out of excuses for explaining what’s going on?”
He couldn’t fool Lovelace; she could hear the relief under his snark. He’d always liked Cressida more than he chose to admit.
“Why yes, I do feel better, thanks for asking,” Cressida shot back.
“Probably a fit of the vapours,” Monterey replied, patting her on the bustle. “Corset too tight, old thing?”
