“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Oxford, looking uncomfortable.
“You mean, you haven’t seen the footage?”
“Have some pineapple upside-down cake,” urged Burbage. “It’s terribly good, we have a favourite patisserie in the village — well, not so much a village these days. Kettlewick is more of a residential hub with cake. But there’s a charming little bowling green. I pop over there when Banksia gets sick of my company.”
“Three pubs,” Banksia mouthed.
“All the best villages have three pubs,” replied Burbage.
Ruthven’s eye was drawn back to the pineapple upside-down cake. “Were you expecting company?” That was a lot of cake for one professor… and one cat, if Banksia ate cake.
Aesop used to have such a sweet tooth, though she knew it was bad for her. She would lean over the sonic tooth cleaner for ages in the bathroom afterwards, complaining that it tickled her gums.
Another question rose on Ruthven’s lips before they’d answered the first one. “Anne Boleyn said Banksia stole the Jade Pineapple. When you two disappeared. Is that true?”
“The truth,” Burbage said, sounding a little sad. “Ah, well. Not stole as much as… removed it from the wrong hands. Insurance, you might say. To make sure they would allow us to stay away.”
“We didn’t think they’d be able to keep going without it,” said Banksia, clawing a little at the hearthrug in his frustration. “But they already had so many time hoops, the postcards, the opals… they’d developed their own time technology based on what they learned from the Jade Pineapple. We gave it to a trusted friend to hide so that we could honestly say we had no idea where it was.”
That might not be enough to keep you both safe now,” Oxford said in concern. “Once the Founders and the Anachronauts wear themselves out with committee-based shouting matches, someone will come for you. If you’re their only hope to get time travel back on track…”
“They can’t seriously want to continue with it after everything!” said Ruthven.
Oxford gave him a long stare. “You don’t know my mothers. All of the Founders. Controlling time travel, being part of a secret cabal with immense power. I don’t know if they know how to give that up.”
“They kept it all running so much longer than we expected,” murmured Burbage. “Twenty years.”
“I’d like to see Egypt again,” Banksia said. “They were very nice to cats there. So many fish. And that Cleopatra was a jolly sort.”
Ruthven rubbed his face. He still didn’t have any answers about the one thing he had actually come here to find out. He looked helplessly over at Oxford.
Oxford nodded. “I know,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d have to explain this part.”
“Why not?” And again, Ruthven’s hopes warmed up. “Who was going to explain it?”
Professor Burbage gave Ruthven’s arm a friendly pat. He leaned over the tea trolley to cut three wedges of cake. “You’ll find her in the grounds,” he said. “Be gentle, dear boy. She’s been through a lot.”
1 Ruthven had mentioned his unofficial getaway to Tunbridge, who was so distracted by the force of nature that was Zadie Kincaid on a rampage that she didn’t have the energy to offer him more than a pitying look.
Fifty-Two
Aesop
Somehow Ruthven got himself down several flights of stairs, and all the way to the kitchen at the back of the ground floor before his body reacted to the news.
He let out a shuddering breath that was almost but not quite a sob, and reached out for Oxford, because he had not fully absorbed the idea that he couldn’t trust him.
Oxford held him for a moment, his body warm and comforting, though it had no right to be.
“She’s alive,” muttered Ruthven. “And you knew.”
Oxford said nothing. No justification. No excuses. No apology. He held on, and let Ruthven lean on him.
The greenhouse was long gone. Not even the frame of it remained. Instead, there was a series of white vegetation pods, humming along with power from a solar battery, growing veggies like everyone else did in the twenty-fourth century. They had similar food production pods up on Chronos College.
Otherwise, the grounds of Fenthorp were startling in their familiarity. Grass hadn’t changed in three hundred or more years; if anything, it was lusher than it had appeared in the 1960s and again in 2034. The hedges and trees had been tended carefully. They weren’t exactly the same as they had looked when Ruthven visited here across the twentieth and twenty-first century, but it still felt right.
It was a sign of unbearable inherited wealth, so much land existing simply to look pretty, but preserving green space was one of the requirements of anyone over a certain tax bracket in this century. There were places like this all over England, all over the world. Groves of trees, chamomile lawns, hedge mazes, all created and maintained for tax incentives, since the Regreening Act of the 2040s.1 Professor Burbage-Hepple must have enough socked away in the investment vaults that he didn’t have to hire the place out to TV crews, anyway.
It occurred to Ruthven that he didn’t know that much about his own century. His life at Chronos College had completely insulated him from what it was like to live in the world right now.
A long purple tail swished from within a small grove of silver birch trees.
She emerged from behind the trees, prowling. She looked like another one of those aetherial, glowing purple sphinxes that had lunged at Ruthven from out of a cupboard. Her eyes glowed yellow and green, and it was that — those familiar part-coloured irises, which confirmed for Ruthven that it really was her, beneath all the purple fur. Aesop. His tiny, adorable calico cat, transformed into something majestic.
No, not transformed. She had always been this. The tiny calico cat he thought he knew, that was the disguise.
Aesop blinked her eyes slowly at him, and then looked past Ruthven to his friend. “That’s what I get for trusting an Oxford,” she said in chilly tones.
Oxford was just as furious in reply. “You should never have made me promise,” he said. “Not about this. It wasn’t fair. You don’t do this to people you love, Aesop.”
“Why not?” she snarled back. “You did.”
“Aesop,” Ruthven said, finally finding his voice.
The glowing purple feline turned back to him. “Ruthven,” she said, and lowered her head. “I never wanted you to see me like this.”
