“Excuse me,” Boswell rumbled in a purr intended to rattle the nerves of his unwanted visitors. “I don’t believe you have an appointment. Perhaps you could return after semester is over and I am on holiday, somewhere far from here.”
The humans all looked appropriately intimidated. This usually gave Boswell a glow of satisfaction. Right now, with his favourite sunbeam slowly disgorging its peak warmth into an ungrateful piece of carpet, he felt nothing but irritated.
Fenella stepped aside, and Lovelace of all cats wound around the girl’s ankles before stalking directly up to Boswell. Her deep amber eyes glowed with utter contempt.
“Stop fucking around, Boswell,” she snarled. “This is important. Believe it or not, you care about what we’re about to tell you. So let’s go somewhere private.”
Even Boswell at his grumpiest knew better than to cross Lovelace.2
They did not go to the staffroom. Too many opportunities to be interrupted, and Boswell knew that once he caught sight of the dying light of his favourite sunbeam, he would not be able to listen to a word they had to say.
Since it was Lovelace asking, he broke another ingrained habit and allowed this rabble into his inner sanctum: his office. It was a point of pride to Boswell that not one student had ever been allowed over the threshold.
These weren’t students. They were graduates, which was worse.
“No Monterey?” Boswell asked, leaping up on to his desk as the two cats and three humans squashed themselves inside his office. It might be considered roomy quarters for a cat-sized professor were it not for the towering piles of books which filled most of the floor and air space.
“It conflicted with his inability to get out of bed before noon,” said Lovelace, leaping to a higher position thanks to a teetering stack of the Loeb Classical Library. She left a slightly damp paw print on Herodotus without shame, glaring haughtily at Boswell as if he was the one at fault.
The only way Boswell could move to a higher position than Lovelace now was by climbing the bookshelves, and that would be a little too obvious. Instead, he licked his paw to convey abject boredom.
“You mean he’s still hiding from me?” he said mildly. Monterey was, like most humans, entirely predictable.
Lovelace glared down at him. “I couldn’t possibly comment.” Her loyalty to her ridiculous human was one of the things Boswell respected most about her, though he could never let her know that.
He had once had his own ridiculous human; he knew how attached one could get.
“We found something of interest,” blurted Oxford, the alarmingly tall human who was the only reason that Nero had the second highest position in the room.3 That white long-haired bastard was getting hair everywhere. It drifted off him like dust motes in a sunbeam.
Damn. Now Boswell was thinking about that sunbeam again.
“I doubt that, young man,” he said grumpily. If he had a pair of spectacles (the lack of which was a constant disappointment in Boswell’s life) he would have chosen this moment to peer over them in a disapproving manner. Humans got all the best props.
“We’ve found a trace of Cressida Church,” said Lovelace. “A genuine lead, Boswell. In the twentieth century, of all places.”
Church.
Professor Boswell remained very still. It was too much to hope that by freezing to the spot, the annoyances in his office might assume he was a statue and leave him alone. This was a technique he often resorted to when under great shock, or strain.
He did not like to be surprised. One of the best things about being a cranky professor specialising in Time Mechanics at a secret university in space was that surprises were few and far between. They lived in a bubble, protected by the Global Official Secrets Act. Most staff rarely left campus except those who disappeared through time hoops on a regular basis.
Why would you bother to go anywhere, if you could not travel in time?
Students were always the same. Once they graduated, the best of them became travellers. The teaching staff around Boswell rarely changed — except when a student transitioned into a professor, and he was expected to learn their first name.
Nothing ever changed around here. Not since he lost Church.
That was years ago. He was over it. Humans were hardly an endangered species. Getting attached to them was the height of foolishness.
(He had almost torn time apart, looking for her. He couldn’t do that again.)
“Well?” Professor Boswell said irritably, once he had recovered from the first wash of shock. “What do you expect me to do about this? I have essays to mark.”
“It’s the first day of semester,” protested Oxford.
Boswell hissed, his hackles rising quite literally. “I have to decide which students I shall take up an irrational dislike against for the rest of the year,” he snapped. “Demanding essays is part of my process. I don’t have time for this kind of frivolous nonsense.”
He had almost lost himself in his agonised hunt for that wretched human when she first disappeared. Whole tracts of the tenth century were now inaccessible due to his obsession with getting her back.
Seven years. Church had been gone seven years. She was lost. He had done everything in his power to find her, and he had failed.
He was not going to allow hope back in, not again.
The only possible thing for Professor Boswell to do now was to glare at this group of intruders and give them the silent treatment until they awkwardly left his office.
And damn it, he was going to have to dust Nero’s fallen hair off all the books.
Today’s sunbeam was gone forever. Professor Boswell would allow himself a brief moment of mourning, and then he would move on.
He was good at that.
1 Learning that cats could speak at all was something of a social adjustment for humanity; learning that they did it extremely well was, however, a shock to no one.
2 It was not that Lovelace was more popular or likeable than other cats, or even more terrifying (she was a little more terrifying). It was mostly that she knew where the bodies were buried. She had dirt on everyone, and she never used it. Anyone who spent any amount of time on campus owed Lovelace far more favours than they cared to count, and Boswell had been around long enough that his was not so much a list of favours as a hoard.
3 Humans often win the higher ground game by accident, which is why they are not allowed to play in any formal manner. This is also why so many of them have, over the years, been felled by one of the most useful tools in the cat’s arsenal: the seemingly random weaving around the ankles. Cats like to look down on their enemies and their friends alike… but that doesn’t mean they want anyone to know how much they care about doing so.
