Outside, he heard the sound of feet as his pursuers gave chase. Fear lent him speed and he rapidly put distance between them. He came out of the alley into the side street, gratefully finding himself only yards from his privy.
Fumbling with his keys, he ran to the door. The sounds of pursuit rumbled in his ears and made it harder for his shaking fingers to put the key into the lock. Glancing down, he realised this was because it was, in fact, the wrong key. He tried a second and felt it bite just as the sound of boots became a thunder.
Quickly, he unlocked the door, opened it and threw himself into his seat, not even bothering to extract the key from the outside. Instead, he slammed the door and scrabbled for the controls.
Outside in the street, the peasants came to a halt. The guards pushed past them and approached the privy with caution. A few feet from the device, one of the guards paused and tapped his partner’s arm.
‘What is it, Smith?’ snapped the other guard.
‘I’ve just trod in summat, Sarge.’
‘Can’t it wait? We’ve got a man to catch.’
There was an eerie whine from inside the privy. Both guards shivered.
‘He’s not going anywhere, Sarge,’ said Smith. He began casually scraping the manure from his boot using the blade of his sword. His eyes, however, were firmly on the wooden box.
‘We ought to arrest him,’ said the sergeant, although his voice seemed to suggest this was a junior guard’s job.
‘No rush,’ said Smith. ‘We’ll just say we were waiting for her presence. It’s not like he’s escaped.’
Just as he spoke, a gust of hot air blew the dust up from the road. Guards and peasants covered their faces as if an army of naked women stood before them. Then, the sound of a thunderclap came from the direction of the privy and the guards dropped their hands to their sides and gaped. The street where the privy had stood was empty.
For a moment there was silence, then Smith, his wide-open mouth filling with dust, began to choke. They were still thus distracted when the sound of hooves came clopping up behind them.
Godiva forced the peasants aside and brought her horse to a halt next to the guards, narrowly missing Smith’s foot. She stared at them scornfully. The guards closed their mouths and attempted to look businesslike. This was made somewhat difficult by the fact they couldn’t look at Godiva to see her reaction.
‘Where is he, then?’
‘Vanished, ma’am,’ said the sergeant, keeping his eyes trained studiously on the horse’s head. The horse shook its head to dislodge some of the dust that was still drifting through the air and hmmphed scornfully.
‘Vanished?’
‘Into thin air,’ said Smith, trying not to look at either Godiva or the rear end of the horse, which was the part nearest to him. The horse’s tail lashed his nose and he sneezed.
‘He must have been an alchemist, m’lady.’
The horse shook its head as if in disagreement.
‘An alchemist?’ Godiva seemed equally unconvinced.
‘Must have been,’ the sergeant concurred.
Godiva mused on this a moment then wheeled her horse round. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘When we get back we’re going to see about a crackdown on alchemists.’ She started forward and the two guards stepped back to avoid being trampled. The peasants turned to study the nearest wall intently. Godiva ignored them and kept her eyes on the guards.
‘Lead on,’ she said.
The two guards walked on, a few yards ahead of the horse.
‘We got off lightly there,’ said the sergeant.
‘You might have done,’ said Smith.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That bloody horse just crapped on my foot.’
The room was small, dark and dusty. The scarce amount of moonlight from the skylight revealing its contents to be a desk strewn with papers, two wardrobes, some steel racks and a single, bare light-bulb, currently switched off and hanging from the ceiling. It was also silent, as one would expect from a disused storeroom in a school after the children had long since gone home. A draught from under the door wafted in, toyed with some of the paperwork then left, evidently finding little to occupy its interest. Eventually, even the moon disappeared behind a cloud, as if popping off to find something more significant to illuminate.
It was whilst both wind and moon were absent from their posts that the room came to life: at first it was just a gentle breeze that seemed to blow from every corner of the room at the same time, then as the paperwork began to rise from the desk and distribute itself across the floor there was a sound like a box of firecrackers being dropped into a furnace. As the echoes of the sound died away the paperwork fell to the floor and in the room stood a large, wooden structure where no such item had previously been.
After a few moments, the door to the structure opened and a man dashed out, reached for the light switch and flooded the room with a warm, yellow light. The man was slight of build, but without any suggestion of athleticism. His hair was like a study in chaos conducted by a man who, far from keeping his pencils in size order, rarely kept them in the same place as each other. His face, flushed as it was with recent exertions, was otherwise unobtrusive: youngish, free from the lines of age or scars of experience, but with a glint in the eyes which suggested a man more knowledgeable than his years would usually belie and a warmth suggesting he was comfortable in that knowledge.
Erasmus Hobart, to his understanding the first time traveller in human history (or at least the first to depart – there was no telling where subsequent travellers might arrive), wiped the sweat from his brow and made a half-hearted attempt to gather up some of the scattered paperwork from around the room. Somehow the mundane nature of this task was made all the worse by the fact that what had gone before had been in such stark contrast.
He turned back to the stout, wooden privy that stood conspicuously in the middle of the room. It wasn’t an obvious addition to a teacher’s storeroom – even a school as old as St Cuthbert’s had plumbing – but were any inquisitive soul to guess at the reason for its presence, it was remarkably unlikely that they would have guessed remotely correctly. Erasmus’ experiments in time had remained a secret for almost two years now, from the earliest sending of inanimate objects to a few minutes before or hence, right up to his first personal trips, and the teacher had managed to avoid all questions, even when the topic of conversation moved to the distinct lack of 2B pencils.
He ran his hands over the surface of the time machine: it was warm, but not unduly so. Erasmus had often been concerned about the potential thermal effects of time travel: his early experiments, when he had sent small, unmanned devices a few minutes backwards or forwards in time, had invariably resulted in the machine getting extremely hot, which Erasmus assumed to be due to some kind of temporal friction. The chance occasion on which he had, due to budgetary restraints, made one of his experimental models out of wood he had been pleasantly surprised to find it was entirely unaffected. Pleasantly surprised because not only did it mean he could build a machine which wouldn’t spontaneously combust the moment you went farther than a week from home without having to find some exotic and undoubtedly expensive metal, it also allowed him