Tea with Professor Hinley

“Ah, the summers we used to have, at least, the summers a boy remembers.” Professor Hinley was in typically expansive mood as they strode across the quad in the freshly washed sunlight of early June. Far off came the unmistakable thwack of leather upon willow and the occasional muffled splash as some lithesome undergraduate toppled off his punt into the cam. Katherine enjoyed the light kiss of the sun on the back of her neck but wasn’t one for nostalgia, in her position there seemed little point. The old boy must have cut a dashing figure in his undergraduate days all the same. A cloud put a hand over the sun for a moment and the air was like ice on her cheekbones.
“If we could return to the facts of the matter..Professor?”

Hinley had paused as the first swifts of the year tore screaming through the quadrangle. There'd be fewer of them every year now, but Katherine bit her tongue. The delirious gang roared in tight formation, up and over the tiled roof, like so many experimental 50’s British fighter jets. She watched them go and felt her heart fly with them. They did everything on the wing, sleep, eat, mate and die. There were connections everywhere. He was looking older, or perhaps she was feeling younger. Either way, it was time to focus on matters at hand.

Professor Hindley stared on at the space the swifts had instantaneously vacated. Despite his affectation of good humour an observer might have said he looked sad for a moment. Miss Barley's visits were ever more infrequent now, and the notes on her 'voyages extraordinaires' by degrees more random, despite her best efforts at categorisation. Still, he had reconciled himself to the inevitable. He knew the college had long since passed from its former pre-eminence as the locus of her investigations, however vital his role had been at the start. Just as the weeds and birch had reclaimed the still sealed off site of their former laboratories, indeed the first ferns had cracked the concrete cap while the remnants still smoldered, so the lure of the chronosphere had inevitably enticed, enraptured and now perhaps captured the girl. Still, one must press on regardless, despite Miss Barley's ever more obvious distance from the original aims of the project and the occasional unpleasantness in the press. Terms like armageddon and apocalypse were tossed around with all too gay an abandon these days, in his earnest estimation. There have been a thousand minutely discussed and devoutly believed scenarios for the end of the world, or, to be more precise the end of our undisputed soveriegnty in it. Be they economic or ecological, geological or theological, the only factor they shared in common was that, up till now, they'd been wrong. He'd fancied he'd write a paper for the Royal Society on the matter, science, if anything, should be an optimistic endeavour, but Miss Katherine had proved somewhat reticent on the matter and he knew better than to press her on such issues now.
“Tea?”
“Most kind.”
“Our assassins will be waiting.”

They skirted her mausoleum without comment. The pink blossom hung heavy on the aging cherry trees, long after it had blown from the avenues which led to the river. Even the sun was reluctant here. A few leaves from the previous autumn, or perhaps many autumns before that, clung to spider dank shadows. She shivered as she walked over her grave.


Markov and his disreputable cockney sidekick Alan the Weasel were indeed scuffing their shoes in the Professor's immaculately disheveled study. His batman, Caruthers Smith Thompson, barely caught her eye as he bade her enter, so keen was he to keep the two miscreants in view and protect his master's silver.
“Markov."
Even as he greeted his surly visitor, the Professor's habitual bonhomie was strained. The Russian, for his part, stared at the English woman with barely concealed loathing while the Weasel's glare was tinged with polecat lust.
“Miss Barley, more beautiful than ever. The whole...” He passed his hand over his face “It suits you.”
He half rose to acknowledge her, his English had improved, if not his dental hygiene.
“I don't know about that.” She kept her thick leather jerkin tight around her, despite the warmth of Thompson's generous fire.
“You must have Russian blood.”
“Oh, I've had plenty, in my time.”
“Now, now, such unpleasantness is long forgotten.”
“Not by the dead, in my experience.”
“Tea, Mr Markov?” The professor stepped in before things became strained, he hated any fuss or bother. He arranged his not inconsiderable bulk in a leather chair which sighed softly in accepting its accustomed burden. “and a little raw meat for your friend?”
The professor smiled winningly. Alan's teeth showed for a moment, they might almost have been filed to their points. The Hurricane Lamp above the alcove which afforded a splendid view over the tarpits began to rock a little in the still, early summer air. She glanced around at the familiar study, the bound leather volumes of Kepler and Newton, the quills in the Xin Dynasty vase on the writing desk next to the new fangled typography apparatus. She was touched to see one of her few attempts at a watercolour tacked up behind the easel on which she'd first outlined her plans for the chronotheric interloculur to the skeptical high table. Hinley had been the only one who'd listened. She really should have worn a longer skirt.

Katherine found herself again, it was so easy to drift off these days. She accepted her Darjeeling in a china cup so ancient it was almost transparent. A dash of milk and a pinch of sugar, the admirable Thompson never forgot what one preferred. She wondered if he ever forgot a face, or rather her face, her appearance had proved somewhat malleable over the years. She'd read that a large portion of the human brain is devoted to facial recognition, so important in such an essentially social - and warlike - creature as ourselves. She wondered if her own abilities utilised a similar sphere of grey matter. She recognised times far younger or more ancient than she'd known, just as one sees the face of one we've loved in their earliest photograph or one step from the grave. She had seen too many of her fellows born, age and die and had no wish to see the same of her country.

The weasel scratched himself like a tinker's second best dog. Katherine rather liked dogs, they always seemed so busy, places to go, people to see. How much easier than her current position. She affected to gaze around once more, the ornate brass spyglass, the quagga head on the wall while in fact observing Markov's nervous, expectant fingering of the one shot revolver in his jacket pocket. At least Barley hoped that was the nature of the item. The unmistakable whiff of freshly grilled crumpets under the tiny grill next door regained her attention.
“Is that a new picture, professor?" Markov didn't miss much, except when brushing his teeth in the morning. The touch of the gun, as so often with those of his dubious profession, momentarily emboldened him far beyond its meagre range.
“Hmm?" The professor cast about for his slippers. Archie, the aging academics indefatigable African Grey, trilled briefly from his customary perch high over the symphonion.
“The Vermeer."
“Is it? I wouldn't know."
"Perhaps a minor Pieter de Hooch?"
“No Miss Barley, I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but the brush work is unmistakable. The perspective from the Camera Oscura is..."
The Professor waved a hand, bored with Markov's persistence. His eyes were intent, like a terrier shaking a rat.
"A present from Miss Barley I take it? A find like that, I'd have it in a more prominent position."
“Oh, one should never put the focus of interest in the centre of the canvas, any common street dauber knows that."
“Thirty six Vermeers, who'd have thought it?" Markov seemed almost genuinely interested.
"He was forgotten for two hundred years, one could pick them up for a song." Barley was annoyed, though he'd taken the bait, there was no need to gild the lily. The professor held that every Vermeer held a novel, a different novel for everyone who saw it, and a different novel every time they glanced at the picture anew. The mark of truly great art was that it didn't merely afford you a view of a daubing of a particular tree but that it changed how you saw every tree in reality from that point forth. Barley considered that Hinley should stick to chronospherical physics but theoretical science, like poetry and fast bowling, was a young man's game. The professor was only 157 but his reading glasses hung from a mantled gas lamp and, she reluctantly conceded, even her own back ached in the mornings sometimes.

Thomson served the weasel with a pointedly chipped mug, a batman must be as good a judge of character as he is discrete about disseminating his conclusions, while Markov held his scalding black tea in the palm of his hand without the least semblance of pain. Six years in handcuffs plays havoc with one's nerve endings. If she'd been the one to clap him in irons on that Turkish galley, she'd been the one to release him as she recalled. She hoped he'd grown beyond grudges. Revenge is so ravenous, it consumes you by the end. The professor tucked into a slice of moist Jamaican ginger cake. Katherine plumped for the fruit slice, if only she had time to bake more often. The knife Thomspon had slipped to her plate was larger than it need be and curved like a Saracen's smile. She kept it close at hand. A prickle of sweat inched down her neck.
"I'm in a position to offer thirty thousand."
"A trifle, Markov, let us be serious here." For all his other worldly affectations the professor was sharp where money was concerned. Money, he'd once pointed out to her, was how grown ups kept score.
"I'm not talking about the picture."
"What precisely is your position here Markov?" Katherine found her voice a little sharp, Markov was right, there was no need for unpleasantness. He turned to her, in a poor approximation of the Professor's amiable style.
"A go-between, an enabler, a messenger, nothing more."
Barley's gaze was blue ice and even Markov seemed embarrassed by her stare.


He'd left her to drown in a St. Petersburg sewer, she'd pursued him through the white nights, on steamers and rowboats, through gaily turbaned cathedrals till running him aground in St. Michael's square. He rubbed his wrists reflexively. She softened just a little, after all, killing thta was something she couldn't help but understand.
"What makes you think I'm interested in money?"
"We're all interested in money."
"My fealty to the Estonian cause is well known to your..ah..employers."
"You need to recognise reality, an intelligent woman like you, the Imperial necessities."
"I scarcely think you're interested in the political ramifications of this affair" harrumped the Professor.
"To practicalities then. Do you have the, ah, mechanism here? On the premises..Sir?" From Markov's rancid mouth the title was sulkily insulting.
The professor beamed. "It is..readily accessible."
"I'm prepared to go as high as fifty thousand."
"You don't even know what it does Markov."
"My instructions are to prevent falling into revolutionary hands. I can toss it in the Volga for all they care after that."
"Fifty thousand?"
"Fifty thousand."
"Yes, but fifty thousand what?"

Katherine paused as Thompson returned with the crumpets. no, pikelets, she corrected herself, accuracy is so important sometimes. The knife flicked out of her hand and speared the Weasel through the throat even before Markov had tugged the tiny gun from its hiding place. Thompson levelled the Professor's ancient fowling piece at Markov's greasy head.
"I'd put that down if I were you, Sir." The servants were as well spoken as the academics here. Markov lay the revolver on the crumpet tray. Barley reached across and buttered one, she just couldn't resist. The weasel gurgled gently and died.

"I wish you wouldn't keep doing that." Markov seemed almost upset at the abrupt demise of his long time low life partner in skulduggery. It was a softer side she seldom saw, and certainly didn't like. A sentimental assassin will always let you down in the end.
"I was aiming for you."
"I could talk to the embassy, perhaps they could manage..sixty?"
"The embassy?"
"Certain..representatives."
Katherine allowed herself a moment's indulgence as the hot butter cascaded over her taste buds. She imagined the grinding of the gears, the heavy iron doors of the mechanism parting to reveal the sapphire effluviance of the inner chronotheric flux, she saw herself poised over the heavy, ornate signal box levers. motioning Thompson to toss the trussed Markov in. Torn apart by a sabre toothed tiger, buried alive under the yurt of the Scourge of God. Whatever his fate, at least he'd get his money's worth. She sighed, it all seemed so futile. The Russians couldn't operate the mechanism even if they possessed it and she simply didn't need it any more. Sometimes she wondered, when she was finally landed and gutted like a cod, if they'd find nothing inside her but gears and pistons and chronotheric lubrication. The professor, she knew, had used it but once, to visit his long dead sister in Worthing. Worthing in happier, less cynical times, ah, the summers that they used to have. Katherine sighed, time was not on her side, it was the first thing the mechanism had taught her.

The professor eyed a heavy drop of the Weasel's blood as it hesitated, trembled then fell heavily to his magnificent Afghan carpet. He relaxed a little as he saw how it suited the pattern.
"More tea, Mr Markov?"
Thompson was already hand cuffing the Russian's hairy wrists behind his back.
"Shall I dispose of..this..in the usual fashion?"
Barley bit into the last of her crumpet as a precautionary measure. The professor nodded his aquiescence, what Thompson actually did with the occasional bodies which turned up in the professor's rooms was something of a mystery but none had ever turned up again. Not dead, anyway. Markov looked between the three of them, somewhat aghast. He couldn't believe, even at this late juncture, that everything he'd ever been told about the English was true.
"You're not just going to kill me."
"Of course not, but then lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off, did you know that Mr Markov?"
"It's laughing, for a man." The old rouge was brave, she give that to him.
Markov swallowed, any Russian would have been kinder and killed him by now.
"What should we do with him, Professor?" Barley, for once, had no idea.
The professor beamed. "A sprat to catch a mackerel, my dear."
Thompson was happily trussing the Russian, a sheaf of only partially forged documentation spilled from inside his jacket. Five minutes with the Professor's fountain pen and she'd have admittance to the ambassador. She tucked Thompson's knife into the slash in her airshipman's jerkin, alongside her own needle blade. Markov was beginning to put up some belated resistance. Barley fed Archie some sunflower seeds.