Chapter Thirty
“Well wouldn’t that be interesting?” Father O’Flynn asked, dropping into English from a Latin that he could understand, but had never yet spoken as a language of conversation. “They’ve built themselves a time machine, have they?” Jennifer nodded—though she might have got the same reaction if she’d claimed the Archbishop of Canterbury was the King in drag. The Irish priest took another swig of distilled beer, before letting out a happy burp.
“Did your people follow us?” Jennifer asked in English. She looked over at Pierre, who was standing guard at the doorway of the railway arch warehouse. He noticed she was looking, and twirled his moustache and blew a kiss back at her. O’Flynn had put his pint mug down and was poking ineffectually at the little coal brazier. It seemed for a moment he’d put it out, and Pierre took a step into the room. But O’Flynn pushed his red face close to the charcoal, and managed, by much huffing and puffing, to get it glowing again. As the smoke dispersed, he motioned to Pierre to shut the door. He sat back with a grunt and reached for his mug.
Beside her, on the stained settee. Michael sat back and stretched his legs. Jennifer thought she’d have to repeat her question. But O’Flynn sat up again and gave a bleary smile. “I suppose, in a manner of speaking, they did follow you,” he said. “You see, it’s always now that they make a run for it—when the leccie’s gone off for the night, and the grand people go up to their beds. The pair of you was spotted doing all the right things. You ran like bats out of hell from a big house. You ran with no apparent place to go. You ended up down at the River—and they always end up down there. It’s like moths to a candle. It’s as if they know they have to get across that wide Styx of a river to get back to the field of the blessed from whence they came.” He smiled, coming to his point. “So it’s down by the River that Pierre catches his fish. None of us was supposing we’d go and catch a real live ambassador from the Byzantine Empire. Now, would you ever go believing that?”
There was a noise out in the approach road. Pierre narrowed his eyes and went out with an iron sword that he pulled out from behind a filing cabinet. O’Flynn poured himself another pint of moonshine and looked fondly at Michael. “Can you be interpreting for this young fellow here?” She nodded. “To be sure, we might have guessed you weren’t just runaways. They don’t go and get the police buzzing about like blue-arsed flies. Nor do they get all the street lighting put on for the first time this year.”
He stopped and waited for Jennifer to interpret—as if there were anything so far worth the effort. He took another swig and grinned at the abbreviated version of what he’d said. “Now it’s not that I’ve ever been thinking, mind you, of the correct protocol for a Byzantine ambassador. I mean, can you remind me, young Jennifer, of that church council where Pope and Emperor had thrones at equal height, and were supposed to sort out the Great Schism as equals? No? Well, I can’t remember either—if I ever did know. To be sure, it was long after this young man was supposed to have closed his eyes. But we’re just a decade after the Great Schism—not that I can remember what that was all about—and the question is whether I should get up and bow to the representative of the Pope’s former overlord, or curse him as a schismatic Greek.” He paused again. “But wasn’t it one of the Gregories,” he asked with his brightest smile yet, “who threw off the Emperor hundreds of years before this lad opened his eyes? Oh, but I was never a one for the history. All I ever wanted was to be a humble priest.” He burped again, and looked at Pierre, who’d slithered back inside the little warehouse, and was stroking the blade of his sword.
“Can I ask the Reverend Father,” Michael broke in, a slight impatience in his voice, “What view the Western Church takes of this whole position? Is it able or willing to give assistance of any kind?” She could have asked what assistance he had in mind—Jennifer couldn’t fill in that blank for him. But O’Flynn had managed to catch his drift, and was clucking away over a second refill of his cup.
“Now, isn’t that a question we’d all like to see answered?” he sniffed. “It’s sure as anything, there’s been a Miracle of God. You don’t get a whole big island sucked out of the twenty first century, and dumped in the middle of the eleventh—not without a fair bit of the miraculous. The pity is that God has left it to man to try to understand the miracle.” He sat back and looked at the door that Pierre had pushed shut. “Even if we aren’t always right, you can generally expect uniformity from Holy Mother Church. But we’re as divided over this as everyone else.” He laughed. “There’s no doubt, we look to Rome—but to which Rome no one can agree. Are we to conform ourselves to a Church that still hasn’t known Anselm and Aquinas, or a Renaissance and Reformation and Counter-Reformation? What about the Enlightenment and our response to that? Are we to set aside a thousand years of unfolding understanding in response to movements of the secular mind, and adopt the simple piety of the middle ages? Or are we here to bring our Brothers in Christ to our own state of illumination?”
He stopped and creased his face into a look of extreme concentration. But the drink was against him—that or the inherent difficulties for him of giving a straight answer to any question. Or was it? “I only ever wanted to be a humble priest,” he said again, though with a edge this time in his voice that almost took away the impression he’d created of rambling sottishness. “Our mission is to save runaways, not try saving the world.” His eyes narrowed. “Wouldn’t you be the daughter of Richard Baldwin, the novelist and hatcher of more plots that many today get hot dinners?”
Jennifer kept her voice steady. “Did you know my father?”
“Not,” came the reply—“which may be, perhaps, why I’m still here on this mortal coil, when our Bishop, who might have known him well, hasn’t come back from trying to persuade those poor souls to disperse from Oxford Street.” He gave Jennifer a strangely dead look, and ignored her further question. “What did he do, but come and speak to the poor Bishop about his plan to overthrow the State? Do that, he was telling us, and let there be open commerce with the Outsiders—let our own people flood out into Europe, and spread our knowledge, and create a new kind of free civilisation—and His Majesty and all his ministers could be stuck up against a wall and shot, and we could try to set things up to avoid everything that went wrong after about 1914.” He took a deep breath and scowled. “Some of us thought it was a fine, musical sound—not least for what the authorities have been doing across the water in Ireland.” He stopped for a bleak laugh. “Is there nothing happens to the English, but they find an excuse to do ill in Ireland?”
“Do you know what happened to my father?” Jennifer asked. She tried to keep her mind free of hope, and waited for anything she might learn about them. “Can you say who killed him and my mother?”
“Now, shouldn’t you be asking that of the man that betrayed him?” came the answer. “Wasn’t he supposed to be your father’s oldest friend—all the way back to university days?”
“Do you—do you mean a man called Basil Radleigh?” she asked with a catching of breath. She tried to think of another question that would pin the man down.
O’Flynn laughed again. “What I heard was they were both in with Anglo Oil,” he growled. “Your father said the oil men had the same objective interests as he and his so-called friend. The Bishop didn’t trust your father. Nor did I,” he ended quietly. He saw the look that came over Jennifer’s face, and shrugged. “You can ask me anything more you like, so long as you don’t mind not getting an answer. But, if you ever see your father again, in this world or the next, you can ask him for me which lunatic it was who went about, lying the simple-minded into gathering in Oxford Street, so to draw armed men away from the Channel ports. Now, wasn’t your father close with the Outsiders? Might he have been thinking that a riot in London would be enough to let a few horsemen with carbines get a foothold in Kent? Was he really working with a man anyone with his head screwed on could smell as a traitor—a traitor who eventually got him finished off?”