He reread this, frowning. Were Guy Fawkes and Shakespeare too advanced for the seven-and eight-year-olds who devoured Wilberforce’s adventures? No, surely they would have heard of both gentlemen, and it would probably please a number of parents to think their offspring were picking up odd snippets of history. It would also allow the illustrators to have a field day. Michael emailed the biography to his editor before he could change his mind, and went off to his faculty meeting.
His return was greeted by the vet’s bill for de-turpentining Wilberforce, which had been brought up to his rooms by the porter on the grounds that it was marked ‘Urgent’. The porter pointed out that it was not part of his duties to hand-deliver missives, but you could not ignore an ‘Urgent’ letter, could you, so here it was, Dr Flint, and begging pardon for being so out of breath, but climbing those bloody stairs played havoc with the tubes of a morning.
‘It’s very good of you,’ said Michael, reaching for his wallet. ‘Have a drink on me to help the tubes out.’
By the time the porter had departed, his tubes considerably appeased by the tip, and Michael had recovered from astonishment at the amount requested by the vet, his editor, who had the uncanny ability of reading most things at the speed of light, had emailed again. She liked the Wilberforce biog so much she wanted him to expand the Gunpowder Plot idea, with the aim of starting a spin-off for a set of children’s historical tales. Michael could doubtless dash off one or two books on this theme, could he? Not too teachy, but underpinned by accurate historical information.
Michael wrote a cheque for the vet, smacked a stamp onto the envelope, then sent a deliberately non-committal email to his editor, saying he thought the Gunpowder Plot book was a very good idea.
These annoying interludes and interruptions dealt with, he set off for the Rural Council offices, encountering the Bursar as he crossed the quad, and spending ten minutes listening to the Bursar’s discourse on the unreliable nature of modern workmen. The decorators, it appeared, could not finish the painting that day as arranged, because they’d had to order an extra twenty litres of paint which would not arrive until Thursday. College would therefore have to continue in its present dust-sheet and stepladder disarray for at least another week. The Bursar found it all very annoying and did not know what things were coming to if a firm of decorators could not calculate how much paint was needed for a few perfectly ordinary stairways.
Michael’s request at the Rural Council offices for a sight of the Deadlight Hall records was received as an everyday occurrence. Certainly he could be given sight of Searches and Land Registrations and Transfers, said the helpful assistant. They had had quite a few people asking to see them recently, what with the place being renovated. The records might not be as complete as they would like – there had been some bomb damage to the old Council offices during WWII – and she believed there were a number of ‘lost years’, which sounded rather romantic, didn’t it. There was, however, still a fair amount of stuff, and everything was scanned on to hard disk, all the way back to 1800. The viewing room was just through there, there was a coffee machine in the corridor, and if he needed any assistance of any kind, please to let her know.
Michael always found it vaguely wrong to use a computer screen for this kind of research. If you were going to make an expedition into the cobwebby purlieus of history, it ought to be by means of curling parchments with crabbed writing penned by long-dead monks and scribes, or through faded diaries chronicling forgotten loves and hates and wars and friendships. It had to be acknowledged, though, that computers were more efficient and a great deal faster than the parchment/diary method. Michael collected a cup of coffee from the machine, sat down at the screen, and waited for the past to open up.