A Perfect Storm

by Jodi Taylor

Genres: Time Travel; General Fiction

Synopsis

A Chronicles of St Mary's short story that is sure to entertain. If you love Jasper Fforde or Ben Aaronovitch, you won't be able to resist Jodi Taylor. You don't have to travel through time to experience catastrophe on an epic scale, as the disaster-magnets from St Mary's are about to find out... For Max, what starts off as a perfectly normal week is about to degenerate into a quagmire of egotistical film producers, monumental pub crawls, unsigned contracts, exploding rocks, Professor Rapson and his megaphone, the world's biggest bacon butty - and Angus - the third component of the most notorious love triangle since Menelaus, Paris and Whatshername - the one with the face they launched ships off. A Perfect Storm of calamity, devastation and misfortune only ever encountered at St Mary's. Readers love Jodi Taylor: 'Once in a while, I discover an author who changes everything... Jodi Taylor and her protagonista Madeleine "Max" Maxwell have seduced me' 'A great mix of British proper-ness and humour with a large dollop of historical fun ' ' Addictive. I wish St Mary's was real and I was a part of it' 'Jodi Taylor has an imagination that gets me completely hooked ' 'A tour de force'

Release date: January 1, 2019

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 58

Sample

A Perfect Storm

Prologue



People think the life of an historian is packed full of excitement, danger, romance, glamour and lashings of History. And yes, usually it is, although there’s often a great deal more excitement, danger and lashings than a normal person might be comfortable with. But since at St Mary’s lack of normality is in our job spec, we generally manage to cope.

And, believe it or not, coming to a spectacularly nasty end somewhere and sometime in the past is not our only function. After all, we are the Institute of Historical Research and part of our job is actually that – research. We assist authors, educational establishments, private citizens, pretty well anyone who writes to us for help, really. We lecture at educational facilities and societies and, occasionally, we advise TV or holo producers on knotty historical problems. We research the historical facts for whatever epic they’re planning, bundle it all up and send it off to them so they can ignore it. Mrs Enderby provides the details of the costumes to be worn and sometimes the Wardrobe Department is asked to make them as well. She’s been nominated for several awards and we’re very proud of her, and it brings in a modest but much needed income because, according to Dr Bairstow, you could fund a small city for a year on what it takes to keep St Mary’s up and running for an afternoon. At this moment, we generally nod sympathetically and edge towards the door.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that we, the Institute of Historical Research at St Mary’s Priory, to give us our correct title, do other things besides endangering ourselves getting to grips with History. Sometimes, we can endanger ourselves by remaining quietly at home.

Take last week, for example … not only did we not have any current assignments, we hadn’t been up and running properly for some time. A very nasty explosion in Hawking had taken out the hangar and most of the pods inside it. Markham, Guthrie and Leon had been badly injured. And then a rock fell on me in Constantinople – hey, these things happen.

So, given that everything had been very quiet for a very long time while we regrouped and rebuilt, you’d think that the opportunities for anything catastrophic to occur would be few.

Wouldn’t you?

MONDAY



Every day begins with tea. That’s a given. Leon and I take it in turns and that particular Monday morning, it was Leon’s. I lay still and listened to him hobbling slowly around our rooms, getting things ready. It takes him ages these days, but he insists on carrying on as normal and I wasn’t going to argue. Well, not very much. I always kept my eyes closed and pretended I couldn’t hear him making his very slow and painful way across the room. He was recovering, but it was a long process. He was due back at Time Police HQ in a few days for yet another course of treatment, and I would be back to work next week, so we were making the most of these last few days together.

We always took our time and drank our tea in bed. I insisted on it. Not for any sloppy, sentimental reasons, you understand; mostly to give Leon a face-saving moment to rest before heaving himself to his feet to embark on his shower, shit and shave routine. Sometimes, on his less good mornings, it nearly broke my heart, but he wouldn’t accept any help, so I just had to grit my teeth and let him get on with it, cheering him on with word and gesture and by comparing his top speed unfavourably to that of continental drift.

We always walked downstairs to breakfast together as well. Very slowly. We do have a heavy goods lift which is used to get the big stuff up and down the building – it had once had an illegal mammoth in it, but it’s probably best for everyone if we don’t mention that. Leon wouldn’t use it even without the smell. Lifts are for wimps, apparently. Real men use stairs.

We split up in the dining room. He said, ‘See you later,’ and limped off to the techies’ table, and I joined Peterson and Markham. We’d got into the habit of eating together a year or so ago when we’d done something naughty and I’d been suspended and no one else wanted to have anything to do with us. I’d been reinstated, but as Markham pointed out, for some strange reason still no one seemed to want to have anything to. . .