From Chapter 8
The afternoon bell sounded with a
disappointed clang across the turrets and battlements of Botolf College. It was the tintinnabulation of a bell which
had long ago lost the will to carry on and was only going through the motions
for the sake of routine. Even the
starlings directly under the eaves of the bell tower didn’t bother to open an
eye for the dull toll, students in their rooms barely registered it and most members
of staff couldn’t be woken by the peel of twenty Big Bens next to their
shell-like ears.
Throughout
its history Botolf had a lax attitude to timetables. Morning lectures were rare and those that
were scheduled were done so more out of optimistic ambition than professional
fortitude. Down in the kitchens the house chef had made and thrown away
breakfast as was his habit every day. He
immediately began lunch which was unofficially the first meal of the day for
almost everyone, the menu having varied little in five-hundred years: swans, peafowl, boar, partridge, stork,
rabbit, cranes, larks, linnets were all still on the bill of fare at
Botolf. As with many of their other
activities some underhanded methods had to be used to obtain the College’s traditional
dishes, Botolf’s grounds men were not so much poachers turned gamekeepers as
the other way round.
As the chef
conducted his underlings in a time-honoured battle with several live swans (the
outcome of which was not always a foregone conclusion) the cleaning staff, or
Madam Marie as she was known, was adding a final polish to the balustrades of
the grand staircase. Botolf prided itself on first appearances; any potential
student arriving with their parents would be impressed by the Great Entrance
Hall, the Dining Rooms and the Grand Cantilever Staircase winding its way up
through the heart of the old house, and too late the student who has enrolled
and paid their year’s fee in advance (no refunds) realises that the clean
polished surfaces of the front rooms are just a veneer over the dirt encrusted
chambers of the rest of the house.
Even Madam Marie, who has been employed in Botolf longer
than any Bursar has been alive, does not enter the uncharted paths of the
Library or the lost corridors of the Department of Medieval Thought.
James
Philips stood behind his new office door.
He’d been there for ten minutes now and had made several aborted
attempts at opening it. He had of course
given lectures before, Oxford had employed him temporarily to fill in for some
professor on a sabbatical treasure hunt in the vaults of the Vatican and he had
presented his PhD findings to illustrious audiences in Yale, Chicago (where he
first met Liz) and the British Museum, but Botolf was different, Botolf was
very different indeed.
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