Chapter Six
The return journey to Britain had taken a lot longer than the outward one. Bobbie often found that was the case, and she suspected it was because the time dragged when she didn’t have a project to work on.
At Dover docks, she disembarked the ferry with a heavy heart. The adventures she had shared with Sean were surely drawing to a close, now, and she wished they could have spent a little more time together. She was almost tempted to run away once more, to get him to chase her again. But she knew that, sooner or later, she would have to part ways with him.
They got a train from Dover into London, and while they were getting onto the London Underground at Victoria, Bobbie caught sight of a line of posters that made her stop, dead.
“Watch out!” a Londoner complained as he bumped into her. Bobbie ignored him and kept staring at the posters.
“Lass?” Sean might have said, although she wasn’t paying enough attention to know for sure. Bobbie just pointed at the posters. William Petrie’s image was positioned with one of a man who was clearly supposed to be a Viking barbarian, and the caption read, “A real live Viking chieftain at the Royal Society. Tickets for members only.”
It was a full minute before she could speak. “Petrie. What the Dickens has he done this time?”
“Is this the Viking chap you were looking for in the cave, all those months ago?” Sean asked.
Bobbie nodded mutely.
“Look, I’m sorry that I stopped you from finding him, but you understand why, don’t you?”
She glared at Sean and stalked away from the posters, toward the northbound platform, and then she waited. Sean caught up with her easily, of course, but her heart was too miserable to rally. Today, she didn’t feel like being the sort of girl who pulled herself together in a jiffy.
More than anything, Bobbie wondered why the poster had claimed there would be a ‘live’ Viking chieftain. She made a mental note of the date, racking her brain to try to decide, of all her friends in the Royal Society, who might be able to get her a ticket to the event.
“Are you going to talk to me, lass, or is that it, now we’re in England?” Sean prompted as they got into the underground carriage together.
Bobbie bristled at the insinuation that she was being churlish, so she merely glared at him and looked out through the black window, trying not to feel like her heart was being torn apart. This was the last time she would see Sean before he went back to whatever he did when he wasn’t chasing after her, and she didn’t want it to end with this frosty atmosphere, but she didn’t know how to talk to him right now.
She felt worse that she had been so self-centred every time she was around him that she hadn’t even asked him what else he did with his life. He deserved someone better than her; someone who could treat him properly instead of dragging him along in her slipstream. Why, oh why had she taken him for granted this whole time? And now she was about to lose him, forever, and she couldn’t even tell him, because he might not feel the same way, and her heart wasn’t ready for that kind of rejection on top of the burning pain of seeing Petrie trample upon her career once more.
He leaned over and grabbed her head, then turned it to face him. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Tell me what you’re feeling,” he ordered in his sternest voice.
“I’m never going to see you again. And Petrie has a Viking. And I was so close to getting that Viking. And I know you saved me from gun runners, but all the same, Petrie has my Viking. And I don’t know what to say to you. I feel that I’ve treated you badly. I don’t want to be mad at you after all that happened, but… oh, damn, Petrie has my Viking chieftain. And he’s claiming it’s alive.”
“How can that be?” Sean frowned. The carriage stopped and the doors opened, then several people got off. Bobbie and Sean were alone, now, save for an old woman reading The Telegraph and seemingly minding her own business.
Bobbie forgot her mixture of strong emotions as the mystery pulled at her logical brain. “I’m not sure, but I’m rather hoping that I can get into the Royal Society to find out. Are you going to stop me?”
Sean looked at her for a long time, then his gaze softened. “No. I was supposed to protect you. I can’t imagine anything dangerous happening in the centre of London in a building full of people with more money than names.”
“And they do have a lot of names,” Bobbie mused. She smiled softly. “Thank you for not trying to talk me out of it. Now, I just need to get a ticket.”
“Actually, lass, I think I can help with that. My pal Stuart has a lifetime membership, along with his infirm parents, who cannae go. I’d bet anything they’ll have tickets.”
“You’re brilliant!” Bobbie declared, then threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the train, much to the irritation of the old woman nearby who kept clearing her throat pointedly and glaring at them over the top of The Telegraph. Bobbie and Sean ignored her.
* * *
On the evening of Petrie’s big presentation, Bobbie was pacing outside the Royal Society, waiting for a man she hadn’t met to recognize her somehow and hand over a ticket. As it got closer to the allotted time, and more people had gone inside, she wondered if he’d forgotten, or not found her, or decided to remain at home for the evening.
“Roberta!” A plummy man’s voice made Bobbie’s insides churn. She looked up and saw her rival, William Petrie, flanked by two of his friends.
“Good day, Petrie,” she boomed in the voice she usually reserved for the hunt. If nothing else, she insisted on being a good sport. Anyway, she was British. Both of those facts culminated in a desire to be deathly polite to the man she hated.
“Moping around out here in the hope of cadging a ticket from someone?” he teased. The man had no class, whatsoever, and Bobbie hated that.
“Bobbie! Great to see you! Mwah, mwah!” To Bobbie’s immense surprise, she found herself ensconced in an overly familiar greeting from an exceedingly tall man dressed from head to toe in tweed, and who had a faint and refined Scottish accent.
“Hullo,” Bobbie said, not needing to feign pleasure at someone being here to extract her from the awkwardness of speaking with Petrie.
“Billy boy! Can’t wait to see your exhibit! It’s going to be talk of the town, aye?” The man’s voice was like a blanket that silenced any argument or correction, and Bobbie watched in great amusement as Petrie, struck dumb for once, merely nodded.
“I bid you good day, Roberta,” he said stiffly, then touched his hat and went inside. The moment he was out of earshot, Bobbie burst out in peals of laughter.
“You must be Stuart,” she said, when she could finally speak again.
“Aye. And where’s Sean?”
Bobbie frowned in surprise. “I didn’t know he was attending this evening.”
“‘Course I am, lass. What else would I do on a fine day like today? One must attend these little talks, whether one wants to or not.”
Bobbie looked up in surprise and saw Sean strutting toward her.
“You’ve literally just heard someone say that, haven’t you?” Bobbie teased. Sean nodded.
“Here’s your tickets, we’re sitting together, so let’s go and get a good seat,” Stuart said. The three of them went inside, and found that most people had taken up the middle seats, leaving some choice positions at the very front. Bobbie wanted to have the best view of Petrie as he showed off his Viking.
They made polite conversation amongst themselves while they waited for the talk to begin, then two assistants wheeled a table onto the stage. It had what looked like a shrouded body on top of it. Bobbie’s breath hitched in her throat.
Then, looking smug as ever, Petrie appeared, striding oleaginously across the stage until he stood beside the table.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I thought I should say a few words about myself before we commence,” he began. Bobbie inwardly groaned. Of course he was going to take this opportunity to waffle. She tried to look interested while he droned on about his early childhood, his days at Eton, his mother’s steadfast belief that he would go on to do great things.
Luckily, seven years at a girls’ boarding school, where half the teachers were hot-air balloons, meant she had vast experience at remaining stoic in the face of absolute boredom and pointless speech.
Sean, on the other hand, was getting restless, and Bobbie suppressed a giggle when he whispered into her ear, “If Petrie’s head gets any bigger he won’t be able to walk through the main doors when he tries to leave!”
After an interminable twenty minutes, Petrie finally exhausted the topic of himself.
“And now, let us consider the Vikings,” he began. When Bobbie groaned, she heard the sound repeated around the room by bored adults. If this was what it was like to be a member of the Royal Society, she was rather glad that she’d never been successful.
Petrie talked for another twenty minutes about the Vikings, and Bobbie was much amused when the famous Viking historian Wolfrun Diettrich took to the stage, interrupting Petrie to correct his many inaccuracies. Petrie, however, was too arrogant to let that faze him, and when Diettrich returned to his seat, Petrie nodded with a sickly grin, then pulled back the sheet on the table.
Bobbie frowned as a murmur went up around the room. There was no live Viking. Beneath the sheet, there was just a collection of yellowed bones, mottled with black from where they’d been found.
“As you can see,” Petrie bellowed over the crowd, “This is a not-quite-intact skeleton of the Viking chieftain Ralagok. I found his remains in a cave near Malmo.”
Bobbie gritted her teeth and tried to let the fury subside.
“I also found reference to a special elixir, rumoured to bring dead Vikings back to life. It does only work on Vikings, but the reason remains unclear.”
Probably because of the specific burial practices of Vikings, Bobbie wanted to scream.
She watched in morbid fascination as Petrie picked up a silver stein and held it out for the audience to see. “This drinking stein is the only thing the elixir works in.”
A hush fell over the audience, then, and Bobbie was on the edge of her seat as Petrie poured the contents of the stein over the old bones on the table. Then, there was a high-pitched sound that filled the room and shook the chandelier above her. She stared at the table in shock, for before her eyes, bones were being covered in muscle, then blood vessels; organs were growing themselves; then, skin and hair knitted everything else together.
The audience collectively gasped in surprise. A couple of women shrieked and fainted, but not until they’d seen the whole thing.
Bobbie was riveted to the spot as the person—if that was the right word for it—on the table sat up. Then, she couldn’t help laughing. A tangle of long, matted blonde hair spread out from a finely chiselled face with high cheekbones. Two large breasts hung down and the rest of the woman was hidden by shapely legs. She looked wildly around the room, and Bobbie felt a rush of empathy. It wasn’t especially pleasant to be a young woman inside the Royal Society, and being naked on a stage had to be even worse still. While Bobbie’s own discomfort came from knowing she would never be accepted here as anything other than someone’s wife, she was sure the young woman on the stage was wrestling with more immediate problems.
Petrie stared at the young woman, doing a fantastic impression of a fish as he opened and closed his mouth.
“Some Viking chieftain,” Sean remarked loudly, and the spell was broken.
“Regardless of the fact this is a woman, it still proves the elixir has worked!” Petrie declared, but the audience had seen too much.
“Put it out of its misery,” an older gentleman declared. Bobbie’s eyes widened with horror. The men of the Royal Society were talking as though the resurrected woman wasn’t human, when she so clearly was. All she needed was a hairbrush, a bath, and a nice gown, and Bobbie thought the woman might be quite pretty. And there was no sign she was miserable about anything other than waking up dead on a table in the middle of a theatre.
“Ugh, it’s grotesque!” another man jeered. Bobbie pressed her lips together and tried not to start an argument. Her rational side told her she needed to stay calm and see how this played out.
“I shall, indeed, return it to its death,” Petrie announced. He took out a rag and a bottle of chloroform, and the woman on the table must have sensed his malicious intent, for she got to her feet and lifted the table easily, then hit Petrie with it, all the while making the most animalistic noises. Petrie fell to the floor, dazed.
The people in the audience panicked. Most of them fell over themselves trying to get out of the auditorium, but a couple of braver chaps decided to try to subdue the woman. Bobbie decided she’d had enough.
She strode into the fray shooing the men who were trying to converge on the terrified woman, and when the woman growled at her, she took off her coat and held it out for her. For a split second, the woman stared at it, and Bobbie thought she might be about to attack again, but instead, she took the coat and put it on. The men hung back, uncertain of what to do, but then they rallied.
“She needs to be put out of her misery,” one of them declared. At that, Bobbie gave up trying to stay silent.
“Don’t you think she’d stop being miserable if you all stopped trying to kill her?” Bobbie snapped with all the force of her most headmistress-y voice. Then, Petrie pulled out a gun.
Bobbie blanched inside, but she steeled herself and stepped in front of the young woman, slowly reaching for her own weapon, and soon Bobbie and Petrie were in a standoff.
“Move aside, Roberta,” Petrie snarled. “I need to clean up my mess.”
“Go and whistle up a rope!” Bobbie retorted. “You’re bested and you know it.”
“What are you going to do with her? Return her to the fjords of Sweden?”
“I’m sure you’ll find out when you follow me on my next excursion and steal my finds once more,” Bobbie snapped.
“That’s a very grave accusation,” an elderly man, apparently oblivious to guns and resurrected Viking women, spoke with a voice like yellowed paper.
“But murdering a young woman is perfectly fine? Oh, you are all an utter disgrace,” Bobbie snapped. She wondered why she had spent so many years trying so hard to satisfy the entry requirements to become a member of the Society. Perhaps being ostracized from the upper echelons of antiquarianism was a mercy. If everyone was this cold and unfeeling, and so completely disinterested in the wellbeing of other people, Bobbie thought the lot of them were fit for kindling.
Before anything could happen, Sean stole up behind Petrie, picked up the drinking stein, and hit him on the head with it, hard. Petrie slumped over. Bobbie tried not to giggle. Instead, she pointed her gun at the other men trying to interfere. She was glad she wasn’t alone, here; not because she couldn’t handle this situation, but rather because it was refreshing to have someone on her side against London’s academics for a change. Not that she had ever anticipated a literal fight with the country’s leading scholars, when she had envisioned this evening.
“You will all allow us to leave the building with the young woman. She’s alive, now, regardless of what she was before, and I expect her to stay that way, or I’ll find each of you in the night and do terrible things to you. You all know the rumours about old girls from my school,” Bobbie warned. She knew that the older men of the Society still thought of women her age as girls, and many of them were deathly wary of children.
The assembled men backed off, and Sean joined her. Bobbie’s heart was full as she shot him a smile. In her peripheral vision, Bobbie watched Stuart approach the young woman and put an arm around her.
“Roberta Huntingdon-Smythe, you are now persona non grata at the Royal Society. You will never be a member,” an elderly man declared, as she turned to leave. Even one day ago, his words would have destroyed her, and made her doubt everything she held dear to her. But not now. She could see them all for what they truly were, and she didn’t want to be within a mile of them.
“Well, if all the events are as dull and self-serving as this one, I’m jolly glad. You’re all crashing bores.” Bobbie, Sean, Stuart, and the confused Viking all left through the stage door, and Sean swiftly summoned a taxi, which they piled into.
“King’s Cross, please,” Stuart said, then turned apologetically to the others. “It seems like the best starting point.”
“The peelers will be looking for us, soon,” Sean muttered. “What on Earth can we do with her?”
Bobbie was vexed. She didn’t want the poor Viking woman to get arrested when she hadn’t done anything wrong. If they could only get out of the city with her, they could probably hide her somewhere until the nine-day wonder was over. In time, people would start making the myriad excuses about what had really happened this evening, until no one believed this had ever taken place. But in the meantime, what was the best course of action?
Bobbie shook her head. “I don’t know. Here, let me try to talk to her.”
Bobbie turned to the young woman and spoke in Old Norse. “My name is Bobbie. What’s yours?”
“Freya,” she replied.
“What’s the last thing you remember, before being here?” Bobbie asked.
“I’d been wedded to the chieftain Ralagok, but then he died at the feast on our wedding night, so they put me in the cave with him.”
Bobbie thought it was curious that he hadn’t had a funeral pyre, but this wasn’t the time to bring it up.
“How old are you?” Bobbie asked.
“Eighteen,” Freya replied. “I was chosen to be his wife because his last one died in childbirth and I have good hips.”
“That sounds about right for men. Do you know where you are?” Bobbie asked.
Freya shook her head. “Is it some sort of afterlife?”
Bobbie wasn’t sure how to answer. “It’s a different world to the one you are from. You’ve been asleep for over a thousand years.”
“What are they saying?” Sean asked.
“Beats me. I hope they’re not conspiring to overthrow mankind,” Stuart chuckled. Bobbie rolled her eyes and was about to playfully punch Stuart, but she stopped abruptly when she caught a sharp look from Sean. He was right, she decided. This wasn’t the time to fight, even in jest.
“Now, if we were going to do that, surely we’d wait until we had arrived at wherever we are going,” Bobbie interjected, switching back to English. “Her name’s Freya. She’s eighteen. The poor thing has had a thoroughly miserable time, even before Petrie brought her back. What can we do with her?”
Stuart glanced furtively at the taxi driver, who wasn’t paying them any attention, which probably meant he was hanging onto their every word. “I know where we can take her. Do you both trust me?”
Bobbie explained to Freya in Old Norse that they were going to get her somewhere safe, where men wouldn’t be trying to kill her. For the first time since Petrie had resurrected her, the girl smiled. Bobbie sincerely hoped they could get her out of London before the police tried to intervene. If nothing else, the girl deserved a long, hot bath after her ordeal, and she almost certainly wouldn’t get one before being dragged in front of a magistrate.
* * *
The taxi pulled up at King’s Cross station and Sean was amazed by the way Bobbie had handled the whole situation. He’d known, of course, that she was good in a crisis in the field, when it was a race against time to put the seven-headed snake back where it belonged, but now, watching her take care of the young Viking woman, he was able to see Bobbie’s compassion.
From the tone of her voice and the way she looked at the other woman, it was clear that Bobbie wasn’t talking down to the young woman, as the men at the Royal Society had, or treating her like some sort of terrifying abomination, which most people would have done. She spoke to her like they were equals, and when Freya’s voice became agitated, Bobbie spoke in soothing tones that calmed her down.
When the police stopped them on the pavement before the entrance to the station, Sean was sure they were done for, but Bobbie calmly strode toward the lead officer as though she did this every day.
“Madam, we have reports of…” the officer paused and frowned, clearly not wanting to repeat what he’d heard, “…of a woman matching this girl’s description, coming back from the dead.”
“Is that a crime?” Bobbie asked calmly.
“Well… no. But she was nude in public…”
“The Royal Society is hardly a public place, Officer. And anyway, reports of her being brought back from the dead are utterly ludicrous. Did you ever hear of such a thing? Does she look like she’s been recently deceased?”
“No, she certainly appears to be alive, madam, but…”
The policeman didn’t stand a chance, and Sean was highly amused as he watched Bobbie talk the poor chap around in circles using logic and received pronunciation.
“Officer, do I need to remind you that it is Boat Race day? My poor Scandinavian friend has been the victim of a very cruel practical joke played upon her by William Petrie. I might add that he did declare his intent to murder her before a packed auditorium of several hundred Royal Society members. I and my friends here managed to intervene and are in the process of taking her back to my family home.”
“Attempted murder, you say? We’d best take a statement…” The sergeant went from about to arrest Freya for something he wasn’t sure was a crime, to having solid evidence that he could arrest someone else for something that was definitely a crime, and Sean watched his demeanour change as the man of the law found himself in more certain territory. Attempted murder was most definitely against the law, and all those witnesses would attest to the fact Petrie had said it. Sean wondered if this would stick, but even if not, the scandal of being arrested for such a thing would haunt Petrie for a long time to come.
He shook his head in wonder as Bobbie told the precise and exact truth in a way that cleared up any doubt about who had done what to whom. By the end of the conversation, the police officers were headed for a police box so they could telegraph the station nearest to the Royal Society to apprehend Petrie.
Bobbie took Freya by the arm and they chattered away in Old Norse while Sean and Stuart followed.
“She’s really something, aye?” Stuart nodded at the women.
Sean smiled. “Indeed. She’s truly one of a kind.” He couldn’t believe he’d been about to let her go back to her life without telling her how he felt about her. At the time, he’d thought it was best to let her find someone better matched to her in financial and social standing, but now, having seen her interacting with the men of her own station, he knew she would never be happy with one of them.
They reached the departures board and Sean cursed. “We’ve missed the last train back to Brecon.”
“But conversely, the sleeper to Fort William hasn’t departed, yet,” Stuart observed. “If Freya would be amenable, I think it would be better all-round if she stayed at my estate in the Highlands. My parents are far too infirm to notice a Viking woman about the place.”
Bobbie nodded. “I agree, although won’t you have difficulty with the language?”
“She can learn English. She’ll need to, if she’s sticking around. Do we know when that resurrection stuff wears off?” Stuart asked.
“No idea. I’ll do some research and find out, but it’s probably worth assuming that she’s here to stay, unless we find out otherwise.” Bobbie’s words made sense, and once more Sean was amazed by how quickly she was able to puzzle through this situation.
More than anything, he wanted to spend every day of the rest of his life with her. As they bought tickets, then piled onto the Caledonian Sleeper to Fort William, Sean decided he was going to propose to Bobbie just as soon as he had a moment alone with her. He could clear it with her parents later. While he didn’t want to disrespect her family, he knew that if Bobbie wanted to marry him, she would find a way around them.