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banged on the desk with his board rubber. ‘Can we have a little order?’ he asked. The room fell silent, except for a few murmurings from Barnstaple, still seething at being insulted.

      ‘Now,’ Erasmus continued. ‘The example I had in mind is the return of King Richard – that’s been a part of the legend for as long as we can trace it back. Historically, it seems extremely unlikely. Richard spent most of his time out of the country and there’s plenty of evidence he didn’t care about the place in the slightest. Even if we allow for the possibility that Robin could have met the King during the siege of Nottingham Castle, it seems unlikely that standing up for the rights of English peasants would have pleased Richard. Marian is an interesting one, though. It’s widely held she was, as Atkinson pointed out, added by French-inspired romantics at roughly the same time that Guinevere was added to the legend of King Arthur, but a new school of thought has it that Marian was part of the original legends and was removed by chroniclers of the day, possibly because they shared the opinions of Heathfield’s father.’

      There were a few chuckles around the room and Heathfield’s face flushed red.

      ‘Please, sir,’ Harrison held his arm so high Erasmus wondered at how he didn’t dislocate it.

      ‘Yes, Harrison,’ Erasmus prompted, expecting one of Harrison’s regular requests for the lavatory.

      ‘Did Robin Hood really exist?’ Harrison asked.

      Erasmus sat down on the edge of his desk. ‘That’s difficult to say,’ he admitted. ‘It’s usually true that legends have at least some historical basis, but it’s very hard to tell how much of the legend is attributable to a real person.’

      ‘Can’t you just look up his birth certificate?’

      Erasmus smiled. ‘They hadn’t started keeping them back then,’ he said. ‘But there are Robin Hoods in the records.’ He noted Harrison’s sudden look of enthusiasm. ‘They’re all years later,’ he said.

      ‘What about going back to the earliest version of the legend?’ Atkinson asked.

      Erasmus shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The trouble with legends like Robin Hood is that they usually begin as an oral tradition. The first written stories of Robin appear at least a hundred years after the time of King John and it’s possible these left out elements, like Marian, which were added by later writers who knew some of the oral traditions. It’s also possible the original writers added some of the political material of their own time to the message.

      ‘Robin, we are told, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but this was supposed to happen at a time when we’re told money wasn’t in wide circulation. Peasants were living off the land and they paid for the rights to that land by working the lands of their masters. Their masters mostly earned their keep by means of military service.’

      ‘So where did all the robbing come from?’ asked Atkinson.

      ‘Possibly from when the stories were written down. By then, the feudal system had been devastated by the Black Death, labourers were being paid to farm, and King Edward the Third was expecting to live just us as well in a country where thirty per cent of the population had died in a few short years.

      ‘Robin Hood was the perfect tale to carry the sentiments of the people of that time, which might explain why King John is given such a poor portrayal. King Richard, by contrast, is portrayed as a great king even though he was hardly ever in the country.’

      ‘Sir,’ Harrison asked. ‘What’s the feudal system?’

      ‘I’m glad you asked that,’ Erasmus told him, ‘because that’s what we were supposed to be studying today. Now, if you’ll all turn to page one hundred and thirty in your textbooks, we’ll have a look at what life was like in the Middle Ages.’

      There was a general rustling of pages and Erasmus drank deeply from his lukewarm tea. In a way he was grateful for the school play – he’d never have been able to get the pupils interested in the Barons’ Revolt and Magna Carta if they weren’t already thinking about the period. That was the trouble with the curriculum, history was expected to be a dry repetition of facts: there was no real understanding to go with it. If you could put the class into one of those reconstruction villages for a week, like a mediaeval version of Big Brother, now that might help them to understand what it was like.

      He opened his own battered copy of the textbook to the relevant page – oh well, time to get on with the lesson. He noticed Barnstaple was leaning over towards Harrison’s desk, his eyes intent on the smaller boy’s sandwiches. Almost unconsciously, the teacher picked up his board rubber and hurled it across the room. The projectile hit the desk within an inch of Barnstaple’s hand and bounced off towards the back of the room; the sound of the impact made both boys jump and Barnstaple, already in an imbalanced position, fell from his chair with a crash. A ripple of laughter spread across the class as Barnstaple picked himself up, his face red with embarrassment and one hand clutching his forehead.

      ‘Now what’s the matter?’ Erasmus asked.

      ‘I hit my head,’ Barnstaple replied. Erasmus summoned the boy to his desk and inspected the purple swelling just above his eye. It was nothing serious but, if it meant he could rid the class of a disruptive influence for long enough to get the other boys settled into some work, then it was an opportunity worth taking.

      ‘Go and see the nurse,’ he instructed the boy, ‘and don’t be too long, you’ll be making the time up tomorrow evening.’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ said Barnstaple, thoroughly cowed, then made his way out of the classroom door. The other pupils watched him go then looked expectantly at their teacher.

      ‘Right,’ said Erasmus in a businesslike tone. ‘What we’re going to do today is to read the chapter on Magna Carta and then I want you to write a thousand words on what effect you think the document had on the common man. Heathfield, you can come here and distribute the exercise books.’

      The ginger-haired boy made his way unhurriedly to the front of the class and took the pile of books from his teacher. Erasmus watched as each child accepted his book and turned to see what mark they had received for their homework. Atkinson was staring wistfully into the corner of the room and Erasmus followed his gaze, which was trained somewhere just above his confiscated bow.

      ‘We’ll never know, will we sir?’ Atkinson asked.

      ‘Know what?’

      ‘Whether Robin Hood really existed.’

      ‘Perhaps we will one day,’ said Erasmus and he shot a glance at the equations, just visible at the top of the board. ‘Perhaps we will.’

       Chapter Four

      The end of the school day came, as it always did, as something of a relief. Despite having a passion for teaching, Erasmus always felt the school day was at least half an hour too long and that the hours of eight-thirty until four o’clock had been arrived at with more consideration to the children’s parents than to the children themselves. He retrieved his board rubber from the back of the room for the third time that day, then sat down at his desk and finished his mug of tea, before rolling the blackboard round to the squiggles that had so confused Clarence the previous night.

      Ciphered in the impenetrable scrawl was the key to time, an equation so elegant it was almost a work of art, yet so simple it should scarcely have taxed a remedial student and yet – and yet – it was he, Erasmus Hobart, who had discovered that equation, who had realised it could be applied to create a machine that could travel in what had once been naively cast as the fourth dimension. There, described in a thin layer of chalk dust, was a summation of the quantum nature of time, a description of how all times were superposed in one space and how, far from accepting the universe as observed, a traveller could spin the quantum universe until he had selected the time at which he wished to observe it. The full ramifications of interacting with a different quantum state of the universe weren’t entirely certain, but

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