interesting.'
The group progressed to Broad Street, where Downes brought them all to a stop again, this time immediately outside the Master's Lodge at Balliol. 'Here — on your left here — the plaque on the wall — this is where Latimer and Ridley, and later Cranmer, were burned at the stake in 1555 and 1556. Not difficult to remember the date, is it? You can see the actual spot, the cross there — see it? — right in the middle of the road.'
A little silence fell on the group: those with the faculty of a visual imagination watching as the long, grey beards began to sizzle, and then the ankle-length shirts suddenly leap up in a scorching mantle of fire, and others hearing perhaps those agonised shrieks as the faggot-fired flames consumed the living flesh. For a few moments it seemed that everyone was strangely affected by Cedric Downes's words. Perhaps it was the way he'd spoken them, with a sad and simple dignity.
'Here we are then! No more walking to do at all.' He pointed immediately across the way to the triple-arched entry of the three-storeyed building that housed The Oxford Story.
That same evening Miss Ginger Bonnetti (not 'Ginger', but christened Ginger) wrote a longish letter to her married sister living in Los Angeles, one Mrs. Georgie (as christened!) Bonnetti, who had married a man named Angelo Bonnetti. (Morse would have had great joy in learning of this, for he gloried in coincidences; but since Miss Ginger Bonnetti was destined to play no further role in the theft of the Wolvercote Tongue, he never did.)
Hi, sis! We had a great morning in Oxford. There's a kind of tourist attraction here called The Oxford Story and we got into these sort of cars, but they're more like those old-fashioned desks from schooldays really — sitting side by side remember? Made of some dark sort of wood with slightly sloping tops as if you'd just got to listen to the class teacher or write out the alphabet again if you didn't. Then we went up a sort of special gradiant at.000001 mph — no kidding! I wish I could remember all those great names we saw, and I do mean great! And you sit. You sit in these double desks and listen to a commentary from you guess who! Sir Alec Guiness. I mean, the voice. So the pen was working away as we went around and I've kept a brochure for you somewhere of all these people, Roger Bacon, Thomas Bodley, Charles First (what a little guy he was), Hobbes and Locke, Wilkens C? — I can't read my own handwriting). Sir Christopher Wren, Boyle (you remember our Physical teacher?), John Wesely (or is it Wessley?), Alice (yeah, the same!). William Ewart Gladstone and no end of those other PM's. And of course Cranmer and the Protestant Martyrs, and I'm starting to remember I've forgotten so many of the others. Does that last bit make sense, Georgie? Anyway it was marvellous, the only trouble was that the poor fellow in front of me had to put up with all this incessant chatter from a really dreadful little woman who's clearly tring to trap another victim. But I've left the big news till now. You remember I told you about the jewel one of the group was going to bring to the Oxford museum here? Well yesterday this poor woman had a coronary and died and someone stole her handbag with this jewel inside it! Where is safe these days? You tell me that. She'd been a little poorly and her husband said she always knew it was going to be sooner or later but it's a bad time just now, fot the tour I mean. Eddie, he's the husband, doesn't want us to be too upset and the tour goes on as scheduled, and well he was her second! He's a pretty nice guy really. But I reckon she was the one with the money and I just hope she was pretty well insured all round. So as you can see we're having plenty happening here!
Love to Angelo,
Ginger
P.S. I forgot to tell you it was just a bit spooky for a start in that Oxford Story.
P.P.S. My room looks right out on the Ashmolean — see that X on the enclosed card?
In the Oxford Story Gift Shop, the group had stayed quite some time, examining aprons, busts, chess-sets, Cheshire cats, cufflinks, games, gargoyles, glassware, jewellery, jigsaws, jugs, maps, pictures, postcards, posters, stationery, table-mats, thimbles, videos — everything a tourist could wish for.
'Gee! With her feet, how Laura would have loved that ride!' remarked Vera Kronquist. But her husband made no answer. If he were honest he was not wholly displeased that Laura's feet were no longer going to be a major factor in the determination of the tour's itineraries. She was always talking about lying down; and now she was lying down. Permanently.
'Very good,' said Phil Aldrich as he and Mrs. Roscoe and the Browns emerged through the exit into Ship Street.
'But the figures there — they weren't nearly as good as the ones in Madame Tussaud's, now were they?'
'No, you're quite right, Janet,' said Howard Brown, as he gently guided her towards Cornmarket and back towards The Randolph.
When, five days later, Mrs. Georgie Bonnetti received her sister's interesting letter, she was a little disappointed (herself a zealous Nonconformist) that with neither cartridge from the double-barrelled rifle had her sister succeeded in hitting the saintly founder of Methodism. (The unbeliever Morse would have been rather more concerned about the other four mis-spellings.)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them
(Frank Moore Colby)
AFTER HIS IN SITU briefing outside Balliol, Downes left the scene of the barbarous burnings and strolled thoughtfully along to Blackwells. An hour and a quarter (Ashenden had suggested) for The Oxford Story; then back to The Randolph where he and Sheila Williams and Kemp (the man would always remain a surname to Downes) had agreed to hold the question-and-answer session with the Americans. Downes sometimes felt a bit dubious about 'Americans'; yet like almost all his colleagues in Oxford, he often found himself enjoying actual Americans, without those quotation marks. That morning he knew that as always some of their questions would be disturbingly naive, some penetrating, all of them honest. And he approved of such questions, doubtless because he himself could usually score a pretty point or two with answers that were honest: quite different from the top-of-the-head comments of some of the spurious academics he knew.
People like Kemp.
After spending fifty minutes browsing through the second-hand books in Blackwell's, Downes returned to The Randolph, and was stepping up the canopied entrance when he heard the voice a few yards behind him.
'Cedric!'
