Chrístõ caught a glance of himself in a mercury backed mirror in the long hall and knew he cut an impressive figure in the black and silver doublet and hose he had chosen to wear today. By his side Garrick was slender and boyish in royal blue and black, a little self-conscious of how much of his legs inside the hose were visible and unconvinced that it was absolutely de rigueur for men in this time.

Chrístõ was privately amused that Garrick still worried about his legs. They had been nearly a month on an undercover mission for Paracell Hext that had brought them to mid-sixteenth century Earth.

The mission actually had their father’s approval. When he discovered that they had to take work as ‘gentlemen of the household’ in an Elizabethan manor he had sent a message that Garrick grimaced at but made Chrístõ smile broadly.

“It will do Garrick good to serve instead of being served for a while.”

Chrístõ was full sure that Valena didn’t know about the message or about Garrick being involved in a Celestial Intervention Agency mission. After it was over, Chrístõ intended to send her some images of her son in the Tudor gentleman’s finery, but for now she knew nothing of their activities.

They came down a wide stairwell, passing a chambermaid who scurried away to do her quiet, invisible work. They continued across the entrance hall and out into the formal garden of the finely built Chatsworth House, intended to be the home of Sir William Cavendish and his wife Lady Elizabeth, known to history as Bess of Hardwick, but by now, some twenty years since the building commenced, and long after Sir William’s death, it was one of several homes owned by Bess and her fourth and richest husband, George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, who duly made her a Countess.

The Derbyshire countryside rolled away in the distance on a fine September afternoon, but the centre of attention was here in the garden where something rather impressive had just been installed.

It was a chess set, but one the size of a lawn tennis court – notwithstanding the fact that lawn tennis wasn’t played in England at this time. The squares were nearly a metre wide - though Chrístõ had to remind himself several times that the people around him measured in ‘yards’. They were perfectly smooth, made from two different hardwoods and stained black and red. The moveable pieces stood waist height to the tallest of the gentlemen and were exquisitely carved from the same woods.

The pieces stood in their home positions, ready for the promised game. Chrístõ left his brother’s side and took his place behind the rows of black pieces. Sir George stood ready behind the reds. His wife and her ladies stood along one side while the men gathered on the other.

Sir George’s secretary, one Giles of Chesterfield, stepped forward to make the announcement.

“The game between his Grace the Earl of Shrewsbury and Christopher of Leon shall commence, the winner being champion of Chatsworth in this year of Our Lord, fifteen hundred and seventy-six. Sir George shall make the first move.”

Sir George made his move by calling it out loud and clear. A servant hurriedly ran to move the piece into the first position. Then Chrístõ made his move. Garrick served as his ‘shunter’ as they had determined to call the people who moved the pieces. It was a good move. Depending on Sir George’s next choice he could end the game right now.

The Earl’s second move was a good one, too. He was a skilled chess player. Chrístõ had played him on very fine ordinary sized boards on several evenings, which was why the chance to play on this giant board had been so tempting.

Chrístõ could still have ended the game in two moves. Simple one-dimensional chess like this was easy. He had been skilled at multi-dimensional games before he was Garrick’s age.

But he didn’t.

For one thing, it would hardly be good policy for a gentleman of the house to beat his Grace so quickly.

For another, there was an audience looking forward to a longer entertainment than that.

For another, he really wanted to look closely at this chess set.

“It’s not just another renegade,” Paracell Hext had told him. “He took a device with him that we’re anxious to get back.”

“What device?” Chrístõ had asked. “And remember my brother… my underage brother… is with me. I’m not getting involved with interplanetary weapons. What are we doing developing such things, anyway? We’re supposed to be a peaceful people.”

“It’s not a weapon,” Hext had assured him. “At least, its not supposed to be one. It could be dangerous in the wrong hands. That was Salomon’s argument. It was why he took the Atavan Device.”

“That’s Salomon Hext, your cousin?”

“Third cousin… twice removed,” Hext had answered with some embarrassment on his face all the same. A renegade with even a slight degree of relationship with the Director of the Celestial Intervention Agency was worrying.

He was, it had to be said, the last person anyone had expected to become a renegade. Salomon was an engineer, working on one of Gallifrey’s space born scientific stations in the Ganymede sector. He was a small, inconspicuous mam. The only reason he didn’t wear horn-rimmed glasses like a clichéd absent-minded professor was that Gallifreyans didn’t generally suffer from eyesight problems.

So when he stole the Atavan Device and an old Type Thirty TARDIS, everyone was surprised, shocked and just a bit alarmed. Renegades were usually men like the infamous Morbius or Salayevin, names spoken of in darkly awed whispers. They were not mild-mannered scientists.

“The good news is that we traced his TARDIS to your favourite planet,” Hext had said.

“Earth?”

“Earth… a place called Der…. Dar….”

Hext struggled with the name of the English county. The very concept of political divisions of a planet confused him, let alone the further sub-division of a country.

“Derbyshire?” Chrístõ queried. “Yes, I know of it. It’s in the northern part of England. Can you be more specific?”

Hext had only been a little more specific.

Derbyshire in England, in the year Fifteen Seventy-Six was that specific location. Even more specifically, the Chatsworth household. A signal from the old TARDIS had been traced to that place and time before it disappeared from the Celestial Intervention Agency’s deep space monitors.

The TARDIS could have gone dark, untraceable even with deep space scanners. Salomon Hext could have used a Chameleon Arch to disguise himself as a human. If so, it was highly likely that he was hiding out as a member of the Earl and Countess’s household, as a servant or a gentleman.

Which brought Chrístõ and his brother to investigate. They had a three-pronged mission – to find Salomon, to find his TARDIS, and to find the Atavan Device.

So far, they had drawn blanks on all three, but Chrístõ had become very good at drawing out chess games to make it look as if he and Sir George were evenly matched. He had lost at least as many games against his Lordship as he had won, and in both cases only by a very small margin.

As a result, he was fast becoming a firm favourite among the gentlemen of the house, frequently called upon to play a game either on the drawing room boards or on this giant outdoor board.

But he was no closer to discovering the answer to his three questions.

Unless, that is, the Time Lord called Salomon Hext had disguised himself as a nobleman called Thomas Donne who had been the Earl’s guest these past two months and who had made a gift of the giant chessboard on the occasion of Sir George and Countess Elizabeth’s wedding anniversary. In that case, the board or the pieces could be the Atavan Device under a chameleon disguise.

Or the board could actually be his TARDIS and the Device within it.

Both of those were likely scenarios.

Thomas Donne looked, physically, nothing like Salomon Hext, but that meant nothing, either. He could have forced himself to regenerate, or to actually change his appearance as well as his species DNA using a Chameleon Arch. Both were drastic and very painful things to do, but if he needed to disappear as completely as a renegade from Gallifrey needed to disappear, then the excruciating and drawn out agony might seem worth it.

Donne was standing with the other men watching the game with interest. He wore an azure doublet with a dark blue cloak, a striking colour combination and expensive dyes that proclaimed a man of substance. There was nothing in his appearance that suggested anything untoward.

But, still, Donne was the best candidate. Everybody else in the household could be traced historically. Parish registers of births, baptisms and marriages placed even the menial staff in their proper time and place. The Earl and his wife were noted in their own lifetimes and beyond. In the far future both of them would have their own Wikipedia entries, a definitive indication of their lasting fame.

Thomas Donne did not fit. His story was that he owned a substantial property near Buxton. But even the TARDIS computer, reaching across centuries to find databases and online records, couldn’t find a land registry with his name on it. There was no house he paid taxes upon, no accounts of any sort in his name. Nor were there any parish records of his coming into this world in the usual way.

He had to be the one, but they just couldn’t prove it.

Chrístõ won the game after an hour and a half of carefully staying one step behind Sir George and allowing him to move his pieces into a trap he was able to spring unexpectedly.

His Grace laughed as he found himself beaten. He was no sore loser, finding pleasure in the game itself, not the winning of it. He shook Chrístõ’s hand warmly and invited everyone to drink ale with him in the Great Hall.

Ale drinking was a safer option than water and milk in this time, but Chrístõ was still careful not to overindulge, and to ensure that his underage brother didn’t, either.

In that he was almost unique. Many of the gentlemen got quickly drunk and slumped in chairs, snoring noisily. Sir George was another exception. He remained upright and in charge of his faculties.

“Too many of my men have quicklime in their bellies,” he said cheerfully. “I shall leave them to snore and spend the afternoon with my Bess. Those of you still standing may be at your leisure.”

“I shall take my brother for a riding lesson,” Chrístõ announced. “He is still too stiff in the saddle.”

The Earl approved of that and left them to it. Chrístõ and Garrick headed to the stables. Garrick tried to match his brother in the complicated matter of fixing a saddle and bridle to a horse but in the end had to accept help.

“We don’t have horses on Gallifrey. How did you get so good at this sort of thing?” the younger brother asked.

“When I was very young father was ambassador to Ventura, where everyone has a horse. You should ask him if you can spend a summer break there on one of their intensive courses.”

“I think after a year at the Academy I’ll just want to be at home,” Garrick admitted. “I think I’m going to hate being away from my family a lot.”

Chrístõ had plenty to say on that matter. Homesickness had been his trouble, too, as a tyro at the Prydonian Academy. But he was silenced by somebody coming into the top end of the stables. Both of them became quiet, holding their horses’ bridles as they watched between the stalls.

“It’s Thomas Donne,” Garrick said telepathically. “I thought he was drunk on the chaise with the shoulder of Edwin Carr as a pillow.”

“Very suspicious behaviour,” Chrístõ confirmed. “We’ll wait until he goes out, then follow at a safe distance.”

Surely, this was it, they both thought. Salomon Hext had to be going to his TARDIS for some purpose. It could, in the end, be this easy.

They kept their distance because two horses crossing open fields and then going along a bridle path through a small but dense woodland made a certain amount of noise. Even so, they were able to track the other rider ahead of them, either by ordinary clues such as trampled grass and by a certain amount of extra-sensory power that marked the presence of the other man ahead of them.

They paused only once where the path crossed a shallow stream.

“He turned off the path and went upstream.” Chrístõ decided after a while. He turned his horse. Garrick followed behind since there wasn’t room for them to ride side by side. The horses’ hooves plashed noisily in the stream and kicked up small pebbles, but Donne’s horse must have been making the same noise. He wouldn’t be aware of the pursuit.

They followed the stream up a slight rise for nearly a mile before they came to a clearing where a horse was placidly grazing. Nearby was a large wooden hut from which familiar rasping noises were coming.

“He’s trying to dematerialise his TARDIS!” Garrick exclaimed. He jumped from his horse urgently and without thinking of the height and the problem of extricating his feet from the stirrups. Chrístõ dismounted rather more elegantly and was ahead of his brother as they rushed towards the door. It was dangerous to approach a dematerialising TARDIS, of course, but the sound wasn’t quite right. There was some engine trouble….

Chrístõ grasped the door and was surprised to find an old-fashioned latch that had to be raised. Then he yanked the door open and stepped over the threshold, fully expecting to feel the dimensional transfer as he passed from one reality to another.

He stopped and stared at a man in homespun clothes bending over a worktable where he was smoothing a piece of wood with a hand lathe. That was the noise he had mistaken for a dematerialising TARDIS.

Garrick looked past the workman at a suit of satin clothes hung on a peg on the far wall, away from the dust of manual labour. As he did so, Thomas Donne looked up at the unexpected arrivals, wiping sweat from his brow as he straightened his back and faced them.

“Some explanation is required, I think,” he said calmly.

“I was about to say the same thing,” Chrístõ answered. He noted that the wood he was working on was a square similar to the giant chess board sections. It was finely done as by a master craftsman. “I’ve never heard of a country gentleman with such skills.”

“I’m not a country gentleman,” he admitted. “My name isn’t Thomas Donne. It’s Carpenter…. I am a carpenter by trade.”

“Appropriate,” Chrístõ commented. “But there must be more to this story, yet.”

He found a wooden stool and sat upon it. Garrick perched on the edge of a sawhorse. They both waited patiently to hear the story.

“Ten years ago, I was carpenter aboard a ship going to the New World. It was a well-paid job and besides, there was the adventure and the chance of a fortune to be made. There was talk of gold to be had from the natives. As it turned out, there was no gold. We were attacked by the natives and barely made it back to our ship. There was a friend of the Captain… a man of some substance… he was wounded, and I looked after him for ten days, hoping he would recover. He didn’t. The wounds festered and he died… but before he did, he bequeathed me the contents of his trunks. These included some finely made clothes and a small bag of gold and jewels… hardly the fortune I had gone to sea to find, but enough to set up a business in Buxton… making furniture for the gentry.”

Chrístõ nodded. So far all made a kind of sense. Except….

“The gentry didn’t seem to want my furniture. I was running out of money. Then I had the idea… if I wore the fine clothes and posed as a man of substance…. If I made a gift to a man like the Earl that would impress him and his friends….”

“It might lead to some commissions?”

“And it has. I’ve been asked to make another chess board for Lathom Hall… in Lancashire… the home of the Earl of Derby, Lord Lieutenant of that county. He is paying fifty pounds… a trifle to his Lordship, but a fortune to a humble carpenter.”

Chrístõ wasn’t quite sure of the going rate for carpentry work in the sixteenth century, but it seemed fair enough.

“And the name of ‘Donne’?”

“It was a name I heard of by chance. A London gentleman who writes poetry. I… can only read a little, but I came by the poem… about a traveller who compared a pair of compasses stretching out over the map yet still joined at the foot….”

“To his love for his lady that does not waver no matter how far apart they are.” Chrístõ smiled. “John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. I sent a copy to my own fiancée to remind her of that same sentiment.”

“My lady married a fishmonger because she thought I wasn’t coming back from the sea,” Thomas Carpenter mused wryly. “But I remembered the poem and the author of it, and it proved a useful… a… what is the term a gentleman lie yourself would use for a false name?”

“A pseudonym, a nom-de-plume,” Christo answered. “Though a magistrate might well call it something else. But go on with your tale.”

“There isn’t much more. I had learnt enough of gentlemanly behaviour. I was accepted as such while acquiring commissions for Master Carpenter.”

“So, you’re not....” Garrick began, then stopped. It all seemed a bit absurd now to accuse him of being a renegade Time Lord.

“I’m not who Sir George and the others think I am. And now that you know….”

“I have no reason to betray your secret,” Chrístõ promised him. “Don’t worry about that. You’re a very good carpenter. I hope your business prospers enough that you can give up the deception and hold your head up as Thomas Carpenter of Buxton.”

He stood up. Garrick did the same. They quietly left the shack. As they found their horses the sound of the hand lathe resumed.

“Well….” Garrick began as they rode away.

“Well… back to square one. We have no idea who among the household of Chatsworth is really Salomon Hext. Perhaps we’re completely wrong. Perhaps he isn’t here at all?”

Garrick had no answers to that. He had been as sure as his brother that it was Thomas Donne.

They made their way back to the house and found quiet amusements until dinner time when they joined the family in the dining room. Sir George, with Bess and both his and her children from previous marriages at his side gave thanks to the Lord for their food before the whole company sat to a first course of boiled beef and bread cubes for mopping up the gravy, followed by a portion of beans and carrots. The potato was not yet a common part of the English diet, and the idea of meat and vegetables on the same plate was not yet heard of.

The vegetables were followed by cheese and apple tarts and the whole meal accompanied by wine and ale. The more of that was consumed, more of the company either fell silent from a surfeit or talked more boldly with the confidence drink could give to some.

Chrístõ listened for clues, but there were none. When, eventually, the company were released to go to their beds he had no more idea than before about the disguised Renegade.

“Maybe it isn’t one of the Gentlemen?” Garrick suggested when they were alone in their bedchamber. “What if he disguised himself as one of the Ladies?”

Chrístõ was startled by the idea. That really WAS drastic. Regeneration into the opposite gender was rare but not completely unknown in Time Lord society. The Chameleon Arch could even be configured to make such a transformation. It probably wasn’t MUCH more painful than any other re-alignment of DNA, though the thought made his eyes glaze over a little.

“Then we’re not even back at square one,” he said. “We’re in a big hole that square one just collapsed into.”

“I could concentrate on the ladies while you look at the men all over again,” Garrick suggested, ignoring his brother’s metaphor for their problem. “Some of the younger ones seem to like me. I get a lot of smiles.”

“You could end up betrothed to one of them,” Chrístõ answered him. “They do very early marriages around here. One of the Countess’s daughters was twelve on her wedding day, and Sir George arranged a marriage for his eight year old girl.”

Garrick looked worried and admitted that chatting up Tudor women wasn’t the best policy.

“Let me think about our next move,” Chrístõ suggested as he pulled back the covers on his four-poster bed and adjusted the embroidered bolster. Garrick got into his own bed and wriggled uncomfortably on the mattress. Before he went to sleep he had a sudden recollection of his early childhood when he used to sleep warm and protected cuddled up with his older brother.

“You’re far too old for that, now,” Chrístõ said, catching the stray thought on the edge of sleep. “And don’t go thinking about that when you’re in the dorm at the Academy. You’ll never hear the last of it.”

Having the idea in his head, Chrístõ woke in the dark of the night thinking that his brother WAS trying to get into the bed with him. As his mind cleared he realised he was just trying to wake him.

“The building is definitely not on fire. I’ve visited it in the twenty-fourth century,” he said. “So, what’s the matter?”

“Somebody is doing something weird outside,” he said. “I think it might be Salomon Hext, after all.”

Chrístõ swung from lying down to standing up very quickly and went to the window Garrick indicated. In that far future when he brought Julia on a day trip as a tourist the gardens of Chatsworth had subtle uplighting. In this time, they were dark except for a sliver of moonlight. Even so he could see a dark clad figure bending beside a new ornamental fountain that was being installed in the garden.

It certainly wasn’t a fountain engineer earning overtime.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was….” Chrístõ paused just a moment before reaching for a warm overgrown and cloak and a pair of boots. He reached automatically for his sonic screwdriver before remembering that he didn’t have it. He had left it in the TARDIS to avoid introducing any more alien technology into the place than Salomon Hext already brought. He grasped a sword instead and fixed the scabbard belt around his waist.

Garrick dressed hurriedly, too. A few minutes later they were heading down a staircase and out into the crisp air of a clear September night. They moved quickly along carefully laid paths in what would one day be one of the most celebrated gardens in England.

“He’s gone,” Garrick noted as they rounded the fountain.

“Yes, but he hasn’t gone far,” Chrístõ confirmed. He raised his hand and felt the air around him. With his sonic screwdriver he would have found it easier to detect the minute disturbances in the atmosphere, but he was, after all, a Time Lord. That was more than just a title. It meant that his whole body was tuned to the passage of time and to any interference with it.

He stepped towards the fountain, his hand still held out. Before his feet splashed in the pool he crossed the perception wall that disguised the TARDIS door from anyone who wasn’t a Time Lord.

He had stepped into the console room before he remembered that Type Thirty TARDISes weren’t equipped with perception walls.

There were several details inside the console room that had been modified by a very clever engineer, but that wasn’t the important factor right now.

“Sir George….” Garrick began, his head bowing respectfully.

“No,” Chrístõ said firmly, his head firmly erect and his hand conspicuously on his sword hilt. “The REAL Earl of Shrewsbury is a high nobleman of England, close to the Queen herself. But Salomon Hext is nobody. OUR family is far more important than his. He should bow to us.”

The man who everyone knew as George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury looked at the two brothers and then he did, in fact, bow his head the full measure that a distant cousin of an Oldblood family owed to the sons of one of the Twelve Ancient Houses.

“That’s better,” Chrístõ said, though his hand stayed on the sword. Salomon Hext saw that detail and his demeanour was compliant.

“I only knew for certain when you came in here,” he admitted. “Out there, the effects of the Chameleon Arch make it difficult. Outside, I almost forget who I really am, let alone the sons of one of our greatest families. I need to come into my TARDIS to remember why I am here.”

“Where is the REAL Earl of Shrewsbury?” Chrístõ asked. “And how were you able to take his place?”

“The real Earl is….”

Salomon Hext paused. He looked steadily at Chrístõ and his brother.

“What do you intend? Will you take me back to Gallifrey?”

“That’s for me to decide. What did you do to the real Earl?”

“He isn’t dead… at least not yet. Will you let me show you? Will you listen to my story?”

“Keep your hands where we can see you, and don’t try anything,” Chrístõ told him. “I will decide whether your story is worth listening to.”

Salomon Hext nodded. He kept his hands visible as he turned towards the inner corridor of his TARDIS. He led the brothers down through several stairways until they reached the cloister room.

Cloister rooms varied according to the taste of the TARDIS owner – or possibly the taste of the TARDIS itself. This one had a Tudor country garden look, right down to a small maze surrounding the Eye of Harmony cover.

But Chrístõ and Garrick weren’t looking at the scenery. Their eyes fell upon a glass case in which a man was lying.

“Sir George?” Garrick queried. The man was pale, his skin glossy, his beard untidy, but unmistakeably the real Earl of Shrewsbury.

“What happened to him?” Chrístõ demanded coldly. “Did you kill him?”

“I did not,” Salomon Hext answered, and there was a ring of veracity in his voice. “Look for yourself.”

He pointed to a panel at the head end of the glass case. Chrístõ examined it carefully.

“He is… in extremis. A broken neck… he would be dead if your cabinet wasn’t providing very basic life support… breathing, minimum brain activity.”

Salomon Hext nodded.

“I am guiltless of his condition. It was a pure coincidence. My TARDIS landed randomly on this planet just over a year ago. I found Sir George a few metres away. He must have been thrown from his horse… the creature was wandering loose, still saddled and bridled. I brought the dying man into my TARDIS, but clearly there was nothing to be done for him. Human necks break so easily. I put him into the life support chamber, though I knew not what I intended, in full truth. Then I came to realise… if I re-routed the Chameleon Arch through the chamber… I could take on his persona. I would have most of his memories, his mannerisms, his face, his life. I could hide here on Earth.”

“That isn’t how the Chameleon Arch normally works,” Chrístõ noted. “You must be quite a gifted engineer. But don’t mistake admiration for compliance.Did you know how important Sir George was? Did you realise the sort of man whose life you were taking over? He was no ordnary humam. He was one of the most powerful men in this realm.”

“I didn’t know until the process was complete,” Salomon Hext admitted. “Then I knew that, in this world, I hadca status equal to any Oldblood Patriarch og Gallifrey. That was a... a bonus, I suppose I could call it. But it was not part of my first intention. Still... when I rode his horse back to the house his servants bowed to me. My servants. His wife… she was my wife. I began to take the life for granted, to be honest. Of course, I knew it couldn’t last. I saw Sir George’s history in my TARDIS database. He should die in 1590. But I thought….”

“You thought at the appropriate time that you would swap his near dead body for yours and disappear again?”

“Yes.”

“You and the Atavan Device.”

“I don’t have the Atavan Device,” Salomon Hext replied. “I launched it into a neutron star before I came to Earth.”

“Why?” Garrick asked, the very question Chrístõ was about to ask.

Salomon Hext looked at both of them.

“You don’t know what the Atavan Device does, do you?”

“I know that it isn’t a weapon, but it might be used as one,” Chrístõ replied. “What that means, I don’t know. The Celestial Intervention Agency Director might have known, but he didn’t tell me. He’s like that. But I was told to find the device, your TARDIS and you in no particular order, and deal with all three.”

“The Atavan Device is a terraforming torpedo. It is meant to be launched at uninhabited planets or moons… dead worlds. It would start a chain reaction that would terraform the planet in a day, rather than the years it normally takes, creating a breathable atmosphere, oceans, continents, polar ice caps…. That’s why I designed it….”

“YOU designed it?” Chrístõ queried. “Hext didn’t tell me that. Only that you took the Device.”

“I designed it… so that we might expand our colonisation programme. But I realised that it could have terrible consequences. If the device was used against an inhabited world…”

“Sweet Mother of Chaos….” Chrístõ swore. “You didn’t think of that when you designed it?”

“I thought only of the good it could do. Then I began to wonder why certain members of our government were interested in it. I wondered if they wanted to colonise or conquer.”

“Which members of our government want to conquer other races?” Chrístõ demanded. “We have never done such things. Our entire philosophy is….”

“Don’t be naïve,” Salomon Hext retorted. “Don’t you remember the stories about Morbius… the planets he devastated?”

“Morbius is dead… he has been dead since long before I was born.”

“Do you imagine he is the only Time Lord with such dark ambitions? If it was known that we had the ability to rewrite the DNA of a whole world, destroying all life on that world… somebody would do that. Maybe not in my lifetime or yours, but one day the ambition would override the horror of such a deed. And I knew I could not be the author of such a genocidal act. I knew I had to destroy my own creation and all of the design notes and blueprints to recreate it. But the only way I could do that was by leaving Gallifrey… by becoming a Renegade, an exile, beyond the reach of the Celestial Intervention Agency.”

“Not quite far enough,” Chrístõ said. “That’s the whole truth of it? You’re not lying to me… knowing my own non-conforming attitude to Gallifreyan politics… seeking to make an ally of me.”

“I hope you ARE an ally in this. For all I’ve heard of you… the hero of the Mallus War, the Prydonian Rebel, the defender of so many worlds…. I don’t believe you would simply take me back to Gallifrey as a criminal.”

“Prydonian Rebel?” Garrick queried. “They call him that?”

“I’ve been called worse,” Chrístõ conceded. “But you, Salomon Hext, are assuming a lot about me based on rumour and legend.”

“Yes, I am. But… am I wrong? Are you not sympathetic to my cause?”

“I’m thinking about it.” He looked again at the near dead Earl of Shrewsbury. His mind drifted over his biography in the years before his death. Of course, both he and Bess were long past child-bearing age. Most of the Earl’s political ambitions were achieved. If his death occurred now, the only thing it really changed was the date on his epitaph. He could force Salomon Hext to relinquish his rather magnificent bolt hole and bring him back to an ignominious charge of Treason, to interrogation and quite possibly torture by Paracell Hext and probably imprisonment for his crimes.

He could do that. It was what he was sent to do.

He turned and strode out of the cloister room, following the long way back to the console room without hesitation at any of the turns. Garrick hurried after him. Salomon Hext came just as quickly. Neither were sure what he had in mind until they reached the console room.

Even then, he said nothing, but walked right out through the perception wall to the moonlit garden of Chatsworth.

“It’s the middle of the night,” he finally said. “I really don’t know what any of us are doing wandering around the garden in the dark. Come on, brother. Let us retire to our beds.”

Garrick followed his brother. Salomon Hext, aka Sir George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was left standing beside the fountain for several minutes before he headed inside by a different door.

The next morning, even before breakfast, Chrístõ met with the Earl in his private chamber. He told him that he and his brother had to leave his service at once.

“At once?” he queried. “Surely you will have breakfast and… one more game of chess out in the courtyard.”

Chrístõ agreed to so much. After breakfast the household gathered around the giant chessboard. The Earl’s secretary announced the match. The Earl made the first move.

Chrístõ let it last as long as possible, giving everybody their full entertainment. Most satisfied of all was Thomas Donne who was pleased to see his gift used so well. In the end, though, he let himself win by one carefully set up move.

There was polite applause. He shook hands with the Earl. For a brief moment their eyes met and a kind of understanding passed between them.

Chrístõ and his brother returned to their chamber. They packed their bags. Then they opened a large oak cabinet that stood in the corner of the chamber. If anyone else had looked at it, they would have thought it had been there ever since the house was built. But that was a kind of mental perception filter.

To Chrístõ and Garrick it was their TARDIS, used during their time at Chatsworth for showers and other matters of hygiene that the sixteenth century didn’t offer. Now they closed the door on that century for the last time. Moments later, the large cabinet in the bedchamber vanished, never to be seen again.

Once in temporal orbit, Chrístõ went to the communications console. He quickly connected to the Celestial Intervention Agency headquarters on Gallifrey, using Paracell Hexts’ own private number.

“The Atavan Device has been destroyed,” he said. “It no longer exists. It can’t be used as a weapon, or for any other purpose.”

“That’s not the sort of news I was hoping for,” Hext answered. “A number of High Councillors have taken a close interest in the recovery of the device.”

“If I were you, I’d take a close interest in those High Councillors,” Chrístõ answered.

“You would?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Then perhaps I should do that. What about the Renegade and his TARDIS?”

“They won’t be any further bother to you, to the High Council or to Gallifrey. You can call off the pursuit.”

“I can?” Hext was sceptical.

“Yes, you can. Just bury the case in your files. Forget about it. Apart from anything else it will save you the embarrassment of torturing your own cousin to extract his confession.”

“I sent you after Rondin Devos and you resettled him on a new planet. You did the same with Cadan Sanger… although I really didn’t want HIM back, to be honest. One day, if I send you after a renegade, will you actually bring him back for an honest session with my electronic whips?”

“Probably not,” Chrístõ answered. “But you have real agents for those. You send me after the dubious ones, and you know it. Anyway, I’m taking Garrick for a tour of some English cathedrals and then we’re going to surf the horsehead nebula and then try any random co-ordinate we can generate. I’ll talk to you when I decide I feel like getting entangled in your intrigues again. Give my love to your wife and daughter.”

With that he closed the call and grinned at his brother.

“Cathedrals?” Garrick queried.

“It’s a sad thing, but Lady Bess and Sir George actually had marital troubles near the end. Even Queen Elizabeth couldn’t reconcile them. When he died in 1590, he was interred in a family shrine in Sheffield Cathedral. When she died some twenty years later, her tomb was laid in the parish church of Derby. In the twentieth century it was moved to Derby Cathedral. I think it behoves us to pay respect to them both. And after that… my mother and our father were friends with the Twelfth Duke of Devonshire in the 1990s. We have pretty much an open invitation to drop in for tea with him or his son, the Thirteenth Duke. The chess set is long gone, but the fountains are beautiful, and none of them are Type Thirty TARDISes in disguise.”

Garrick nodded to confirm his agreement with that itinerary. Chrístõ grinned again and set their new course.