Just One Damned Thing After Another

Cover of Just One Damned Thing After Another

**Just One Damned Thing After Another** is the first novel in the Chronicles of St Mary's. It tells the story of one of St Mary's newest recruits as she starts her career as an historian, introducing her friends, colleagues, and enemies along the way.

**This page is chock-full of spoilers for the Chronicles of St Mary's. Proceed with caution.**

## Blurb

*'So tell me, Dr Maxwell, if the whole of History lay before you... where would you go? What would you like to witness?'*

When Madeleine Maxwell is recruited by the St Mary's Institute of Historical Research, she discovers the historians there don't just study the past - they revisit it.

But one wrong move and History will fight back - to the death. And Max soon discovers it's not just History she's fighting...

Follow the tea-soaked disaster magnets of St Mary's as they rattle around History. Because wherever the historians go, chaos is sure to follow.

## Plot

Dr Madeleine Maxwell, a short, read-haired, engaging, impatient and self-depricating woman in her late twenties, sums up the two single most important events of her life: when her head teacher, Mrs De Winter, sent her on an assignment in the library instead of expelling her for her bad behaviour, and when she received an email from Mrs De Winter about a job interview at St Mary's Institute of Historical Research. The first event sparks her interest in a career as an historian, while the second takes said career in a whole new direction.

Mrs De Winter meets her at St Mary's and gives her a tour, telling everyone they meet on their way to the director that Max hasn't had 'the interview' yet, hinting to some secretive information she obviously isn't entitled to yet, including Professor Rapson, Dr Dowson, Chief Technical Officer Farrell and Mrs Enderby. Once ready for the interview, they greet Mrs. Partridge, the director's PA.

The interview with Dr Bairstow, St Mary's director, starts easily enough with some work related questions. Those questions soon turn into cryptic what-if's about time travel, all of which Max wholeheartedly says 'yes' to. She's hired by a captivated Dr Bairstow who then leaves her in the extremely capable hands of Chief Farrell for the 'other' tour. They explore the previously skipped parts of St Mary's, like Hawking Hangar and Sick Bay. The Chief shows her the pods in which the historians travel up and down, though usually down and then back up, the timeline.

Max starts her training along with Dr Sussman, Dr Grant, Dr Rutherford, Dr Stevens, Dr Nagley and Dr Jordan, though most of her fellow trainees don't qualify. Only Max, Sussman and Grant become fully fledged historians after successfully completing their final test. Each one of the remaining trainees must go to a preset time and location, spend a few hours doing what historians should do, and then return to St Mary's. Instead of the actual coordinates for their destinations, however, they each land in an unknown location at an unknown time and must either wait a few days for their pod to take them back to St Mary's or take matters into their own hands by calling for an emergency extraction. Max waits the full sixteen days it takes her pod to resume its countdown, to the approval of the senior staff.

After several unfortunate events that lead to the death or departure of most of the earlier qualified and more experienced historians, Grant gets his chance to travel through time. Max learns that he tried to help someone in a dangerous battle and ended up getting killed himself, because History doesn't like pesky little historians fiddling with important moments in time. She experiences this herself when she is almost killed by falling debris trying to prevent a robbery on a jump to London in 1040 to see Westminster Abbey during its construction, after which Tim Peterson, her chaperone for this jump, accidentally pees on her.

Her next jump is to a chateau near the Somme in France in 1917, in the middle of World War one. Both Kalinda Black and Sussman accompany her, all three of them taking on odd jobs in the chateau-turned-field hospital in order to document how and why it burned down. Max is once again nearly killed, though this time not by History's fickle whims; she opens the door to the linen room, which causes a massive explosion. She struggles back to the pod, helping hurt soldiers, nurses and others along the way. Kal does the same, while Sussman went straight for the pod; this results in a rift between the two historians who, henceforth, stop working together.

She and Sussman are called into Dr Bairstow's office and are assigned a really Big Job: to travel sixty-seven million years back in time and do research in the middle of the Cretaceous Period. During their prep for the three month mission, several people warn Max about Sussman's cocky behaviour. Before the jump, Max is invited to a fancy dinner with Kal and Dr Helen Foster, who works in the Medical Section of St Mary's. To her surprise, Peterson, Dieter and Chief Farrell show up as well; it was simply a ploy by her friends to get Max and Farrell together. The two of them retreat to Max's room where Farrell tells her he's from the future. He was actually a frenchman with a great mother, a beautiful wife and two lovely kids until his wife left him and his mother and his two sons died of the flu. He tells her she's important and that she should be careful to stay alive. One day soon after the dinner, Max finds a little wooden model of the Trojan Horse on her doorstep, left there by Farrell who made it himself.

It's finally time for Max and Sussman's jump to the Cretaceous, and the first 73 days are absolutely magnificent. On the 74th day, Max wakes up to Sussman bent over her with his todger in his hand and an insatiable lust in his eyes, and proceeds to douse him in dinosaur grade pepper spray and lock him out of and restrict his access to their shared pod. When she decides to go about their business as usual, Sussman hits her over the head with a rock and leaves her for dead stuck beneath a tree trunk in the valley below their camp. She regains conciousness, crawls back to the camp and discovers that Sussman has been attacked and eaten by Deinonychus in the meantime, finding only one of his feet in the foliage.

Max, grieving the loss of her friend and colleague, decides to stay in the Cretaceous despite St Mary's rule about historians working in pairs to finish the last sixteen days of the mission. Upon her return to St Mary's, Dr Bairstow, Mrs Partridge and Chief Farrell discover what happened right before Sussman's death via the pod's video feed which he turned on to film his sexual exploits. The footage is deleted, though Max watches all of it, including what happens outside the pod. After almost killing her, Sussman is approached by Clive Ronan who stabs him with a knife and leaves him to be eaten alive by the Deinonychus.

Chief Farrell takes Max to a special place of his with his own personal pod, a Mediterranean island some five thousand years ago. Here he tells her about Clive Ronan, his history with Dr Bairstow and Annie Bessant, and the start of his evil ways. They stay on the island for a few days before returning to St Mary's with a considerable tan that nobody seems to notice.

Isabella Barclay and her team finish working on the holo, but Max wants to make some minor changes to the credits, including putting Sussman's dedication way up front instead of at the end. She shows the holo to all her colleagues at St Mary's before going to the University of Thirsk with Chief Farrell for the official sales pitch, and it's a smashing success. On their way back to St Mary's, Max comments on Farrell's driving, distracting him enough to crash Dr Bairstow's leant Bentley into a tree. Max and Farrell finally have it out on the bonnet, after which Mr Dieter shows up to tow them back to St Mary's.

After seeing something suspicious in the holo, Max takes an extremely uncomfortable Mr Dieter back to the Cretaceous Period to check something. They discover that Clive Ronan has been capitalizing off commercial time travel to have tourists hunt and kill dinosaurs for sport. They make it back to St Mary's, but only by emergency extraction and to the detriment of Dieter and the pod. The whole unit plans to stop Ronan's business in the Cretaceous and jumps back. Things go wrong almost immediately: Barclay opens the dinosaur cages instead of locking them, creating a bloodbath in Ronan's tourist encampment; Farrell, Peterson, Guthrie and Markham get lost before the unit is extracted back to St Mary's; Dr Bairstow is seriously injured and subsequently replaced by Barclay as Acting Director.

In the face of the recent failure and Max's 'reckless behaviour' during and after the mission, Barclay fires her with immediate effect. She gets one hour to gather her personal belongings before leaving and settling in Rushford. There, both her health and her meagre savings quickly deteriorate and she ends up in a medical clinic, having just had a miscarriage. She is at an extremely low point, spending the last of her savings on a supper in a local café and apparently planning her own demise, when a concerned but kind Mrs De Winter shows up and takes her to her bed & breakfast.

Mrs De Winter gives Max the two personal possessions her sister, Mrs Partridge, had managed to save from Barclay's wrath: a picture of her and Farrell, and the little wooden model of the Trojan horse that he made for her. They discover the remote control to Farrell's pod in the belly of the wooden horse and plan a rescue attempt for Farrell, Peterson, Guthrie and Markham. During the rescue, which almost doesn't happen by virtue of a very hungry Tyrannosaurus rex, a very loud explosion rocks the Cretaceous and Max spots the wreckage of a pod.

Max and the four men are welcomed to the b&b by Dr Bairstow and Mrs De Winter, who has made them a more than adequate supper. They all go back to St Mary's the next day, where Max personally confronts Barclay. A proper bitchfight ensues. Dr Bairstow relieves Barclay of her function of Director and takes up the mantle himself again. Max is reinstated as Chief Operations Officer, but quits together with Peterson after she is angrily berated and insulted by Farrell, who has heard from Barclay about Max's miscarriage, and assaulted by Mr Whissel since he thinks her body is now free real estate. That night, Farrell apologizes for his behaviour and he and Max make up before descending onto her couch in a crying heap.

After Mrs Partridge repeatedly tells her to do her laundry, Max finds a pinecone caught in the lining of her jacket, proving that object that would shortly be destroyed can actually be removed and replaced elsewhere. Since Dr Bairstow has given both Max and Peterson a five day waiting period before they can actually quit, Max still has a job at St Mary's and is able to come up with a plan to rescue a few thousand scrolls from the library of Alexandra right before it burns down.

The mission seems to be a success, but lots of things go wrong from the get go. Max, the appointed mission leader, gets distracted and tries to take even more scrolls with her once the need to retreat to the pod is voiced by another member of staff. Ronan's thugs show up at the library, too, and start shooting at them. Upon their jump to their secondary camp somewhere in the desert, they find out they've managed to rescue some fifteen thousand scrolls, but are ambushed again by Ronan in the night.

Ronan wants someone from St Mary's to open the pods with the scrolls, and lines up everyone in the desert sand. He shoots Jamie Cameron and Mr Markham, then threatens to shoot Max, but before he can do so Farrell opens their new, large transport pod Thunderbird Two. Professor Rapson and Dr Dowson emerge with a handmade flamethrower fueled by the animal droppings the former had wanted to use to seal in the scrolls for preservation. Ronan is chased, but jumps away with Izzie in TB2. Max notices the same painted RD T on the pod that she saw on the wreckage in the Cretaceous and gets why Farrell let them go; he'd rigged the pod beforehand to explode.

Max talks with Mrs Partridge in a semiconscious state, realizing that she is actually Kleio, daughter of Zeus and Muse of History. Mrs Partridge tells her that 'the anomaly is under the fourth step', and once she's back at St Mary's, Max finds some sonnets and a play by Shakespeare under the fourth step of the stairs to the front door. The play, a marvelous piece about Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I of England, has a mistake in it: instead of being executed at the end of the first act, Mary lives and becomes Queen of England and Scotland, while Elizabeth I takes her place at the gallows.

## Dramatis Thingummy

* Dr Edward Bairstow - Director of St Mary's. Tall, authoritative. Early 50s. Holds together a volatile mix of technicians, historians, kitchen staff, ssecurity teams and the sometimes explosive Research and Development Section.
* Mrs Partridge - PA to Director. Not to be crossed.

### History Department

* Madeleine Maxwell (Max) - Historian. In her late 20s. Short, red-haired, engaging, impatient, self-deprecating, with a murky past and a precarious future.
* Tim Peterson - Historian, late 20s. Tall and shaggy. A good friend.
* Kalinda Black - Historian. Blonde and blue-eyed. Looks like a Disney princess. Possibly drinks the blood of recently qualified trainees. Recipient of Mr Dieter's affections.
* Sussman, Grant, Rutherford, Stevens, Nagley, Jordan - Max's fellow trainees.

### Technical Section

* Leon Farrell - Chief Technical Officer. In his mid-30s. Dark hair, blue eyes, competent, calm, quiet.
* Mr Dieter - Farrell's number two. Built like a brick shi - a very large young man.

### Medical Section

* Dr Helen Foster - Early 30's. Medical doctor and with the people skills of Vlad the Impaler. Recipient of Mr Peterson's affections.
* Nurse Hunter - Recipient of Markham's dubious affections.

### Security Section

* Major Ian Guthrie - Head of Security and whose unenviable task it is to keep St Mary's safe, despite all their best efforts. Late 30s
* Mr Markham - Security guard. Small, grubby and disaster-prone. Reputedly indestructible - which is just as well.
* Mr Whissel - Nasty piece of work.
* Big Dave - Murdoch. Gentle giant.

### Research & Development

* Professor Rapson - Head of R & D. Age unknown. Lives in his own world. Responsible for the destruction of the Clock Tower and the disastrous Icarus Experiment. Apparently unaware of the properties of Methane.
* Doctor Dowson - Librarian and Archivist. Age unknown. Also not quite up to speed re methane.

### IT Department

* Isabella Barclay - Head of IT. Professional bitch. Short, spiteful and redheaded. Gossip says she harbours an unrequited passion for Farrell.
* Polly Perkins - Technician

### Others

* Mrs Mack - Kitchen Supremo. Mid 40s
* Jenny Fields - Kitchen Assistent and dodo advocate.
* Mrs De Winter - Retired schoolteacher.
* Turk - Officially a horse.

### The Villain

* Clive Ronan - Dark, nondescript, impassive and deadly.
* Plus, assorted armies, raptors, stonemasons and hostile contemporaries too numerous to mention.