Sentence The Threehundredandfifth
Aunty Crist sat down after the last quartet had left the room; she felt more exhausted than ever before, yet light with an elation rarely experienced outside of the bedroom – there was that faint tingling in her left alar, and absently her right hand found the opposite oxter and gently rubbed until the tingle faded; she looked down at the parchment in her lap, still elated from the meeting with Dr Clotilde Kranklemittel of the National Library of Scotland, who had confirmed the date of the animal-skin, the ink, and had even photographed the finger-prints which could be separated from the blur of other hands and labelled them L1,L2 and L3; it was clear from Clot's report (and she would always be Clot to Crist, ever since that snowy night in Michaelmas Term when they had first made love in a long-forgotten oubliette deep under Edinburgh Castle, far more years ago than Aunty Crist cared to recall) that the script dated from the 13th Century, was unlikely to be a
rescript for there were indications that it had been written in some haste, as if the thoughts in it's author's head were tumbling over one another in their desperation to flow out through the ink, rather than with the care of a copyist; the provenance could be traced through the different generations of the Lermontov family back to the Thomas Learmonth who, as a young man, had made his way to Russia in the hope of making his fortune and had stayed, in the Court and the bedroom of Catherine The Great, quickly becoming one of her many lovers and founding the family who still bore his Russianised name; and although it had been a tad handwavy to follow it's existence over the centuries before that, nonetheless, it was believed to have been alluded to in certifiable references in various charters, but the crunch seemed the be in three groups of consonants, in the same flowery hand as the rest, which, at first, were thought to be three purely decorative flourishes at 
the end of the document, which was a common enough practice, until Dr Morag McCorquodale, Clot's expert on calligraphy had separated them into distinct letters and in an attachment had spelt them out in Roman Type: BRN WSTWTR, TMMY SHNTR, and TVSH DLWHNN and when Cristobal first saw them, her mind immediately supplied the missing vowels – EIE EAE; A AE; AI AIIE – and read the names: Bernie Westwater, Tammy Shanter and Tavish Dalwhinnie! “now how on earth, dearest” she asked Clot, herself a cousin of Crist's, being an Aunt of Pru Montelimart and whose assistant Morag (another niece) had gone out on the search with the three eldest Montelimart girls, “could the names of the three missing members of the family have found their way onto a document dating from the 13th Century?” which was when Clot's other niece, Jasmine Juniper-Green, looked up from her examination of the OS map of Melrose and environs
and said: “it's a simple matter of a quantum collision, they have passed through a portal and it is very near here, albeit in an alternative universe, in which all time is simultaneous,” and she pointed to a spidery web of Ley Lines which intersected on the Middle Eildon: “Morag noticed a reference to 'a tavern on the hill' but then saw that the 't' could actually be a 'c' and as there is no record of there ever being a tavern, or inn, or such on any of the three hills, realised that it meant 'a cavern in the hill'!"
Aunty Crist sat down after the last quartet had left the room; she felt more exhausted than ever before, yet light with an elation rarely experienced outside of the bedroom – there was that faint tingling in her left alar, and absently her right hand found the opposite oxter and gently rubbed until the tingle faded; she looked down at the parchment in her lap, still elated from the meeting with Dr Clotilde Kranklemittel of the National Library of Scotland, who had confirmed the date of the animal-skin, the ink, and had even photographed the finger-prints which could be separated from the blur of other hands and labelled them L1,L2 and L3; it was clear from Clot's report (and she would always be Clot to Crist, ever since that snowy night in Michaelmas Term when they had first made love in a long-forgotten oubliette deep under Edinburgh Castle, far more years ago than Aunty Crist cared to recall) that the script dated from the 13th Century, was unlikely to be a rescript for there were indications that it had been written in some haste, as if the thoughts in it's author's head were tumbling over one another in their desperation to flow out through the ink, rather than with the care of a copyist; the provenance could be traced through the different generations of the Lermontov family back to the Thomas Learmonth who, as a young man, had made his way to Russia in the hope of making his fortune and had stayed, in the Court and the bedroom of Catherine The Great, quickly becoming one of her many lovers and founding the family who still bore his Russianised name; and although it had been a tad handwavy to follow it's existence over the centuries before that, nonetheless, it was believed to have been alluded to in certifiable references in various charters, but the crunch seemed the be in three groups of consonants, in the same flowery hand as the rest, which, at first, were thought to be three purely decorative flourishes at the end of the document, which was a common enough practice, until Dr Morag McCorquodale, Clot's expert on calligraphy had separated them into distinct letters and in an attachment had spelt them out in Roman Type: BRN WSTWTR, TMMY SHNTR, and TVSH DLWHNN and when Cristobal first saw them, her mind immediately supplied the missing vowels – EIE EAE; A AE; AI AIIE – and read the names: Bernie Westwater, Tammy Shanter and Tavish Dalwhinnie! “now how on earth, dearest” she asked Clot, herself a cousin of Crist's, being an Aunt of Pru Montelimart and whose assistant Morag (another niece) had gone out on the search with the three eldest Montelimart girls, “could the names of the three missing members of the family have found their way onto a document dating from the 13th Century?” which was when Clot's other niece, Jasmine Juniper-Green, looked up from her examination of the OS map of Melrose and environs
and said: “it's a simple matter of a quantum collision, they have passed through a portal and it is very near here, albeit in an alternative universe, in which all time is simultaneous,” and she pointed to a spidery web of Ley Lines which intersected on the Middle Eildon: “Morag noticed a reference to 'a tavern on the hill' but then saw that the 't' could actually be a 'c' and as there is no record of there ever being a tavern, or inn, or such on any of the three hills, realised that it meant 'a cavern in the hill'!"
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