Rory fell silent. Ben stared at him.
'Oh, come now. If you don't tell him, I can – and will.' She patted her briefcase.
'Very well,' Rory blurted. 'It was Nicea.'
Ben was bewildered. 'Nicea?'
Julia smiled. 'You're clearly not as intimately acquainted with Christian history as your little friend here, Ben. Nicea, 325 AD. Where the Emperor Constantine convened his great Church council.'
'Constantine!' Rory spat. 'It was all his fault!'
IV
'Ah, the Romans,' Julia said. 'They were Aryans, you know, without a doubt. Hitler has the scholarship to prove it… Before Constantine,' she sneered, 'Jesus was a god of the slaves. By establishing the Church as the state religion of Rome, Constantine saved Christianity for the future.'
'Only by making it into a reflection of Rome itself! And it is that Roman autocracy and intolerance that has been at the root of the evil done in Christ's name ever since.'
'And so you had the temerity to cook up a plan. Didn't you? A scheme to use your Loom of time to unpick a few threads of history.'
'You told me none of this,' Ben accused Rory.
'Of course not,' he said miserably, still avoiding his eyes. 'Because you would have stopped me.'
'He worked out a message to send to the past,' Julia said brightly. 'A sort of retrospective prophecy, yes? You meant to send it to the age of Emperor Claudius, I gather, and his invasion of Britain. It was going to contain news about the future – and a little comical nonsense about democracy-'
'The republican age was the best of Rome,' Rory said defiantly. 'It inspired America centuries later. I wanted to give them hope.'