To Say Nothing of the Dog

or

How We Found The Bishop’s Bird Stump At Last

CONNIE WILLIS

“. . . a harmless, necessary cat”

William Shakespeare

“God is in the details.”

Gustave Flaubert

To Robert A. Heinlein

Who, in Have Space Suit, Will Travel,

first introduced me to Jerome K. Jerome’s

Three Men in a Boat,

To Say Nothing of the Dog

“It would have been nice to start fresh without those messy old ruins,” she said.

“They’re a symbol, dear,” said her friend.

Mollie Panter-Downs

C H A P T E R  O N E

A Search Party—Wartime Headgear—The Problem of Nepotism—Royal Headgear—The Bishop’s Bird Stump Is Missing—Jumble Sales—A Clue to Its Whereabouts—Astronomical Observations—Dogs—A Cat—Man’s Best Friend—An Abrupt Departure

There were five of us—Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the bishop’s bird stump.

Or at any rate I was. The new recruit was gawking at the blown-out stained-glass windows, Mr. Spivens was over by the vestry steps digging up something, and Carruthers was trying to convince the verger we were from the Auxiliary Fire Service.

“This is our squadron leader, Lieutenant Ned Henry,” he said, pointing at me, “and I’m Commander Carruthers, the post fire officer.”

“Which post?” the verger said, his eyes narrowed.

“Thirty-six,” Carruthers said at random.

“What about him?” the verger said, pointing at the new recruit, who was now trying to figure out how his pocket torch worked and who didn’t look bright enough to be a member of the Home Guard, let alone AFS.

“He’s my brother-in-law,” Carruthers improvised. “Egbert.”

“My wife tried to get me to hire her brother to work on the fire watch,” the verger said, shaking his head sympathetically. “Can’t walk across the kitchen without tripping over the cat. ‘How’s he supposed to put out incendiaries?’ I asks her. ‘He needs a job she says. ‘Let Hitler put him to work,’ I says.”

I left them to it and started down what had been the nave. There was no time to lose. We’d gotten here late, and even though it was only a bit past four, the smoke and masonry dust in the air already made it almost too dark to see.

The recruit had given up on his pocket torch and was watching Mr. Spivens digging determinedly into the rubble next to the steps. I sighted along him to determine where the north aisle had been and started working my way toward the back of the nave.

The bishop’s bird stump had stood on a wrought-iron stand in front of the parclose screen of the Smiths’ Chapel. I picked my way over the rubble, trying to work out where I was. Only the outer walls of the cathedral and the tower, with its beautiful spire, were still standing. Everything else—the roof, the vaulted ceiling, the clerestory arches, the pillars—had come crashing down into one giant unrecognizable heap of blackened rubble.

All right, I thought, standing on top of a roof beam, that was the apse, and along there was the Drapers’ Chapel, although there was no way to tell except by the blown-out windows. The stone arches had come down, and there was only the bayed wall left.

And here was the St. Laurence Chapel, I thought, scrabbling over the rubble on my hands and knees. The clutter of stone and charred beams was five feet high in this part of the cathedral, and slippery. It had drizzled off and on all day, turning the ash to blackish mud and making the lead slates from the roof as slick as ice.

The Girdlers’ Chapel. And this must be the Smiths’ Chapel. There was no sign of the parclose screen. I tried to judge how far from the windows it would have stood, and started digging.

The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t underneath the mass of twisted girders and broken stone, and neither was the parclose screen. A broken-off length of kneeling rail was, and part of a pew, which meant I was too far out into the nave.

I stood up, trying to orient myself. It’s amazing how much destruction can distort the sense of space. I knelt down and looked up the church toward the choir, trying to spot the base of any of the north aisle pillars to see how far out into the nave I was, but they were hopelessly buried.

I needed to find where the arch had been and work from there. I looked back up at the Girdlers’ Chapel’s east wall, aligned myself with it and the windows, and started digging again, looking for the supporting pillar of the arch.

It had been broken off six inches from the floor. I uncovered the space around it, then, sighting along it, tried to estimate where the screen would have been, and started digging again.

Nothing. I heaved up a jagged piece of the wooden ceiling, and under it was a giant slab of marble, cracked across. The altar. Now I was too far in. I sighted along the new recruit again, who was still watching Mr. Spivens dig, paced off ten feet, and started digging again.

“But we are from the AFS,” I heard Carruthers say to the verger.

“Are you certain you’re with the AFS?” the verger said. “Those coveralls don’t look like any AFS uniform I’ve ever seen.”

He wasn’t having any of it, and no wonder. Our uniforms had been intended for the middle of an air raid, when anyone in a tin helmet can pass for official. And for the middle of the night. Daylight was another matter. Carruthers’s helmet had a Royal Engineers insignia, mine was stencilled “ARP” and the new recruit’s was from another war altogether.

“Our regular uniforms were hit by a high explosive,” Carruthers said.

The verger didn’t look convinced. “If you’re from the fire service, why weren’t you here last night when you might have done some good?”

An excellent question, and one that Lady Schrapnell would be sure to ask me when I got back. “What do you mean you went through on the fifteenth, Ned?” I could hear her asking. “That’s a whole day late.”

Which was why I was scrabbling through smoking roof beams, burning my finger on a still-melted puddle of lead that had dripped down from the roof last night, and choking on masonry dust instead of reporting in.

I pried up part of an iron reinforcing girder, nursing my burnt finger, and started through the heap of roof slates and charred beams. I cut the finger I’d burnt on a broken-off piece of metal and stood up, sucking on it.

Carruthers and the verger were still at it. “I never heard of any Post Thirty-six,” the verger said suspiciously. “The AFS posts in Coventry only go up to Seventeen.”

“We’re from London,” Carruthers said. “A special detachment sent up to help out.”

“How’d your lot get through?” the verger said, picking up his shovel aggressively. “The roads are all blocked.”

It was time to lend assistance. I went over to where they were standing. “We came round Radford way,” I said, fairly sure the verger wouldn’t have been out that direction. “A milk lorry gave us a lift.”

“I thought there were barricades up,” the verger said, still clutching his shovel.

“We had special passes,” Carruthers said.

Mistake. The verger was likely to ask to see them. I said hastily, “The Queen sent us.”

That did it. The verger’s tin helmet came off, and he came to attention, his shovel like a staff. “Her Majesty?”

I placed my ARP helmet over my heart. “She said she couldn’t look Coventry in the face till she’d done something to help. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ she said to us. ‘You must go up to Coventry straightaway and offer them whatever help you can.’”

“She would,” the verger said, shaking his bald head reverently. “She would. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral.’ It sounds just like her.”

I nodded solemnly at the verger, winked at Carruthers, and went back to my digging. The rest of the collapsed arch was underneath the roof slates, along with a tangle of electrical cords and a broken memorial tablet that read, “May you know rest et—,” a wish which apparently had not been granted.

I cleared a space three feet wide around the pillar. Nothing. I crawled over the rubble, looking for the rest of the pillar, found a fragment of it, and began digging again.

Carruthers came over. “The verger wanted to know what the Queen looked like,” he said. “I told him she was wearing a hat. She did, didn’t she? I can never remember which one wore the hats.”

“They all did. Except Victoria. She wore a lace cap affair,” I said. “And Camilla. She wasn’t queen long enough. Tell him Her Majesty saved Queen Victoria’s Bible when Buckingham Palace was bombed. Carried it out in her arms like a baby.”

“She did?” Carruthers said.

“No,” I said, “but it’ll keep him from asking why you’re wearing a bomb squad helmet. And it might get him talking about what was saved last night.”

Carruthers pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his coveralls. “The altar candlesticks and cross from the high altar and the Smiths’ Chapel were saved by Provost Howard and the fire watch and taken to the police station. Also a silver paten and chalice, a wooden crucifix, a silver wafer box, the Epistles, the Gospels, and the regimental colors of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Seventh Battalion,” he read.

It matched the list in Provost Howard’s account of the raid. “And not the bishop’s bird stump,” I said, surveying the rubble. “Which means it’s here somewhere.”

“No luck finding it?” Carruthers asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance anyone arrived earlier and has already found it?”

“Nobody of ours,” Carruthers said. “Davis and Peters couldn’t even get to the right year. It took me four tries to get this close. The first time I came through I landed on the nineteenth. The second time I ended up in the middle of December. The third time I ended up spot-on target, right month, right day, ten minutes before the raid started. And in the middle of a field of marshmallows halfway to Birmingham.”

“Marshmallows?” I said, thinking that I couldn’t have heard right. Marshmallows didn’t grow in fields, did they?

“Marrows,” Carruthers said, sounding irritated. “In a field of vegetable marrows. And it wasn’t anything to joke about. The farmer’s wife thought I was a German paratrooper and locked me in the barn. I had the devil of a time getting out.”

“What about the new recruit?” I said.

“He came through right before I did. I found him wandering about in the Warwick Road, no idea of where to go. If I hadn’t found him he’d have fallen in a bomb crater.”

Which might not have been a bad thing, considering. The new recruit had given up watching Mr. Spivens and was back trying to figure out how to switch on his pocket torch.

“It took us two hours to get here,” Carruthers said. “How about you, Ned? How many tries before you got this close?”

“Just the one. I only just got pulled off jumble sales to try when you weren’t having any luck.”

“Jumble sales?”

“Lady Schrapnell got the idea the bishop’s bird stump might have been sold at one of the cathedral’s jumble sales,” I said. “You know, to raise money for the war effort. Or given to a scrap iron drive, so she sent me to every church and community function from September on. I say, you don’t know what a penwiper’s used for, do you?”

“I don’t even know what a penwiper is.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “I’ve bought seven. Two dahlias, a rose, a kitten, a hedgehog, and two Union Jacks. One’s got to buy something, and since I couldn’t bring anything I bought back through the net with me, it had to be something I could slip onto the fancy goods table without being caught, and penwipers are small. Except for the rose. It was nearly as big as a soccer ball, made out of layers and layers of bright fuchsia wool sewn together, and pinked round the edges. And what I can’t see is what on earth the use of something like that would be, except of course for people to buy at jumble sales. They all had them, the Evacuated Children Charity Fair, the ARP Gas Mask Fund Baked Goods Sale, the St. Anne’s Day Sale of Work—”

Carruthers was looking at me oddly. “Ned,” he said, “how many drops have you made in the past week?”

“Ten,” I said, trying to remember. “No, twelve. There was the Trinity Church Harvest Fête, the Women’s Institute Victory Drive Sale of Work, the Spitfire Benefit Tea. Oh, and the bishops’ wives. Thirteen. No, twelve. Mrs. Bittner wasn’t a drop.”

“Mrs. Bittner?” Carruthers said. “The wife of the last bishop of Coventry?”

I nodded. “She’s still alive. And still living in Coventry. Lady Schrapnell sent me out to interview her.”

“What could she possibly know about the old cathedral? She wouldn’t even have been born when it burned.”

“Lady Schrapnell had the idea that if the bishop’s bird stump survived the fire, it might have been put in storage somewhere in the new cathedral, so she sent me to interview the bishops’ wives because, and I quote, ‘Men don’t know where anything’s kept.’”

Carruthers shook his head sadly. “And did the wives know?”

“They’d never even heard of it except for Mrs. Bittner, and she said it wasn’t there when they packed up everything before they sold the new cathedral.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “If it isn’t here either, that means it wasn’t in the cathedral when the raid happened, and you can tell Lady Schrapnell she won’t need to have a reconstruction of it in the cathedral for the consecration.”

“You tell her,” I said.

“Perhaps it was removed for safekeeping,” he said, looking at the windows. “Like the east windows.”

“The bishop’s bird stump?” I said incredulously. “Are you joking?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to keep from being blown up. Victorian art!” He shuddered.

“Besides,” I said, “I’ve already been to Lucy Hampton rectory—that’s where they took the windows—to check. It wasn’t there.”

“Oh,” Carruthers said. “Could it have been moved to somewhere else in the church?”

That was an idea. Perhaps one of the Altar Guild ladies, unable to stand the sight of it, had stuck it in a corner behind a pillar or something.

“Why is Lady Schrapnell so obsessed with this stump thing anyway?” Carruthers said.

“Why is she so obsessed with every detail of this project?” I said. “Before she assigned me to the bishop’s bird stump, it was monuments. She wanted a copy of every inscription on every monument in the cathedral, including the one on Captain Gervase Scrope’s tomb, which went on forever.”

Carruthers nodded sympathetically. “Organ pipes,” he said. “She’s had me all over the Middle Ages measuring organ pipes.”

“The real question, of course, is, why is she so obsessed with rebuilding Coventry Cathedral?” I said.

“Her great-great-something grandmother went to Coventry and—”

“I know, I know, the experience changed her great-great-something grandmother’s life, and when Lady Schrapnell found her diary, it changed her life, and she decided to rebuild the cathedral exactly as it was just before it burned down in honor of, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve heard that speech a number of times. Also the one about how God—”

“—is in the details,” Carruthers quoted. “I despise that speech.”

“The one I hate the most is the ‘leave no stone unturned’ speech. Give me a hand.” I pointed to the end of a large stone.

He stooped down and got hold of the other side of it.

“One, two, three,” I said, “lift,” and we heaved it across the aisle, where it rolled into what was left of a pillar and knocked it down.

The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t under the stone, but the wrought-iron stand it had stood on was, and one of the crosspieces of the parclose screen, and, under a chunk of red sandstone, a half-charred stem of a flower. There was no telling what sort of flower, there weren’t even any leaves left, and it might have been a stick or an iron rod except for the inch or so of green at one end.

“It stood in front of a screen?” Carruthers said, crunching through the glass.

“This screen. On this stand,” I said, pointing at the wrought-iron stand. “As of November the ninth, the Prayers for the RAF Service and Baked Goods Sale. Two crocheted antimacassars, a pansy penwiper, and half a dozen rock cakes. Extremely aptly named.”

Carruthers was looking round at the glass. “Could the blast have knocked it to some other part of the nave?” he asked.

“It wasn’t high explosives that destroyed the cathedral, it was incendiaries.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked over at the verger, who was coming toward us. “Queen Victoria’s Bible, did you say?”

“Yes. Complete with the births, deaths, and nervous breakdowns of all those Georges,” I said. “Find out if anything was taken away for safekeeping to anywhere besides Lucy Hampton before the fire.”

He nodded and went back over to the verger, and I stood there looking at the wrought-iron stand and wondering what to do next.

The majority of the bombs that had fallen on the cathedral had been incendiaries, but Carruthers was right. Concussion can do peculiar things, and there had been a number of explosions in the vicinity, from HEs to gas mains going. The bishop’s bird stump might have been blown into the central aisle of the nave, or the choir.

I cleared away more masonry, trying to see what direction the glass from the Drapers’ Chapel had taken. Most of it seemed to have sprayed south and west. I should be looking in the other direction, toward the back of the nave.

I went back to the screen and started digging south and west from it. No stone unturned.

The bells began to strike the hour, and we all stopped what we were doing, even Mr. Spivens, and looked up at the tower. With the roof gone, we could see the spire, rising above the smoke and dust unharmed. The bells sounded beautiful, undimmed by the destruction that lay around us.

“Look, there’s a star,” Carruthers said.

“Where?” I said.

“There,” he pointed.

All I could see was smoke. I said so.

“There,” he said. “Above the spire. Above the smoky pall of war, above the wrack of destruction. Untouched by man’s inhumanity to man, a high herald of hope and beauty, of better times to come. A sparkling symbol of a resurrection it yet kens not.”

“It yet kens not?” I looked at him, worried. “A high herald of hope and beauty?”

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. Carruthers had been on at least four drops in the past day, two of them within hours of each other, and who knew how many others researching the organ pipes. He’d said himself he hadn’t had any sleep.

I frowned, trying to remember the checklist of time-lag symptoms. Maudlin sentimentality, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, fatigue—but he’d heard the bells, and everyone associated with Lady Schrapnell’s reconstruction project was suffering from sleep deprivation. The only sleep I’d gotten in the past week was during the St. Crispin’s Day War Effort Bazaar. I’d dozed off during the “Welcome” and slept through half the “Introductions of the Organizing Committee.”

What were the other symptoms? Tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies. Slowness in answering. Blurred vision.

“The star,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“What do you mean what does it look like?” Carruthers said, not at all slow to answer. “It looks like a star.”

The bells stopped chiming, their echoes lingering in the smoky air.

“What do you think a star looks like?” Carruthers said, and stomped off toward the verger.

Irritability was a definite symptom. And the net guidelines specifically stated that time-lag sufferers were to be immediately “removed from the environment” and from duty, but if I did that, I would have to explain to Lady Schrapnell what we were doing in Oxford instead of Coventry.

Which was why I was here poking about in the rubble in the first place, because I didn’t want to try and explain why I hadn’t landed at eight o’clock on the fourteenth in front of the cathedral like I’d been supposed to, and it was no good trying to explain that it was because of the slippage because Lady Schrapnell didn’t believe in slippage. Or time-lag.

No, so long as Carruthers wasn’t completely incoherent, it was better to stay here, find the bishop’s bird stump, and then go back and be able to tell Lady Schrapnell, yes, it had been in the cathedral during the raid, and then get some sleep. Sleep, that knits the ragged sleeve of non-AFS uniforms, that soothes the sooty brow and shuts out sorrow, blessing the weary soul with blissful, healing rest—

Carruthers came over, looking neither fatigued nor distracted. Good.

“Ned!” he said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“You must have been. I’ve been calling for five minutes,” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

I must have misheard that, too, or else Carruthers was more time-lagged than I’d thought. “Dookie?” I said cautiously.

“Yes, Dookie!” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

Oh, no, I was going to have to get him back to Oxford without making the verger suspicious, get him to Infirmary, and then try to get back here to finish searching the cathedral and probably end up in a marrows field halfway to Liverpool.

“Ned, can’t you hear me?” Carruthers was saying worriedly. “I said, ‘Did she have Dookie with her?’”

“With whom?” I said, wondering how I was going to convince him he needed to be taken out. Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged. “Lady Schrapnell?”

“No,” he said, very irritably. “Her Majesty. The Queen. When she commissioned us to come up here. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ and all that.” He pointed to the verger, who was heading toward us. “He asked me if she had Dookie with her when we saw her, and I didn’t have any idea who that was.”

I didn’t either. Dookie. It seemed unlikely that that would have been her nickname for the King. For her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, perhaps? No, Edward had already abdicated by 1940, and the Queen wasn’t calling him anything.

The Queen’s dog, I thought, but that didn’t help particularly. In her later years as the Queen Mum, she’d had Welsh corgis, but what had she had during World War II? A Yorkshire terrier? A toy spaniel? And what gender, if any? And what if Dookie was her maid instead? Or a nickname for one of the princesses?

The verger came up. “You were asking about Dookie,” I said. “Afraid Dookie wasn’t with Her Majesty. Up at Windsor for the duration. Terrified of the bombs, you see.”

“It takes some of them that way,” the verger said, looking over toward where Mr. Spivens and the new recruit were. “Weak nerves.”

The new recruit had finally figured out how the pocket torch worked. He’d switched it on and was playing the beam on the blackened walls of the chancel and on Mr. Spivens, who was apparently digging a tunnel into the rubble next to the steps.

“Blackout?” I mentioned to Carruthers.

“Oh, Lord,” Carruthers said. “Put that out!” he shouted, and clambered over toward him.

“Week before last I go up on the roofs, and what do I find?” the verger said, looking over at the chancel, where Carruthers had grabbed the torch away from the new recruit and was switching it off. “My brother-in-law, careless as you please, striking a match. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I say. ‘Lighting my cigarette,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you light some flares while you’re at it,’ I say, ‘and set them out so the Luftwaffe will be certain to know where to find us?’ ‘It was only one match,’ he says. ‘What harm could it do?’ ”

He looked around bleakly at what the Luftwaffe had so obviously found, and I wondered if he considered his brother-in-law accountable, but he said instead, “Poor Provost Howard.” He shook his head. “It was a blow to him, losing the cathedral. Wouldn’t go home. Stayed here all night.”

“All night?” I said.

He nodded. “Watching for looters, I suppose.” He looked sadly at the rubble. “Not that there was much left to pinch. Still, if anything did survive, you don’t want people making off with it.”

“No,” I agreed.

He shook his head sadly. “You should have seen him, walking up and down across the rubble, back and forth. ‘Go home and have a lie down,’ I told him. ‘Let me and Mr. Spivens take a turn.’ ”

“So someone’s been here the whole time since the fire,” I persisted.

“Pretty near,” he said, “except when I went home to tea. And this morning it started to rain and I sent my brother-in-law home for my mackintosh and an umbrella, but he never came back, so I had to go home and get them myself. Getting dark,” he added, looking nervously at the sky to the east. “The jerries will be back soon.”

Actually they wouldn’t. The Luftwaffe had decided to go after London tonight instead. But it was getting dark. The far end of the church, where Carruthers was yelling at the new recruit over blackout regulations, was in gloom, and the blown-out east window gaped on a darkening blue-black haze of smoke crisscrossed by searchlights.

“We’d best do what we can before night falls,” I said, and went back over to where I’d been digging and surveyed the rubble, trying to guess how far the bishop’s bird stump had been knocked by the blast. If it hadn’t been carted off by looters. The verger had been gone for at least an hour having his tea, during which time anyone could have walked in through the nonexistent south door and carried off anything they liked. Including the bishop’s bird stump.

I must be getting light-headed from lack of sleep. No one, even badly shell-shocked, would steal it. Or buy it at a jumble sale. This was the bishop’s bird stump. Even the munitions scrap iron drive would turn it down. Unless of course someone recognized its potential as a psychological weapon against the Nazis.

So it had to be here somewhere, along with the rest of the parclose screen and the section of memorial tablet that read, “—ernal,” and I’d better get busy if I was going to find them before dark. I picked up a kneeling cushion, still smouldering and smelling strongly of feathers, laid it in the aisle, and started digging toward the back of the nave.

I found a kneeling rail, a single bronze candlestick, and a charred hymnal, open to “From All That Dwell Below the Skies.” There was a sheet of paper stuck inside the back cover.

I pulled it out. It was an order of service for Sunday the tenth of November. I opened the folded sheet, blackened fragments flaking away as I did.

I squinted, trying to read it in the gloom, wishing I had the new recruit’s pocket torch. “. . . and red carnations on the High Altar,” it read, “were given in remembrance of Lieutenant David Halberstam, RAF. The pulpit arrangement of pink begonias and the bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums in the bishop’s bird stump were donated and arranged by the Flower Committee of the Ladies’ Altar Guild, Chairwoman Lo—”

The rest of the chairwoman was burnt away, but at least we had proof that the bishop’s bird stump had been in the cathedral five days ago. So where was it now?

I kept digging. It got darker, and the moon that had been such an aid to the Luftwaffe the night before came up and promptly disappeared into the murk of smoke and dust.

This part of the church seemed to have fallen in all in one piece, and I almost immediately ran out of things I could lift by myself. I looked over at Carruthers, but he was deep in royal conversation with the verger and, presumably, getting some information out of him. I didn’t want to bother him.

“Give me a hand!” I called to the new recruit instead. He was squatting next to Mr. Spivens, watching him burrow into the tunnel. “Over here!” I shouted, gesturing to him.

Neither of them paid any attention. Mr. Spivens had nearly disappeared into the tunnel, and the new recruit was fiddling with his pocket torch again.

“Hullo!” I shouted, “Over here!” and several things happened at once. Mr. Spivens reappeared, the new recruit reared back and fell over, the pocket torch came on, its beam sweeping the sky like one of the searchlights, and a long dark animal shot out of the tunnel and across the top of the rubble. A cat. Mr. Spivens took off after it, barking wildly.

I went over to where the new recruit was sitting gazing interestedly after them, switched off the torch, helped him up, and said, “Come help me with these timbers.”

“Did you see that cat?” he said, looking over to where it had disappeared under the chancel steps. “It was a cat, wasn’t it? They’re smaller than I thought they’d be. I thought they’d be more the size of a wolf. And they’re so fast! Were all of them black like that?”

“All of them that had been crawling about in a burnt-out cathedral, I should think,” I said.

“A real cat!” he said, dusting off his non-AFS coveralls and following me. “It’s just so amazing, seeing a creature that’s been extinct for nearly forty years. I’ve never seen one before.”

“Take hold of that end,” I said, pointing at a length of stone gutter.

“It’s all so amazing,” he said. “Actually being here, where it all started.”

“Or ended,” I said dryly. “Not that one, the one on top.”

He lifted, his knees straight, staggering a little. “It’s just so exciting! Lady Schrapnell said working on Coventry Cathedral would be a rewarding experience, and it is! Seeing this and knowing that it isn’t really destroyed, that it’s rising out of the ashes at this very minute, resurrected and restored to all its former glory.”

He sounded time-lagged, but probably wasn’t. All of Lady Schrapnell’s new recruits sound time-lagged.

“How many drops have you done?” I asked.

“This is my first,” he said, his face eager, “and I still can’t quite believe it. I mean, here we are in 1940, searching for the bishop’s bird stump, unearthing a treasure of the past, the beauty of a bygone era.”

I looked at him. “You’ve never actually seen the bishop’s bird stump, have you?”

“No,” he said, “but it must be truly amazing. It changed Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother’s life, you know.”

“I know, ” I said. “It’s changed all of our lives.”

“Here!” Carruthers called from the Drapers’ Chapel. He was on his knees. “I’ve found something.”

He was in the wrong direction for blast, and at first all I could see was a tangle of timbers, but Carruthers was pointing at something in the midst of the tangle.

“I see it!” the verger said. “It looks like metal.”

“Use your torch,” Carruthers said to the new recruit.

The recruit, who’d forgotten how to switch it on, messed with it for a bit and then switched it on in Carruthers’ face.

“Not on me,” Carruthers said. “Under there!” He snatched it away from him and shone it on the pile of timbers, and I caught a glint of metal. My heart leaped.

“Get those timbers off there,” I said, and we all went at the pile.

“Here it comes,” the verger said, and Carruthers and the new recruit hauled it up out of the rubble.

The metal was black with soot, and it was badly crushed and twisted, but I knew what it was, and so did the verger. “It’s one of the sand buckets,” he said, and burst into tears.

It was physically impossible for the verger to be suffering from time-lag, unless it was somehow contagious. He was giving a good imitation of it, though.

“I saw that bucket only last night,” he blubbered into a very sooty handkerchief, “and now look at it.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Carruthers said, patting him awkwardly. “It’ll be as good as new,” which I doubted.

“The handle’s blown clean off,” the verger said. He blew his nose loudly. “I filled that bucket with sand myself. Hung it up by the south door myself.”

The south door was at the other end of the church, with the full length of the nave and rows and rows of solid oak pews between it and the Drapers’ Chapel.

“We’ll find the handle,” Carruthers said, which I also doubted, and they knelt as if in prayer and started digging through the timbers.

I left them and the new recruit, who was peering under the steps, presumably looking for cats, and went back over to where the roof had fallen in in one piece.

And stood there in what had been the center aisle, trying to reason out where to look. The blast had knocked the sand bucket nearly half the length of the church in the opposite direction of the blast from the Smiths’ Chapel window. Which meant the bishop’s bird stump could be anywhere.

And it was dark. The searchlights had come on, sweeping the sky in long arcs, and off to the north an orange-brown glow from a fire Posts One through Seventeen hadn’t yet got under control lit the sky, but neither of them gave any light, and the moon was nowhere to be seen.

We wouldn’t be able to work much longer, and Lady Schrapnell would meet us in the net, demanding to know where we’d been and why we hadn’t found the bishop’s bird stump. She’d send me back to try again, or, worse, she’d put me back on jumble sale duty, with all those dreadful penwipers and embroidered tea cloths and hard-as-rock cakes.

Perhaps I could simply stay here, enlist in the Infantry and get sent to somewhere safe and quiet, like the beaches of Normandy. No, D-Day wasn’t until 1944. To North Africa. El Alamein.

I shoved aside a burnt end of a pew and lifted the stone beneath it. Under it was pavement, the sandstone floor of the Dyers’ Chapel. I sat down on a piece of coping.

Mr. Spivens trotted over and began scrabbling at the pavement. “It’s no use, boy,” I said. “It’s not here.” I thought despairingly of the sweet-pea penwipers I would have to purchase.

Mr. Spivens sat down at my feet, looking up at me sympathetically.

“You’d help if you could, wouldn’t you, boy?” I said. “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—”

And found myself yanked back to Oxford and hauled off to Infirmary before I’d even finished patting him on the head.

“If everyone minded their own business,” said the Duchess in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

Lewis Carroll.

C H A P T E R  T W O

The Spanish Inquisition—Oxford, City of Dreaming Spires—Escape—Entanglement—Extrication—Explication—The Playing Fields of Merton—Eavesdropping—Difference Between Literature and Real Life—Some Sort of Nymph—An Important Clue—Lady Windermere’s Fan—A Good Idea

“Your partner says you’re suffering from advanced time-lag, Mr. Henry,” the nurse said, fastening a tach bracelet round my wrist.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m aware that I may have got a bit carried away on the dog thing, but I must get back to Coventry immediately.”

It was bad enough that I’d landed fifteen hours later than I was supposed to have. Now I’d also left the cathedral only partly searched, which was as bad as not searching at all, and even if I was able to get back there at something close to the time I’d left at, there would still be all those missing moments, during which the verger, led by the cat, might have found the bishop’s bird stump and given it for safekeeping to his brother-in-law, whence it would pass out of history altogether.

“It’s essential I return to the ruins,” I said. “The bishop’s bird stump—”

“Preoccupation with irrelevancies,” the nurse said into her handheld. “Appearance dirty and disheveled.”

“I was working in a burnt-out cathedral,” I said. “And I must get back there. The—”

She popped a temp into my mouth and stuck a monitor on my wrist.

“How many drops have you made in the last two weeks?” she said.

I watched her punch the reads into her handheld, trying to remember what the legal limit on drops was. Eight? Five?

“Four,” I said. “The person you should be examining is Carruthers. He’s even dirtier than I am, and you should have heard him, going on about the stars and the ‘future ye ken not.’ ”

“What symptoms are you experiencing? Disorientation?”

“No.”

“Drowsiness?”

That was more difficult. Everyone under Lady Schrapnell’s lash was automatically sleep deprived, but I doubted that the nurse would take that into consideration, and at any rate it didn’t manifest itself so much as drowsiness as a sort of “walking dead” numbness, like people bombarded night after night in the Blitz had suffered from.

“No,” I said finally.

“Slowness in Answering,” she said into the handheld. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“1940,” I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

She typed some more. “Have you been experiencing any difficulty in distinguishing sounds?”

“No,” I said, smiling at her. Infirmary nurses usually resemble something out of the Spanish Inquisition, but this one had an almost kindly face, the sort an assistant torturer, the one who straps you to the rack or holds the door to the Iron Maiden open for you, might have.

“Blurring of vision?” she asked.

“No,” I said, trying not to squint.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Slowness in Answering or not, this question required some thought. Two was the most likely number, being easily confused with both three and one, but she might have chosen five to confuse me, and if that was the case, should I answer four, since the thumb isn’t technically a finger? Or might she be holding her hand behind her back?

“Five,” I said finally.

“How is that possible when according to you, you only made four drops?”

No matter how far my guess had been from the actual number of extended fingers, this was surely an inappropriate response. I considered asking her to repeat the question, but decided she would type in Difficulty in Distinguishing Sounds. I decided on a frontal attack.

“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of the situation,” I said. “The cathedral’s consecration is seventeen days from now, and Lady Schrapnell—”

The nurse handed me a stiff card and went back to making incriminating remarks into the handheld. I looked at the card, hoping it wasn’t something I was supposed to read as a further test of Blurring. Especially as it appeared to be blank.

“It’s essential that the bishop’s bird stump—” I said.

The nurse flipped the card over. “Tell me what you see.”

It appeared to be a postal card of Oxford. Seen from Headington Hill, her dear old dreaming spires and mossy stones, her hushed, elm-shaded quads where the last echoes of the Middle Ages can still be heard, murmuring of ancient learning and scholarly tradition, of—

“That’s about enough of that,” she said, and wrenched the card out of my hand. “You have an advanced case of time-lag, Mr. Henry. I’m prescribing two weeks’ bed rest. And no time travel.”

“Two weeks?” I said. “But the consecration’s in seventeen days—”

“Let other people worry about the consecration. You need to focus on getting rest.”

“You don’t understand—”

She folded her arms. “I certainly don’t. I suppose your devotion to duty is admirable, but why you should want to risk your health to rebuild an archaic symbol of an outmoded religion is beyond me.”

I don’t want to, I thought. Lady Schrapnell wants to, and what Lady Schrapnell wants, Lady Schrapnell gets. She had already overcome the Church of England, Oxford University, a construction crew of four thousand who informed her daily it was impossible to build a cathedral in six months, and the objections of everyone from Parliament to the Coventry City Council, to rebuild her “archaic symbol.” I didn’t stand a chance.

“Do you know what fifty billion pounds could do for medicine?” the nurse said, typing things into the handheld. “We could find a cure for Ebola II, we could vaccinate children all over the world against HIV, we could purchase some decent equipment. With what Lady Schrapnell is spending on the stained-glass windows alone, Radcliffe Infirmary could build an entire new facility with the latest in equipment.” The handheld spit out a strip of paper.

“It isn’t devotion to duty, it’s—”

“It’s criminal carelessness, Mr. Henry.” She tore off the strip and handed it to me. “I want you to follow these instructions to the letter.”

I looked bleakly at the list. The first line read, “Fourteen days’ uninterrupted bed rest.”

There was nowhere in Oxford I could get uninterrupted bed rest, or in England, for that matter. When Lady Schrapnell found out I was back, she’d track me down and interrupt me with a vengeance. I could see her storming in, flinging the covers off, and leading me by the ear over to the net.

“I want you to eat a high-protein diet and drink at least eight glasses of fluid daily,” the nurse said. “No caffeine, no alcohol, no stimulants.”

A thought struck me. “Could I be admitted to Infirmary?” I said hopefully. If anyone could keep Lady Schrapnell out, it would be those Grand Inquisitors, the ward nurses. “Put in isolation or something?”

“Isolation?” she said. “Certainly not. Time-lag isn’t a disease, Mr. Henry. It’s a biochemical imbalance brought about by disruption of the internal clock and the inner ear. You don’t need medical treatment. All you need is rest and the present.”

“But I won’t be able to sleep—”

Her handheld began to bleep. I jumped.

“Exaggerated Nervousness,” she said, typing it into the handheld, and to me, “I want to run a few tests. Take off your clothes and put this on,” she said, taking a paper gown out of a drawer and dumping it on my legs. “I’ll be back directly. The fastening tapes go in the back. And wash up. You’re covered in soot.”

She went out and shut the door. I got off the examining table, leaving a long black smear where I’d been sitting, and went over to the door.

“Worst case of time-lag I’ve ever seen,” she was saying to someone. I hoped it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell. “He could write rhymed verse for the dailies.”

It wasn’t Lady Schrapnell. I knew because I couldn’t hear whoever it was answer.

The nurse said, “He’s showing undue anxiety, which isn’t a usual symptom. I want to run a scan to see if I can find out the source of the anxiety.”

I could tell her right now the source of my anxiety, which was not undue, if she’d only listen, which wasn’t likely. And fierce though she was, she was no match for Lady Schrapnell.

I couldn’t stay here. When you have a scan, they strap you into a long enclosed tube for an hour and a half and communicate with you by microphone. I could hear Lady Schrapnell’s voice booming at me through the earphones, “There you are. Come out of that contraption immediately!”

I couldn’t stay here, and I couldn’t go back to my rooms. They were the first place she’d look. Perhaps I could find somewhere in the infirmary and sleep long enough to be able to think clearly what to do.

Mr. Dunworthy, I thought. If anyone could find me somewhere quiet and unlikely to hide, it would be Mr. Dunworthy. I put the paper gown, somewhat soot-smudged, back in the drawer, tugged on my boots, and climbed out the window.

Balliol was just down the Woodstock Road from Infirmary, but I didn’t dare risk it. I went round to the ambulance entrance, up to Adelaide and through a yard to Walton Street. If Somerville was open, I could cut through its quad to Little Clarendon and down Worcester to the Broad, and come in through Balliol’s back gate.

Somerville was open, but the journey took a good deal longer than I thought it would, and when I did reach the gate, something had happened to it. It had been twisted in on itself, and the ironwork scrolls had been bent into prongs and hooks and points, which kept catching on my coveralls.

At first I thought it was bomb damage, but that couldn’t be right. The Luftwaffe was supposed to hit London tonight. And the gate, including prongs and points, had been painted a bright green.

I tried sidling through crabwise, but the epaulet on my non-AFS uniform caught on one of the hooks, and when I tried to back out, I got even more entangled. I flailed about wildly, trying to free myself.

“Let me help you there, sir,” a polite voice said, and I turned around, as much as I was able, and saw Mr. Dunworthy’s secretary.

“Finch,” I said. “Thank God you’re here. I was just coming to see Mr. Dunworthy.”

He unhooked the epaulet and took hold of my sleeve. “This way, sir,” he said, “no, not that way, through here, that’s it. No, no, this ways,” and led me, finally, to freedom.

But on the same side I’d been when I started. “This is no good, Finch,” I said. “We’ve still got to get through that gate into Balliol.”

“That’s Merton, sir,” he said. “You’re on their playing fields.”

I turned and looked where he was pointing. Finch was right. There was the soccer field, and beyond it the cricket ground, and beyond that, in Christ Church Meadow, the scaffolding-and-blue-plastic-covered spire of Coventry Cathedral.

“How did Balliol’s gate get here?” I said.

“This is Merton’s pedestrian gate.”

I squinted at the gate. Right again. It was a turnstile gate, designed to keep bicycles out.

“The nurse said you were time-lagged, but I had no idea . . . No, this way.” He took hold of my arm and propelled me along the path.

“The nurse?” I said.

“Mr. Dunworthy sent me over to Infirmary to fetch you, but you’d already left,” he said, guiding me between buildings and out onto the High. “He wants to see you, though what use you’ll be to him in your condition I can’t quite see.”

“He wants to see me?” I said, confused. I had thought I was the one who wanted to see him. I thought of something else. “How did he know I was in Infirmary?”

“Lady Schrapnell phoned him,” he said, and I dived for cover.

“It’s all right,” Finch said, following me into the shop doorway I’d ducked into. “Mr. Dunworthy told her you’d been taken to the Royal Free Hospital in London. It’ll take her at least half an hour to get there.” He pulled me forcibly out of the doorway and across the High. “Personally, I think he should have told her you’d been taken to Manhattan General. How do you put up with her?”

You keep a sharp eye out, I thought, following Finch into the walkway next to St. Mary the Virgin’s and keeping close to the wall.

“She has no sense of the proper way of doing things,” he said. “Won’t go through the proper channels, won’t fill up requisition forms. She simply raids the place—paper clips, pens, handhelds.”

And historians, I thought.

“I never have any idea of what supplies to order, if I had time to order anything. I spend all my time trying to keep her out of Mr. Dunworthy’s office. She’s in there constantly, harping on something. Copings and brasses and lectionaries. Last week it was the Wade Tomb’s chipped corner. How did it get chipped and when did it get chipped, before the raid or during it, and what sort of edges does it have, rough or smooth? Must be completely authentic, she says. ‘God is—’ ”

“ ‘In the details,’ ” I said.

“She even tried to recruit me,” Finch said. “Wanted me to go back to the Blitz and look for the bishop’s bathtub.”

“Bird stump,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said,” he said, looking hard at me. “You’re having difficulty distinguishing sounds, aren’t you? The nurse said you were. And you’re obviously disoriented.” He shook his head. “You’re not going to be any use at all.”

“What does Mr. Dunworthy want to see me about?”

“There’s been an incident.”

“Incident” was the euphemism the AFS employed to mean a high-explosive bomb, houses reduced to rubble, bodies buried, fires everywhere. But surely Finch didn’t mean that sort of incident. Or perhaps I was still having Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds.

“An incident?” I said.

“Calamity, actually. One of his historians. Nineteenth Century. Pinched a rat.”

Oh, definitely Difficulty, although there had been rats in the Victorian era. But no one would have pinched one. It would pinch you back, or worse. “What did you say?” I asked cautiously.

“I said, ‘Here we are,’ ” Finch said, and we were. There was Balliol’s gate, though not the side one, the front gate and the porter’s lodge and the front quad.

I started through the quad and up the stairs to Mr. Dunworthy’s room, but I was apparently still disoriented because Finch took my arm again and led me across the garden quad to Beard.

“Mr. Dunworthy’s had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak or the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy’s had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.”

He opened the door to what had been the buttery. It now looked like a physician’s waiting room, with a row of cushioned chairs against the wall and a pile of fax-mags on a small side table. Finch’s desk stood next to the inner door and practically in front of it, no doubt so Finch could fling himself between it and Lady Schrapnell.

“I’ll see if he’s in,” Finch said and started round the desk.

“Absolutely not!” Mr. Dunworthy’s voice thundered from within. “It’s completely out of the question!”

Oh, Lord, she was here. I shrank back against the wall, looking wildly for somewhere to hide.

Finch grabbed my sleeve, and hissed, “It’s not her,” but I had already deduced that.

“I don’t see why not,” a female voice had answered, and it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell, because it was sweet rather than stentorian, and I couldn’t make out what she said after “why not.”

“Who is it?” I whispered, relaxing in Finch’s grip.

“The calamity,” he whispered back.

“What on earth made you think you could bring something like that through the net?” Mr. Dunworthy bellowed. “You’ve studied temporal theory!”

Finch winced. “Shall I tell Mr. Dunworthy you’re here?” he asked hesitantly.

“No, that’s all right,” I said, sinking down on one of the chintz-covered chairs. “I’ll wait.”

“Why on earth did you take it into the net with you in the first place?” Mr. Dunworthy shouted.

Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me.

“I don’t need anything to read,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you.”

“I thought you might sit on the mag,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.”

I stood up and let him put the opened mag on the seat and then sat down again.

“If you were going to do something so completely irresponsible,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “why couldn’t you have waited till after the consecration?”

I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was rather pleasant listening to someone else being read out for a change, and by someone besides Lady Schrapnell, even though it was unclear what exactly the calamity was guilty of. Particularly when Mr. Dunworthy yelled, “That is no excuse. Why didn’t you simply pull the cab out of the water and leave it on the bank? Why did you have to carry it into the net with you?”

Cab-toting seemed even less likely than rat-pinching, and neither one seemed in need of rescue from a watery grave. Rats especially. They were always swimming away from sinking ships, weren’t they? And had they had taxis in the Nineteenth Century? Horse-drawn hansom cabs, but they were too heavy to carry even if they would fit into the net.

In books and vids, those being eavesdropped upon always thoughtfully explain what they are talking about for the edification of the eavesdropper. The eavesdroppee says, “Of course, as you all know, the cab to which I refer is Sherlock Holmes’s hansom cab which had been accidentally driven off a bridge during a heavy fog while following the Hound of the Baskervilles, and which I found it necessary to steal for the following reasons,” at which point said theft is fully explained to the person crouched behind the door. Sometimes a floor plan or map is thoughtfully provided next to the frontispiece.

No such consideration is given the croucher in real life. Instead of outlining the situation, the calamity said, “Because bane came back to make sure,” which only confused the issue further.

“Heartless monster,” she said, and it was unclear whether she was referring to the bane that had come back or to Mr. Dunworthy. “And it would only have gone back to the house, and he’d have tried it again. I didn’t want him to see me because he’d know I wasn’t a contemp and there wasn’t anyplace to hide but the net. He’d have seen me in the gazebo. I didn’t think—”

“Exactly, Miss Kindle,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “You didn’t think.”

“What are you going to do?” the calamity said. “Are you going to send it back? You’re going to drown it, aren’t you?”

“I do not intend to do anything until I have considered all the possibilities,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Utterly heartless,” she said.

“I am extremely fond of cabbies,” he said, “but there is a good deal at stake here. I must consider all the consequences and possibilities before acting. I realize that’s an alien notion to you.”

Cabbies? I wondered why he was so fond of them. I have always found them entirely too talkative, especially the ones during the Blitz, who apparently paid no attention to the admonition that “Loose lips sink ships.” They were always telling me how someone had been buried alive in the rubble or got blown up—“Head was all the way across the street in a shop window. Milliner’s. Riding in a taxi just like you are now.”

“Are you sending me back?” she said. “I told them I was going out sketching. If I don’t come back, they’ll think I’ve drowned.”

“I don’t know. Until I decide, I want you in your rooms.”

“Can I take it with me?”

“No.”

There was a sinister-sounding silence, and then the door opened, and there stood the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

Finch had said Nineteenth Century, and I’d expected hoop skirts, but she had on a long, greenish gown that clung to her slim body as if it were wet. Her auburn hair trailed about her shoulders and down her back like water weeds, and the whole effect was that of a Waterhouse nymph, rising like a wraith out of the dark water.

I stood up, gawping as foolishly as the new recruit, and took off my ARP helmet, wishing I had cleaned up when the nurse told me to.

She took hold of her long, trailing sleeve and wrung it out on the carpet. Finch grabbed a fax-mag and spread it under her.

“Oh, good, Ned, you’re here,” Mr. Dunworthy said from the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”

The nymph looked at me, and her eyes were a dark clear greenish-brown, the color of a forest pool. She narrowed them. “You’re not sending that, are you?” she said to Mr. Dunworthy.

“I’m not sending anyone. Or anything until I’ve thought about it. Now go change out of those wet clothes before you catch cold.”

She gathered up her dripping skirts with one hand, and started out. At the door she turned back, her rosy lips open to impart some final benediction, some last word to me perhaps of love and devotion. “Don’t feed her. She’s had an entire place,” she said, and drifted out the door.

I started after her, bewitched, but Mr. Dunworthy had his hand on my arm. “So Finch found you all right,” he said, steering me around behind Finch’s desk and into the inner office, “I was afraid you’d be off in 1940 at one of those church bazaars Lady Schrapnell keeps sending you to.”

Outside the window I could see her crossing the quad, dripping gracefully on the pavement, a lovely . . . what were they called? Dryads? No, those were the ones that lived in trees. Sirens?

Mr. Dunworthy came over to the window. “This is all Lady Schrapnell’s fault. Kindle’s one of my best historians. Six months with Lady Schrapnell, and look at her!” He waved his hand at me. “Look at you, for that matter. The woman’s like a high-explosive bomb!”

The siren passed out of my vision and into the mist she had emerged from, only that wasn’t right. Sirens lived on rocks and shipwrecked sailors. And it sounded like dryads. Delphides? No, those were the ones who went about predicting doom and disaster.

“. . . had no business sending her in the first place,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying. “I tried to tell her, but would she listen? Of course not. ‘No stone unturned,’ she says. Sends her off to the Victorian era. Sends you off to jumble sales to buy pincushions and tea towels!”

“And calves’ foot jelly,” I said.

“Calves’ foot jelly?” he said, looking at me curiously.

“For the sick,” I said. “Only I don’t think the sick eat it. I wouldn’t eat it. I think they give it to the next jumble sale. It makes the rounds from year to year. Like fruitcake.”

“Yes, well,” he said, frowning. “So now a stone has been turned, and she’s created a serious problem, which is what I wanted to see you about. Sit down, sit down,” he said, motioning me toward a leather armchair.

Finch got there first with a fax-mag, murmuring, “So difficult to get soot out of leather.”

“And take off your hat. Good Lord,” Mr. Dunworthy said, adjusting his spectacles, “you look dreadful. Where have you been?”

“The soccer field,” I said.

“I gather it was a somewhat rough game.”

“I found him in the pedestrian gate by Merton’s playing fields,” Finch explained.

“I thought he was in Infirmary.”

“He climbed out the window.”

“Ah,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “But how did he get in this condition?”

“I was looking for the bishop’s bird stump,” I said.

“On Merton’s playing fields?”

“In the cathedral ruins just before he was brought to Infirmary,” Finch said helpfully.

“Did you find it?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“No,” I said, “and that’s the reason I came to see you. I wasn’t able to finish searching the ruins, and Lady Schrapnell—”

“—is the least of our worries. Which is something I never thought I’d find myself saying,” he said ruefully. “I gather Mr. Finch has explained the situation?”

“Yes. No,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better review it for me.”

“A crisis has developed regarding the net. I’ve notified Time Travel and—Finch did Chiswick say when he’d be here?”

“I’ll check on it, sir,” he said, and went out.

“A very serious situation,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “One of our historians—”

Finch came back in. “He’s on his way over,” he said.

“Good,” Dunworthy said. “Before he gets here, the situation is this:  One of our historians stole a fan and brought it back through the net with her.”

A fan. Well, that made a good deal more sense than a rat. Or a cab. And it explained the pinching part. “Like Lady Windermere’s mother,” I said.

“Lady Windermere’s mother?” Mr. Dunworthy said, looking sharply at Finch.

“Advanced time-lag, sir,” Finch said. “Disorientation, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, tendency to sentimentalize, impaired ability to reason logically,” he said, emphasizing the last two words.

“Advanced?” Dunworthy said. “How many drops have you made?”

“Fourteen this week. Ten jumble sales and six bishops’ wives. No, thirteen. I keep forgetting Mrs. Bittner. She was in Coventry. Not the Coventry I was in just now. Coventry today.”

“Bittner,” Mr. Dunworthy said curiously. “This wasn’t Elizabeth Bittner, was it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “The widow of the last bishop of Coventry Cathedral.”

“Good Lord, I haven’t seen her in years,” he said. “I knew her back in the early days when we were first experimenting with the net. Wonderful girl. The first time I saw her I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Too bad she had to fall in love with Bitty Bittner. She was absolutely devoted to him. How did she look?”

Hardly like a girl, I thought. She’d been a frail, white-haired old lady who had seemed ill-at-ease through the whole interview. She had probably thought Lady Schrapnell was going to recruit her and send her off to the Middle Ages. “She looked very well,” I said. “She said she had some difficulty with arthritis.”

“Arthritis,” he said, shaking his head. “Hard to imagine Lizzie Bittner with arthritis. What did you go and see her for? She wasn’t even born when the old Coventry Cathedral burned down.”

“Lady Schrapnell thought the bishop’s bird stump might have been stored in the crypt of the new cathedral and that since Mrs. Bittner was there when the cathedral was sold, she might have supervised the cleaning out of the crypt and have seen it.”

“And had she?”

“No, sir. She said it had been destroyed in the fire.”

“I remember when they had to sell Coventry Cathedral,” he said. “People had lost interest in religion, attendance was down at the services . . . Lizzie Bittner,” he said fondly. “Arthritis. I suppose her hair’s not red anymore either?”

“Preoccupation with irrelevancies,” Finch said loudly. “Miss Jenkins said Mr. Henry had a severe case of time-lag.”

“Miss Jenkins?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“The nurse who examined Mr. Henry at Infirmary.”

“Lovely creature,” I said. “A ministering angel, whose gentle hands have soothed many a fevered brow.”

Finch and Mr. Dunworthy exchanged looks.

“She said it was the worst case of time-lag she’d ever seen,” Finch said.

“Which is why I came to see you,” I said. “She’s prescribed two weeks of uninterrupted bed rest, and Lady Schrapnell—”

“Will never allow that,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “The cathedral’s consecration is only seventeen days away.”

“I tried to tell the nurse that, sir, but she wouldn’t listen. She told me to go to my rooms and go to bed.”

“No, no, first place Lady Schrapnell would look. Finch, where is she?”

“In London. She just phoned from the Royal Free.”

I started up out of the chair.

“I told her there’d been a mistake in communications,” Finch said, “that Mr. Henry’d been taken to the Royal Masonic.”

“Good. Ring up the Royal Masonic and tell them to keep her there.”

“I’ve already done so,” Finch said.

“Excellent,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Sit down, Ned. Where was I?”

“Lady Windermere’s fan,” Finch said.

“Only it wasn’t a fan the historian brought through the net,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “It was—”

“Did you say brought through the net?” I said. “You can’t bring anything through the net from the past. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“Apparently not,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

There was a scuffling sound in the outer office. “I thought you said she was at the Royal Free,” Mr. Dunworthy said to Finch, and a short, harried-looking man burst in. He was wearing a lab coat and carrying a bleeping handheld, and I recognized him as the head of Time Travel.

“Oh, good, you’re here, Mr. Chiswick,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I want to talk to you about an incident concerning—”

“And I want to talk to you about Lady Schrapnell,” Chiswick said. “The woman’s completely out of control. She pages me night and day, wanting to know why we can’t send people more than once to the same time and place, why we can’t process more drops per hour even though she has systematically stripped me of my research staff and my net staff and sent them running all over the past looking at almsboxes and analyzing flying buttresses.” He waved the bleeping handheld. “That’s her now. She’s paged me six times in the last hour, demanding to know where one of her missing historians is! Time Travel agreed to this project because of the opportunity the money afforded us to advance our research into temporal theory, but that research has come to a complete stop. She’s appropriated half my labs for her artisans, and tied up every computer in the science area.”

He stopped to punch keys on the still bleeping handheld, and Mr. Dunworthy took the opportunity to say, “The theory of time travel is what I wanted to discuss with you. One of my historians—”

Chiswick wasn’t listening. The handheld had stopped bleeping, and now it was spitting out inch upon inch of paper. “Look at this!” he said, tearing off a foot and brandishing it before Mr. Dunworthy. “She wants me to have one of my staff telephone every hospital in the greater London area and find this missing historian of hers. Henry, his name is, Ned Henry. One of my staff. I don’t have any staff! She’s taken every single one of them except Lewis, and she tried to take him! Luckily, he—”

Mr. Dunworthy broke in. “What would happen if an historian brought something from the past forward through the net?”

“Did she ask you that?” he said. “Of course she did. She’s gotten it into her head to have this bishop’s bird stump she’s so obsessed with if she has to go back in time and steal it. I’ve told her and told her, bringing anything from the past to the present would violate the laws of the space-time continuum, and do you know what she said? ‘Laws are made to be broken.’ ”

He swept on, unchecked, and Mr. Dunworthy leaned back in his desk chair, took off his spectacles, and examined them thoughtfully.

“I tried to explain to her,” Chiswick said, “that the laws of physics aren’t mere rules or regulations, that they’re laws, and that the breaking of them would result in disastrous consequences.”

“What sort of disastrous consequences?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“That is impossible to predict. The space-time continuum is a chaotic system, in which every event is connected to every other in elaborate, nonlinear ways that make prediction impossible. Bringing an object forward through time would create a parachronistic incongruity. At best, the incongruity might result in increased slippage. At worst, it might make time travel impossible. Or alter the course of history. Or destroy the universe. Which is why such an incongruity is not possible, as I tried to tell Lady Schrapnell!”

“Increased slippage,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “An incongruity would cause an increase in slippage?”

“Theoretically,” Mr. Chiswick said. “Incongruities were one of the areas Lady Schrapnell’s money was to enable us to research, research which now has gone completely by the wayside in favor of this idiotic cathedral! The woman’s impossible! Last week she ordered me to decrease the amount of slippage per drop. Ordered me! She doesn’t understand slippage either.”

Mr. Dunworthy leaned forward and put his spectacles on. “Has there been an increase in slippage?”

“No. Lady Schrapnell simply has no concept of the workings of time travel. She—”

“The field of marrows,” I said.

“What?” Mr. Chiswick turned and glared at me.

“The farmer’s wife thought he was a German paratrooper.”

“Paratrooper?” Chiswick said, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re not the missing historian, are you? What’s your name?”

“John Bartholomew,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Whom, I see from his condition, Lady Schrapnell has recruited. She must be stopped, Dunworthy.” The handheld began bleeping and spitting again. He read aloud.” ‘No info yet on Henry’s whereabouts. Why not? Send location immediately. Need two more people to go to Great Exhibition, 1850, check on possible origins of bishop’s bird stump.’ ” He crumpled the readout and threw it on Mr. Dunworthy’s desk. “You’ve got to do something about her now! Before she destroys the university!” he said, and swept out.

“Or the known universe,” Mr. Dunworthy murmured.

“Should I go after him?” Finch asked.

“No,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Try to get in touch with Andrews, and call up the Bodleian’s files on parachronistic incongruities.”

Finch went out. Mr. Dunworthy took off his spectacles and peered through them, frowning.

“I know this is a bad time,” I said, “but I wondered if you had any idea where I might be able to go to convalesce. Away from Oxford.”

“Meddling,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Meddling got us into this, and more meddling will only make it worse.” He put his spectacles back on and stood up. “Clearly the best thing to do is wait and see what happens, if anything,” he said, pacing. “The chances that its disappearance would affect history are statistically insignificant, particularly from that era. Whole batches of them were routinely thrown in rivers to keep the numbers down.”

The number of fans? I thought.

“And the fact that it came through the net is in itself a proof that it didn’t create an incongruity, or the net wouldn’t have opened.” He wiped his spectacles on the tail of his jacket and held them up to the light. “It’s been over a hundred and fifty years. If it were going to destroy the universe, it would very likely have done so by now.”

He exhaled onto the lenses and wiped them again. “And I refuse to believe that there are two courses of history in which Lady Schrapnell and her project to rebuild Coventry Cathedral could exist.”

Lady Schrapnell. She’d be back from the Royal Masonic any time now. I leaned forward in the chair. “Mr. Dunworthy,” I said, “I was hoping you could think of somewhere where I could recover from the time-lag.”

“On the other hand, there’s a good chance that the reason there wasn’t an incongruity is that it was returned before there could be any consequences, disastrous or otherwise.”

“The nurse said two weeks’ bed rest, but if I could just get three or four days—”

“But even if that is the case,” he stood up and began pacing, “there’s still no reason not to wait. That’s the beauty of time travel. One can wait three or four days, or two weeks, or a year, and still return it immediately.”

“If Lady Schrapnell finds me—”

He stopped pacing and stared at me. “I hadn’t thought about that. Oh, Lord, if Lady Schrapnell were to find out about it—”

“If you could just suggest somewhere quiet and out of the way—”

“Finch!” Mr. Dunworthy shouted, and Finch came in from the outer office, carrying a readout.

“Here’s the bibliography on parachronistic incongruities,” he said. “There wasn’t much. Mr. Andrews is in 1560. Lady Schrapnell sent him there to examine the clerestory arches. Should I try to get Mr. Chiswick back here?”

“First things first,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “We need to find Ned here a place where he can rest and recuperate from his time-lag without interruption.”

“Lady Schrapnell—” I said.

“Exactly,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “It can’t be anywhere in this century. Or the Twentieth Century. And it needs to be somewhere peaceful and out of the way, a country house, perhaps, on a river. The Thames.”

“You’re not thinking of—” Finch said.

“He needs to leave immediately,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Before Lady Schrapnell finds out about it.”

“Oh!” Finch gasped. “Yes, I see. But Mr. Henry’s in no condition to—” Finch said, but Mr. Dunworthy cut him off.

“Ned,” he said to me, “how would you like to go to the Victorian era?”

The Victorian era. Long dreamy afternoons boating on the Thames and playing croquet on emerald lawns with girls in white frocks and fluttering hair ribbons. And later, tea under the willow tree, served in delicate Sèvres cups by bowing butlers, anxious to minister to one’s every whim, and those same girls, reading aloud from a slim volume of poetry, their voices floating like flower petals on the scented air. “All in the golden afternoon, where Childhood’s dreams are twined, In Memory’s mystic band—”

Finch shook his head. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mr. Dunworthy.”

“Nonsense,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Listen to him. He’ll fit right in.”

“. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Sherlock Holmes.

C H A P T E R  T H R E E

A Straightforward Job—Angels, Archangels, Cherubim, Powers, Thrones, Dominions, and the Other One—Drowsiness—I Am Prepped in Victorian History and Customs—Luggage—The Inspiring Story of Ensign Klepperman—More Luggage—Difficulty in Distinguishing Sounds—Fish Forks—Sirens, Sylphs, Nymphs, Dryads, and the Other One—An Arrival—Dogs Not Man’s Best Friend—Another Arrival—An Abrupt Departure

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Finch said. “He’s already suffering from advanced time-lag. Won’t that large a jump—?”

“Not necessarily,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And after he’s completed his assignment, he can stay as long as he needs to to recover. You heard him, it’s a perfect holiday spot.”

“But in his condition, do you think he’ll be able to—” Finch said anxiously.

“It’s a perfectly straightforward job,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “A child could do it. The important thing is that it be done before Lady Schrapnell gets back, and Ned’s the only historian in Oxford who’s not off somewhere chasing after misericords. Take him over to the net and then ring up Time Travel and tell Chiswick to meet me there.”

The telephone bipped, and Finch answered it, then listened for a considerable length of time. “No, he was at the Royal Free,” he said finally, “but they decided to run a TWR, so they had to transport him to St. Thomas’s. Yes, in Lambeth Palace Road.” He listened again, holding the receiver some distance from his ear. “No, this time I’m certain.” He rang off. “That was Lady Schrapnell,” he said unnecessarily. “I’m afraid she may be returning soon.”

“What’s a TWR?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“I invented it. I think Mr. Henry had best get over to the net to be prepped.”

Finch walked me over to the lab, which I was grateful for, especially as it seemed to me we were going completely the wrong direction, though when we got there, the door looked the same, and there was the same group of SPCC picketers outside.

They were carrying electric placards that read, “What’s wrong with the one we already have?,” “Keep Coventry in Coventry,” and “It’s Ours!” One of them handed me a flyer that began, “The restoration of Coventry Cathedral will cost fifty billion pounds. For the same amount of money, the present Coventry Cathedral could not only be bought back and restored, but a new, larger shopping center could be built to replace it.”

Finch pulled the tract out of my hand, gave it back to the picketer, and opened the door.

The net looked the same inside, too, though I didn’t recognize the pudgy young woman at the console. She was wearing a white lab coat, and her halo of cropped blonde hair made her look like a cherub rather than a net technician.

Finch shut the door behind us, and she whirled. “What do you want?” she demanded.

Perhaps more an archangel than a cherub.

“We need to arrange for a jump,” Finch said. “To Victorian England.”

“Out of the question,” she snapped.

Definitely an archangel. The sort that tossed Adam and Eve out of the Garden.

Finch said, “Mr. Dunworthy authorized it, Miss . . .”

“Warder,” she snapped.

“Miss Warder. This is a priority jump,” he said.

“They’re all priority jumps. Lady Schrapnell doesn’t authorize any other sort.” She picked up a clipboard and brandished it at us like a flaming sword. “Nineteen jumps, fourteen of them requiring 1940 ARP and WVS uniforms, which the wardrobe department is completely out of, and all the fixes. I’m three hours behind schedule on rendezvous, and who knows how many more priority jumps Lady Schrapnell will come up with before the day’s over.” She slammed the clipboard down. “I don’t have time for this. Victorian England! Tell Mr. Dunworthy it’s completely out of the question.” She turned back to the console and began hitting keys.

Finch, undaunted, tried another tack. “Where’s Mr. Chaudhuri?”

“Exactly,” she said, whirling round again. “Where is Badri, and why isn’t he here running the net? Well, I’ll tell you.” She picked up the clipboard threateningly again. “Lady Schrapnell—”

“She didn’t send him to 1940, did she?” I asked. Badri was of Pakistani descent. He’d be arrested as a Japanese spy.

“No,” she said. “She made him drive her to London to look for some historian who’s gone missing. Which leaves me to run Wardrobe and the net and deal with people who waste my time asking stupid questions.” She crashed the clipboard down. “Now, if you don’t have any more of them, I have a priority fix to calculate.” She whirled back to the console and began pounding fiercely at the keys.

Or perhaps an arch-archangel, one of those beings with enormous wings and hundreds of eyes, “and they were terrible to see.” What were they called? Sarabands?

“I think I’d better go fetch Mr. Dunworthy,” Finch whispered to me. “You’d best stay here.”

I was more than glad to comply. I was beginning to feel the drowsiness that the nurse at Infirmary had questioned me about, and all I wanted to do was sit down and rest. I found a chair on the far side of the net, took a stack of gas masks and stirrup pumps off another one so I could put my feet up on it, and stretched out to wait for Finch and try to remember the name of arch-archangels, the ones “full of eyes round about.” It began with an “s.” Samurai? No, that was Lady Schrapnell. Sylphs? No, those were heavenly sprites, who flitted through the air. The water sprites began with something else. An “N.” Nemesis? No, that was Lady Schrapnell.

What were they called? Hylas had come upon them while he was fetching water from a pond, and they had pulled him into the water with them, twining their white arms about him, tangling him in their trailing auburn hair, drowning him in the dark, deep waters . . . .

I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes, Mr. Dunworthy was there, and the tech was threatening him with her clipboard.

“It’s out of the question,” she was saying. “I’ve got four fixes to do, eight rendezvous, and I’ve got to replace a costume one of your historians got wet and ruined.” She flipped violently through the sheets on the clipboard. “The soonest I can fit you in is Friday the seventh at half-past three.”

“The seventh?” Finch gurgled. “That’s next week!”

“It must be today,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Today?” she said, raising the clipboard like a weapon. “Today?”

Seraphim. “Full of eyes all around and within, and fire, and out of the fire went forth lightning.”

“It won’t require calculating new time coordinates,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “We’re using the ones Kindle came through from. And we can use the drop you’ve got set up at Muchings End.” He looked round at the lab. “Where’s the tech in charge of Wardrobe?”

“In 1932,” she said. “Sketching choir robes. On a priority jump for Lady Schrapnell to see whether their surplices were linen or cotton. Which means I’m in charge of Wardrobe. And the net. And everything else around here.” She flipped the pages back down to their original position and set it down on the net console. “The whole thing’s out of the question. Even if I could fit you in, he can’t go like that, and, besides, he’d need to be prepped on Victorian history and customs.”

“Ned’s not going to tea with the Queen,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “His assignment will only bring him into limited contact with the contemps, if any. He won’t need a course in Victoriana for that.”

The seraphim reached for her clipboard.

Finch ducked.

“He’s Twentieth Century,” she said. “That means he’s out of his area. I can’t authorize his going without his being prepped.”

“Fine,” Mr. Dunworthy said. He turned to me. “Darwin, Disraeli, the Indian question, Alice in Wonderland, Little Nell, Turner, Tennyson, Three Men in a Boat, crinolines, croquet—”

“Penwipers,” I said.

“Penwipers, crocheted antimacassars, hair wreaths, Prince Albert, Flush, frock coats, sexual repression, Ruskin, Fagin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw, Gladstone, Galsworthy, Gothic Revival, Gilbert and Sullivan, lawn tennis, and parasols. There,” he said to the seraphim. “He’s been prepped.”

“Nineteenth Century’s required course is three semesters of political history, two—”

“Finch,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Go over to Jesus and fetch a headrig and tapes. Ned can do high-speed subliminals while you,” he turned back to the seraphim, “get him dressed and set up the jump. He’ll need summer clothes, white flannels, linen shirt, boating blazer. For luggage, he’ll need . . .”

“Luggage!” the seraphim said, sprouting eyes. “I don’t have time to collect luggage! I have nineteen jumps—”

“Fine,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “We’ll take care of the luggage. Finch, go over to Jesus and fetch some Victorian luggage. And did you contact Chiswick?”

“No, sir. He wasn’t there, sir. I left a message.”

He left, colliding with a tall, thin young black man on his way out. The black man had a sheaf of papers, and he looked no older than eighteen, and I assumed he was one of the pickets from outside and held out my hand for a leaflet, but he went up to Mr. Dunworthy and said nervously, “Mr. Dunworthy? I’m T.J. Lewis. From Time Travel. You were looking for Mr. Chiswick?”

“Yes,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Where is he?”

“In Cambridge, sir,” he said.

“In Cambridge? What the devil’s he doing over there?”

“Ap-applying for a job, sir,” he stammered. “H-he quit, sir.”

“When?”

“Just now. He said he couldn’t stand working for Lady Schrapnell another minute, sir.”

“Well,” Mr. Dunworthy said. He took his spectacles off and peered at them. “Well. All right, then. Mr. Lewis, is it?”

“T.J., sir.”

“T.J., would you go tell the assistant head—what’s his name? Ranniford—that I need to speak with him. It’s urgent.”

T.J. looked unhappy.

“Don’t tell me he’s quit as well?”

“No, sir. He’s in 1655, looking at roof slates.”

“Of course,” Mr. Dunworthy said disgustedly. “Well, then, whoever else is in charge over there.”

T.J. looked even unhappier. “Uh, that would be me, sir.”

“You?” Mr. Dunworthy said in surprise. “But you’re only an undergraduate. You can’t tell me you’re the only person over there.”

“Yes, sir,” T.J. said. “Lady Schrapnell came and took everyone else. She would have taken me, but the first two-thirds of Twentieth Century and all of Nineteenth are a ten for blacks and therefore off-limits.”

“I’m surprised that stopped her,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“It didn’t,” he said. “She wanted to dress me up as a Moor and send me to 1395 to check on the construction of the steeple. It was her idea that they’d assume I was a prisoner brought back from the Crusades.”

“The Crusades ended in 1272,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“I know, sir. I pointed that out, also the fact that the entire past is a ten for blacks.” He grinned. “It’s the first time my having black skin has been an actual advantage.”

“Yes, well, we’ll see about that,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Have you ever heard of Ensign John Klepperman?”

“No, sir.”

“World War II. Battle of Midway. The entire bridge of his ship was killed and he had to take over as captain. That’s what wars and disasters do, put people in charge of things they’d never ordinarily be in charge of. Like Time Travel. In other words, this is your big chance, Lewis. I take it you’re majoring in temporal physics?”

“No, sir. Comp science, sir.”

Mr. Dunworthy sighed. “Ah, well, Ensign Klepperman had never fired a torpedo either. He sank two destroyers and a cruiser. Your first assignment is to tell me what would happen if a parachronistic incongruity had occurred, what indications we would have of it. And don’t tell me it couldn’t happen.”

“Para-chron-istic incon-gruity,” T.J. said, writing it on the top of the papers he was holding. “When do you need this, sir?”

“Yesterday,” Mr. Dunworthy said, handing him the bibliography from the Bodleian.

T.J. looked bewildered. “You want me to go back in time and—”

“I am not setting up another drop,” Warder cut in.

Mr. Dunworthy shook his head tiredly. “I meant I need the information as soon as possible,” he said to T.J.

“Oh,” T.J. said. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” and started for the door. Halfway there, he stopped and asked, “What happened to Ensign Klepperman?”

“Killed in the line of duty,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

T.J. nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

He went out and Finch came in, carrying a headrig.

“Ring up Ernst Hasselmeyer in Berlin and ask him if he knows anything about parachronistic incongruities, and if he doesn’t, ask him who does,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And then I want you to go over to the cathedral.”

“The cathedral?” Finch said, alarmed. “What if Lady Schrapnell’s there?”

“Hide in the Drapers’ Chapel,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “See if there’s anyone over there who works in Time Travel, anyone at all. There has to be someone around with more experience than an undergraduate.”

Finch said, “Right away, sir,” and crossed over to me. He put the headrig in my ear. “The subliminal tapes, sir,” he said.

I started to roll up my sleeve for the hypnotic.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to use drugs in your condition,” he said. “You’ll have to listen to them at normal speed.”

“Finch,” Mr. Dunworthy said, coming over. “Where’s Kindle?”