“Mama!” Tossie said, starting up. Terence peered round his paper and then dropped it in a rattling heap.

Mrs. Mering had fallen slantwise across the door, with her head fortunately on the plush seat and her arms flung out to either side.

Terence and I scooped her up and deposited her more or less on the seat, with Tossie fluttering around us.

“O, Mama!” she said, leaning over Mrs. Mering’s inert form. “Wake up!”

She took off her mother’s hat, which didn’t seem particularly to the point, and began patting her cheek. “O, do wake up, Mama!”

There was no response.

“Speak to me, Mama!” Tossie said, gently patting her cheek. Terence picked up the newspaper he’d dropped and began fanning her with it.

Still no response.

“You’d better go and get Baine,” I said to Terence.

“Yes. Baine,” Tossie said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Right,” Terence said, handed Tossie the newspaper, and hurried off down the corridor.

“Mama!” Tossie said, picking up fanning where Terence had left off. “Speak to me!”

Mrs. Mering’s eyes fluttered open. “Where am I?” she said faintly.

“Between Upper Elmscott and Oldham Junction,” Tossie said.

“On the train from Coventry,” I translated. “Are you all right?”

“O, Mama, you gave us such a fright!” Tossie said. “What happened?”

“Happened?” Mrs. Mering repeated, pushing herself to sitting. She felt at her hair. “Where’s my hat?”

“It’s here, Mama,” Tossie said, handing me the newspaper and picking up the hat. “You fainted. Did you have another premonition?”

“Premonition?” Mrs. Mering said vaguely, trying to pin her hat back on. “I don't . . .”

“You were looking at Terence, and you stopped speaking, as though you’d seen a spirit, and then you fell to the floor in a faint. Was it Lady Godiva?”

“Lady Godiva?” Mrs. Mering said, sounding more like her old self. “Why on earth would Lady—” She stopped.

“Mama?” Tossie said anxiously.

“I remember,” Mrs. Mering said. “We asked the spirits for news of Princess Arjumand, and the doors opened . . .” she said, her voice rising, “. . . it must have been just at that moment . . . I asked if she had been drowned. . . .”

And went out like a light again. Her head fell sideways onto the plush armrest, and her hat flopped forward over her nose.

“Mama!” Tossie shrieked.

“Do you have any smelling salts?” I asked, propping Mrs. Mering up.

“Jane has,” she said. “I’ll go and fetch them.” She scampered off down the corridor.

“Mrs. Mering,” I said, fanning her with one hand and holding her erect with the other. She had a tendency to flop over to one side. “Mrs. Mering!” I wondered if I should loosen her stays, or at the least her collar, but decided I’d better wait for Tossie. Or Verity. And where were they?

The door banged open and Terence galloped in, panting. “I couldn’t find Baine anywhere. ‘He has vanished from the sight of mortal men.’ Perhaps he’s been apported.” He peered interestedly at Mrs. Mering. “She’s still out?”

“Again,” I said, fanning. “Any idea what brought this on?”

“Not a clue,” he said, sitting down on the seat opposite. “I was reading the newspaper, and she suddenly looked at me as though I were Banquo’s ghost. ‘Is that a dagger that I see before me, its handle towards my hand?’ only in this case it was the Oxford Chronicle, and went out like a light. Was it my choice of reading material, do you think?”

I shook my head. “She said something about Princess Arjumand, and about the spirits.”

Verity came in, carrying the fan. “What—” she said blankly.

“She’s fainted,” I said. “Tossie’s gone for the smelling salts.”

Tossie hurried in, followed by Baine.

“Where’s Jane?” I said, glancing briefly at her. “Did you bring the smelling salts?”

“I brought Baine,” she said, her cheeks very pink from her haste.

Baine immediately took charge, kneeling in front of Mrs. Mering and taking off her hat. He unbuttoned her collar. “Mr. St. Trewes, open the window. Mr. Henry, if you could give me some room, please.”

“Careful,” I said, letting go of Mrs. Mering’s arm. “She has a tendency to list to starboard,” but he already had hold of both her shoulders. I stepped back next to Verity, still holding the folded newspaper.

“Now then,” he said, and pushed her head down between her knees.

“Baine!” Tossie said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Mering said, and tried to sit up.

“Take deep breaths,” Baine said, keeping his hand firmly on the back of her neck. “That’s it. Deep breaths. Good,” he said, and let her sit up.

“What—” she said, bewilderedly.

Baine produced a flask of brandy from his coat pocket and a china teacup. “Drink this,” he commanded, placing her gloved hands around it. “That’s it. Good.”

“Are you feeling better, Mama?” Tossie said. “What made you faint?”

Mrs. Mering took another sip of the brandy. “I don’t remember—” she said. “Whatever it was, I feel much better now.” She handed the teacup to Baine. “How much farther to Muchings End?”

Verity, standing next to me, whispered, “What happened?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. Terence was reading the newspaper,” I said, holding it up for illustration, “and she suddenly—” I stopped, staring, just like Macbeth.

It was the second story down, just under an article about boating congestion on the Thames.

“BALLIOL PROFESSOR DROWNED,” it read, and under it, in smaller caps, but still quite readable (this being the Oxford Chronicle and not the Times):

“HISTORY PROFESSOR MATTHEW PEDDICK KILLED IN RIVER ACCIDENT”

“ ‘The curse has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - O N E

Explanations and Recriminations—Another Premonition—Our Corporeality Is Called in Question—A Thunderstorm—The Mystery of the Telegrams Solved—A Quiet Evening at Home—An Arrival—Childhood Nicknames—The Establishment of the Jumble Sale as an Ongoing Tradition—Decline and Fall

The remainder of the trip consisted of explanations and recriminations. “I thought you said he sent his sister a telegram,” Terence said.

“I thought he had,” I said. “I asked him, ‘Did you send your telegrams?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and waved the yellow receipt slips at me.”

“Well, he must have forgotten to pay for them or something. The funeral’s tomorrow at ten.”

“Madame Iritosky tried to warn me,” Mrs. Mering said, lying back against three cushions and a folded blanket Baine had been dispatched to fetch for her. “ ‘Beware the sea,’ she said. ‘Beware the sea!’ She was trying to tell me Professor Peddick had drowned!”

“But he didn’t drown,” I said. “It’s all a misunderstanding. He fell in the river, and Terence and I fished him out. Professor Overforce must have thought he drowned when he couldn’t find him.”

“Fell in the river?” Mrs. Mering said. “I thought your boat capsized.”

“It did,” Terence said, “but that was the next day. We heard this splash, and I thought it was Darwin, because there were a number of trees along the bank just there, but it wasn’t. It was Professor Peddick, and it was a lucky thing we came along just at the right moment to save him or he would have been done for. Fate. ‘Ah, happy fate, that grasped the skirts of happy chance!’ Because he was going down for the third time, and we had the very devil of a time—”

“Mr. St. Trewes!” Mrs. Mering, obviously recovering, said. “There are ladies present!”

Terence looked chagrined. “Oh, I do beg your pardon. In the excitement of telling the story, I—”

Mrs. Mering nodded dismissively. “You say Professor Peddick fell in the river?”

“Well, actually, Professor Overforce—they were discussing history, you see, and Professor Peddick said . . .”

I had stopped listening and was staring blankly at the wall, the way Mrs. Mering had stared with her premonition. Something someone had said—for a moment I had almost had it, the solution to the mystery, the significant clue, and Verity was right, we had been looking at it the wrong way round—but I had only had it for an instant, and then it had slipped away. It was something that one of them had said. Mrs. Mering? Terence? I squinted at Terence, trying to remember.

“. . . and then Professor Peddick said Julius Caesar wasn’t irrelevant and that was when Professor Overforce went in the drink.”

“Professor Overforce!” Mrs. Mering said, motioning to Verity for the smelling salts. “I thought you said Professor Peddick fell in.”

“Actually, it was more that he was pushed,” Terence said.

“Pushed!”

It was no use. Whatever my premonition had been, it was gone. And it was obviously time to intervene.

“Professor Peddick slipped and fell in,” I said, “and we rescued him and intended to take him back home, but he insisted on coming with us downriver. We stopped in Abingdon so he could send a telegram to his sister, telling her of his plans, but it obviously went astray, and when he turned up missing, she assumed that he was dead. Whereas he was really alive and with us.”

She took a deep whiff of the smelling salts. “With you,” she said, looking speculatively at Terence. “There was a cold gust of wind, and I looked up, and there you were, standing in the doorway in the darkness. How do I know you’re not all spirits?”

“Here. Feel,” Terence said, offering his arm. “ ‘Too, too solid flesh.’ ” She squeezed his sleeve gingerly. “There, you see,” he said. “Quite real.”

Mrs. Mering looked unconvinced. “The spirit of Katie Cook felt solid. Mr. Crookes put his arm round her waist at a séance, and he said she felt quite human.”

Yes, well, there was an explanation for that, and for the fact that spirits bore an unusual resemblance to people draped in cheesecloth, and with that sort of reasoning, we were never going to be able to prove we were alive.

“And they had Princess Arjumand with them,” Mrs. Mering said, warming to her theory, “who Madame Iritosky said had crossed over to the Other Side.”

“Princess Arjumand isn’t a spirit,” Verity said. “Baine caught her in the fishpond this morning, trying to catch Colonel Mering’s Black Moor. Isn’t that right, Baine?”

“Yes, miss,” he said, “but I was able to remove her before there was any harm done.”

I looked at him, wondering if he had removed her to the middle of the Thames, or if he’d been too frightened by the Verity incident to try it again.

“Arthur Conan Doyle says that spirits eat and drink in the afterlife just as we do here,” Mrs. Mering said. “He says the afterlife is just like our world, but purer and happier, and the newspapers would never print anything that isn’t true.”

And so on, until we changed trains at Reading, at which terminus the topic switched to how disgracefully Professor Peddick had behaved.

“To put his loved ones through such dreadful anguish,” Mrs. Mering said, standing on the platform watching Baine struggle with the luggage, “to leave them to sit by the window, anxiously watching for his return, and then, as the hours passed, to have all vestiges of hope fade, is the absolute height of cruelty! Had I but known how careless of his loved ones’ affections he was, I should never have opened our home and our hospitality to him. Never!”

“Should we wire ahead and warn Professor Peddick of the impending storm?” I whispered to Verity as we walked up the steps to the other train.

“When I was gone to fetch the fan,” she said, watching Tossie ahead of us with Terence, “did anyone come into the compartment, anyone at all?”

“Not a soul,” I said.

“And Tossie stayed there the whole time?”

“She went to get Baine, after her mother fainted,” I said.

“How long was she gone?”

“Only long enough to fetch Baine,” I said, and then at her crestfallen look, “She might have bumped into someone in the corridor. And we’re still not home. She might meet someone here. Or at the station at Muchings End.”

But the guard who handed her into our compartment was at least seventy, and there wasn’t a soul, departed or otherwise, on the rainy platform at Muchings End. Or at home. Except for Colonel Mering and Professor Peddick.

I should definitely have wired ahead.

“Had the most wonderful idea,” Colonel Mering said, coming happily out to greet us in the rain.

“Mesiel, where is your umbrella?” Mrs. Mering cut in before he could get any farther. “Where is your coat?”

“Don’t need ‘em,” the Colonel said. “Just been out to look at my new red-spotted silver tancho. Perfectly dry,” even though he looked fairly damp and his mustache had gone limp. “Couldn’t wait to tell you our idea. Absolutely splendid. Thought we’d come straight up to tell you, didn’t we, Professor? Greece!”

Mrs. Mering, being helped out of the carriage by Baine, who was holding an umbrella over her, looked warily at Professor Peddick, as if still not quite sure of his corporeality. “Grease?”

“Thermopylae,” the Colonel said happily. “Marathon, the Hellespont, the straits of Salamis. Laying out the battle today. Came to me. Only way to see the lay of the land. Envision the armies.”

There was an ominous peal of thunder, which he ignored. “Holiday for the whole family. Order Tossie’s trousseau in Paris. Visit Madame Iritosky. Got a telegram from her today saying she was going abroad. Pleasant tour.” He stopped and waited, smiling, for his wife’s response.

Mrs. Mering had apparently decided Professor Peddick was alive, at least for the moment. “Tell me, Professor Peddick,” she said in a voice that could have used several shawls, “before departing on this ‘tour,’ did you intend to inform your family of your plans? Or allow them to continue to wear mourning, as you have done thus far?”

“Mourning?” Professor Peddick said, pulling out his pince-nez.

“Beg pardon, my dear?” the Colonel said.

There was another extremely apt peal of thunder.

“Mesiel,” Mrs. Mering said, “you have been nursing a viper in your bosom.” She extended an accusing finger toward Professor Peddick. “This man has deceived those who befriended him, who took him in, but far, far worse, he has deceived his own loved ones.”

Professor Peddick took off his pince-nez and peered through them. “Viper?”

It occurred to me that we could stand here all night and Professor Peddick never get any closer to comprehending the calamity that had befallen him, and I wondered if I should attempt to intervene, particularly since the rain was starting up again.

I glanced at Verity, but she was looking hopefully up the empty drive.

“Professor Peddick,” I began, but Mrs. Mering was already thrusting the Oxford Chronicle at him.

“Read that,” she commanded.

“Feared drowned?” he said, putting on his pince-nez and then taking them off again.

“Didn’t you send your sister a telegram?” Terence asked. “Telling her you were going downriver with us?”

“Telegram?” he said vaguely, turning over the Chronicle as though the answer might be on the back.

“Those telegrams you sent at Abingdon,” I said. “I asked you if you’d sent your telegrams, and you said you had.”

“Telegrams,” he said. “Ah, yes, I remember now. I sent a telegram to Dr. Maroli, the author of a monograph on the signing of the Magna Carta. And one to Professor Edelswein in Vienna.”

“You were supposed to send one to your sister and your niece,” Terence said, “letting them know your whereabouts.”

“Oh, dear,” he said. “But Maudie’s a sensible girl. When I didn’t come home, she’d know I’d gone on an expedition. Not like most women, fretting and stewing and thinking you’ve been run over by a tram.”

“They didn’t think you’d been run over by a tram,” Mrs. Mering said grimly. “They thought you’d drowned. The funeral is tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

“Funeral?” he said, peering at the newspaper. “Services at ten o’clock. Christ Church Cathedral,” he read. “Why on earth would they have a funeral? I’m not dead.”

“So you say,” Mrs. Mering said suspiciously.

“You must send them a telegram immediately,” I said before she could ask to feel his arm.

“Yes, immediately,” Mrs. Mering said. “Baine, fetch writing materials.”

Baine bowed. “You would perhaps be more comfortable in the library,” he said, and mercifully got us indoors.

Baine brought a pen, ink, paper, and a penwiper shaped like a hedgehog, and then tea, scones, and buttered muffins on a silver tray. Professor Peddick composed a telegram to his sister and another to the dean of Christ Church, Terence was dispatched to the village to send them, and Verity and I took advantage of his departure to sneak into the breakfast room and plot our next move.

“Which is what?” Verity said. “There wasn’t anyone at the station. Or here. I asked the cook. Nobody’s come to the door all day. As soon as it stops raining, I think we should go through and tell Mr. Dunworthy we’ve failed.”

“The day’s not over yet,” I said. “There’s still dinner and the evening. You’ll see, Mr. C will burst in during the soup and announce they’ve been secretly engaged since Easter.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Verity said without conviction.

But nothing happened during dinner except Mrs. Mering’s repeating of her premonition, which had now taken on elaborate embellishments. “And as I stood there in the church, I seemed to see the spirit of Lady Godiva before me—clothed, of course—in a robe of Coventry blue, with her long hair hanging down, and as I stood there, transfixed, she held up her glowing white hand in warning and said, ‘Things Are Not What They Seem.’ ”

Nothing happened over cigars and port, either, except a full description of the merits of the Colonel’s new red-spotted silver tancho. I found myself hoping that when we rejoined the ladies, they’d be sitting round a shipwrecked sailor or a disinherited duke, listening eagerly to his tale of having got lost in the rainstorm, but when Colonel Mering pulled the folding doors open, Mrs. Mering was draped on the settee, apparently overcome again and breathing deeply into a scented handkerchief, Tossie was sitting at the writing table and writing in her diary, and Verity, on the slipper chair, was looking up eagerly, as if she expected the sailor to come in with us.

There was a knock on the front door, and Verity half-stood up, letting her embroidery fall, but it was only Terence, back from sending the telegrams.

“I thought it best to wait for an answer to the one to your sister,” he said, handing his wet coat and umbrella to Baine. He handed Professor Peddick two yellow envelopes.

The professor fumbled for his pince-nez, tore the telegrams open, and proceeded to read them aloud. “ ‘Uncle. Delighted to hear from you. Knew you were well. All love. Your niece.’ ”

“Dear Maudie,” he said. “I knew she wouldn’t lose her head. It shows what intelligent creatures women can be when properly educated.”

“Educated,” Tossie cut in. “Is she aesthetically educated?”

Professor Peddick nodded. “Art, rhetoric, the classics, mathematics.” He tore open the other envelope. “None of your silly music and needlework.” He read the second telegram out loud. “ ‘Horace. How could you? Mourning ordered. Flowers and pallbearers already arranged. Expect you on 9:32 train. Professor Overforce already engaged to give eulogy.’ Professor Overforce!” He stood up. “I must leave for Oxford at once. When is the next train?”

“There are no more trains to Oxford tonight,” Baine, the walking Bradshaw, said. “The first train tomorrow is the 7:14 from Henley.”

“I must be on it,” Professor Peddick said. “Pack my bags at once. Overforce! He does not want to give a eulogy. He wants to discredit my theory of history and advance his own. He’s after the Haviland Chair. Natural forces! Populations! The murderer!”

“Murderer?” Mrs. Mering shrieked, and I thought we were going to have to go over the entire living-or-dead thing again, but Professor Peddick didn’t give her so much as a chance to call for her smelling salts.

“Not that murder counts in his theory of history,” he said, clutching the telegram. “The murder of Marat, of the two Little Princes in the Tower, the murder of Darnley, none of them had any effect on the course of history, according to Overforce. Individual action is irrelevant to the course of history. Honor doesn’t matter in Overforce’s theory, nor does jealousy, nor foolishness, nor luck. None of them have any effect on events. Not Sir Thomas More, nor Richard the Lionhearted, nor Martin Luther.” And so on.

Mrs. Mering attempted to interrupt once or twice and then subsided against the settee. Colonel Mering took up his newpaper (not the Oxford Chronicle). Tossie, her chin propped on her hand, played idly with a large carnation penwiper. Terence stretched out his legs toward the fire. Princess Arjumand curled up in my lap and fell asleep.

Rain pattered against the window, the fire crackled, Cyril snored. Verity poked determinedly at her embroidery and kept glancing at the ormolu mantel clock, which appeared to have stopped.

“At the Battle of Hastings,” Professor Peddick said, “King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. A lucky shot that determined the outcome of the battle. How does Overforce’s theory of history account for luck?”

The front-door knocker banged, loudly, and Verity stabbed her finger with her embroidery needle. Terence sat up, blinking. Baine, adding logs to the fire, stood up and went to answer the door.

“Who can that be, at this hour?” Mrs. Mering said.

Please, I thought, let it be Mr. C.

“Natural forces! Populations!” Professor Peddick fumed. “How does the Siege of Khartoum fit into that theory?”

I could hear muffled voices in the vestibule, Baine’s and another man’s. I looked over at Verity, who was sucking her pricked finger, and then back at the parlor door.

Baine appeared in it. “The Reverend Mr. Arbitage,” he said, and the curate bustled in, rain dripping from his flat-brimmed hat.

“Absolutely unforgivable to visit so late, I know,” he said, handing his hat to Baine, “but I simply had to stop by and tell you how well the fête did. I was over at Lower Hedgebury at a meeting of the Slum Charities Committee and everyone was simply agog at our success. A success,” he simpered, “which I consider to be entirely due to your idea of having a jumble sale, Mrs. Mering. Reverend Chichester wants to institute one for his Mission for Unfortunate Girls Midsummer Bazaar.”

“Reverend Chichester?” I said, leaning forward.

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “He wanted to know if you would be willing to lend your expertise to the enterprise, Mrs. Mering. And Miss Mering and Miss Brown, of course.”

“Reverend Chichester,” I said. “I believe I’ve heard of him. Young, unmarried, dark mustache?”

“Reverend Chichester?” the Reverend Arbitage said. “Good heavens, no. Ninety, if he’s a day. Rather afflicted with palsy, I’m afraid, but still active in good works. And very interested in the Other Side.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Colonel Mering muttered from the depths of his newspaper. “He’s already got one foot over the line.”

“The Final Judgment may be but a step away for all of us,” the Reverend Arbitage said, pursing his lips. “ ‘Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come.’ Revelation chapter fourteen, verse seven.”

He truly was a toad. Prissy, self-righteous, humorless. The perfect mate for Tossie. And there didn’t seem to be any other takers.

“Arbitage,” I said. “Is that your full name?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

“So many people have multiple names these days,” I said. “Edward Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I thought perhaps Arbitage was short for Arbitage-Culpepper or Arbitage-Chutney.”

“Arbitage is my full name,” he said, drawing himself up. “Eustace Hieronymous Arbitage.”

“And no pet names, I suppose, not for a man in your line of work,” I said. “In childhood, though? My sisters’ pet name for me was Curls, because of my baby locks. Did you have curly hair?”

“I believe,” the Reverend Mr. Arbitage said, “I was quite bald until the age of three.”

“Ah,” I said. “Chuckles, perhaps? Or Chubby?”

“Mr. Henry,” Mrs. Mering said, “Mr. Arbitage is trying to tell us the results of the fête.”

“Yes, well,” the Reverend Mr. Arbitage said, pulling a leather notebook from his pocket, “after expenses the receipts came to eighteen pounds, four shillings and eight pence, more than enough to paint over the wall murals and put in a new pulpit. We may even have enough to purchase an oil painting for the lady chapel. Perhaps a Holman-Hunt.

“What do you think the purpose of art is, Mr. Arbitage?” Tossie asked abruptly.

“To edify and instruct,” he said promptly. “All art should point a moral.”

“Like The Light of the World,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “ ‘For behold, I stand at the door and knock. . . .’ Revelation chapter three, verse twenty.” He turned to Mrs. Mering. “So may I tell the Reverend Mr. Chichester he can count on your assistance?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Mering said. “We are leaving for Torquay the day after tomorrow.”

Verity looked up, stricken, and the Colonel lowered his paper.

“My nerves,” Mrs. Mering said, looking hard at Professor Peddick. “So many unsettling things have happened in the last few days. I feel the need to consult with Dr. Fawleigh. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He’s an expert in spiritism. Ectoplasm. And from there, we shall journey to Kent to meet Mr. St. Trewes’s parents and make arrangements for the wedding.”

“Ah,” Mr. Arbitage said. “But you will be back by August, I do hope. Our summer fête was such a success I’ve decided we should have a St. Bartholomew’s Day Fair, and we will of course want to have a fortuneteller. And a jumble sale. Mrs. Chattisbourne wanted to have a whist drive instead, but I told her the jumble sale was destined to become a tradition. And all thanks to you. I have already been collecting items for it. Miss Stiggins donated a boot rack, and my great-aunt is sending me an etching of The Battle of Naseby!”

“Ah, yes, Naseby!” Professor Peddick said. “Prince Rupert’s cavalry charge. A classic example of how one can be within a hairsbreadth of success, only to see it turn into defeat, and all because of not using forethought.”

There was some more discussion of the perils of acting without thinking, and then the Reverend Mr. Arbitage delivered a benediction and took his leave.

Tossie scarcely seemed to notice. “I am rather tired,” she said as soon as Baine had shown him out. She kissed her father and then her mother.

“You’re looking pale,” Mrs. Mering said. “The sea air will do you good.”

“Yes, Mama,” she said as though she were thinking of something else. “Good night,” and went upstairs.

“It is time we all retired,” Mrs. Mering said, standing up. “It has been a long—” she fixed Professor Peddick with a gimlet eye, “—and eventful day for all of us, and, Mesiel, you will need to be up early to accompany Professor Peddick on his journey.”

“Accompany Professor Peddick?” Colonel Mering said, stammering. “Can’t leave my red-spotted silver tancho.”

“I am certain you would wish to ensure that Professor Peddick does not drop from sight,” Mrs. Mering said firmly. “I am certain you would not wish to be responsible for leaving a second family uninformed and bereft.”

“No, of course not,” Colonel Mering said, defeated. “Glad to see you home, Professor Peddick.”

While they consulted with Baine about train times, I went over to Verity and whispered, “I’ll report in in the morning when I take Cyril out to the stable.”

She nodded numbly. “All right.” She took one last look round, as if she hoped Mr. C might still appear. “Good night,” she said and went upstairs.

“Come, Cyril,” Terence said, looking meaningfully at me. “Time for you to go out to the stable,” but I wasn’t paying any attention.

I was looking at the writing table, where Tossie had left her diary.

“I’ll be up in a moment,” I said, sidling over in front of it. “I just want to find a book to read.”

“Books!” Mrs. Mering said. “Entirely too many people read books these days,” and swept from the room.

“Come along, Cyril,” Terence said. Cyril staggered to his feet. “Still raining outside, Baine?”

“I’m afraid so, sir,” Baine said and went to open the front door for them.

“Pickett’s Charge!” Professor Peddick said to Colonel Mering. “At the American battle of Gettysburg. Another excellent example of acting without thinking! How would Overforce account for Pickett’s Charge?” and they went out together.

I shut the parlor door behind them and hurried over to the writing desk. The diary was open, with the pen and the carnation penwiper covering the bottom two-thirds of the page. At the top was written, in a ruffly hand, “June the fifteenth,” and below it, “Today we went to Cov—”

I lifted the penwiper. “—entry,” it read, the “y” trailing off into blankness. Whatever she’d recorded for posterity about the great day, she hadn’t done it yet, but there might be clues to Mr. C in earlier entries.

I shut the diary, grabbed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vols. One and Two, off the shelf behind, sandwiched the diary between them, and turned round with the books in my hands.

Baine was standing there. “I shall be glad to take Miss Mering’s diary up to her so that you are not inconvenienced, sir,” he said.

“Excellent,” I said, and extricated it from between the Gibbon. “I was just taking it up to her.”

“As you wish, sir!”

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “You take it up. I think I shall take a walk before bed.” A patently ridiculous remark with the rain beating against the French doors, and one he didn’t believe any more than he believed I was taking Tossie’s diary up to her. But he only said, “As you wish, sir,” again.

“Did anyone come to the door tonight?” I said. “Besides the Reverend Mr. Arbitage?”

“No, sir,”

“Or to the kitchen door? A peddler? Or someone seeking shelter from the storm?”

“No, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

Yes, that would be all. And in a few years, what? The Luftwaffe would finish off the RAF and commence landing at Dover, and Tossie and Terence’s grandchildren would fight them on the beaches and in the ditches and in Christ Church Meadow and at Iffley, to no avail. They would hang Nazi banners from Buckingham Palace’s balconies and goose-step through Muchings End and Oxford and Coventry. Well, at least Coventry wouldn’t burn down. Only the Houses of Parliament. And civilization.

And the space-time continuum would correct itself eventually. Unless Hitler’s scientists discovered time travel.

“Will that be all, sir?” Baine said again.

“Yes,” I said, “that will be all,” and turned to open the door.

Rain blew in, and getting wet and cold seemed somehow fitting. I started out.

“I have taken the liberty of putting Mr. St. Trewes’s friend in your room, sir,” Baine said.

“Thank you,” I said gratefully. I shut the door, turned, and started past him up the stairs.

“Mr. Henry,” he said.

“Yes?” I said, but whatever he intended to say, he must have thought better of it.

“An excellent book,” he said. “The Decline and Fall.”

“Edifying and instructive,” I said, and went up to bed.

“And kiss me, Kate!  We will be married a Sunday.”

Petruchio

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - T W O

Inherent Optimism of Time Travel—An Early Departure—A Problem—Gladys and Gladys—Finch Is Missing—Anecdotes of Cats’ Maternal Resourcefulness—A Delayed Departure—Eavesdropping—Cabbages—Verity Is Missing—Baine Quotes Shakespeare—Illiteracy Laws Proposed—The Mystery of the Waterlogged Diary Solved—A Premature Departure

I felt better in the morning. When I came down with Cyril at six, the rain had stopped, the sky was blue, and the wet grass glittered like diamonds.

And time travel is inherently hopeful. Failing to fix it once, you get innumerable other chances, or at least somebody does, and a week from now, or a year, when the forensics expert finally managed to decipher the diary, Carruthers or Warder or some addled new recruit could come back on the fifteenth and see to it that Mr. C made his entrance on cue.

We hadn’t succeeded, but at this very moment they might have solved the Mystery of Waterloo and self-correction. At this very moment T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy might be sending someone through to intercept me on my way to Oxford’s railway station and keep me from meeting Terence and mucking up his love life. Or to separate Professor Peddick and Professor Overforce. Or to stop Verity from wading into the Thames and rescuing Princess Arjumand in the first place. Or to send me to World War I to recover from my time-lag.

The cat would swim to shore, Terence would meet Maud, and the Luftwaffe would bomb London. And I would never meet Verity. Small price to pay for saving the universe. Well worth the sacrifice.

And I wouldn’t feel any loss because I wouldn’t ever have met her. I wondered suddenly if Terence did, if he knew on some level that he hadn’t met his true love. And if he did, what did he feel? Mawkish sorrow, like one of his Victorian poems? Or a gnawing of some need unsatisfied? Or just a grayness to everything?

I took Cyril out to the stable. Princess Arjumand had come down with us, and she stalked ahead across the wet grass, her tail in the air, coming back periodically to wind herself around Cyril’s hind legs and my ankles. There was a sound over by the stable, and the big doors began to creak open.

“Hide,” I said, scooping up Princess Arjumand and ducking back into the shelter of the kitchen door. The groom, looking like he’d just been awakened, pushed the doors open, and the driver led two horses, hitched to the carriage, out. The carriage to take Professor Peddick and Colonel Mering to the station.

I looked toward the house. Baine was bringing out the luggage and setting it on the front steps. Professor Peddick stood behind him in his academic gown and mortarboard, holding his kettle of fish against his stomach and talking to Terence.

“Come along,” I whispered to Cyril and started toward the side of the stable. Princess Arjumand wriggled wildly in my arms, trying to get free, and I let her down. She took off like a shot across the lawn. I led Cyril in the groom’s door.

“Make it look like you’ve been here all night,” I said, and Cyril promptly went over to his burlap sacking, turned round three times, flopped down, and began to snore loudly.

“Good boy,” I said, and let myself out of the stable. And collided with Terence.

“Have you got Cyril?” he said.

“I just brought him down,” I said. “Why? Is something wrong? Did Mrs. Mering see me?”

He shook his head. “Baine came and knocked me up this morning and said Colonel Mering was ill and would I accompany Professor Peddick to Oxford. Seems he caught a chill yesterday fishing for trout, and Mrs. Mering wants to make certain Professor Peddick makes it home. Good idea, actually. He’s likely to spot a hill that reminds him of the Battle of Hastings or something and get off the train. I thought I’d take Cyril. Thought it would be a bit of a holiday for him from—” he stopped and started again, “—especially as he didn’t get to go to Coventry yesterday. Is he in the stable?”

“Next to the hay bales,” I said, but when he opened the groom’s door, Cyril was standing just inside, wagging his pudgy body.

“Would you like to take a journey by rail, old man?” Terence said, and the two of them set off happily for the house.

I waited till the carriage had set off and Baine had gone back into the house and then legged it out to the laburnum arbor before the groom came yawning back to the stables, and then went out through the herbaceous border and across the croquet lawn to the gazebo.

There was someone in it. I circled round the weeping willow and came up behind the lilacs. A dark figure was sitting hunched on one of the side benches. Who would be sitting out here at this hour? Mrs. Mering, hunting for ghosts? Baine, catching up on his reading?

I parted the lilac branches so I could see better, sending a shower of water over my blazer and flannels. Whoever it was, they had a cloak wrapped around them and a hood pulled up over their head. Tossie? Waiting for a rendezvous with her life-changing lover? Or the mysterious Mr. C himself?

I couldn’t see the figure’s face from there. I needed to be on the other side of the gazebo. I carefully let go of the branches, dousing myself again, and stepped back squarely on Princess Arjumand.

“Mrowrrrr!” she yowled, and the figure darted up, clutching the cloak. The hood fell back.

“Verity!” I said.

“Ned?”

“Mreer!” Princess Arjumand said. I scooped her up to see if I’d hurt her. “Mere,” she said, and began to purr.

I carried her round the lilacs and over to where Verity was standing. “What are you doing out here?” I said.

Verity looked as pale as one of Mrs. Mering’s spirits. The cloak, which must have been an evening cloak of some kind, was drenched, and under it she had on her white nightgown.

“How long have you been out here?” I said. Princess Arjumand was squirming. I put her down. “You didn’t have to report in. I told you I’d do it when I brought Cyril down. What did Mr. Dunworthy say about—” and saw her face. “What is it?”

“The net won’t open,” she said.

“What do you mean, it won’t open?”

“I mean, I’ve been out here for three hours. It won’t open.”

“Sit down and tell me exactly what happened,” I said, indicating the bench.

“It won’t open!” she said. “I couldn’t sleep, and I thought the sooner we reported in, the better, and I could be back before anybody got up, so I came out to the drop, and the net wouldn’t open.”

“The drop’s not there?”

“No, it’s there. You can see the shimmer. But when I step into it, nothing happens.”

“Could you be doing something wrong? Are you sure you were standing in the right place?”

“I’ve stood in a dozen different places,” she said impatiently. “It won’t open!”

“All right, all right,” I said. “Could someone have been there? Someone who might have seen you? Mrs. Mering, or Baine, or—”

“I thought of that. After the second time, I walked down to the river and out to the fishpond and over to the flower garden, but no one was there.”

“And you aren’t wearing something from this era?”

“I thought of that, too, but this is the nightgown I brought through in my luggage, and, no, it hasn’t been mended or had a new button sewn on.”

“Maybe it’s you,” I said. “I’ll try.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said more cheerfully. “The next drop should be any minute.”

She led me out of the gazebo and around to the side to a patch of grass next to a cluster of pink peonies. There was already a faint glitter to the grass. I hastily checked my clothes. Blazer, flannels, socks, shoes, and shirt were all the ones I’d worn through.

The air shimmered, and I stepped into the very center of the grass. The light began to grow. “Is this what happened when you tried it?” I said.

The light abruptly died. Condensation glittered on the peonies.

“Yes,” Verity said.

“Perhaps it’s my collar,” I said, unfastening it and handing it to her. “I can’t tell mine from the ones Elliott Chattisbourne loaned me.”

“It’s not your collar,” Verity said. “It’s no use. We’re trapped here. Just like Carruthers.”

I had a sudden vision of staying here forever, playing croquet and eating kedgeree for breakfast and boating on the Thames, Verity trailing her hand in the brown water and looking up at me from under her beribboned hat.

“I’m sorry, Ned. This is all my fault.”

“We’re not trapped,” I said. “All right. Let’s be Harriet and Lord Peter and examine all the possibilities.”

“I’ve already considered all the possibilities,” she said tightly. “And the only one that makes any sense is that it’s all breaking down, like T.J. said it would.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “It takes years for an incongruity to collapse the continuum. You saw the models. It maybe breaking down in 1940, but not a week after the incongruity.”

She was looking like she wanted to believe me.

“All right,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “You go back to the house and get dressed before you compromise us both and I have to marry you.”

That made her smile, at least. “And then have breakfast, so Mrs. Mering won’t think you’re missing and send out a search party for you. After breakfast, tell her you’re going sketching and come back out here and wait for me. I’m going to go find Finch and get another opinion.”

She nodded.

“This is probably nothing, a glitch, and Warder just hasn’t noticed it yet. Or maybe she’s shut down all return drops till she gets Carruthers back. Whatever it is, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

She nodded again, a little more cheerfully, and I took off for the Chattisbournes, wishing I believed anything I’d just said, and that the Victorians hadn’t lived so far apart.

A maid in a ruffled apron and cap answered the door.

“Gladys, I need to speak to Mr. Finch, the butler,” I said, when I was able to catch my breath. I felt like Professor Peddick’s runner from the battle of Marathon who’d run all the way to Sparta. He’d died, hadn’t he, after delivering his message? “Is he here?”

“I’m very sorry, sir,” the maid said, dropping an even worse curtsey than Jane’s. “Mr. and Mrs. Chattisbourne are not at home. Would you wish to leave your card?”

“No,” I said. “It’s Mr. Finch I wish to speak to. Is he here?”

She had clearly not been briefed for this contingency.

“You may leave your calling card, if you wish,” she said, and held out a small silver plate embossed with curlicues.

“Where did Mr. and Mrs. Chattisbourne go?” I persisted. “Did Mr. Finch drive them?”

She looked completely undone. “Mr. and Mrs. Chattisbourne are not at home,” she said, and shut the door in my face.

I went round to the kitchen and knocked on the door. It was answered by another maid. This one had on a canvas apron and a kerchief and was armed with a potato peeler.

“I need to speak to the butler, Mr. Finch, Gladys,” I said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Chattisbourne aren’t here,” she said, and I was afraid she was going to be equally unforthcoming, but she added, “They went over to Donnington. To the St. Mark’s Fancy Works Sale.”

“It’s Mr. Finch I need to speak to. Did he accompany them?”

“No,” she said. “He’s up to Little Rushlade, buying cabbages. He left this morning carrying a big basket to fetch them home in.”

“When?” I asked, wondering if I could catch up with him.

“Before breakfast. It was scarcely light out. What’s wrong with Farmer Gamin’s cabbages down the road I don’t know, but he says only the best for Mrs. Chattisbourne’s table. I say one cabbage is as good as another.” She made a face. “It’s three hours’ walk at the least.”

Three hours’ walk. There was no point in going after him, and he wouldn’t be back soon enough to justify waiting. “When he gets back, would you be good enough to tell him that Mr. Henry from the Merings’ was here and to please come see him at once?”

She nodded. “Though I should imagine he’ll be all tuckered out by the time he gets back. Why he should have decided to go today, after the night we had, I don’t know. Mrs. Marmalade had her kittens last night, and a time we had finding out where she’d hid them.”

I wondered if the rules against discussing sex didn’t apply to the servant classes, or if once the kittens were a fact, they became an acceptable topic.

“Last time it was the root cellar,” she said, “and once their eyes are open, you can never find them all to drown them. And the time before we never did find where she’d hid them. That Mrs. Marmalade’s a sly boots, she is.”

“Yes, well, if you’d just please give him my message as soon as he gets back,” I said, putting on my boater.

“The time before that, it was Miss Pansy’s sewing box. And the time before that the linen drawer in the upstairs cupboard. The sly boots know you’ll try to take their kittens, you know, and so they hide them in the most peculiar places. When the Merings’ cat had her kittens last winter, she hid them in the wine cellar and they didn’t find them for nearly three weeks! Christmas Day it was they finally found them, and what a time catching them all. When I was in service at the Widow Wallace’s, the cat had her kittens in the oven!”

I managed to get away after several more anecdotes about resourceful cat mothers, and hotfooted it back to the gazebo.

At first I didn’t see Verity, and I thought perhaps she’d tried it again while I was gone and been successful, but she was on the other side of the gazebo, sitting under a tree. She was wearing the white dress I’d first seen her in, and her neck was bent gracefully over her sketchbook.

“Any luck?” I said.

“Nothing.” She got to her feet. “Where’s Finch?”

“Off buying cabbages in a neighboring village,” I said. “I left a message for him to come to Muchings End as soon as he gets back.”

“A message,” she said. “That’s a good idea. We could try and send a message.” She looked speculatively at her sketchbook. “You don’t have any paper you brought through with you, do you?”

I shook my head. “Everything I brought through was washed away when the boat capsized. No, wait. I’ve got a bank note.” I got it out of my pocket. “But what do we write with?”

“We take the chance that a milliliter or so of carbon is a nonsignificant article,” she said, holding up her charcoal pencil.

“That’s too thick,” I said. “I’ll go back to the house and fetch a pen and ink. When’s the next rendezvous?”

“Now,” Verity said, and pointed at the shimmering air.

There wasn’t time to race to the house and back, let alone scrawl, “Can’t get through,” and our coordinates. “We’ll need to wait till next time,” I said.

Verity was only half-listening to me. She was watching the growing glow in the grass. She stepped into the center of it and handed me her sketchbook and pencil.

“You see?” she said. The glow immediately dimmed. “It still won’t open,” and disappeared in a shimmer of condensation.

Well, and that was that. The continuum hadn’t broken down, at least not yet, and we weren’t trapped here. Ah, well, it was probably for the best. I truly did hate kedgeree, and croquet matches were deadly. And if St. Michael’s was any indication, the late summer would bring on hordes of jumble sales and fêtes.

I looked at my pocket watch. It was half past IX. I needed to get back to the house before somebody saw me and asked me what I was doing loitering out here, and with luck I might still be able to get some devilled kidneys or smoked kippers from the Stag at Bay.

I started for the rockery, and nearly ran into Baine. He was standing looking grimly out over the Thames, and I scanned the water, looking for Princess Arjumand out in the middle of it treading water with her white paws.

I didn’t see her, but Baine was going to see me in a moment. I ducked back into the lilacs, trying not to rustle any leaves, and nearly stepped on Princess Arjumand.

“Muir,” she said loudly. “Mrowr.”

Baine turned and looked straight at the lilacs, frowning.

“Mere,” Princess Arjumand said. Shhh, I said silently, putting my finger to my lips. She began rubbing up against my leg, meowing loudly. I stooped to pick her up and knocked against a dead branch. It snapped off, its brittle leaves rattling sharply.

Baine started toward the lilacs. I began thinking up excuses. A lost croquet ball? And what was I doing playing croquet by myself at nine o’clock in the morning? Sleepwalking? No, I was fully dressed. I looked longingly back at the gazebo, gauging the distance and time to the next rendezvous. Both too far. And, knowing Princess Arjumand, she’d saunter in at the last minute and cause another incongruity in the continuum. It would have to be a lost croquet ball.

“Mire,” Princess Arjumand said loudly, and Baine raised his arms to part the lilac bushes.

“Baine, come here immediately,” Tossie said from the towpath. “I wish to speak to you.”

“Yes, miss,” he said, and went over to where she was standing, dressed in ruffles, tucks, and lace, and holding her diary.

I took advantage of the distraction to scoop Princess Arjumand up and step farther into the depths of the lilacs. She snuggled against my chest and began purring loudly.

“Yes, miss?” Baine said.

“I insist that you apologize to me,” Tossie said imperiously. “You had no right to say what you did yesterday.”

“You are quite right,” Baine said solemnly. “It was not my place to express my opinions, even though they were solicited, and I do apologize for speaking as I did.”

“Meeee,” Princess Arjumand said. In listening, I had forgotten to keep petting her, and she put her paw gently on my hand. “Mooorre.”

Tossie looked round, distractedly, and I backed farther out of sight behind the bushes.

“Admit that it was a beautiful piece of art,” Tossie said.

There was a long pause, and then Baine said quietly, “As you wish, Miss Mering.”

Tossie’s cheeks flushed pink. “Not ‘as I wish.’ The Reverend Mr. Doult said it was . . .” There was a pause, “. . . ‘an example of all that was best in modern art.’ I copied it down in my diary.”

“Yes, miss.”

Her cheeks went even pinker. “Are you daring to disagree with a man of the cloth?”

“No, miss.”

“My fiancé Mr. St. Trewes said it was extraordinary.”

“Yes, miss,” Baine said quietly. “Will that be all, miss?”

“No, it will not be all. I demand that you admit you were wrong about its being an atrocity and mawkishly sentimental.”

“As you wish, miss.”

“Not as I wish,” she said, stamping her foot. “Stop saying that.”

“Yes, miss.”

“Mr. St. Trewes and the Reverend Mr. Doult are gentlemen. How dare you contradict their opinions! You are only a common servant.”

“Yes, miss,” he said wearily.

“You should be dismissed for being insolent to your betters.”

There was another long pause, and then Baine said, “All the diary entries and dismissals in the world cannot change the truth. Galileo recanted under threat of torture, but that did not make the sun revolve round the earth. If you dismiss me, the vase will still be vulgar, I will still be right, and your taste will still be plebeian, no matter what you write in your diary.”

“Plebeian?” Tossie said, bright pink. “How dare you speak like that to your mistress? You are dismissed.” She pointed imperiously at the house. “Pack your things immediately.”

“Yes, miss,” Baine said. “E pur si muove.”

“What?” Tossie said, bright red with rage. “What did you say?”

“I said, now that you have dismissed me, I am no longer a member of the servant class and am therefore in a position to speak freely,” he said calmly.

“You are not in a position to speak to me at all,” Tossie said, raising her diary like a weapon. “Leave at once.”

“I dared to speak the truth to you because I felt you were deserving of it,” Baine said seriously. “I had only your best interests at heart, as I have always had. You have been blessed with great riches; not only with the riches of wealth, position, and beauty, but with a bright mind and a keen sensibility, as well as with a fine spirit. And yet you squander those riches on croquet and organdies and trumpery works of art. You have at your disposal a library of the great minds of the past, and yet you read the foolish novels of Charlotte Yonge and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Given the opportunity to study science, you converse with conjurors wearing cheesecloth and phosphorescent paint. Confronted by the glories of Gothic architecture, you admire instead a cheap imitation of it, and confronted by the truth, you stamp your foot like a spoilt child and demand to be told fairy stories.”

It was quite a speech, and after it, I fully expected Tossie to hit him over the head with the diary and sweep off in a flurry of ruffles, but instead she said, “You think I have a bright mind?”

“I do. With study and discipline, you would be capable of marvelous things.”

From my mid-lilac vantage point, their faces were hidden from me, and I had a feeling seeing them was important. I moved over to the left to a thinner bush. And ran squarely into Finch. I nearly dropped Princess Arjumand. She yowled, and Finch yelped.

“Shh,” I said to both of them. “Finch, did you get the message I left at the Chattisbournes’?” I whispered.

“No, I’ve been in Oxford,” Finch said, beaming, “where, I’m delighted to say, my mission was a complete success.”

“Shh,” I whispered. “Keep your voice down. The butler and Tossie are having an argument.”

“An argument?” he said, pursing his lips. “A butler never argues with his employer.”

“Well, this one does,” I said.

Finch was rustling under the lilacs. “I’m glad I ran into you,” he said, coming up with a basket full of cabbages. “Where’s Miss Kindle? I need to speak with both of you.”

“What do you mean, ‘Where’s Miss Kindle?’ I thought you said you just came through from the lab.”

“I did,” he said.

“Then you must have seen her. She just went through.”

“To the laboratory?”

“Of course to the laboratory,” I said. “How long were you there before you came through?”

“An hour and a half,” Finch said. “We were discussing the next phase of my mission, but no one came through during that time.”

“Could she have come through without you noticing?” I said. “While you were having this discussion?”

“No, sir. We were standing in the net area, and Miss Warder has been keeping a very close watch on the console because of Carruthers.” He looked thoughtful. “Had you noticed any problem with the net?”

“Problem?” I said, forgetting we were supposed to keep our voices down. “We’ve been trying for the last five hours to get the bloody thing to open!”

“Shh,” Finch said, “keep your voice down,” but it scarcely mattered. Baine’s and Tossie’s voices had risen to shouting point.

“And don’t quote Tennyson at me!” Tossie said furiously.

“That was not Tennyson,” Baine shouted. “It was William Shakespeare, who is eminently quotable. ‘Think you a little din can daunt mine ears? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field and heaven’s artillery thunder in the skies?’ ”

“The net wouldn’t open?” Finch said.

“That’s what my message was about,” I said. “It wouldn’t open for either of us. Verity’d been trying since three o’clock this morning.” A thought struck me. “When did you go through from here?”

“At half past two. ”

“That was just before Verity tried,” I said. “How much slippage was there?”

“None,” he said, looking worried. “Oh, dear, Mr. Lewis said something like this might happen.”

“Something like what?”

“Some of his Waterloo models showed aberrations in the net, due to the incongruity.”

“What sort of aberrations?” I said, raising my voice again.

“Failure to open, destination malfunction.”

“What do you mean, ‘destination malfunction’?”

“In two of the simulations, the historian was sent to some other destination on the return drop. Not just locational slippage, but an entirely different space-time location. Mexico in 1872, in one instance.”

“I’ve got to go tell Mr. Dunworthy,” I said, starting for the drop. “How long ago did you come through?”

“At twenty till ten,” he said, scurrying after me, taking out his pocket watch. “Twelve minutes ago.”

Good. That meant only four minutes till the next one. I reached the gazebo and went over to the spot where Verity had gone through.

“Do you think this is a good idea, sir?” Finch said worriedly. “If the net’s not working properly—”

“Verity might be in Mexico or God knows where else,” I said.

“But she’d have come back, sir, wouldn’t she, as soon as she realized it was the wrong destination?”

“Not if the net wouldn’t open,” I said, trying to find the spot where Verity had stood.

“You’re right,” Finch said. “What can I do, sir? I’m expected back from Little Rushlade,” he indicated the basket, “but I could—”

“You’d better take your cabbages to the Chattisbournes’ and then meet me back here. If I’m not here, you go through and tell Mr. Dunworthy what’s happened.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “What if the net won’t open, sir?”

“It’ll open,” I said grimly.

“Yes, sir,” he said and hurried off with his basket.

I looked hard at the grass, willing the shimmer to start. I was still holding the cat, and I couldn’t just put her down. She was liable to walk into the net at the last minute, and another incongruity was the last thing we needed.

There were still three minutes left. I pushed back through the lilacs to where Tossie and Baine had been, intending to put the cat down where they could see her.

Things had apparently not improved. “How dare you!” Tossie said.

“ ‘Nay, come, Kate, come!’ ” Baine said. “ ‘You must not look so sour.’ ”

“How dare you call me Kate, as if I were a common servant like you!”

I squatted down and tipped Princess Arjumand out of my hands. She sauntered off through the bushes toward Tossie, and I sprinted back to the drop.

“I intend to tell my fiancé how insolently you spoke to me,” Tossie shouted. Apparently she hadn’t noticed Princess Arjumand. “When Mr. St. Trewes and I are married, I intend to make him run for Parliament and pass a law making it a crime for servants to read books and have ideas.”

There was a faint hum, and the air began to shimmer. I stepped into the center of it.

“And I intend to write down everything you said to me in my diary,” she said, “so that my children and my children’s children shall know what a rude, insolent, barbaric, common—what are you doing?”

The net began to shimmer in earnest, and I didn’t dare step out of it. I craned my neck, trying to see over the lilacs.

“What are you doing?” Tossie cried. “Put me down!” A string of screamlets. “Put me down this instant!”

“I have only your best interests at heart,” Baine said.

I looked at the growing light, trying to gauge how long I had. Not long enough, and I couldn’t risk waiting for the next drop, not with Verity God-knew-where. Mexico had had a revolution in the 1870s, hadn’t it?

“I shall have you arrested for this!” A series of thumps, as of someone beating on someone’s chest. “You arrogant, horrid, uncivilized bully!”

“ ‘And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour,’ ” Baine said. “ ‘He that knows better how to tame a shrew, now let him speak.’ ”

The air around me filled with light. “Not yet,” I said, and, as if in response, it dimmed a little. “No!” I said, not knowing whether I wanted the net to open or not.

“Put me down!” Tossie demanded.

“As you wish, miss!” Baine said.

The light from the net flared and enfolded me. “Wait!” I said as it closed, and thought I heard a splash.

“Can you row?” the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles as she spoke.

“Yes, a little—but not on land—and not with needles—” Alice was beginning to say, when suddenly the needles turned into oars in her hands, and she found they were in a little boat, gliding along between banks: so there was nothing for it but to do her best.

Lewis Carroll

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - T H R E E

Arrival—In the Lab—I Attempt to Ascertain My Space-Time Location—I Hide—Zuleika Dobson—Eavesdropping—Treasures of Various Cathedrals—In a Bookstore—Timelessness of Men’s Clothing—Timelessness of Books—More Eavesdropping—Spoiling the Ends of Mysteries—In a Dungeon—Bats—I Attempt to Use the Little Gray Cells—I Fall Asleep—Yet Another Conversation with a Workman—Origin of Ghost Legend in Coventry Cathedral—Arrival

Wherever I was, it wasn’t the lab. The room looked like one of Balliol’s old lecture rooms. There was a blackboard on one wall and, above it, the mounting for an old-fashioned pull-down map, and on the door were a number of taped-up notices.

But it was obviously being used as a lab. On a long metal table was a row of primitive digital-processor computers and monitors, all linked together with gray and yellow and orange cords and a clutch of adaptors.

I looked back at the net I had just come through. It was nothing but a chalked circle, with a large masking-tape “X” in the center. Behind it, and attached to it by an even more dangerous-looking tangle of cords and copper wires, was a frightening assortment of capacitors, metal boxes studded with dials and knobs, lengths of PVC pipe, thick cables, jacks, and resistors, all taped together with wads of wide silver tape, which had to be the mechanism of the net, though I could not have imagined trying to cross the street in such a contraption, let alone going back in time.

A horrible thought struck me. What if this was the lab after all? What if the incongruity had altered more than Terence and Maud’s marriage and the bombing of Berlin?

I strode over to the door, hoping against hope the printed notices didn’t say 2057. And weren’t in German.

They weren’t. The top one said, “Parking is forbidden on the Broad, Parks Road, and in the Naffield College car park. Violators will be towed,” which sounded fascist, but then the Parking Authority always sounded fascist. And there were no swastikas on it, or on the railway schedule beside it. A large notice on pink paper read, “Fees for Hilary term are now past due. If you have not paid, please see the bursar immediately.”

And, inevitably, below it, “Orphans of the Pandemic Jumble Sale and St. Michael’s at the North Gate Charity Drive. April fifth, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Bargains. White elephants. Treasures.”

Well, it definitely wasn’t Nazi England. And the Pandemic had still happened.

I examined the notices. Not a sign of a year on any of them, no dates at all, except for the upcoming jumble sale at St. Michael’s at the North Gate, and even that wasn’t certain. I’d seen notices over a year old on the notice board at Balliol.

I went over to the windows, pried the tape off one corner, and pulled the paper aside. I was looking out at Balliol’s front quad at a beautiful spring day. The lilacs outside the chapel were in bloom, and in the center of the quad a huge beech tree was just leafing out.

There was a chestnut tree in the center of the quad now, and it was at least thirty years old. Before 2020, then, but after the Pandemic, and the railway schedule meant it was before the Underground had reached Oxford. And after the invention of time travel. Between 2013 and 2020.

I went back over to the computers. The middle monitor was blinking, “Push ‘reset.’ ”

I did, and the veils above the net descended with a thunk. They weren’t transparent, they were dusty dark-red velvet that looked like they belonged in amateur theatricals.

“Destination?” the screen was blinking now. I had no idea what system of coordinates they’d used in the Twenties. Mr. Dunworthy had told me stories about the point-and-shoot time travel they’d done in the early days, without Pulhaski coordinates, without safeguards or parameter checks or any idea of where they were going or whether they’d get back. The good old days.

But at least the computer spoke English and not some primitive code. I typed in, “Current location?”

The screen went blank and then began blinking, “Error.”

I thought a minute and then typed in, “Help screen.”

The screen went blank again and stayed blank. Wonderful.

I began punching function keys. The screen began blinking, “Destination?”

There was a sound at the door. I looked round wildly for someplace to hide. There wasn’t any. Except the net, which was no place at all. I dived into the red velvet curtains and yanked them together.

Whoever was at the door was having difficulty getting in. There was a good deal of rattling and jimmying before the door opened.

I retreated to the center of the net and stood very still. There was the sound of the door’s closing, and then silence.

I stood there, listening. Nothing. Had whoever it was changed their mind and gone out again? I took a careful step toward the edge and pulled the curtains a millimeter apart. A beautiful young woman was standing by the door, biting her lip and looking straight at me.

I fought the impulse to jerk back. She hadn’t seen me. I wasn’t sure she was seeing the net either. She seemed lost in some inner vision of her own.

She was wearing a calf-length white dress that could have been from any decade from the 1930s on. Her red hair was long and looped up in the knotted ponytail of the Millennium era, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Historians in the Fifties wore them, too, along with braids and snoods and coronets, anything to keep the long hair they had to have for their drops out of the way.

The young woman looked younger than Tossie, but probably wasn’t. She was wearing a wedding ring. She vaguely reminded me of someone. It wasn’t Verity, though her determined expression made me think of Verity. And not Lady Schrapnell or any of her ancestors. Somebody I’d met at one of my jumble sales?

I squinted at her, trying to get a fix. Her hair was wrong. Should it be lighter? Reddish-blonde, perhaps?

She stood there a long minute with the look Verity had had—frightened, angry, determined—and then walked rapidly in the direction of the computers and out of my line of sight.

Silence again. I listened for the quiet click of keys, hoping she wasn’t setting up a drop. Or typing in directions for the veils to rise.

I couldn’t see from this angle. I moved carefully to the next break in the curtain and peered through. She was standing in front of the comps, staring at them, or, rather, past them, through them, with that same look of determination.

And something else I’d never seen on Verity’s face, not even when Terence had told us he and Tossie were engaged, an edge of reckless desperation.

There was a sound at the door. She turned and immediately started toward the door. And out of range again. And the person at the door obviously had a key. By the time I’d moved back to my original vantage point, he was standing in the open door, looking at her.

He was wearing jeans and a ragged sweater and spectacles. His hair was light brown and the longish indeterminate cut historians adopt because it can be maneuvered into almost any era’s style, and he looked familiar, too, though it was probably just the expression on his face, which I would have known anywhere. I should. It was the expression I had every time I looked at Verity.

He was holding a fat stack of papers and folders, and he still had the key to the lab in his hand.

“Hullo, Jim,” she said, her back to me, and I wished I could see her face, too.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a voice I knew as well as my own. Good Lord! I was looking at Mr. Dunworthy.

Mr. Dunworthy! He’d told me stories about the infancy of time travel, but I had always thought of him as, you know, Mr. Dunworthy. I hadn’t imagined him as skinny or awkward. Or young. Or in love with somebody he couldn’t have.

“I came to talk to you,” she said. “And to Shoji. Where is he?”

“Meeting with the head,” Mr. Dunwor—Jim said. “Again.” He went over to the table and dumped his load of papers and folders on the end of it.

I switched peepholes, wishing they’d stay put.

“Is this a bad time?” she said.

“The worst of times,” he said, looking through the stack for something. “We’ve got a new head of the history faculty since you left to marry Bitty. Mr. Arnold P. Lassiter. “P” for Prudence. He’s so cautious we haven’t done a drop in three months. ‘Time travel is an endeavor that should not be undertaken without a complete knowledge of how it works.’ Which means filling up forms and more forms. He wants complete analyses on every drop—the ones he’s willing to authorize, that is, which are few and far between—parameter checks, slippage graphs, impact probability stats, security checks—” He stopped rummaging. “How did you get into the lab?”

“It was unlocked,” she said, which was a lie. I twisted my head around, trying to find an angle from which I could see her face.

“Wonderful,” Jim said. “If Prudence finds out, he’ll have a fit.” He found the folder he wanted and pulled it out of the stack. “Why isn’t Bitty the Bishop with you?” he said, almost belligerently.

“He’s in London, appealing the C of E’s ruling.”

Jim’s face changed. “I heard about Coventry’s being declared nonessential,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lizzie.”

Coventry. Lizzie. This was Elizabeth Bittner he was talking to, the wife of the last bishop of Coventry. The frail, white-haired lady I’d interviewed in Coventry. No wonder I’d thought her hair should be lighter.

“Nonessential,” she said. “A cathedral nonessential. Religion will be ruled nonessential next, and then Art and Truth. Not to mention History.” She walked toward the blacked-out windows and out of range.

Will you stand still? I thought.

“It’s so unfair,” she said. “They kept Bristol, you know. Bristol!”

“Why didn’t Coventry make the cut?” Jim said, moving so I couldn’t see him either.

“The C of E ruled that all churches and cathedrals have to be seventy-five percent self-supporting, which means tourists. And the tourists only come to see tombs and treasures. Canterbury’s got Becket, Winchester’s got Jane Austen and a black Tournai marble font, and St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields is in London, which has the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s. We used to have treasures. Unfortunately, they were all destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940,” she said bitterly.

“There’s the baptistry window of the new cathedral,” Jim said.

“Yes. Unfortunately there’s also a church that looks like a factory warehouse and stained-glass windows that face the wrong way and the ugliest tapestry in existence. Mid-Nineteenth Century was not a good period in art. Or architecture.”

“They come to see the ruins of the old cathedral, don’t they?”

“Some of them. Not enough. Bitty tried to convince the Appropriations Committee that Coventry’s a special case, that it has historical importance, but it didn’t work. World War II was a long time ago. Scarcely anybody remembers it.” She sighed. “The appeal’s not going to work either.”

“What happens then? Will you have to close?”

She must have shaken her head. “We can’t afford to close. The diocese is too far in debt. We’ll have to sell.” She abruptly moved back into my line of sight, her face set. “The Church of the Hereafter made an offer. It’s a New Age sect. Ouija boards, manifestations, conversations with the dead. It’ll kill him, you know.”

“Will he be completely out of a job?”

“No,” she said wryly. “Religion’s nonessential, which means clergy are hard to come by. Rats deserting a sinking ship and all that. They’ve offered him the position of senior canon at Salisbury.”

“Good,” Jim said, too heartily. “Salisbury’s not on the nonessential list, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It has plenty of treasures. And Turner. It’s too bad he couldn’t have come to Coventry to paint. But you don’t understand. Bitty can’t bear to sell it. He’s descended from Thomas Botoner, who helped build the original cathedral. He loves the cathedral. He’d do anything to save it.”

“And you’d do anything for him.”

“Yes,” she said, looking steadily at him. “I would.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you. I have a favor to ask.” She stepped eagerly toward him, and they both moved out of my line of sight.

“I was thinking if we could take people back through the net to see the cathedral,” she said, “to see it burn down, they’d realize what it meant, how important it was.”

“Take people back?” Jim said. “We have trouble getting Prudence to approve research drops, let alone tourist excursions.”

“They wouldn’t be tourist excursions,” she said, sounding hurt. “Just a few select people.”

“The Appropriations Committee?”

“And some vid reporters. If we had the public on our side—if they saw it with their own eyes, they’d realize—”

Jim must have been shaking his head, because she stopped and switched tactics. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to the air raid,” she said rapidly. “We could go to the ruins afterward, or—or to the old cathedral. It could be in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be anybody in the cathedral. If they could just see the organ and the Dance of Death miserere and the Fifteenth-Century children’s cross for themselves, they’d realize what it meant to have lost Coventry Cathedral once, and they wouldn’t let it happen again.”

“Lizzie,” Jim said, and there was no mistaking that tone. And she had to know it was impossible. Oxford had never allowed sightseeing trips, not even in the good old days, and neither had the net.

She did know it. “You don’t understand,” she said despairingly. “It’ll kill him.”

The door opened, and a short scrawny kid with Asian features came in. “Jim, did you run the parameter—”

He stopped, looking at Lizzie. She must have cut a real swath in Oxford. Like Zuleika Dobson.

“Hullo, Shoji,” Lizzie said.

“Hullo, Liz,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“How’d the meeting with Prudence go?” Jim said.

“About like you’d expect,” Shoji said. “Now it’s the slippage he’s worried about. What’s its function? Why does it fluctuate so much?” His voice became prissy and affected, imitating Lassiter’s voice, “ ‘We must consider all possible consequences before we initiate action.’ ” He reverted to his own voice. “He wants a complete analysis of slippage patterns on all past drops before he’ll authorize any new ones.” He crossed out of my line of sight and over to the computers.

“You’re joking,” Jim said, following him. “That’ll take six months. We’ll never go anywhere.”

“I think that’s the general idea,” Shoji said, sitting down at the middle computer and beginning to type. “If we don’t go anywhere, there’s no risk. Why are the veils down?”

There was no record of a time traveller from the future or the past suddenly materializing in Balliol’s lab. Which either meant I hadn’t been caught or I’d come up with an extremely convincing story. I tried to think of one.

“If we don’t go anywhere,” Jim said, “how are we supposed to learn anything about time travel? Did you tell him science involves experiments?”

Shoji began hitting keys on the keyboard. “ ‘This is not a chemistry class we are talking about, Mr. Fujisaki,’ ” he said in the prissy voice as he typed. “ ‘This is the space-time continuum.’ ”

The curtains began, awkwardly, to rise.

“I know it’s the continuum,” Jim said, “but—”

“Jim,” Lizzie said, still out of sight but not for long, and both of them turned to look at her. “Will you ask him at least?” she said. “It means—”

And I found myself in a corner of Blackwell’s Book Store. Its dark woods and book-lined walls are not only instantly recognizable but timeless, and for a moment I thought I’d made it back to 2057, and getting to the lab was going to be a simple matter of sprinting up the Broad to Balliol, but as soon as I poked my head round the bookcase, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. Outside Blackwell’s bow windows it was snowing. And there was a Daimler parked in front of the Sheldonian.

Not Twenty-First Century, and now that I looked around, not the end of Twentieth either. No terminals, no paperbacks, no print-and-binds. Hardbacks, mostly without dust jackets, in blues and greens and browns.

And a shop assistant bearing down on me with a notebook in her hand and a yellow pencil behind her ear.

It was too late to duck back into a corner. She’d already seen me. Luckily, men’s clothes, unlike women’s, haven’t changed that much over the years, and boating blazers and flannels can still be seen in Oxford, though usually not in the dead of winter. With luck, I could pass as a first-year student.

The shop assistant was wearing a slimmish navy-blue dress Verity would probably have been able to date to the exact month, but the mid-Twentieth Century decades all look alike to me. 1950? No, her pencil-decked hair was put up in a severe knob, and her shoes laced. Early 1940s?

No, the windows were intact, there weren’t any blackout curtains and no sandbags piled up by the door, and the clerk looked far too prosperous to be post-war. The Thirties.

Verity’s regular assignment was the Thirties. Maybe the net had mistakenly sent me to the coordinates of one of her old drops. Or maybe she was here.

No, she couldn’t be here. My clothes might pass, but not her long, high-necked dress and piled-up hair.

The range of times and places she could be without creating an incongruity just by her appearance was very limited, and most of them were civilized, thank goodness.

“May I help you, sir?” the shop assistant said, looking at my mustache disapprovingly. I’d forgotten about it. Had men been clean-shaven in the 1930s? Hercule Poirot had had a mustache, hadn’t he?

“May I help you, sir?” she repeated, more severely. “Is there a particular book you are looking for?”

“Yes,” I said. And what books would they have had in Blackwell’s in Nineteen-Thirty-What? The Lord of the Rings? No, that was later. Goodbye Mr. Chips? That had been published in 1934, but what was this? I couldn’t see a date on that salespad of the shop assistant’s, and the last thing we needed, with the continuum falling down around our ears, was another incongruity.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” I said to be safe. “By Gibbon.”

“That would be on the first floor,” she said. “In History.”

I didn’t want to go up to the first floor. I wanted to stay close to the drop. What was on this floor? Eighty years from now, it would be metafiction and self-writes, but I doubted they had either here. Through the Looking Glass? No, what if children’s lit was already in a separate shop?

“The stairs up to the first floor are just there, sir,” she said, removing her pencil from behind her ear and pointing with it.

“Have you Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat?” I said.

“I will have to check,” she said, and started toward the rear.

“To Say Nothing of the Dog,” I called after her, and, as soon as she had rounded a bookcase, darted back to my corner.

I had been half-hoping the net would be open, or faintly shimmering in preparation, but there was nothing in the ceiling-to-floor rows of books to indicate it had ever been there. Or to give me a clue to what year I was in.

I began taking down books and opening them to the title page. 1904. 1930. 1921. 1756. That’s the trouble with books. They’re timeless. 1892. 1914. No date. I flipped the page over. Still no date. I flipped the page back again and read the title. No wonder. Herodotus’s History, which the Colonel and Professor Peddick had been reading only yesterday.

The bell over the door jangled. I peered carefully round the corner, hoping it was Verity. It was three middle-aged women in fur stoles and angle-brimmed hats.

They stopped just inside the door, brushing snow lovingly off their furs as if they were pets, and talking in high nasal tones.

“. . . and eloped with him!” the one on the right said. Her fur looked like a flattened version of Princess Arjumand. “So romantic!”

“But a farmer!” the middle one said. Her fur looked more like Cyril and was nearly as wide.

“I don’t care if he is a farmer,” the third one said. “I’m glad she married him.” She had the best fur of all, an entire string of foxes with their heads still on and bright little glass eyes. “If she hadn’t, she’d still be trapped in Oxford, serving on church committees and running jumble sales. Now, what was it I wanted to buy? I said to Harold this morning, I must remember to buy that when I go to Blackwell’s. Now, what could it have been?”

“I must get something for my godchild for her birthday,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said. “What should I get? Alice, I suppose, though I’ve never understood why children like it. Going from place to place with no rhyme or reason. Appearing and disappearing.”

“Oh, look!” the string of foxes said. She had picked up a book with a green dust jacket from a display table. Her fox-colored gloved hand was over the title, but I could see the author’s name: Agatha Christie.

“Have you read her latest?” she said to the others.

“No,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said.

“Yes,” the Princess Arjumand said, “and it—”

“Stop,” the string of foxes said, raising her gloved hand in warning. “Don’t tell me the ending.” She turned back to Cyril. “Cora always ruins the ending. Do you remember The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?”

“That was different. You wanted to know what all the fuss in the papers was about, Miriam,” the Princess Arjumand said defensively. “I couldn’t explain it without telling who the murderer was. At any rate, this one isn’t anything like Roger Ackroyd. There’s this girl who someone is attempting to murder, or at least that’s what one’s supposed to think. Actually—”

“Don’t tell me the ending,” the Little Foxes said.

“I didn’t intend to,” the Princess Arjumand said with dignity. “I was simply going to say that what you think is the crime, isn’t, and things aren’t at all what they seem.”

“Like in The Fountain Pen Mystery,” the Cyril-draped one said. “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The first one had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed, and the murderer—”

“Don’t tell me,” the Little Foxes said, clapping fox-gloved hands to her ears.

“The butler did it,” the Cyril said.

“I thought you hadn’t read it,” the Little Foxes said, taking her hands down from her ears.

“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s always the butler,” and the lights went out. But it was daytime, and even if something had happened to the electricity, there would still be enough light from Blackwell’s bow windows to see by.

I put my hand out to the bookshelf in front of me and felt it cautiously. It felt clammy and hard, like stone. I took a cautious step toward it. And nearly pitched forward into emptiness.

My foot was half over a void. I reeled back, staggered, and sat down hard on more stone. A staircase. I felt around, patting the rough stone wall, reaching down. A winding staircase, with narrow wedge-shaped steps, which meant I was in a tower. Or a dungeon.

The air had a cold, mildewy smell, which probably meant it wasn’t a dungeon. A dungeon would smell a good deal worse. But if it were a tower, light should be filtering in from a slit window somewhere above, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. A dungeon.

Or, I thought hopefully, the erratic bouncing had given me such a case of time-lag I’d gone completely blind.

I fumbled in my pockets for a match and struck it on the wall. No such luck. Rock walls, stone steps loomed up around me. Definitely a dungeon. Which meant I probably wasn’t in Oxford in 2018. Or 1933.

The Seventeenth Century had been big on dungeons. Ditto the Sixteenth through the Twelfth. Before that England had run mostly to pigsties and stick huts. Wonderful. Trapped in a Norman dungeon in the Middle Ages.

Or a corner of the Tower of London, in which case tourists would come trooping up the stairs in a few minutes. But somehow I didn’t think so. The steps, in the brief light of the match, had looked unworn, and when I felt along the wall, there weren’t any safety railings.

“Verity!” I shouted down into the blackness. My voice echoed off stone and silence.

I stood, bracing myself against the wall with both hands, and started carefully up, feeling for the edge of the narrow step with my foot. One step. Two. “Verity! Are you here?”

Nothing. I felt for the next step. “Verity!”

I put my foot on the step. It gave under my weight. I started to fall, flailing wildly, trying to catch myself and scraping my hand. I slid two steps and came down hard on one knee.

And if Verity was here, she had to have heard that. But I called again. “Verity!”

There was an explosion of sound, a violent flapping and whirring of wings that sounded like it was diving straight for me. Bats. Wonderful. I flung an arm I couldn’t see in front of my face.

The flapping intensified, but though my eyes strained through the darkness, I couldn’t see.

The flapping was coming straight at me. A wing brushed my arm. Wonderful. The bats couldn’t see either. I flailed at the darkness, and the flapping grew more frantic and then subsided, flying off above me, and I sat down very slowly and silently.

All right. Clearly the intelligent thing to do was sit here and wait for the net to open. And hope I wasn’t permanently stuck like Carruthers.

“And meanwhile Verity’s lost somewhere!” I shouted and was instantly sorry. The bats attacked again, and it was a good five minutes before they subsided.

I sat still and listened. Either this dungeon was completely soundproofed, or I wasn’t anywhere in the last three centuries. The world hasn’t been truly silent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Even the Victorian era had had trains and steam launches to contend with, and in the cities, the rattle and clop of traffic which would shortly become a roar. And both Twentieth and Twenty-First Century have an electronic hum that’s always present. Here, now that the bats had gone back to bed, there was no sound at all.

So what now? I’d probably kill myself if I tried any more exploration, and probably miss the net’s opening in the process. Assuming it was going to open.

I felt in my pocket for another match and my watch. Half past X. Warder had had a half-hour intermittent on the drop at Muchings End and I had only been in the lab twenty minutes, in Blackwell’s possibly fifteen. Which meant the net might open at anytime. Or not at all, I thought, remembering Carruthers.

And in the meantime, what? Sit here and stare at the darkness? Worry about Verity? Try to figure out what had happened to the bishop’s bird stump?

According to Verity, detectives weren’t required to go anywhere or do anything. They could sit in an easy chair (or a dungeon) and solve the mystery just by using “the little gray cells.” And I had more than enough mysteries to occupy me: Who on earth would have wanted to steal the bishop’s bird stump? Who was Mr. C and why the bloody hell hadn’t he shown up yet? What was Finch up to? What was I doing in the middle of the Middle Ages?

But the answer to that one was obvious. Verity and I had failed, and the continuum was starting to collapse. Carruthers trapped in Coventry and then the slippage on the return drops and then Verity—I should never have let her go through. I should have realized what was happening when the net wouldn’t open. I should have realized what was going to happen when Tossie didn’t meet Mr. C.

It was one of T.J.’s worst-case Waterloo scenarios, an incongruity too devastating for the continuum to be able to fix it. “See here,” T.J. had said, pointing at the formless gray image, “and here, you have radically increased slippage, but it can’t contain the incongruity, and you can see here where the backups start to fail, and the net begins to malfunction as the course of history starts to alter.”

The course of history. Terence marries Tossie instead of Maud, and a different pilot flies the mission to Berlin, and he miscalculates the target or is hit by flak, or he thinks he hears something wrong with the engine and turns back, and the other planes, thinking he’s received orders, follow him, or because of him they get lost, the way the German pilots had two nights before, or somehow the lack of their grandson’s presence in the world affects the history of airplane development or the amount of gasoline in England or the weather. And the raid never happens.

The Luftwaffe doesn’t retaliate by bombing London. It doesn’t bomb Coventry. So there is no restoration project. And no Lady Schrapnell to send Verity back to 1888. And the paradoxes multiply and reach critical mass and the net begins to break down, trapping Carruthers in Coventry, sending me farther and farther afield. This is the cat that dropped the bomb that brought down the house that Jack built.

It was getting colder. I pulled the lapels of my blazer together, wishing it was the tweed.

But if it was a worst-case scenario, why hadn’t there been any increased slippage on Verity’s drop? “See here,” T.J. had said, bringing up sim after sim after sim, “every single incongruity has this area of radically increased slippage around the focus.” Except ours.

Nine minutes’ slippage on that first drop, between two and thirty on all the others, an average of fourteen for all drops to the Victorian era. Only two areas of increased slippage, and one of those was due to Ultra.

I took my coat off and wrapped it around me like a blanket, shivering and thinking about Ultra.

Ultra had had a system of backups, too. The first line of defense was secrecy. But if there was a breach, they put their secondary system of defenses into action, like they had done in North Africa.

They’d been using Ultra to locate and sink convoys carrying fuel oil to Rommel, which could have roused suspicions that codes were being broken, so a spotter plane had been sent up each time to be seen by the convoy, so the Nazis could blame the sinking on having been spotted.

Except once, when heavy fog kept the plane from finding the convoy, and, in their panic to make certain the oil didn’t make it to Rommel, the RAF and the Royal Navy had both shown up to sink it, and nearly blown the cover.

So the head of Ultra put a backup plan into operation, planting rumors in the port of Malta, sending an easily decodable message to a nonexistent agent, arranging for it to be intercepted. The message thanked the agent for his information on the convoy and gave him a raise. And the Nazis had spent the next six months tracking down rumors and looking for the agent. And not suspecting we had Ultra.

And if that plan had failed, they would have tried something else. And even if all the plans had failed, they would have failed after, not during the breach.

No matter how bad the incongruity was, the continuum should have tried to prevent it. Instead, it had added nine minutes’ slippage, nine minutes that had sent Verity through at the exact moment to save the cat, when five minutes either way would have prevented it from happening at all. It was as if the continuum had taken one look at the incongruity and fainted dead away, like Mrs. Mering.

Verity had said to look for the one little fact that didn’t fit, but none of it fit: Why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it sent me through at Muchings End so I could have returned the cat before Mrs. Mering went off to consult Madame Iritosky? Why had it sent me through three days late and just in time to prevent Terence from meeting Maud? And the biggest little fact of all, why had the net allowed the incongruity at all when it was supposed to shut down automatically?

“You understand these are all hypothetical scenarios,” TJ. had said. “In all these cases, the net refused to open.”

It was impossible to get anywhere near Waterloo. Or Ford’s Theater. Or Franz-Joseph Street. If the cat was so pivotal to the course of history, why wasn’t it impossible to get anywhere near Muchings End? Why wasn’t there increased slippage on Verity’s drop, where it was needed, and so much in Oxford in April, 2018? And how, if the slippage was keeping everything away, had I gotten through?

It would have been nice if the answer had been there, in the lab in 2018, but it was obvious that, whatever had caused the slippage, it wasn’t anything Jim Dunworthy or Shoji Fujisaki had done. They weren’t doing any drops.

Doubtless, if Hercule Poirot were here, he’d have come up with a neat solution not only to the Mystery of the Baffling Incongruity, but also that of the Little Princes in the Tower, Jack the Ripper, and who blew up St. Paul’s. But he wasn’t, and neither was the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey, and if they were, I’d have taken their coats away from them and put them over my knees.

Somehow, during that reverie, I had realized I was staring at an unevenness in the pitch-blackness opposite that might be the mortar between the stones, and that it meant light was coming from somewhere.

I flattened myself against the wall, but the light, or, rather, very slight absence of darkness, didn’t flicker or grow, like a torch coming down from somewhere above.

And it wasn’t the reddish-yellow of a lantern. It was only a grayer shade of black. And I must really be time-lagged, because it took another five minutes for the other possibility to occur to me: that the reason for the pitch-blackness was that it was night and I was in a tower, after all. And the way out was down.

And a near-fall and scraping of my right hand catching myself to realize that if I waited another half hour I’d be able to see where I was going and get out of here without killing myself.

I sat back down on the step, leaned my head against the wall, and watched the grayness grow.

I had made an assumption that darkness meant a dungeon, and as a consequence, I had been looking at things all wrong. Was that what we were doing in regard to the incongruity, too? Had we assumed something we shouldn’t have?

History was full of mistaken assumptions—Napoleon’s assuming Ney had taken Quatre Bras, Hitler’s assuming the invasion would come at Calais, King Harold’s Saxons’ assuming William the Conqueror’s men were retreating instead of leading them into a trap.

Had we made a mistaken assumption about the incongruity? Was there some way of looking at it which explained everything—from the lack of slippage on Verity’s drop to the excess of it in 2018? Some way of looking at it in which everything fit—Princess Arjumand and Carruthers and the bishop’s bird stump and all those bloody jumble sales and curates, to say nothing of the dog—and it all made sense?

I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, it was fully daylight and there were voices coming up the stairs.

I looked wildly round the narrow tower, as if there might actually be somewhere to hide, and then sprinted up the stairs.

I had gone at least five steps before I realized I needed to count the steps so I would know where the drop was. Six, seven, eight, I counted silently, rounding the next curve of the steps. Nine, ten, eleven. I stopped, listening.

“Hastyeh doon awthaslattes?” the woman said.

It sounded like Middle English, which meant I’d been right about this being the Middle Ages.

“Goadahdahm Boetenneher, thahslattes ayrnacoom,” the man said.

“Thahslattes maun bayendoon uvthisse wyke,” the woman said.

“Tha kahnabay,” he said.

I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had heard this conversation a number of times before, most recently in front of the south door of St. Michael’s. The woman was demanding to know why something wasn’t done. The man was making excuses. The woman, who must be an early ancestor of Lady Schrapnell’s, was saying she didn’t care, it had to be done in time for the jumble sale.

“Thatte kahna bay, Goadahdahm Boetenneher,” he said. “Tha wolde hahvneedemorr holpen thanne isseheer.”

“So willetby, Gruwens,” the woman said.

There was a clank of stone on stone, and the woman snapped, “Lokepponthatt, Gruwens! The steppe bay lossed.”

She was yelling at him for the loose step. Good. I hoped she read him out properly.

“Ye charge yesette at nought,” she said.

“Ne gan speken rowe,” the workman said placatingly.

They were still coming up. I looked up the tower’s shaft, wondering if there might be a room or a platform above.

“Tha willbay doone bylyve, Goadahdahm Boetenneher.”

Botoner. Could the woman be Ann Botoner, or Mary, who had built the spire of Coventry Cathedral? And could this be the tower?

I started up again, trying not to make any noise and counting the steps. Nineteen, twenty.

There was a platform, overlooking an open space. I looked down at it. The bells. Or where the bells would be when they were installed. I had just ascertained my space-time location. It was the tower of Coventry Cathedral, the year it was built. 1395.

I couldn’t hear them. I went back to the stairs and took two tentative steps down. And nearly ran into them.

They were right below me. I could see the top of a white-coiffed head. I leaped back up to the level of the platform, and on up the stairs, and nearly stepped on a pigeon.

It squawked and flew up, flapping like a bat at me and then past me and down onto the platform.

“Shoo!” Dame Botoner shouted. “Shoo! Thah divils minion!”

I waited, poised for flight and trying not to pant, but they didn’t come any farther. Their voices echoed oddly, as if they had gone over to the far side of the platform, and after a minute I crept back down to where I could see them.

The man was wearing a brown shirt, leather leggings, and a pained expression. He was shaking his head. “Nay, Goadudahm Marree,” he said. “It wool bay fortnicht ahthehlesst.”

Mary Botoner. I looked wonderingly at this ancestor of Bishop Bittner’s. She was wearing a reddish-brown shift, cut out in the wide sleeves to show a yellow underdress, and fastened with a metal belt that sank somewhat low. Her linen coif was pulled tight around her plump, middle-aged face, and she reminded me of someone. Lady Schrapnell? Mrs. Mering? No, someone older. With white hair?

She was pointing to things and shaking her head. “Thahtoormaun baydoon ah Freedeywyke,” she said.

The workman shook his head violently. “Tha kahna bay, Goaduhdahm Boetenneher.”

The woman stamped her foot. “So willetbay, Gruwens.” She swept round the platform to the stairs.

I ducked back out of sight, ready to go up again, but the discussion was apparently over.

“Bootdahmuh Boetenneher—” the workman pleaded, following her.

I crept after them, keeping one turn above.

“Gottabovencudna do swich—” the workman said, trailing after her.

I was nearly back to the site of the drop.

“Whattebey thisse?” the woman said.

I cautiously came down one step, and then another, till I could see them. Mary Botoner was pointing at something on the wall.

“Thisse maun bey wroughtengain,” she said, and, above her head, like a halo, I saw a faint shimmer.

Not now, I thought, not after waiting a whole night.

“Bootdahmuh Boetenneher—” the workman said.

“So willet bey,” Mary Botoner said, jabbing her bony finger at the wall.

The shimmer was growing brighter. One of them would look up in a moment and see it.

“Takken under eft!” she said.

Come on, come on. Tell her you’ll fix it, I thought.

“Thisse maun bey takken bylyve,” she said, and started, finally, down the stairs. The workman rolled his eyes, tightened his rope belt round his ample middle, and started after her.

Two steps. Three. Mary Botoner’s coiffed head disappeared round the curve of the tower and then bobbed back into sight. “Youre hyre isse neyquitte till allisse doone.”

I couldn’t wait any longer, even if it meant they saw me. People in the Middle Ages had believed in angels—with luck, they’d think I was one.

The shimmer began to glow. I shot down the steps, jumping over the pigeon, who took off into the air with a wild squawking.

“Guttgottimhaben,” the workman said, and they both turned to look up at me.

Mary Botoner crossed herself. “Holymarr remothre—”

And I dived for the already closing net and sprawled flat onto the blessed tiled floor of the lab.

“We realized with intense consternation and horror . . .

that nothing more could be done.”

Provost Howard

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - F O U R

In the Lab—A Long-Delayed Arrival—A Letter to the Editor—In the Tower—I Ascertain My Space-Time Location—In the Cathedral—I Act Without Thinking—Cigars—A Dragon—A Parade—In the Police Station—In a Shelter—Fish—Verity Is Found at Last— “Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral!”—An Answer

And let it be 2057, not 2018. I looked up, and yes, it was. Warder was bending over me, extending a hand to help me up.

When she saw it was me, she stood up and put her hands on her hips.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“What am I doing here?” I said, picking myself up. “What the bloody hell was I doing in 1395? What was I doing in Blackwell’s in 1933? I want to know where Verity is.”

“Get out of the net,” she said, already moving back to the console and beginning to type. The veils on the net began to rise.

“Find out where Verity is,” I said, following her. “She went through yesterday, and something went wrong. She—”

She moved her hand in a gesture of silencing. “Eleven December,” she said into the console’s ear. “Two P.M.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “Verity’s missing. There’s something wrong with the net.”

“In a minute,” she said, staring at the screen. “Six P.M. Ten P.M. Carruthers is stuck in Coventry,” she said, her eyes never moving from the screen, “and I’m trying to—”

“Verity may be stuck in a dungeon. Or the middle of the Battle of Hastings. Or the lion’s cage at the Zoo.” I pounded on the console. “Find out where she is.”

“In a minute,” she said. “Twelve December. Two AM. Six A.M.—”

“No!” I said, grabbing the ear of the console away from her. “Now!”

She stood up angrily. “If you do anything to jeopardize this rendezvous—”

Mr. Dunworthy and T.J. came in, their heads together worriedly over a handheld. “—another area of increased slippage,” T.J. was saying. “See, here it—”

“Give me that ear,” Warder said furiously, and they both looked up.

“Ned,” Mr. Dunworthy said, hurrying over. “How did Coventry go?”

“It didn’t,” I said.

Warder snatched the ear back and began feeding times into it.

“No Mr. C, no ‘life-changing experience,’ ” I said. “Verity tried to come through to tell you, but she didn’t make it. Tell Warder she’s got to find her.”

“I’m running the accelerated,” Warder said.

“I don’t care what you’re running,” I said. “It can wait. I want you to find out where she is now!”

“In a minute, Ned,” Mr. Dunworthy said quietly. He took my arm. “We’re trying to pull Carruthers out.”

“Carruthers can wait!” I said. “You know where he is, for God’s sake! Verity could be anywhere!”

“Tell me what’s happened,” he said, still calmly.

“The net’s starting to break down,” I said. “That’s what’s happened. Verity went through to tell you we failed at Coventry, and right after she’d gone through, Finch came through and said she hadn’t come through to the lab. So I tried to come through and tell you, but I ended up here in 2018, and then in Blackwell’s in 1933, and then in a—”

“You were in the lab in 2018?” Mr. Dunworthy said, looking at T.J. “That’s where the area of slippage was. What did you see, Ned?”

“—and then in the tower of Coventry Cathedral in 1395,” I said.

“Destination malfunction,” T.J. said worriedly.

“Two P.M. Six P.M.,” Warder said, her eyes on the screen.

“The net’s breaking down,” I said, “and Verity’s out there somewhere. You’ve got to get a fix on her and—”

“Warder,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Stop the accelerated. We need—”

“Wait, I’m getting something,” she said.

“Now,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I want a fix on Verity Kindle.”

“In a min—”

And Carruthers appeared in the net.

He was wearing the same thing he’d been wearing last time I’d seen him, his AFS coveralls and nonregulation helmet, except that they weren’t covered with soot. “Well, it’s about time!” he said, taking his tin helmet off.

Warder ran over to the net, pushed through the veils, and flung her arms around his neck. “I was so worried!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I nearly got arrested for not having an identity card,” Carruthers said, looking slightly taken aback, “and I was this close to being blown up when a delayed HE went off, but otherwise I’m fine.” He disentangled himself from Warder’s arms. “I thought something had gone wrong with the net, and I was going to be stuck there for the duration of the war. Where the bloody hell have you been?”

“Trying to get you out,” Warder said, beaming at him. “We thought something had gone wrong with the net, too. Then I thought of running an accelerated to see if we could get past whatever the block was.” She linked her arm through his. “Are you certain you’re all right? Can I get you anything?”

“You can get me Verity. Now!” I said. “I want you to run a fix right now.”

Mr. Dunworthy nodded.

“All right!” Warder snapped, and stomped over to the console.

“You didn’t have any trouble coming back, did you?” T.J. said to Carruthers.

“Except that the bloody net wouldn’t open for three weeks, no,” Carruthers said.

“I mean, you didn’t go to another destination before you came here?”

Carruthers shook his head.

“And you haven’t any idea why the net wouldn’t open?”

“No,” Carruthers said. “A delayed HE went off a hundred yards from the drop. I thought perhaps it had done something to it.”

I went over to the console. “Anything yet?”

“No,” Warder said. “And don’t stand over me like that. It keeps me from concentrating.”

I went back over to Carruthers, who had sat down at T.J.’s sim setup and was pulling off his boots.

“One good thing came out of all this,” he said, peeling off a very dirty sock. “I can definitely report to Lady Schrapnell that the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t in the rubble. We cleared every inch of the cathedral, and it wasn’t there. But it was in the cathedral during the raid. The Head of the Flower Committee, this horrible old spinster sort named Miss Sharpe—you know the type, gray hair, long nose, hard as nails—saw it at five o’clock that afternoon. She was on her way home after a meeting of the Advent Bazaar and Soldiers’ Parcel Effort Committee, and she noticed some of the chrysanthemums in it were turning brown, and she stopped and pulled them out.”

I was only half listening. I was watching Warder, who was hitting keys, glaring at the screen, leaning back thoughtfully, hitting more keys. She has no idea where Verity is, I thought.

“So you think it was destroyed in the fire?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“I do,” Carruthers said, “and everyone else does, except for this dreadful old harpy Miss Sharpe. She insists it was stolen.”

“During the raid?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

“No. She says as soon as the sirens went, she came back and stood guard, so it must have been stolen after five and before eight, and whoever took it must have known there was going to be a raid that night.”

Numbers were coming up rapidly on the screen. Warder leaned forward, tapping keys rapidly. “Have you got the fix?”

“I’m getting it,” she said irritably.

“She had an absolute bee in her bonnet about it,” Carruthers said, peeling off his other sock and dumping it in his boot. “Interrogated everyone who’d been in or near the cathedral during the raid, accused the verger’s brother-in-law, even wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper about it. Generally made everyone’s lives miserable. I didn’t have to do any detective work on it. She was doing it all. If somebody had stolen the bishop’s bird stump, you can be certain she’d have found it.”

“I’ve got it,” Warder said. “Verity’s in Coventry.”

“Coventry?” I said. “When?”

“November fourteenth, 1940.”

“Where?” I said.

She tapped the keys, and the coordinates came up.

“That’s the cathedral,” I said. “What time?”

She worked the keys some more. “Five past eight P.M.”

“That’s the raid,” I said and started for the net. “Send me through.”

“If the net’s malfunctioning—” T.J. said.

“Verity’s there,” I said. “In the middle of an air raid.”

“Send him through,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“We’ve tried this before, remember?” Carruthers said. “Nobody could get near the place, including you. What makes you think—”

“Give me your coveralls and helmet,” I said.

He looked at Mr. Dunworthy and then started to strip them off.

“What was Verity wearing?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

Carruthers handed me the coveralls, and I pulled them on over my tweeds. “A long white high-necked dress,” I said, and realized I’d made an erroneous assumption. Her clothes wouldn’t create an incongruity in the middle of an air raid. No one would even notice them. Or if they did, they’d think she was in her nightgown.

“Here, take this,” T.J. said, handing me a raincoat.

“I want a five-minute intermittent,” I said, taking the raincoat and stepping into the net. Warder lowered the veils.

“If you come through in the marrows field,” Carruthers said, “the barn’s to the west.”

The net began to shimmer.

Carruthers said, “Watch out for the dogs. And the farmer’s wife—”

And found myself right back where I’d started from. And in pitch-blackness. The darkness meant I was there the next night, or any of a thousand nights, a hundred thousand nights, while the cathedral sat its way through the Middle Ages. And meanwhile Verity was in the middle of an air raid. And all I could do was stay put and wait for the bloody net to open again.

“No!” I said, and smashed my fist against the rough rock. And the world exploded around me.

There was a whoosh and then a crump, and ack-ack guns started up off to the east. The darkness flared bluish-white and then the aftercolor of red, and I could smell smoke below me.

“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the stairs to the bells, remembering this time to count the steps. There was just enough orangish light to see by, and a faint smell of smoke.

I reached the bell platform and shouted up the stairs. “Verity! Are you up here?”

Pigeons, no doubt descendants of the one I’d disturbed six hundred years ago, flapped wildly down the upper tower and into my face.

She wasn’t up there. I ran back down the stairs, shouting, till I reached the step where I’d come through, and began counting again.

Thirty-one, thirty-two. “Verity!” I shouted over the drone of planes and the wail of an air-raid siren that had, belatedly and unnecessarily, started up.

Fifty-three, fifty-four, I counted. “Verity! Where are you?”

I hit the bottom step. Fifty-eight. Remember that, I told myself and pushed the tower door open and came out into the west porch. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and had a rich, acrid scent to it, like cigar smoke.

“Verity!” I shouted, pushing open the heavy inner door of the tower. And came out into the nave.

The church was dark except for the rood light and a reddish light in the windows of the clerestory. I tried to estimate what time it was. Most of the explosions and sirens seemed to be off toward the north. There was a lot of smoke up near the organ, but no flames from the Girdlers’ Chapel, which had been hit early. So it couldn’t be later than half past eight, and Verity couldn’t have been here more than a few minutes.

“Verity!” I called, and my voice echoed in the dark church.

The Mercers’ Chapel had been hit in the first batch of incendiaries. I started up the main aisle toward the choir, wishing I’d brought a pocket torch.

The ack-ack stopped and then started up again with renewed effort, and the hum of the planes got louder. There was a thud, thud, thud of bombs just to the east, and flares lit the windows garishly. Half of them, the half that had had their stained glass removed for safekeeping, were boarded up or covered over with blackout paper, but three of the windows on the north were still intact, and the greenish flares made them light the church momentarily with a sickly red and blue. I couldn’t see Verity anywhere. Where would she have gone? I would have expected her to stay close to the drop, but perhaps the raid had frightened her and she’d taken shelter somewhere. But where?

The drone of the planes became an angry roar. “Verity!” I shouted over the din, and there was a clatter above on the roof, like hail pattering, then a pounding and muffled shouts.

The fire watch, up on the roof putting out the incendiaries. Had Verity heard them and hidden somewhere so they wouldn’t see her?

There was a crash overhead and then a whizzing, spitting sound. I looked up, and it was a good thing I did because I narrowly missed being hit by an incendiary.

It fell onto one of the pews, hissing and spitting molten sparks onto the wooden pew. I grabbed a hymnal out of the back of the next pew and knocked the incendiary off with it onto the floor. It rolled into the aisle and up against the end of the pew across the aisle.

I kicked it away, but the wood was already smoking. The incendiary spit and sparked, twisting like a live thing. It hit the kneeling rail and began to burn with a white-hot flame.

A stirrup pump, I thought, and looked around wildly, but they must have taken them all up on the roof. There was a bucket hanging by the south door. I ran back and grabbed it, hoping it had sand in it. It did.

I ran back up the nave and upended the bucket over the incendiary and the already-burning rail, and then stood back, waiting for it to spit.

It didn’t. I used my foot to push the incendiary into the very middle of the aisle and check to make sure the fire on the kneeling rail was out. I had dropped the sand bucket and it had rolled under one of the pews. For the verger to find tomorrow and burst into tears.

I stood there looking at it, thinking about what I’d just done. I’d acted without thinking, like Verity, going after the cat in the water. But there was no chance here of changing the course of history. The Luftwaffe was already correcting any possible incongruities.

I looked up at the Mercers’ Chapel. Flames were already licking through the carved wooden ceiling above it, and no amount of sand buckets would be able to put them out. In another two hours the entire cathedral would be in flames.

There was a dull boom as something landed outside the Girdlers’ Chapel, lighting it for an instant. In the seconds before the light faded, I could see the fifteenth-century wooden cross with the carving of a child kneeling at the foot of it. In another half hour, Provost Howard would see it, behind a wall of flames, and the whole east end of the church would be on fire.

“Verity!” I shouted, and my voice echoed in the darkened church. “Verity!”

“Ned!”

I whirled around. “Verity!” I shouted and bolted back down the main aisle. I skidded to a stop at the back of the nave. “Verity!” I shouted and stood still, listening.

“Ned!”

Outside the church. The south door. I took off between the pews, stumbling over the rails, and across to the south door.

There was a knot of people gathered outside, looking anxiously up at the roof, and two tough-looking youths with their hands in their pockets, leaning casually against a lamp-post on the corner, discussing a fire off to the west. “What’s that smell of cigars?” the taller one was asking, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather.

“Tobacconist’s corner of Broadgate,” the shorter one said. “We shoulda nipped in and pinched some cigs before it got going.”

“Did you see a girl come out of the cathedral?” I asked the nearest person, a middle-aged woman in a kerchief.

“It’s not going to catch, is it, do you think?” she said.

Yes, I thought. “The fire watch is up there,” I said. “Did you see a girl run out of the church?”

“No,” she said and went immediately back to looking up at the roof.

I ran down Bayley Lane and then back along the side of the church, but there was no sign of her. She must have come out one of the other doors. Not the vestry door. The fire watch came in and out that door. The west door.

I raced round to the west door. There was a cluster of people there, too, huddled inside the porch, a woman with three little girls, an old man wrapped in a blanket, a girl in a maid’s uniform. A gray-haired woman with a sharp nose and a WAS armband stood in front of the doors, her arms crossed.

“Did you see anyone come out of the church in the last few minutes?” I asked her.

“No one’s allowed inside the church except the fire watch,” she said accusingly, and her voice reminded me of someone’s, too, but I didn’t have time to try to work out whose.

“She has red hair,” I said. “She’s wearing a long white . . . she’s wearing a white nightgown.”

“Nightgown?” she said disapprovingly.

A short, stout ARP warden came up. “I’ve got orders to clear this area, he said. “The fire brigade needs all avenues to the cathedral cleared. Come along.”

The woman with the little girls picked up the littlest one and started out of the porch. The old man shuffled after her.

“Come along,” the warden said to the maid, who seemed paralyzed with fright. “You too, miss Sharpe.” He waved to the gray-haired woman.

“I have no intention of going anywhere,” she said, crossing her arms more militantly. “I am the vice-chairwoman of the Cathedral Ladies’ Altar Guild and the head of the Flower Committee.”

“I don’t care who you are,” the warden said. “I’ve got orders to clear these doors for the fire brigade. I’ve already cleared the south door, and now it’s your turn.”

“Warden, have you seen a young woman with red hair?” I interrupted.

“I have been assigned to guard this door against looters,” the woman said, drawing herself up. “I have stood here since the raid began and I intend to stand here all night, if necessary, to protect the cathedral.”

“And I intend to clear this door,” the warden said, drawing himself up.

I didn’t have time for this. I stepped between them. “I’m looking for a missing girl,” I said, drawing myself up. “Red hair. White nightgown.”

“Ask at the police station,” the warden said. He pointed back the way I’d come. “Down St. Mary’s Street.”

I took off at a trot, wondering who would win. My money was on the head of the Flower Committee. Who did she remind me of? Mary Botoner? Lady Schrapnell? One of the fur-bearing ladies in Blackwell’s?

The warden hadn’t done a very effective job of clearing the south door. The exact same knot of people was standing there, and the two youths were still holding up the lamp-post. I hurried along the south side of the cathedral toward Bayley Lane and straight into the processional.

I had read about what the police sergeant had called the “solemn little procession” when the fire watch had rescued what treasures they could grab and taken them across to the police station for safekeeping. And in my mind’s eye, I had thought of it as that—a decorous parade, with Provost Howard leading, trooping the colors of the Warwickshire Regiment, and then the others, carrying the candlesticks and chalice and wafer box at a measured pace, and the wooden crucifix bringing up the rear—so that at first I didn’t recognize it.

Because it wasn’t a processional, it was a rabble, a rout, Napoleon’s Old Guard frantically saving what they could from Waterloo. They stumbled down the road at a half-run, the canon with a candlestick under each arm and a load of vestments, a teenaged boy clutching a chalice and a stirrup pump for dear life, the provost charging with the colors thrust out before him like a lance and half-stumbling over the trailing flag.

I stopped, watching them just as if it were a parade, and that took care of one possibility Verity had proposed. None of them was carrying the bishop’s bird stump.

They ran back into the police station. They must have dumped their treasures unceremoniously on the first surface they found, because they were back outside in under a minute and running back toward the vestry door.

A balding man in a blue coverall met them halfway up the stairs, shaking his head. “It’s no good. There’s too much smoke.”

“I’ve got to get the Gospel and the Epistles,” Provost Howard said and pushed past him and through the door.

“Where the bloody hell is the fire brigade?” said the teenaged boy.

“The fire brigade?” the canon said, looking up at the sky. “Where the bloody hell is the RAF?”

The teenaged boy ran back down St. Mary’s to the police station to tell them to ring the fire brigade again, and I followed him.

The rescued treasures were sitting in a pathetic line on the sergeant’s desk, the regimental colors propped up against the wall behind. While the teenaged boy was telling the sergeant, “Well, try them again. The whole chancel roof’s on fire,” I looked at them. The candlesticks, the wooden crucifix. There was a little pile of worn brown Books of Common Prayer, as well, that hadn’t made the list, and a little bundle of offering envelopes and a choirboy’s surplice, and I wondered how many other rescued items Provost Howard had left out of his list. But the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there.

The boy darted out. The sergeant picked up the phone. “Have you seen a young woman with red hair?” I said before he could dial the fire brigade.

He shook his head, holding his hand over the receiver. “Most likely place she’d be is in one of the shelters.”

A shelter. Of course. The logical place to be during an air raid. She’d have had more sense than to stay out in this. “Where’s the nearest shelter?”

“Down Little Park Street,” he said, cradling the phone. “Go back along Bayley and turn left.”

I nodded my thanks and took off again. The fires were getting closer. The whole sky was a smoky orange, and there were yellow flames shooting up in front of Trinity Church. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, which was getting brighter by the moment. It was getting colder, too, which seemed impossible. I blew on my icy hands as I ran.

I couldn’t find the shelter. A house had taken a direct hit in the middle of the block, a mound of smoking rubble, and next to it, a greengrocer’s shop was on fire. Everything else in the street was silent and dark.

“Verity!” I shouted, afraid I’d hear an answer from the rubble, and started back up the street, looking closely for a shelter sign on one of the buildings. I found it, lying in the middle of the road. I looked around helplessly, trying to determine which direction the blast might have blown it from. “Hello!” I shouted down stairway after stairway. “Is anyone there?”

I finally found it at the near end of the street, practically next to the cathedral, in a half-basement that offered no protection from anything, not even the cold.

It was a small, grubby room without any furniture. Possibly two dozen people, some of them in bathrobes, were sitting on the dirt floor against the sandbag-lined walls. A hurricane lamp hung at one end from a beam, swaying wildly every time a bomb landed, and under it a small boy in earmuffs and pajamas was playing a game of cards with his mother.

I scanned the dimness, looking for Verity, even though she obviously wasn’t there. Where was she?

“Has anyone seen a girl in a white nightgown?” I said. “She has red hair.”

They sat there as if they hadn’t heard me, looking numbly ahead.

“Have you any sixes?” the little boy said.

“Yes,” his mother said, handing him a playing card.

The bells of the cathedral began to chime, ringing out over the steady roar of the ack-ack guns and the whoosh and crump of the high explosives. Nine o’clock.

Everyone looked up at the sound. “That’s the cathedral’s bells,” the little boy said, craning his neck at the ceiling. “Have you any queens?”

“No,” his mother said, looking at her hand and then at the ceiling again. “Go fish. That’s how you know our cathedral’s all right, if you can hear the bells.”

I had to get out of here. I plunged out the door and up the steps to the street. The bells rang out brightly, chiming the hours. They would do that all night, tolling the hours, reassuring the people of Coventry, while the planes droned overhead and the cathedral burned to the ground.

The knot of people had moved across the street from the south door for a better view of the flames shooting up from the cathedral roof. The two youths were still at their lamp-post. I ran up to them.

“It’s no good,” the tall one was saying. “They’ll never get it out now.”

“I’m looking for a young woman, a girl—” I said.

“Ain’t we all?” the short one said, and they both laughed.

“She has red hair,” I persisted. “She’s wearing a white nightgown.”

This, of course, got a huge laugh.

“I think she’s in one of the shelters round here, but I don’t know where they are.”

“There’s one down Little Park,” the tall one said.

“I’ve already been to that one,” I said. “She’s not there.”

They both looked thoughtful. “There’s one up Gosford Street way, but you’ll never get there,” the short one said. “Land mine went off. Blocked the road.”

“She might be in the crypt,” the tall one said, and, at my expression, said, “The cathedral crypt. There’s a shelter down there.”

The crypt. Of course. Several dozen people had taken shelter down there the night of the raid. They’d stayed down there till eleven while the cathedral burned over their heads, and then been led out up the outside steps.

I tore past the gawkers to the south door and up the steps. “You can’t go in there!” the woman in the kerchief shouted.

“Rescue squad,” I shouted back and ran inside.

The west end of the church was still dark, but there was more than enough light in the sanctuary and the chancel. The vestries were ablaze, and the Girdlers’ Chapel and, above, the clerestories were pouring out bronze-colored smoke. In the Cappers’ Chapel, flames were licking at the oil painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Burning pages from the order of service were floating above the nave, drifting and dropping ash.

I tried to remember the layout from Lady Schrapnell’s blueprints. The crypt lay under the St. Lawrence Chapel in the north aisle, just to the west of the Drapers’ Chapel.

I started up the nave, ducking the fiery orders of service and trying to remember where the steps were. To the left of the lectern.

Far forward, in the choir, I caught a glimpse of something moving.

“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the nave.

The figure flitted through the choir toward the sanctuary. I caught its flash of white among the choir stalls.

Incendiaries clattered on the roof, and I glanced up and then back at the choir. The figure, if it had been a figure, had disappeared. Above the entrance to the Drapers’ Chapel, an order of service, caught in the updraft, danced and dipped.

“Ned!”

I whirled around. Verity’s faint voice seemed to come from behind me and far away, but was that a trick of the superheated air in the church? I ran along the choir. There was no one there or in the sanctuary. The order of service twirled in the draft from the Drapers’ Chapel and then caught fire and sank, burning, onto the altar.

“Ned!” Verity shouted, and this time there was no mistaking it. She was outside the church. Outside the south door.

I tore out and down the steps, shouting her name, past the roof-watchers and the lamp-post-loungers. “Verity!”

I saw her almost immediately. She was halfway down Little Park Street, talking earnestly to the stout ARP warden, the skirt of her torn long white dress trailing behind her.

“Verity!” I called, but the din was too great.

“No, you don’t understand,” she was screaming at the warden. “I don’t want a public shelter. I’m looking for a young man with a mustache—”

“Miss, my orders is to clear this area of all civilians,” the warden said.

“Verity!” I shouted, practically in her ear. I grabbed her arm.

She turned. “Ned!” she said, and flung herself into my arms. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Ditto,” I said.

“You’ve got no business being out here,” the warden said sternly. There was a whistle, and a long drawn-out scream, during which I couldn’t hear what he said. “This area is for official services only. Civilians aren’t supposed to be—” There was a sudden deafening bang and the warden disappeared in a shower of dust and bricks.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Warden! Warden!”

“Oh, no!” Verity said, waving her hands as if trying to push the billowing dust aside. “Where is he?”

“Under here,” I said, digging frantically through the bricks.

“I can’t find him,” Verity said, tossing bricks aside. “No, wait, here’s his hand! And his arm!”

The warden shook her arm off violently and stood up, brushing dust off the front of his coveralls.

“Are you all right?” we both said in unison.

“Of course I’m all right,” he said, coughing, “no thanks to you! Civilians! Don’t know what you’re doing. Could have killed someone, throwing bricks about like that. Interfering with the official duties of the ARP is an infraction punishable by—”

Planes began to drone overhead again. I looked up. The sky lit up with sharp flashes, and there was another, closer scream of a whistle.

“We’d better get out of this,” I said. “Down here!” and pushed Verity ahead of me down a basement stairway and into the narrow shelter of a doorway.

“Are you all right?” I shouted, looking at her. Her hair had come down on one side, and her torn dress was streaked with soot. So was her face, and her left hand had a smear of blood on it. “Are you hurt?” I said, lifting it.

“No,” she said. “I hit it on one of the arches in the church. It was dark, and I couldn’t s-see where I was going.” She was shivering. “How can it be so c-cold when the whole c-c-city’s on fire?”

“Here,” I said. “Put this on.” I took off the raincoat and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Courtesy of T.J.”

“Thanks,” she said shakily.

There was another crash, and dirt rained down on us. I pulled her farther back into the doorway and put my arms around her. “We’ll wait till this lets up a bit, and then go back to the cathedral and get out of this and back to a warmer climate,” I said lightly, trying to make her smile. “We’ve got a diary to steal and a husband to find for Tossie. You don’t suppose there’s somebody around here who’d be willing to exchange all this,” I waved my arm at the firelit sky, “for baby talk and Princess Arjumand? No, I suppose not.”

The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted. “Oh, Ned,” Verity said, and burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be making jokes in the middle of a raid. I—”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. Oh, Ned, we can’t go back to Muchings End. We’re stuck here.” She buried her face against my chest.

“Like Carruthers, you mean? They got him out. They’ll get us out, too.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, looking tearfully up at me. “We can’t get to the drop. The fire—”

“What do you mean?” I said. “The tower didn’t burn. It and the spire were the only things that didn’t. And I know that dragon from the Flower Committee’s guarding the west door, but we can get there from the south—”

“The tower?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t come through in the tower?”

“No. In the sanctuary. I stayed there for nearly an hour, hoping it would open again, and then the fires started, and I was afraid the fire watch would catch me, so I went outside and looked for you—”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I knew you’d come as soon as you found out where I was,” she said matter-of-factly.

“But—” I said, and decided not to tell her we’d tried to get here for two weeks and hadn’t been able to even get close.

“—and when I got back to the church, the sanctuary was on fire. And the net won’t open onto a fire.”

“You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t need it to. I came through in the tower, which only got a bit scorched. But we need to be able to get through the nave to the tower, so we’d better go.”

“Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the raincoat on over her arms and then took the tie belt off and used it to hitch her ripped, trailing skirt up to knee-length. “Will I pass for 1940 now?” she said, buttoning the coat.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

We went up the stairs and back toward the cathedral. The east end of the roof was blazing. And the fire brigade had finally arrived. A fire engine was parked on the corner, and we had to step over a tangle of hoses and orange-lit puddles to get to the south door.

“Where are the firemen?” Verity asked as we reached the knot of people by the south door.

“There’s no water,” a ten-year-old boy in a thin sweater said. “Jerries got the water mains.”

“They’ve gone round to Priory Row to find another hydrant.”

“No water,” Verity murmured.

We looked up at the cathedral. A good part of the roof was blazing now, shooting up in sparks at the near end near the apse, and there were flames in the blown-out windows.

“Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral,” a man behind us said.

The boy tugged at my arm. “She’s goin, ain’t she?”

She was going. By ten-thirty, when they finally found a working hydrant, the roof would be completely ablaze. The firemen would attempt to play a hose on the sanctuary and the Lady Chapel, but the water would give out almost immediately, and after that it would just be a matter of time as the roof blazed and the steel rods J.O. Scott had put in to prevent strain on the arches, began to buckle and melt in the heat, bringing the fifteenth-century arches and the roof down on the altar and the carved misereres and Handel’s organ and the wooden cross with the child kneeling at its foot.

Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral. I had always put it in the same class as the bishop’s bird stump—an irritating antiquity—and there were certainly more beautiful cathedrals. But standing here now, watching it burn, I understood what it had meant to Provost Howard to build the new cathedral, modernist-ugly as it was. What it had meant to Lizzie Bittner not to see it sold for scrap. And I understood why Lady Schrapnell had been willing to fight the Church of England and the history faculty and the Coventry City Council and the rest of the world to build it back up again.

I looked down at Verity. Tears were running silently down her face. I put my arm around her. “Isn’t there something we can do?” she said hopelessly.

“We’ll build it back up again. Good as new.”

But in the meantime we had to get back inside and into the tower. But how?

This crowd would never let us walk into a burning church, no matter what pretext I thought up, and the west door was being guarded by a dragon. And the longer we waited, the more dangerous it would be to get across the nave to the tower door.

There was a sound of clanging over the din of the ack-acks. “Another fire brigade!” someone shouted, and in spite of the fact that there was no water, everyone, even the two lamp-post-loungers, ran off toward the east end of the church.

“This is our chance,” I said. “We can’t wait any longer. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Wait,” I said, and tore two long strips from the already-ripped hem of her dress.

I stooped and dipped them in the puddle left by one of the hoses. The water was ice-cold. I wrung them out. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” I said, handing her one. “When we get inside, I want you to head straight for the back of the nave and then go along the wall. If we get separated, the tower door’s just inside the west door and to your left.”

“Separated?” she said, tying on the mask.

“Wind this round your right hand,” I ordered. “The door handles may be hot. The drop’s fifty-eight steps up, not counting the floor of the tower.”

I wrapped my hand in the remaining strip. “Whatever happens, keep going. Ready?”

She nodded, her greenish-brown eyes wide above the mask.

“Get behind me,” I said. I cautiously opened the right side of the door a crack. No flame roared out, only a billow of bronze-colored smoke. I reared back from it and then looked inside.

Things weren’t as bad as I’d been afraid they might be. The east end of the church was obscured by smoke and flames, but the smoke was still thin enough at this end to be able to see through, and it looked like this part of the roof was still holding. The windows, except for one in the Smiths’ Chapel, had been blown out, and the floor was covered with shards of red and blue glass.

“Watch out for the glass.” I pushed Verity ahead of me. “Take a deep breath and go! I’m right behind you,” I said and opened the door all the way.

She took off running, with me right behind her, flinching away from the heat. She reached the door and yanked it open.

“The door to the tower’s to your left!” I shouted, though she couldn’t possibly have heard me above the furious roar of the fire.

She stopped, holding the door open.

“Go up!” I shouted. “Don’t wait for me!” and started to sprint the last few yards. “Go up!”

There was a rumble, and I turned and looked toward the sanctuary, thinking one of the clerestory arches was collapsing. There was a deafening roar, and the window in the Smiths’ Chapel shattered in a spray of sparkling fragments.

I ducked, shielding my face with my arm, thinking in the instant before it knocked me to my knees, “It’s a high explosive. But that’s impossible. The cathedral didn’t sustain any direct hits?’

It felt like a direct hit. The blast rocked the cathedral and lit it with a blinding white light.

I staggered up off my knees, and then stopped, staring out across the nave. The force had knocked the cathedral momentarily clear of smoke, and in the garish white afterlight I could see everything: the statue above the pulpit engulfed in flames, its hand raised like a drowning man’s; the stalls in the children’s chapel, their irreplaceable misereres burning with a queer yellow light; the altar in the Cappers’ Chapel. And the parclose screen in front of the Smiths’ Chapel.

“Ned!”

I started toward it. I only got a few steps. The cathedral shook, and a burning beam came crashing down in front of the Smiths’ Chapel, falling across the pews.

“Ned!” Verity cried desperately. “Ned!”

Another beam, no doubt reinforced with a steel girder by J.O. Scott, crashed down across the first, sending up a blackish swell of smoke that cut off the whole north side of the church from view.

It didn’t matter. I had already seen enough.

I flung myself through the door and through the tower door and up the firelit stairs, wondering what on earth I was going to say to Lady Schrapnell. In that one bright bomb-lit instant I had seen everything: the brasses on the walls, the polished eagle on the lectern, the blackening pillars. And in the north aisle, in front of the parclose screen, the empty wrought-iron flower stand.

It had been removed for safekeeping, after all. Or donated as scrap. Or sold at a jumble sale.

“Ned!” Verity shouted. “Hurry! The net’s opening!”

Lady Schrapnell had been wrong. The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there.

“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and change, you can’t beat a sea trip.”

Three men in a boat

Jerome K. Jerome

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - F I V E

Back in the Tower—The Cask of Amontillado—In the Scullery, the Kitchen, the Stables, and Trouble—Jane Is Completely Incomprehensible—The Prisoner of Zenda—A Swoon, Not Mrs. Mering This Time—Terence’s New Understanding of Poetry—A Letter—A Surprise—One Last Swoon, Involving Furniture—An Even Bigger Surprise

Third time is not necessarily a charm. The net shimmered, and we were in pitch-blackness again. The din had disappeared, though there was still a strong smell of smoke. It was at least twenty degrees cooler. I took one arm away from around Verity and cautiously felt to the side. I touched stone.

“Don’t move,” I said. “I know where we are. I was here before. It’s Coventry’s belltower. In 1395.”

“Nonsense,” Verity said, starting up the steps. “It’s the Merings’ wine cellar.”

She opened the door two steps above us a crack, and light filtered in, revealing wooden steps and racks of cobwebbed bottles below.

“It’s daylight,” she whispered. She opened the door a little wider and stuck her head out, looking both ways. “This passage opens off the kitchen. Let’s hope it’s still the sixteenth.”

“Let’s hope it’s still 1888,” I said.

She peeked out again. “What do you think we should do? Should we try to get out to the drop?”

I shook my head. “There’s no telling where we’d end up. Or whether we could get back.” I looked at her ragged, soot-streaked white dress. “You need to get out of those clothes. Especially the raincoat, which is circa 2057. Give it to me.”

She shrugged out of it.

“Can you get up to your room without being seen?”

She nodded. “I’ll take the back stairs.”

“I’ll go try to ascertain our space-time location. I’ll meet you in the library in a quarter of an hour, and we’ll go from there.”

She handed me the raincoat. “What if we’ve been gone a week? Or a month? Or five years?”

“We’ll claim we’ve been on the Other Side,” I said, but she didn’t laugh.

She said bleakly, “What if Tossie and Terence are already married?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. “Or fall in.”

She smiled back at me, one of those heart-turning smiles no amount of rest was ever going to render me immune to. “Thank you for coming to find me,” she said.

“At your service, miss,” I said. “Go put on a clean dress.”

She nodded. “Wait a few minutes so we won’t be seen together.”

She opened the door and slid out, and I realized suddenly I hadn’t told her what I’d gone all the way to the Fourteenth Century and back to tell her about.

“I found out how Tossie’s diary—” I started, but she was already down the corridor and starting up the back stairs.

I peeled off the coveralls. My coat and trousers had been fairly well protected by them, but my hands, and presumably my face, were a mess. I wiped them on the lining of the coveralls, wishing wine cellars came equipped with mirrors. Then I rolled the coveralls into a bundle with the raincoat, and jammed them far back behind a rack of claret.

I took a cautious look and went out into the passage. There were four doors along it, one of which had to lead to the outside. The last one was covered in green baize, which meant it led to the main part of the house. I opened the first.

The scullery. It was full of Cinderella-like stacks of dirty dishes and piles of pots, and a row of unpolished shoes. The shoes had to mean it was after bedtime and before the family was up, which was good—it meant Verity wouldn’t run into anyone on her way to her bedroom—but on second thought, it didn’t make any sense. That first night, when I sneaked Cyril back to the stable, I had nearly run into Baine putting the polished shoes outside the doors, and it had still been dark out. And he hadn’t collected them till after everyone had gone to bed. But it was clearly morning. Sun was streaming in on the pots and pans.

There was no newspaper and nothing else that might give a clue to our space-time location.

One of the pots had a copper bottom. I peered into it. There was a large smear of soot on my cheek and across my mustache. I pulled out my handkerchief, spit on it, dabbed at my face, smoothed my hair, and went back out into the passage, calculating. If this was the scullery, the next door must be the kitchen, and the one after that the door to the outside.

Wrong. It was the kitchen, and Jane and the cook were in it, whispering together in the corner. They moved apart guiltily. The cook went over to an enormous black stove and began stirring something briskly, and Jane put a piece of bread on a toasting fork and held it over the fire.

“Where’s Baine?” I said.

Jane jumped about a foot. The bread fell off the toasting fork and into the ashes, flaring up brightly.

“What?” she said, holding the toasting fork in front of her like a rapier.

“Baine,” I repeated. “I need to speak with him. Is he in the breakfast room?”

“No,” she said frightenedly. “I swear by the Blessed Mother, I don’t know where he is, sorr. He didn’t tell us anything. You don’t think the mistress will dismiss us, do you?”

“Dismiss you?” I said, bewildered. “Why? What have you done?”

“Nothing. But she’ll say we must have known all about it, what with gossiping in the servants’ hall and all that,” she said, waving the toasting fork for emphasis. “That’s what happened to my sister Margaret when young Mr. Val run off with Rose the scullery maid. Mrs. Abbott sacked the whole lot.”

I took the toasting fork away from her. “Known all about what?”

“Never even guessed,” the cook said from the stove. “All those fine airs and giving orders. It just goes to show you.”

This wasn’t getting anywhere, and I was running out of time. I decided to try the direct approach. “What time is it?” I asked.

Jane looked frightened all over again.

“Nine o’clock,” the cook said, consulting a watch pinned to her bosom.

“Nine o’clock, and I’ve got to be taking it up to them,” Jane said and burst into tears. “He said not to be taking it up till the morning post’d come, so as to give them enough time, and it’s always here by nine o’clock.” She wiped her eyes on the tail of her apron and straightened, steeling herself. “I’d best be going up and see if it’s been.”

I was going to ask, “Take what up?” but was afraid it would bring on a fresh round of tears and incoherencies. And there was no telling what the response might be if I asked them what day it was. “Tell Baine to bring me a copy of the Times. I’ll be in the library,” I said, and went outside.

At least it was still summer, and, on closer inspection, June. The roses were still in bloom, and the peonies, destined to serve as prototypes for countless penwipers, were still just coming out. As was Colonel Mering, carrying a burlap sack toward the fishpond. As oblivious and absorbed with his goldfish as he very likely was, I still didn’t want to have an encounter with him until I knew how much time had elapsed.

Accordingly, I ducked around the side of the house. I’d go round to the groom’s door, through the stable, and from there to the French doors and the parlor. I slipped in the groom’s door. And nearly tripped over Cyril. He was lying on a burlap sack with his chin on his paws.

“You wouldn’t happen to know the time, would you?” I said. “And the date?”

And here was another sign that something was wrong. Cyril didn’t get up. He simply raised his head, looked at me with an expression like the Prisoner of Zenda, and lay it back down again.

“What is it, Cyril? What’s wrong?” I said, and reached to tug on his collar. “Are you ill?” And saw the chain.

“Good Lord,” I said to him. “Terence hasn’t married her, has he?”

Cyril continued to gaze hopelessly at me. I unhooked the chain. “Come along, Cyril,” I said. “We’ll go straighten this out.”

He staggered to his feet and trotted after me resignedly. I went out of the stables and around to the front of the house to find Terence. He was down at the Merings’ dock, sitting in the boat and staring at the river, his head sunk nearly as low as Cyril’s had been when he’d been left to guard the boat.

“What are you doing out here?” I said.

He looked up dully. “ ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side,’ ” he said. “ ‘Out flew the web and floated wide,’ ” which didn’t exactly clarify things.

“Cyril was chained up in the stable,” I said to him.

“I know,” Terence said without moving his gaze. “Mrs. Mering caught me sneaking him upstairs last night.”

So at least a full day and night had passed since our departure, and I’d better think of an explanation for my absence quickly before Terence asked me where I’d been.

But he simply went on gazing out at the river. “He was right, you know. About how it happens.”

“How what happens?”

“Fate,” he said bitterly.

“Cyril was chained up,” I said.

“He’s got to become accustomed to being in the stable,” he said dully. “Tossie doesn’t approve of animals in the house.”

“Animals?” I said. “This is Cyril we’re talking about. And what about Princess Arjumand? She sleeps on the pillows.”

“I wonder if she woke up that morning, happy as a lark, no idea her doom was going to come upon her.”

“Who?” I said. “Princess Arjumand?”

“I hadn’t a clue, you know, even when we were pulling into the station. Professor Peddick was talking about Alexander the Great and the battle of Issus, something about the decisive moment and everything depending on it, and I’d no idea.”

“You got Professor Peddick safely back to Oxford, didn’t you?” I said, suddenly worried. “He didn’t get off the train to go look for gravel bottoms?”

“No,” he said. “I delivered him into the arms of his loved ones. Into the arms of his loved ones,” he repeated anguishedly. “And just in time. Professor Overforce was about to deliver his funeral oration.”