“What did he say?”

“He fainted dead away,” Terence said, “and when he came to, he flung himself at Professor Peddick’s knees, babbling about how he’d never have forgiven himself if he’d drowned and how he’d seen the error of his ways, how Professor Peddick was right, a single thoughtless action could change the course of history and he intended to go straight home and tell Darwin not to jump out of trees anymore. And yesterday he announced he was withdrawing his candidacy for the Haviland Chair in favor of Professor Peddick.”

“Yesterday?” I said. “When did you take Professor Peddick to Oxford? The day before yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Terence said vaguely. “Or was it an eon ago? Or a single moment? ‘We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’ There one is on one’s island, weaving away, and the next thing one knows . . . I didn’t properly understand poetry, you know. I thought it was all just a way of speaking.”

“What was?”

“Poetry. All that about dying for love. And mirrors cracking from side to side. It did, you know. Clean across.” He shook his head sadly. “I never understood why she didn’t just row down to Camelot and tell Lancelot she loved him.” He stared gloomily out at the water. “Well, I know now. He was already engaged to Guinevere.”

Well, not exactly engaged, since Guinevere was already married to King Arthur, and at any rate, there were more important things to be addressed.

“Cyril’s too sensitive to be chained up,” I said.

“We are all, all in chains. Bound, helpless and raging, in the adamantine chains of fate. Fate!” he said bitterly. “Oh, wretched Fate that let us meet too late. I thought she’d be one of those dreadful modern girls, all bloomers and bluestocking ideas. He told me I’d like her, you know. Like her!”

“Maud,” I said, the light finally dawning. “You’ve met Professor Peddick’s niece Maud.”

“There she was, standing on the railway platform at Oxford. ‘Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.’ ”

“The railway platform,” I said wonderingly. “You met her on the railway platform at Oxford. But that’s wonderful!”

“Wonderful?” he said bitterly. “ ‘Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you!’ I am engaged to Miss Mering.”

“But can’t you break the engagement? Miss Mering surely wouldn’t want you to marry her knowing you loved Miss Peddick.”

“I am not free to love anyone. I bound that love to Miss Mering when I pledged my troth to her, and Miss Peddick would not want a love without honor, a love I had already promised to another. Oh, if I had only met Miss Peddick that day in Oxford, how different things—”

“Mr. Henry, sorr,” Jane interrupted, running up to us, her cap askew and her red hair coming down. “Have you seen Colonel Mering?”

Oh, no, I thought. Mrs. Mering caught Verity on her way up the stairs. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“I must find the Colonel first,” she said, which was no answer. “He said I was to be giving it to him at breakfast but he isn’t there, and the mail’s come and all.”

“I saw the Colonel going out to the fishpond,” I said. “Give him what? What’s happened?”

“Oh, sorr, you gentlemen had best both go inside,” she said, in an agony. “They’re in the parlor.”

“Who? Is Verity there? What’s happened?” I said, but she had already taken off at a run for the fishpond, her skirts flying.

“Terence,” I said urgently. “What day is it?”

“What does it matter?” Terence said. “ ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, lighting fools the way to dusty death.’ Fools!”

“This is important,” I said, yanking him to his feet. “The date, man!”

“Monday,” he said. “The eighteenth of June.”

Oh, Lord, we’d been gone three days!

I took off for the house, Cyril at my heels.

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

I could hear Mrs. Mering before we were in the front door. “Your behavior has truly been inexcusable, Verity. I should not have expected my cousin’s daughter to have been so selfish and thoughtless.”

She knew we’d been gone three days, and poor Verity didn’t. I skidded down the corridor toward the parlor, Cyril hot on my heels. I had to tell her before she said anything.

“I had all the care of the patient,” Mrs. Mering said. “I’m utterly exhausted. Three days and nights in that sickroom, and not so much as a moment to rest.”

I had my hand on the doorknob. I stopped. Three days and three nights in a sickroom? Then she might not know after all, she was only chastising Verity for not helping. But who was ill? Tossie? She had looked wan and pale that night after Coventry.

I put my ear to the door and listened, hoping the eavesdroppees would be more informative than they usually were.

“You might at least have offered to sit with the patient for a few minutes,” Mrs. Mering said.

“I am so sorry, Aunt,” Verity said. “I thought you would be afraid of infection.”

Why can’t people say who and what they are talking about so the eavesdropper has a chance? I thought. The patient. Infection. Be more specific.

“And I thought she would insist on you and Tossie nursing him,” Verity said.

Him? Had Mr. C shown up and promptly fallen ill? And fallen in love with his nurse Tossie?

“I would not dream of allowing Tocelyn in the sickroom,” Mrs. Mering said. “She is such a delicate girl.”

Down the corridor I saw Terence open the front door. I was going to have to go in, information or no. I looked down at Cyril. Mrs. Mering would no doubt demand to know what he was doing in the house. Then again, that might be a welcome diversion under the circumstances.

“Tocelyn has far too delicate a constitution for nursing,” Mrs. Mering was saying, “and the sight of her poor father ill would be much too upsetting for her.”

Her poor father. Then it was Colonel Mering who’d been ill. But then what was he doing heading down to the fishpond?

I opened the door.

“I thought you might show more concern for your poor uncle, Verity,” Mrs. Mering said. “I am dreadfully disappointed in—”

“Good morning,” I said.

Verity looked gratefully at me.

“And how is Colonel Mering this morning?” I said. “I trust he is feeling better. I saw him outside just now.”

“Outside?” Mrs. Mering said, clutching at her bosom. “He was told not to come down this morning. He will catch his death. Mr. St. Trewes,” she said to Terence, who had just come in and was standing, looking hangdog, by the parlor door. “Is it true? Has my husband gone outside? You must go and fetch him at once.”

Terence turned obediently to go.

“Where is Tossie?” Mrs. Mering said petulantly. “Why isn’t she down yet? Verity, tell Jane to fetch her.”

Terence reappeared, with the Colonel and Jane behind him.

“Mesiel!” Mrs. Mering cried. “What did you mean by going outside? You have been deathly ill.”

“Had to get out to the fishpond,” the Colonel said, harrumphing. “Check on things. Can’t just leave my Japanese demekins out there with that cat about. Stopped on my way out by that silly girl—can never remember her name—the maid—”

“Colleen,” Verity said automatically.

“Jane.” Mrs. Mering glared at Verity.

“Told me I had to come in here immediately,” Colonel Mering said. “Made a huge fuss. What’s it all about?”

He turned to Jane, who swallowed, took a deep, sobbing breath, and stuck out a letter on a silver salver.

“Harrumph, what’s this?” the Colonel said.

“The mail, sorr,” Jane said.

“Why didn’t Baine bring it?” Mrs. Mering demanded. She took the letter off the salver. “No doubt it is from Madame Iritosky,” she said, opening it, “explaining why she had to leave so suddenly.” She turned to Jane. “Tell Mr. Baine to come here. And tell Tossie to come down. She will want to hear this letter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said, and fled.

“I do hope she has enclosed her address,” Mrs. Mering said, unfolding several closely written pages, “so that I can write and tell her of our experience with the spirits at Coventry.” She frowned. “Why, it is not from Madame—” she stopped, reading the letter silently.

“Who is the letter from, my dear?” the Colonel said.

“O,” Mrs. Mering said, and fainted dead away.

It was a real faint this time. Mrs. Mering crashed into the credenza, decapitated the potted palm, broke the glass dome over the feather arrangement, and ended up with her head on the velvet footstool. The pages of the letter fluttered down around her.

Terence and I dived for her. “Baine!” the Colonel thundered, yanking on the bellpull. “Baine!” Verity stuck a cushion under her head and began fanning her with the letter.

“Baine!” the Colonel bellowed.

Jane appeared in the door, looking terrified.

“Tell Baine to come here immediately,” he shouted.

“I can’t, sorr,” she said, twisting her apron.

“Why not?” he bellowed.

She cringed away from him. “He’s gone, sir.”

“What do you mean, gone?” the Colonel demanded. “Gone where?”

She’d twisted her apron completely into a knot. “The letter,” she said, wringing the ends of it.

“What do you mean, that he’s gone to the postal office? Well, go and fetch him.” He waved her out of the room. “Damn Madame Iritosky! Upsetting my wife even when she isn’t here! Damned spiritist nonsense!”

“Our daughter,” Mrs. Mering said, her eyelids fluttering. She focused on the letter Verity was fanning her with. “O, the letter! The fated letter . . .” and went out again.

Jane ran in with the smelling salts.

“Where’s Baine?” Colonel Mering thundered. “Didn’t you fetch him? And go tell Tossie to come down immediately. Her mother needs her.”

Jane sat down on the gilt chair, flung her apron over her head, and began to bawl.

“Here, here, what’s this?” Colonel Mering harrumphed. “Get up, girl.”

“Verity,” Mrs. Mering said, clutching weakly at Verity’s arm. “The letter. Read it. I cannot bear—”

Verity obediently stopped fanning and held the letter up. “ ‘Dearest Papa and Darling Mumsy,’ ” she said, and looked like she was going to faint.

I started toward her, and she shook her head wordlessly at me and read on. “ ‘Dearest Papa and Darling Mumsy, By the time you read this I shall be a married woman.’ ”

“Married?” Colonel Mering said. “What does she mean, married?”

“ ‘. . . and I shall be happier than I have ever been or ever thought of being,’ ” Verity read on. “ ‘I am very sorry to have deceived you in this way, especially Papa, who is ill, but I feared if you knew of our intentions, you would forbid my marrying, and I know that when you come to know dear Baine as I do,’ ” Verity’s voice caught, and then she went on, pale as death, “ ‘as I do, you will see him not as a servant but as the dearest, kindest, best man in the world, and will forgive us both.’ ”

“Baine?” Colonel Mering said blankly.

“Baine,” Verity breathed. She let the letter fall to her lap and looked up desperately at me, shaking her head. “No. She can’t have.”

“She’s eloped with the butler?” Terence said.

“Oh, Mr. St. Trewes, my poor boy!” Mrs. Mering cried, clutching her bosom. “Are you quite destroyed?”

He didn’t look destroyed. What he looked was blank, with that vague, undecided look soldiers get when they’ve just lost a leg or been told they’re being shipped home and haven’t yet taken it in.

“Baine?” Colonel Mering said, glowering at Jane. “How did a thing like this happen?”

“Read on, Verity,” Mrs. Mering said. “We must know the worst.”

“The worst,” Verity murmured and picked up the letter. “ ‘No doubt you are curious as to how this all came about so quickly.’ ”

Which was putting it mildly.

“ ‘It all began with our trip to Coventry.’ ” She stopped, unable to go on.

Mrs. Mering snatched the letter from her impatiently. “ ‘. . . our trip to Coventry,’ ” she read, “ ‘a trip I know now the spirits were guiding us to that I might find my true love.’ Lady Godiva! I hold her entirely responsible for this!” She took the letter up again. “ ‘While we were there I admired a cast-iron footed pedestal firugeal urn which I know now to be in execrable taste, completely lacking in simplicity of form and design, but I had never been properly trained in matters of Artistic Sensibility or educated in Literature and Poetry, and was only an ignorant, thoughtless spoilt girl.

“ ‘I asked Baine, for that is how I still think of him, though now I must learn to call him William and beloved husband! Husband! How sweet the sound of that precious word! I asked him to concur in my praise of the footed firugeal urn. He would not. Not only would he not, but he called it hideous and told me that my taste in liking it was ignorant.

“ ‘No one had ever contradicted me before. Everyone around me had always indulged me in all my opinions and agreed with everything I said, except for Cousin Verity, who had corrected me once or twice, but I put that down to her not being married and having no prospects. I tried to help her to wear her hair in a more attractive way, but was unable to do much for her, poor thing.’ ”

“What is known as burning your bridges,” I murmured.

“ ‘Perhaps now that I am wed, Mr. Henry will notice her,’ ” Mrs. Mering read. “ ‘I tried to promote her to him, but, alas, he had eyes only for me. They would make a good couple, not handsome or clever, but well-suited nonetheless.’ ”

“All her bridges.”

“ ‘I was not at all used to being contradicted, and at first I was angry, but when you swooned on the train on the way home, Mama, and I went to fetch him, he was so strong and quick-witted and helpful in assisting you, Mama, that it was as if I saw him with new eyes, and I fell in love with him right there in the railway carriage.’ ”

“It’s all my fault,” Verity murmured. “If I hadn’t insisted we go to Coventry—”

“ ‘But I was too stubborn to admit my feelings,’ ” Mrs. Mering read, “ ‘and the next day I confronted him and demanded he apologize. He refused, we quarreled, and he threw me in the river, and then he kissed me, and oh, Mama, it was so romantic! Just like Shakespeare, whose plays my beloved husband is having me read, beginning with The Taming of the Shrew.’ ”

Mrs. Mering flung the letter down. “Reading books! That is the cause of all this! Mesiel, you should never have hired a servant who read books! I blame you entirely for this. Always reading Ruskin and Darwin and Trollope. Trollope! What sort of name is that for an author? And his name. Servants should have solid English names. ‘I used it when I worked for Lord Dunsany,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re certainly not using it here,’ I said. Of course what can one expect from a man who refused to dress for dinner? He read books, too. Dreadful socialist things. Bentham and Samuel Butler.”

“Who?” the Colonel said, confused.

“Lord Dunsany. Dreadful man, but he has a nephew who will inherit half of Hertfordshire and Tossie could have been received at Court, and now . . . now . . .”

She swayed and Terence reached for the smelling salts, but she waved them irritatedly away. “Mesiel! Don’t just sit there! Do something! There must be some way to stop them before it’s too late!”

“It’s too late,” Verity murmured.

“Perhaps not. Perhaps they only left this morning,” I said, gathering up the pages of the letter and scanning them. They were covered with Tossie’s flowery hand and dozens of exclamation points and underlinings and badly blotted in places. She should have bought a penwiper at the jumble sale, I thought irrelevantly.

“ ‘It is no use to try and stop us,’ ” I read. “ ‘By the time you receive this we shall already have been married in Surrey at a registrar’s office and will be on our way to our new home. My dearest husband—ah, that most precious of words!—feels that we will thrive better in a society less enslaved to the archaic class structure, a country where one can have whatever name he likes, and to that end, we sail for America, where my husband—ah, that sweet word again!—intends to earn his living as a philosopher. Princess Arjumand is accompanying us, for I could not bear to be separated from her as well as you, and Papa would probably kill her when he found out about the calico goldfish.’ ”

“My split-tailed nacreous ryunkin?” Colonel Mering said, starting up out of the chair. “What about it?”

“ ‘She ate the calico. Oh, dear, Papa, can you find it in your heart to forgive her as well as me?’ ”

“We must disown her,” Mrs. Mering said.

“We certainly must,” Colonel Mering said. “That ryunkin cost two hundred pounds!”

“Colleen!” Mrs. Mering said. “I mean, Jane! Stop snuffling and fetch my writing desk at once. I intend to write to her and tell her from this day forward we have no daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said, wiping her nose on her apron. I stared after her, thinking about Colleen/Jane and Mrs. Chattisbourne calling all her maids Gladys, and trying to remember exactly what Mrs. Mering had said about Baine. “ ‘I used it when I worked for Lord Dunsany.’ ” And what had Mrs. Chattisbourne said that day we went to fetch things for the jumble sale? “I have always felt it is not the name that makes the butler, but training.”

Colleen/Jane came back into the room, carrying the writing desk and sniffling.

“Tocelyn’s name shall never be spoken again in this house,” Mrs. Mering said, sitting down at the writing table. “Henceforth her name shall never cross my lips. All of Tocelyn’s letters shall be returned unopened.” She took out a pen and ink.

“How will we know where to send the letter telling her she’s disowned if we don’t open her letters?” Colonel Mering said.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” Verity said bleakly to me. “There’s nothing we can do.”

I wasn’t listening. I gathered up the pages of the letter and turned them over, looking for the end.

“From this day forth I shall wear mourning,” Mrs. Mering said. “Jane, go upstairs and press my black bombazine. Mesiel, when anyone asks you, you must say our daughter died.”

I located the end of the letter. Tossie had signed the letter, “Your repentant daughter, Tocelyn,” and then scratched “Tocelyn” out and signed her married name.

“Listen to this,” I said to Verity, and began reading.

“ ‘Please tell Terence that I know he will never get over me, but that he must try, and not to begrudge us our happiness, for Baine and I were fated to be together.’ ”

“If she’s truly gone and married this person,” Terence said, the light dawning, “then I’m released from my engagement.”

I ignored him. “ ‘My darling William does not believe in Fate,’ ” I persisted, “ ‘and says that we are creatures of Free Will, but he believes that wives should have opinions and ideas of their own, and what else can it have been but Fate? For had Princess Arjumand not disappeared, we should never have gone to Coventry—’ ”

“Don’t,” Verity said, “please.”

“You have to hear the rest of it,” I said, “ ‘—to Coventry. And had I not seen the footed firugeal urn, we should never have come together. I will write when we are settled in America. Your repentant daughter,’ ” I read, emphasizing each word, “ ‘Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ ”

“Look here! I’ve an idea we’ve been working this thing from the wrong end.”

Lord Peter Wimsey

C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - S I X

An Anticlimax—How Mystery Novels End—Mrs. Mering Blames the Colonel—Realizing What It Means—A Happy Ending for Cyril—Mrs. Mering Blames Verity—A Séance Proposed—Packing—Premonitions—Mrs. Mering Blames Me—Finch Is Still Not at Liberty to Say—Waiting for the Train—Disappearance of the Bishop’s Bird Stump—Realizing What It Means

Well, it wasn’t exactly the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, with Hercule Poirot gathering everyone together in the drawing room to reveal the murderer and impress everyone with his astonishing deductive powers.

And it definitely wasn’t a Dorothy Sayers, with the detective hero saying to his heroine sidekick, “I say, we make a jolly good detectin’ team. How about makin’ the partnership permanent, eh, what?” and then proposing in Latin.

We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.

Not that there wasn’t whimpering. Mrs. Mering was doing a good deal of that, not to mention weeping, wailing, and clutching the letter to her bosom.

“O, my precious daughter!” she sobbed. “Mesiel, don’t just stand there. Do something.”

The Colonel looked around uneasily. “What can I do, my dear? According to Tossie’s letter, they are already afloat.”

“I don’t know. Stop them. Have the marriage annulled. Wire the Royal Navy!” She stopped, grabbed her heart, and cried, “Madame Iritosky tried to warn me! She said, ‘Beware of the sea!’ ”

“Pah! Seems to me if she’d truly had any contact with the Other Side, she could have given a better warning than that!” Colonel Mering said.

But Mrs. Mering wasn’t listening. “That day at Coventry. I had a premonition—oh, if I had only realized what it meant, I might have saved her!” She let the letter flutter to the floor.

Verity stooped and picked it up. “ ‘I will write when we are settled in America,’ ” she said softly. “ ‘Your repentant daughter, Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ William Patrick Callahan.” She shook her head.

“What do you know?” she said softly. “The butler did it.”

As she said it, I had the oddest sensation, like one of Mrs. Mering’s premonitions, or a sudden shifting underfoot, and I thought suddenly of anti-cathedral protesters and Merton’s pedestrian gate.

“The butler did it.” And then something else. Something important. Who had said that? Verity, explaining the mystery novels? “It was always the least likely suspect,” she had said in my bedroom that first night. “For the first hundred books or so, the butler did it, and after that he was the most likely, and they had to switch to unlikely criminals, you know, the harmless old lady or the vicar’s devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn’t take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, and . . .”

But that wasn’t it. Someone else had said, “The butler did it.” But who? Not anyone here. Mystery novels hadn’t even been invented, except for The Moonstone. The Moonstone. Something Tossie had said about The Moonstone, about being unaware you were committing a crime. And something else. Something about disappearing into thin air.

“And the neighbors!” Mrs. Mering wailed. “What will Mrs. Chattisbourne say when she finds out? And the Reverend Mr. Arbitage!”

There was a long moment during which only the sound of her sobbing could be heard, and then Terence turned to me and said, “Do you realize what this means?”

“Oh, Terence, you poor, poor boy!” Mrs. Mering sobbed. “And you would have had five thousand pounds a year!” and allowed herself to be led weeping from the room by Colonel Mering.

We watched them climb the stairs. Halfway up, Mrs. Mering swayed in her husband’s arms. “We shall have to hire a new butler!” she said despairingly. “Where shall I ever find a new butler? I blame you entirely for this, Mesiel. If you had let me hire English servants instead of Irish—” She broke down, weeping.

Colonel Mering handed her his handkerchief. “There, there, my dear,” he said, “don’t take on so.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Terence said, “Do you Realize What This Means? I’m not engaged. I’m free to marry Maud. ‘Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ ”

Cyril clearly Realized What It Meant. He sat up alertly and began to wag his entire body.

“You do know, don’t you, old fellow?” Terence said. “No more sleeping in the stable for you.”

And no more baby talk, I thought. No more putting up with Princess Arjumand.

“It’s the soft life for you from now on,” Terence said. “Sleeping in the house and riding on trains and all the butcher’s bones you like! Maud adores bulldogs!”

Cyril smiled a wide, drooling smile of pure happiness.

“I must go up to Oxford immediately. When’s the next train? Pity Baine’s not here. He’d know.” He leaped up the stairs. At the top, he leaned down over the railing and said, “You do think she’ll forgive me, don’t you?”

“For being engaged to the wrong girl?” I said. “A minor infraction. Happens all the time. Look at Romeo. He’d been in love with some Rosalind person. It never seemed to bother Juliet.”

“ ‘Did my heart love till now?’ ” he quoted, extending his hand dramatically down toward Verity. “ ‘Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.’ ” He disappeared down the upstairs corridor.

I looked at Verity. She stood with her hands on the newel post and was gazing sadly after Terence.

By tomorrow she’ll be back in the 1930s, I thought, Realizing What It Meant. She would be back to documenting the Depression and reading mystery novels, her beautiful red hair in a pageboy, and her long legs, which I had never seen, encased in silk stockings with a seam down the back. And I would never see her again.

No, I would probably see her at the consecration. If I were still allowed to come. If Lady Schrapnell didn’t permanently assign me to jumble sale duty when I told her that the bishop’s bird stump hadn’t been in the cathedral.

And if I did see Verity at the consecration, what exactly was I supposed to say to her? All Terence had to apologize for was thinking he’d been in love. I had to apologize for being such a liability in the scheme of things that I’d had to be shut up in a dungeon during the denouement. Not exactly something to be proud of. It was just as well I’d be stuck behind the fancy goods stall.

“I’m going to miss all this,” Verity said, her eyes still on the stairs. “I should be glad it’s all worked out so well, and that the continuum’s not going to collapse . . .” She turned her beautiful naiad’s eyes on me. “You do think the incongruity’s repaired, don’t you?”

“There’s a train at 9:43,” Terence said, racketing down the stairs with a valise in one hand and his hat in the other. “Baine thoughtfully left a Bradshaw in my room. Arrives at 11:02. Come along, Cyril, we’re going to go get engaged. Where’s he got to? Cyril!” He disappeared into the parlor.

“Yes,” I said to Verity. “Completely repaired.”

“Ned, you can arrange to have the boat sent back to Jabez, can’t you?” Terence said, reappearing with Cyril. “And the rest of my things sent to Oxford?”

“Yes,” I said. “Go.”

He pumped my hand. “Goodbye. ‘Friend, ahoy! Farewell, farewell!’ I’ll see you next term.”

“I . . . I’m not certain about that,” I said, and realized how much I was going to miss him. “Goodbye, Cyril.” I leaned down to pat him on the head.

“Nonsense. You’re looking much better since we’ve been at Muchings End. You’ll be entirely cured by Michaelmas term. We’ll have such jolly times on the river,” Terence said, and was gone, Cyril trotting happily after him.

“I want them out of this house immediately,” Mrs. Mering’s voice said, overwrought, and we both looked up the stairs.

A door slammed overhead. “Absolutely out of the question!” Mrs. Mering said, and then the low sound of voices murmuring. “. . . and tell them . . .”

More murmuring. “I want you to go downstairs immediately and tell them. This is all due to them!”

More murmuring, and then, “If she’d been a proper chaperone this would never ha—”

A door shutting cut her off, and a minute later Colonel Mering came down the stairs, looking extremely embarrassed.

“All been too much for my poor dear wife,” he said, looking at the carpet. “Her nerves. Very delicate. Rest and absolute quiet is what she needs. Think it best you go to your aunt in London, Verity, and you back to—” He looked at a loss.

“To Oxford,” I said.

“Ah, yes, to your studies. Sorry about this,” Colonel Mering said to the carpet. “Glad to arrange for the carriage.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“No trouble,” he said. “Will have Baine tell—” he stopped, looking lost.

“I’ll see that Miss Brown gets to the station,” I said.

He nodded. “Must go see to my dear wife,” he said, and started up the stairs.

Verity went after him. “Colonel Mering,” she said, following him halfway up the stairs. “I don’t think you should disown your daughter.”

He looked embarrassed. “Afraid Malvinia’s quite determined. Dreadful shock, you know. Butler and all that.”

“Baine—I mean, Mr. Callahan—did prevent Tossie’s cat from eating your Black Moor,” she said.

Wrong thing to say. “He didn’t prevent it from eating my globe-eyed nacreous ryunkin,” he said angrily. “Cost two hundred pounds.”

“But he did take Princess Arjumand with him so she can’t eat any more of your goldfish,” she said persuasively, “and he prevented Madame Iritosky from stealing Aunt Malvinia’s ruby necklace. And he’s read Gibbon.” She put her hands on the newel post and looked up at him. “And she is your only daughter.”

Colonel Mering looked down at me for support. “What do you think, Henry? Will this butler fellow make her a good husband?”

“He has her best interests at heart,” I said firmly.

The Colonel shook his head. “Afraid my wife is quite determined never to speak to her again. Said from this moment forth, Tossie is dead to her.” He went sadly up the stairs.

“But she’s a spiritist,” Verity said, pursuing him. “She is quite capable of speaking to the dead.”

His face lit up. “Capital idea! Could have a séance.” He went happily up the stairs. “Loves séances. Could rap out, ‘Forgive.’ Bound to work. Never thought all that medium poppycock would be of any use.”

He rapped loudly three times on the banister. “Capital idea!”

He started down the corridor and then stopped and put his hand on Verity’s arm. “Should pack and depart for the station as soon as possible. Your own best interests at heart. Nerves, you know.”

“I quite understand,” Verity said and opened the door to her room. “Mr. Henry and I shall be gone directly.” She shut her door behind her.

Colonel Mering disappeared down the corridor. A door opened and shut, but not before Mrs. Mering’s voice had boomed out like the Red Queen’s, “. . . gone yet? I thought I told you—”

Time to depart.

I went upstairs and into my room. I opened the wardrobe and got out my carpetbag. I set it on the bed and then sat down beside it and thought about what had just happened. The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.

But why had it sent us to Coventry’s air raid, a crisis point, where presumably we could do a lot more damage? Or was Coventry a crisis point?

Its being off-limits had seemed to indicate it was a crisis point, and logically Ultra’s involvement should make it one, but perhaps the raid was only off-limits when we were looking for the bishop’s bird stump, because Verity and I had already been there. Perhaps it had been off-limits to give us a clear field.

To do what? To watch Provost Howard take candlesticks and Regimental Colors to the police station and see that the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t among the things saved? To see that it wasn’t in the church during the raid?

I would have given anything not to have seen that, not to have to tell Lady Schrapnell. But it was definitely not there. I wondered who had stolen it and when.

It had to have been that afternoon. Carruthers said the Flower Committee biddy Miss Sharpe had said she’d seen the bishop’s bird stump when she left the cathedral after the Advent Bazaar and Soldiers’ Christmas Parcel Effort meeting, that she’d stopped and pulled three dead flowers out of it.

Everything started to shift, the way it had when Finch said, “You’re on Merton’s playing fields,” and I grabbed for the bedpost like it was the pedestrian gate.

A door slammed. “Jane!” Mrs. Mering’s voice said from the corridor. “Where is my black bombazine?”

“Here, mum,” Jane’s voice said.

“O, this won’t do at all!” Mrs. Mering’s voice again. “It’s entirely too heavy for June. We shall have to order mourning clothes from Swan and Edgar’s. They had a lovely soft black crepe with jet trim on the bodice and a pleated underskirt.”

A pause, either for weeping or wardrobe-planning.

“Jane! I want you to take this note over to Notting Hill. And not a word to Mrs. Chattisbourne. Do you hear?” Slam.

“Yes, mum,” Jane said timidly.

I stood there, still clutching the bedpost, trying to recall the idea, the odd sensation I’d had a moment ago, but it was gone, as quickly as it had come, and that must have been what had happened to Mrs. Mering there in the cathedral. She hadn’t had a message from the spirit world, or from Lady Godiva either. She had looked at Baine and Tossie, and for an instant things had shifted into their true orientation, and she had seen what was happening, what was going to happen.

And then she must have lost it, because otherwise she’d have dismissed Baine on the spot and sent Tossie off on a Grand Tour of Europe. It must have gone as instantly as it came, the way mine just had, and that odd, chipped-tooth-probing look of hers had been her trying to remember what had triggered it.

The butler did it. “If I can ever do anything to repay you for returning Princess Arjumand, I should be more than obliged,” Baine had said, and he certainly had repaid me. In spades. “The butler did it,” Verity had said, and he certainly had.

Only not Verity. The fur-bearing woman in Blackwell’s. “The butler always does it,” she said, and the other one, the one with the Cyril-like fur draped over her shoulders, had said, “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The real crime had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed.” The real crime. A crime the person was unaware of having committed. And something else. About someone marrying a farmer.

“But a butler!” Mrs. Mering’s anguished voice cried from down the corridor, followed by placating murmurs.

“Never should have let them stay in the first place!” Colonel Mering said.

“If she hadn’t met Mr. St. Trewes,” Mrs. Mering wailed, “she’d never have been thinking about marriage.” Her voice died away into sobbing murmurs, and it was nice to know other people second-guessed their actions, but it was definitely time to go.

I opened the bureau and looked at the clothes Baine had neatly stacked inside. The shirts all belonged to Elliott Chattisbourne and the Victorian era. And the collars and cuffs and nightshirt. I wasn’t as certain of the socks, but I must have been wearing the pair I’d come through in or the net wouldn’t have opened. Unless of course I was going to cause an incongruity, in which case there wouldn’t even be any increased slippage.

And if the continuum had been trying to get rid of Verity and me, why hadn’t the net just refused to open the first time we tried to come back from Oxford after we’d reported in? Why hadn’t it refused to open when Verity tried to take Princess Arjumand through? Baine wasn’t trying to drown the cat. He’d have been delighted to find Verity standing there by the gazebo with Princess Arjumand, delighted she’d waded in and rescued her. Why hadn’t it refused to open when Verity tried to come through to Muchings End in the first place? It didn’t make sense.

I opened the bottom drawer. Baine had thoughtfully folded my too-small shirts and waxed my too-small patent leather shoes. I put them in the carpetbag and looked round the room for any other stray items. Not the straight razors, thank goodness. Nor the silver-backed brushes.

My straw boater was lying on the nightstand. I started to put it on and then thought better of it. It was hardly the occasion for jauntiness.

None of it made sense. Why, if the continuum hadn’t wanted us meddling, had it landed me forty miles away? And Carruthers in a marrows field? Why had it refused to open for Carruthers for three weeks after the raid? Why had it sent me to 2018 and 1395 and Verity to 1940? And, the most important question of all, why had it brought us back now?

“An American!” Mrs. Mering shrieked from the end of the corridor. “It’s all Mr. Henry’s fault. His disgraceful American ideas of class equality!”

Definitely time to go. I closed the carpetbag and went out into the corridor. I stopped at Verity’s door and raised my hand to knock, and then thought better of that, too.

“Where is Jane?” Mrs. Mering’s voice rang out. “Why isn’t she back yet? Irish servants! This is all your fault, Mesiel. I wanted to hire—”

I made a speedy and quiet exit down the stairs. Colleen/Jane was standing at the foot of them, twisting her apron in her hands.

“Has she dismissed you?” I asked her.

“No, sorr, not yet,” she said, looking up nervously in the direction of Mrs. Mering’s room. “But she’s that angry.”

I nodded. “Has Miss Brown come down?”

“Yes, sorr. She said to tell you she would wait for you at the station.”

“The station?” I said, and then realized she meant the drop. “Thank you, Jane. Colleen. And good luck.”

“Thank you, sorr.” She started up the stairs, crossing herself as she went.

I opened the front door, and there stood Finch, in his morning coat and butler’s derby, his hand already reaching for the knocker.

“Mr. Henry,” he said. “Just the person I came to see.”

I shut the door behind me and led him over to where we couldn’t be observed from the windows.

“I’m so glad I caught you before you left, sir,” he said. “I have a dilemma.”

“I’m hardly the person to ask,” I said.

“You see, sir, my mission’s nearly completed, and I might be able to depart as early as tomorrow morning, but Mrs. Chattisbourne is having a tea tomorrow afternoon to plan the St. Anne’s Day Sale of Work. It’s terribly important to her, and so I’d planned to stay on to see that everything went well. That kitchen maid of hers, Gladys, has the mind of a rabbit, and—”

“And you’re afraid you’ll miss the consecration if you stay a few more days?” I said.

“No. I asked Mr. Dunworthy and he said it was quite all right, they could bring me through at the same time. No, my dilemma is this.” He held out a square envelope with the initials M.M. embossed in gold script on it. “It’s an offer of employment from Mrs. Mering. She wants me to come and be her butler.”

So that was why Colleen/Jane had her cloak on. With Mrs. Mering’s only daughter gone, run off to elope with the butler, and her heart broken, the first thing she had done was to send Colleen/Jane over to the Chattisbournes’ to filch Finch.

“It’s a very good offer, sir,” Finch said. “There are a number of advantages to taking it.”

“And you’re thinking of staying in the Victorian era permanently?”

“Of course not, sir! Although,” he said wistfully, “there are moments when I feel I have found my true métier here. No, my dilemma is that Muchings End is much more convenient to my mission than the Chattisbournes’. If I am reading the signs correctly, I should be able to complete my mission tonight and it won’t matter, but it might turn out to take several days. And if that were the case, my mission—”

“What is your mission anyway, Finch?” I said, exasperated.

He looked pained. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say. I was sworn to secrecy by Mr. Lewis, and I have also witnessed events you are not yet aware of, and have access to information you have not, and I dare not jeopardize the success of either of our missions by speaking out of turn. As you know, sir, ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ ”

I had that odd, disorienting sensation again, of things up-ending and reorienting themselves, and I tried to grab hold of it, like I had grabbed onto the pedestrian gate.

“Loose lips sink ships.” I knew who had said that. I had, thinking about Ultra and Coventry and secrets as crisis points. It was something about Ultra, and what would have happened if the Nazis had found out we had broken their code—no, it was no use. Just as things were starting to shift, it was gone again.

“If the mission should go several days,” Finch was saying, “Muchings End is much closer both to the vicarage and the drop. And it’s not as if I would be leaving Mrs. Chattisbourne in the lurch. I have already found an excellent butler for her through an agency in London. I intend to telegraph him of the vacant position just before I leave. But it doesn’t seem fair to accept the position with Mrs. Mering when I will not be staying. I suppose I could attempt to find a second but—”

“No,” I said. “Take the position. And don’t give any notice when you leave. Just disappear. Mrs. Mering needs to suffer the slings and arrows of unreliable domestic help so she can learn to appreciate her new son-in-law. Plus, it will teach her not to steal her friends’ servants.”

“Oh, good, sir,” he said. “Thank you. I shall tell her I can take the position after Mrs. Chattisbourne’s tea party.” He started up to the door again. “And don’t worry, sir. It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

He raised the knocker, and I hurried out to the gazebo. At the last minute, I remembered the coveralls and the Burberry and went back down to the wine cellar to collect them and put them in my carpetbag to take through. The coveralls had an ARP patch on them and Burberry hadn’t begun manufacturing his raincoats till 1903, fifteen years from now, and the last thing we needed was another incongruity.

I shut up the carpetbag and started out to the drop again, wondering if Verity would be there or if she would have gone on ahead to Oxford to avoid awkward goodbyes.

But she was there, in the white hat, with her bags on either side of her, as if she were on a railway platform.

I came up beside her. “Well,” I said, setting down my carpetbag.

She looked at me from behind her white veil, and I thought, it truly is too bad I didn’t singlehandedly save the universe. Since I hadn’t, I looked at the peonies behind the gazebo and said, “When’s the next train?”

“Five minutes,” she said. “If it opens.”

“It will open,” I said. “Tossie’s married Mr. C, Terence is getting engaged to Maud, their grandson will fly a night raid to Berlin, the Luftwaffe will leave off bombing aerodromes and begin bombing London, and all’s right with the continuum.”

“In spite of us,” she said.

“In spite of us.”

We stared at the peonies.

“I suppose you’re glad it’s over,” she said. “I mean, you’ll finally be able to get what you wanted.”

I looked at her.

She looked away. “Some sleep, I mean.”

“I’m not nearly so enamored of it anymore,” I said. “I’ve learned to do without.”

We stared at the peonies some more.

“I suppose you’ll go back to your mystery novels,” I said after another silence.

She shook her head. “They’re not very true-to-life. They always end by solving the mystery and righting the wrong. Miss Marple’s never shuffled off to an air raid while they clean up the mess she’s made.” She tried to smile. “What will you do now?”

“Jumble sales, probably. I should imagine Lady Schrapnell will assign me to permanent coconut shy duty when she finds out the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there after all.”

“Wasn’t where?”

“In the cathedral,” I said. “I got a clear view of the north aisle as we were leaving. The stand was there, but no bishop’s bird stump. I hate to tell her, she had her heart so set on its having been in the cathedral. You were right. Strange as it may seem, someone must have removed it for safekeeping.”

She frowned. “Are you certain you were looking in the right place?”

I nodded. “In front of the parclose screen of the Smiths’ Chapel, between the third and fourth pillars.”

“But that’s impossible,” she said. “It was there. I saw it.”

“When?” I said. “When did you see it?”

“Just after I came through,” she said.

“Where?”

“In the north aisle. The same place it was when we were there yesterday.”

There was a faint whisper of air, and the net began to shimmer. Verity stooped to pick up her bags and stepped down onto the grass.

“Wait.” I grabbed her arm. “Tell me exactly when and where you saw it.”

She looked anxiously at the shimmering net. “Shouldn’t we—”

“We’ll catch the next one,” I said. “Tell me exactly what happened. You came through in the sanctuary—”

She nodded. “The sirens were going, but I couldn’t hear any planes, and it was dark in the church. There was a little light on the altar and another one on the rood screen. I thought I’d better stay near the drop, in case it opened again right away. So I hid in one of the vestries and waited, and after a while I saw torches over by the vestry door, and the fire watch came in, going up to the roofs, and I heard one of them say, ‘Had we better start carrying things out of the vestries?’ so I sneaked into the Mercers’ Chapel and hid. I could still see the drop from there.”

“And then the Mercers’ Chapel caught on fire?”

She nodded. “I started for the vestry door, but there was all this smoke, and I must have got turned around. I ended up in the choir. That’s when I hit my hand on the arch and cut it. I remembered that the tower hadn’t burned, so I got down on the floor and worked my way along the choir railing to the nave and then crawled down the nave till the smoke got less thick and I could stand up.”

“And when was that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking anxiously at the net. “What if it doesn’t open again? Perhaps we should discuss this in Oxford.”

“No,” I said. “When did you stand up in the nave?”

“I don’t know. A little before they started carrying things out.”

The shimmer flared into light. I ignored it. “All right. You crawled down the nave—” I prompted.

“I crawled down the nave and after I’d gone about halfway, the smoke started to thin out, and I could see the west door. I took hold of the pillar I was next to and stood up, and there it was, in front of the screen. On its stand. It had a big bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums in it.”

“You’re certain it was the bishop’s bird stump?”

“It doesn’t exactly look like anything else,” she said. “Ned, what’s this all about?”

“What did you do then?”

“I thought, well, at least I’ve accomplished something. I can tell Ned it was there during the raid. If I make it out of here. And I started toward the tower door. The aisle was blocked with a pew that had got knocked over, and I had to go round it, and before I could reach the tower, the fire watch came in and started carrying things out.”

“And?” I prompted.

“I ducked across into the Cappers’ Chapel and hid.”

“How long were you in there?”

“I don’t know. A quarter of an hour or so. One of the fire watch came back in and got the altar books. I waited till he was gone, and then I went out to look for you.”

“Out the south door?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, looking at the net. It was beginning to dwindle and fade.

“Were there people outside on the steps when you went out?”

“Yes. If we’ve missed our chance to go home—”

“Did any of the fire watch go near the bishop’s bird stump?”

“No. They went into the sanctuary and the vestries and one of them ran down and got the altar cross and the candlesticks out of the Smiths’ Chapel.”

“And that’s all he got?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“I’m certain. He had to go round the back of the nave and up the south aisle with them, because of the smoke. He ran right past me.”

“Did you see any of them in the Drapers’ Chapel?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t go in the Drapers’ Chapel?”

“I told you. I came through in the sanctuary, and I was in the Mercers’ Chapel and then the choir. And that’s all.”

“Could you see the north door from where you were hiding?”

She nodded.

“And no one went out that way?”

“It was locked,” she said. “I heard one of the fire watch tell another to unlock the north door, that the fire brigade would bring the hoses in that way, and he said they’d have to do it from the outside, because of the Smiths’ Chapel being on fire.”

“What about the west door? The tower door?”

“No. The fire watch all went out the vestry door.”

“Did you see anyone else in the cathedral?” I said. “Besides the fire watch? And the firemen?”

“In the cathedral? Ned, it was on fire.”

“What were the fire watch wearing?”

“Wearing?” she said bewilderedly. “I don’t know. Uniforms. Coveralls. I . . . the verger was wearing a tin helmet.”

“Were any of them wearing white?”

“White? No, of course not. Ned, what—?”

“Could you see the west door—the tower door—from where you were hiding?”

She nodded.

“And no one went out the west door while you were there? You didn’t see anyone in the Drapers’ Chapel?”

“No. Ned, what’s this all about?”

The north door was locked, and Verity had a clear view of the south door, and there were people—that knot of roof-watchers and the two louts by the lamp-post—outside the whole time.

The fire watch was using the vestry door, and shortly after Provost Howard made it out with the altar books, it was blocked by fire. And there were people by the vestry door, too. And the stout ARP warden making the rounds. And the dragon lady head of the Flower Committee was standing militant guard outside the west door. There was no way out of the cathedral.

There was no way out of the cathedral. There was no way out of the lab. And no place to hide. Except the net.

I grabbed both of Verity’s arms. I had hidden in the net, behind the theatrical curtains, and listened to Lizzie Bittner say, “I’d do anything for him.” In Oxford in 2018. Where T.J. had discovered a region of increased slippage.

“It’s because we don’t have the treasures Canterbury and Winchester have,” Lizzie Bittner had said. Lizzie Bittner, whose husband was a descendant of the Botoners who had built the church in 1395. Lizzie Bittner, who had lied about the lab’s being open. Who had a key.

“What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second,” the fur-bearing woman had said. “The first crime had happened years before.” Or after. This was time travel, after all. And in one of the Waterloo sims, the continuum had gone back to 1812 to correct itself.

And the clue, the little fact that didn’t fit, was the increased slippage. The increased slippage that hadn’t happened on Verity’s drop, that should have prevented her from rescuing the cat, from committing the incongruity in the first place. Five minutes either way would have done it, but instead there’d been nine minutes’ worth. Nine minutes that had put her right at the scene of the crime.

“Every one of the simulated incongruities has increased slippage at the site,” T.J. had said. Every single one of them. Even the ones in which the incongruity was too great for the continuum to correct it. Every single one. Except ours.

And all we had was a cluster of slippage in 2018, which T.J. had said was too great for being that far from the site. And Coventry. Which was a crisis point.

“Ned,” Verity said urgently. “What’s wrong?”

“Shh,” I said, holding onto her arms like I had held onto the green metal uprights of Merton’s pedestrian gate. I almost had it, and if I didn’t jar it with any sudden movements or distractions, I would see the whole thing.

The slippage was too far from the site, and discrepancies were only found in the immediate vicinity of the incongruity. And the fur-bearing lady in Blackwell’s had said, “I’m glad she married him.” She had been talking about some woman who had married a farmer. “If she hadn’t, she’d still be trapped in Oxford, serving on church committees and running jumble—”

“Ned?” Verity said.

“Shh.”

“She was convinced the bishop’s bird stump had been stolen,” Carruthers had said, talking about the “bitter old spinster sort,” Miss Sharpe, who had been in charge of the Flower Committee.

And the ARP warden had said, “Come along, Miss Sharpe,” to the gray-haired woman guarding the west door. The gray-haired woman who had reminded me of someone, and she had said, “I have no intention of going anywhere. I am the vice-chairman of the Cathedral Ladies’ Altar Guild and the head of the Flower Committee.”

“Miss Sharpe,” he had called her.

Miss Sharpe, who had been so upset she’d accused everyone of knowing about the raid in advance. Who’d even written a letter to the editor.

She’d sent a letter to the paper, saying someone had advance knowledge of the raid.

In Coventry, which had known about the raid in advance. Which, unlike Muchings End, wasn’t an historical backwater. Which was a crisis point. Because of Ultra.

Because if the Nazis found out we had their Enigma machine, it could change the course of the war. The course of history.

And the only instance of something being brought forward through the net was as part of a self-correction.

I was gripping Verity’s arms so hard it had to be hurting her, but I didn’t dare let go. “That young woman in the cathedral,” I said. “What was her name?”

“In the cathedral?” Verity said bewilderedly. “Ned, there wasn’t anyone in the cathedral. It was on fire.”

“Not during the raid,” I said. “The day we went there with Tossie. The young woman who came to see the curate. What was her name?”

“I don’t . . . It was a flower name,” she said. “Geranium or—”

“Delphinium,” I said. “Not her first name. Her last name.”

“I . . . it began with an ‘S.’ Sherwood, no, Sharpe,” she said, and the world shifted 180 degrees, and I wasn’t at Balliol’s gate, I was on Merton’s playing fields, and there, in Christ Church Meadow, was Coventry Cathedral, the center of it all.

“Ned,” Verity said urgently. “What is it?”

“We’ve been looking at this the wrong way round,” I said. “You didn’t cause an incongruity.”

“But—the coincidences,” she stammered, “and the increased slippage in 2018. There had to have been an incongruity.”

“There was,” I said. “And, thanks to my amazing little gray cells, I know when it happened. And what caused it.”

“What?”

“Elementary, my dear Watson. I will give you a clue. Several clues, in fact. Ultra. The Moonstone. The Battle of Waterloo. Loose lips.”

“Loose lips?” she said. “Ned—”

“Carruthers. The dog that didn’t bark in the night. Penwipers. Pigeons. The least likely suspect. And Field General Rommel.”

“Field General Rommel?”

“The battle of North Africa,” I said. “We were using Ultra to locate Rommel’s supply convoys and sink them, being careful to send out a reconnaissance plane to be seen by the convoy so the Nazis wouldn’t get suspicious.”

I told her about the fog and the plane being unable to find the convoy, the RAF and the Navy’s simultaneous arrival, and about what Ultra had done afterward—the telegram, the planted rumors, the messages intended to be intercepted. “If the Nazis had found out we had Ultra, it would have changed the outcome of the war, so they had to set in motion an elaborate intelligence mission to correct the slip-up.” I beamed at her. “Don’t you see? It all fits.”

It all fit. Carruthers being trapped in Coventry, my making Terence miss meeting Maud, Professor Overforce pushing Professor Peddick in the Thames, even all those bloody jumble sales.

The fur-bearing ladies in Blackwell’s, Hercule Poirot, T.J., Professor Peddick with his talk of the Grand Design, all of them had been trying to tell me, and I’d been too blind to see it.

Verity was looking worriedly at me. “Ned,” she said, “exactly how many drops have you had?”

“Four,” I said. “The second of which was to Blackwell’s, where I overheard three fur-bearing matrons having an extremely enlightening discussion of a mystery novel, and the first of which was to the lab in 2018, where I heard Lizzie Bittner say she would do anything to keep Coventry Cathedral from being sold to a gaggle of spiritualists.”

The net began to shimmer faintly.

“What if there was an incongruity?” I said. “A slip-up? And the continuum, trying to protect the course of history, set in motion a sophisticated system of secondary defenses to correct the problem? Like Ultra, sending out telegrams and false leads, implementing an elaborate plan involving the drowning of cats and séances and jumble sales and elopements. And dozens of agents, some of whom weren’t even aware of the true purpose of the mission.”

The peonies glittered brightly. “In the best detective tradition, I cannot prove any of this,” I said. “Therefore, Watson, we must go collect evidence.” I picked up Verity’s bags and deposited them next to the peonies. “ ‘Quick, Watson! A hansom cab!’ ”

“Where are we going?” she said suspiciously.

“To the lab. 2057. To check the Coventry local papers and the cathedral’s committee rosters for 1888 and 1940.”

I took her arm, and we stepped into the shimmering circle. “And then,” I said, “we will go to get the bishop’s bird stump.”

The light began to grow. “Hold on,” I said and stepped out of the net to get the carpetbag.

“Ned!” Verity said.

“Coming,” I said. I opened the carpetbag, took out the boater, shut the bag and carried it back into the circle. I set the bag down and put the boater on at a jaunty angle that would have made Lord Peter proud.

“Ned,” Verity said, stepping back, her greenish-brown eyes wide.

“Harriet,” I said, and pulled her back into the already shining net.

And kissed her for a hundred and sixty-nine years.

“Quick, Hastings.  I have been blind, imbécile.  Quick, a taxi.”

Hercule Poirot

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

I Fail to Ascertain My Space-Time Location—Carruthers Refuses to Go to Coventry—The Mystery of Verity’s Drop Solved—A Complication—Carruthers Goes to Coventry—Finch is Still Not at Liberty to Say—More Newspapers—On the Tube to Coventry—Failure of Contemps to Appreciate Transportation of Own Time—I Quote Poetry—The Criminal Confesses—The Bishop’s Bird Stump Is Found at Last

When, oh, when will I ever learn to ascertain my space-time location on arrival? Granted, I had a number of things on my mind, most particularly what I intended to say to Verity when I got the time, and what I needed to do right now, but that was no excuse.

“Where’s Mr. Dunworthy?” I said to Warder the minute we came through. I didn’t wait for the veils to rise. I grabbed Verity’s hand and fought my way through them to the console.

“Mr. Dunworthy?” Warder said blankly. She was dressed up, in a print dress and a curly hairdo that made her look almost pleasant.

“He’s in London,” Carruthers said, coming in. He was dressed up as well and had washed all the soot off. “I see you found Verity.” He smiled at her. “You didn’t happen to see if the bishop’s bird stump was there while you were in Coventry, did you?”

“Yes,” I said. “What’s Mr. Dunworthy doing in London?”

“Lady Schrapnell had a last-minute notion the bishop’s bird stump might have been stored in the same place as the treasures from the British Museum were during the Blitz, in an unused tunnel of the Underground.”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “Ring him up and tell him to come back here immediately. T.J. didn’t go with him, did he?” I said, looking at the bank of stack screens he’d run his Waterloo models on.

“No,” he said. “He’s changing his clothes. He should be back in a minute. What’s this all about?”

“Where’s Lady Schrapnell?” I said.

“Lady Schrapnell?” Warder said, as if she’d never heard of her.

“Yes. Lady Schrapnell,” I said. “Coventry Cathedral. The bane of our existence. Lady Schrapnell.”

“I thought you were trying to avoid her,” Carruthers said.

“I am trying to avoid her right now,” I said. “But in a few hours, I may want her. Do you know where she is?”

He and Warder exchanged glances. “At the cathedral, I would imagine.”

“One of you needs to find out for certain,” I said. “Ask her what her schedule for the rest of the day is.”

“Her schedule?” Carruthers said.

Warder, at the same time, said, “You go find her if you want her,” and it would obviously take more than a few curls to make her pleasant. “I’m not running the chance of her giving me something else to do! She’s already got me ironing all the altar cloths and—”

“Never mind,” I said. I didn’t need Lady Schrapnell right now, and there were other, more important things to check. “I need you to do something else for me. I need copies of the Coventry Standard and the Midlands Daily Telegraph for November fifteenth through—” I turned to Carruthers. “When did you come back from Coventry? What day?”

“Three days ago. Wednesday.”

“What day in Coventry?”

“December the twelfth.”

“From November the fifteenth through December the twelfth,” I said to Warder.

“That’s out of the question!” Warder said. “I’ve got the altar cloths to iron and three rendezvouses to bring in. And all the choir’s surplices to press. Linen! There are any number of fabrics she could have had the choir wear that wouldn’t wrinkle walking up the nave to the choir, but Lady Schrapnell had to have linen! ‘God is in the details,’ she said. And now you expect me to get copies of newspapers—”

“I’ll do it,” Verity said. “Do you want facsimiles or articles only, Ned?”

“Facsimiles,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll do them at the Bod. I’ll be back directly,” she said, flashed me one of her naiad smiles, and was gone.

“Carruthers,” I said. “I need you to go to Coventry.”

“Coventry?” Carruthers said, backing up abruptly and crashing into Warder. “I’m not going back there. I had enough trouble getting out last time.”

“You don’t have to go to the air raid,” I said. “What I need—”

“And I’m not going anywhere in the vicinity. Remember the marrows field? And those bloody dogs? Forget it.”

“I don’t need you to go back in time,” I said. “All I need is some facts from the church archives. You can take the tube. I want you to find out—”

T.J. came in, and he was dressed up too, in a white shirt and his short academic robe. I wondered if Lady Schrapnell had imposed some sort of dress code.

“Just a minute, Carruthers,” I said. “T.J., I need you to do something. The model you did of the incongruity. I want you to change the focus.”

“Change the focus?” he said blankly.

“The site where the incongruity occurred,” I said.

“Don’t tell me there’s been another incongruity,” Warder said. “That’s all we need right now. I’ve got fifty linen surplices to press, three rendezvouses—”

“You said a self-correction could extend into the past, right, T.J.?” I said, ignoring her.

T.J. nodded. “Some of the models showed preemptive self-corrections.”

“And that the only instance you found of a significant object being removed from its space-time location was as part of a self-correction.”

He nodded again.

“And you said that our incongruity didn’t match any of the Waterloo models. I want you to see if it matches with the focus changed.”

T.J. obligingly sat down at the bank of computers and pushed the sleeves of his robe up. “To what?”

“Coventry Cathedral,” I said. “November the fourteenth—”

“November the fourteenth?” T.J. and Carruthers interrupted in unison. Warder gave me one of those “how-many-drops-have-you-had?” looks.

“November the fourteenth,” I said firmly. “1940. I don’t know the exact time. Sometime after 7:45 PM. and before eleven. My guess is half-past nine.”

“But that’s during the air raid,” Carruthers said, “the place none of us could get anywhere near.”

T.J. said, “What’s this all about, Ned?”

“The Fountain Pen Mystery and Hercule Poirot,” I said. “We’ve been looking at this the wrong way round. What if the rescue of the cat wasn’t the incongruity? What if it was part of the continuum’s self-correction and the real incongruity had happened earlier? Or later?”

T.J. began feeding in figures.

“There wasn’t any increased slippage on Verity’s drop,” I said, “even though five minutes either way would have kept her from rescuing Princess Arjumand. So would the net’s failure to open, but neither line of defense worked. And why did the slippage on my drop send me to Oxford to meet Terence, keep him from meeting Maud, and loan him the money for the boat so he could go meet Tossie? What if it was because the continuum wanted those things to happen? And what if all the signs we saw as indications of breakdown—my being bounced to the Middle Ages, Carruthers being trapped in Coventry—were all part of the self-correction, as well?”

A table of coordinates came up. T.J. scanned the columns, fed in more figures, scanned the new patterns. “Only the focus?” he said.

“You said discrepancies only occurred in the immediate vicinity of the site,” I said to T.J. “But what if the site wasn’t Muchings End? What if it was the raid on the cathedral, and what Verity and I saw was a discrepancy, was the course of events that would have happened if the incongruity hadn’t been repaired?”

“Interesting,” T.J. said. He rapidly fed in more figures.

“Only the focus,” I said. “Same events, same slippage.”

“This will take a while,” he said, feeding in more figures.

I turned to Carruthers. “Here’s what I need you to find out in Coventry.” I reached round Warder for a handheld and spoke into it. “I want the names of the cathedral staff, lay and clerical, in 1940,” I said, “and the cathedral’s marriage records for 1888 through—” I hesitated a moment, thinking, and then said, “—1888 through 1915. No, 1920, to be on the safe side.”

“What if the records were destroyed in the raid?”

“Then get the C of E’s list of church livings for 1940. That will have been on file in Canterbury and a number of other places. They can’t all have been hit by the Blitz.”

I hit the handheld’s print key, watched it spit out the list, and tore it off. “I need these as soon as possible.”

Carruthers stared at it. “You expect me to go now?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is important. If I’m right, we’ll have the bishop’s bird stump in time for the consecration.”

“Then you’d better hurry,” Warder said dryly. “It’s in two hours.”

“The consecration?” I said blankly. “That’s impossible,” and finally asked what should have been my first question on stepping out of the net. “What day is it?”

Verity ran in, carrying an armful of facsimile sheets. She’d changed into a slat dress and plimsolls. Her legs were just as long as I’d imagined them. “Ned, the consecration’s in a few hours!”

“I just found that out,” I said, trying to think what to do. I’d counted on having a couple of days to collect evidence to support my theory, but now there would scarcely be time to get to Coventry and back—

“Can I help?” Verity said.

“We need proof the incongruity’s been fixed,” I said. “I intended to send Carruthers—”

“I can go,” Verity said.

I shook my head. “There isn’t time. When does the consecration start?” I asked Warder.

“Eleven o’clock,” she said.

“And what time is it now?”

“A quarter past nine.”

I looked over at T.J. “How long till you have the sim?”

“Another minute,” T.J. said, his fingers flying. “Got it.” He hit “return,” the columns of coordinates disappeared, and the model came up.

I don’t know what I’d expected. The model that came up on the screen looked just like all the others—a shapeless, shadowy blur.

“Well, will you look at that?” T.J. said softly. He hit some more keys. “This is the new focus,” he said, “and this is a superimpose of the Waterloo soup kettle sim.”

He spoke into the comp’s ear. Both models came up, one over the other, and even I could see that they matched.

“Do they match?” Warder said.

“Yeah,” T.J. nodded slowly. “There are a few minor differences. The slippage at the site isn’t as great, and you can see it’s not an exact match here and here,” he said, pointing at nonexistent shapes. “And I don’t know what this is,” he pointed at nothing in particular, “but it definitely looks like a self-correction pattern. See how the slippage lessens as it approaches 1888, and then ceases altogether on—”

“June eighteenth,” I said.

T.J. typed in some figures. “June eighteenth. I’ll need to run slippage checks and probabilities, and find out what this is,” he said, tapping the nothing-in-particular, “but it definitely looks like that was the incongruity.”

“What was?” Carruthers said. “And who caused it?”

“That’s what I needed you to find out in Coventry,” I said, looking at my useless pocket watch. “But there’s no time.”

“Of course there’s time,” Verity said. “This is a time travel lab. We can send Carruthers back to get the information.”

“He can’t go back to 1940,” I said. “He’s already been there. And the last thing we need is to cause another incongruity.”

“Not to 1940, Ned. To last week.”

“He can’t be in two places at once,” I said and realized he wouldn’t be. Last week he’d been in 1940, not 2057. “Warder, how long will it take you to calculate a drop?” I said.

“A drop! I’ve already got three rendez—”

“I’ll press the surplices,” Verity said.

“I need him to go back for—how long do you think it’ll take you? A day?”

“Two,” Carruthers said.

“For two days. Weekdays. The church archives aren’t open on weekends. And it has to be two days he was in 1940. And then bring him back here immediately.”

Warder looked stubborn. “How do I know he won’t get trapped in Coventry again?”

“Because of that,” I said, pointing at the comp. “The incongruity’s fixed.”

“It’s all right, Peggy,” Carruthers said. “Go ahead and calculate it.” He turned to me. “You’ve got the list of what I need to find out?”

I gave it to him. “And one other thing. I need a list of the heads of all the ladies’ church committees in 1940.”

“I don’t have to look up the head of the Flower Committee. I know who it was,” he said. “That harpy Miss Sharpe.”

“All the ladies’ church committees, including the Flower Committee,” I said.

Verity handed him a pencil and a jotter. “So you won’t be tempted to bring any paper from last week through the net with you.”

“Ready?” Carruthers said to Warder.

“Ready,” she said warily.

He positioned himself in the net. Warder came over and smoothed his collar. “You be careful,” she said, straightening his tie.

“I’ll only be gone a few minutes,” he said, grinning fatuously. “Won’t I?”

“If you’re not,” Warder said, smiling, “I’ll come and get you myself.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it,” I murmured to Verity.

“Time-lag,” she said.

“I’ve got it set on a ten-minute intermittent,” Warder cooed.

“I won’t stay a minute longer than I have to,” Carruthers said. “I’ve got to come back as soon as I can so I can take you to the consecration.” He took her in his arms and gave her a lingering kiss.

“Look, I’m sorry to break up this tender scene,” I said, “but the consecration’s in two hours.”

“All right,” Warder snapped, gave one last smoothing to Carruthers’s collar, and stomped back to the console. Love may conquer all, but old dispositions die hard, and I hoped Baine intended to live near a river in the States.

Warder lowered the veils and Carruthers disappeared. “If he’s not back safely in ten minutes,” she said, “I’m sending you to the Hundred Years’ War.” She turned on Verity. “You promised you’d press the surplices.”

“In a minute,” I said, handing Verity one of the facsimile sheets.

“What are we looking for?” Verity said.

“Letters to the editor. Or an open letter. I’m not certain.”

I leafed through the Midlands Daily Telegraph. An article about the King’s visit, a casualties list, an article beginning, “There is heartening evidence of Coventry’s revival.”

I picked up the Coventry Standard. An advertisement for ARP Sandbags, Genuine Government Size and Quality 36s 6d per hundred. A picture of the ruins of the cathedral.

“Here are some letters,” Verity said, and handed me her sheet.

A letter praising the fire service for their courage. A letter asking if anyone had seen Molly, “a beautiful ginger cat, last seen the night of 14 November, in Greyfriars Lane,” a letter complaining about the ARP wardens.

The outside door opened. Verity jumped, but it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell. It was Finch.

His butler’s frock coat and his hair were flecked with snow, and his right sleeve was drenched.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “Siberia?”

“I am not at liberty to say,” he said. He turned to T.J. “Mr. Lewis, where is Mr. Dunworthy?”

“In London,” T.J. said, staring at the comp screen.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Well, tell him—” he looked warily at us, “—the mission is completed,” he wrung out his sleeve, “even though the pond was solid ice, and the water was freezing. Tell him the number of the—” another look at us, “—the number is six.”

“And I don’t have all day,” Warder said. “Here’s your bag.” She handed him a large burlap sack. “You can’t go through like that,” she said disgustedly. “Come on. I’ll get you dried off.” She led him into the prep room. “I’m not even the tech. I’m only substituting. I’ve got altar cloths to iron, I’ve got a ten-minute intermittent to run—” The door shut behind them.

“What was that all about?” I said.

“Here,” Verity said, handing me a facsimile sheet. “More letters to the editor.”

Three letters commenting on the King’s visit to Coventry, one complaining about the food at the mobile canteens, one announcing a jumble sale at St. Aldate’s for the victims of the air raid.

Finch, dried and combed, came back in with Warder, who was still complaining. “I don’t see why you have to bring them all through today,” she said, marching over to the console to punch keys. “I’ve got three rendezvouses to bring in, fifty—”

“Finch,” I said. “Do you know if Mrs. Bittner intends to attend the consecration?”

“Mr. Dunworthy had me send her an invitation,” he said, “and I should have thought she, of all people, would have wanted to see Coventry Cathedral restored, but she wrote to say she was afraid it would be too fatiguing.”

“Good,” I said, and picked up the Standard for the twelfth and paged through it. No letters. “What about the Telegraph?” I asked Verity.

“Nothing,” she said, putting them down.

“Nothing,” I said happily, and Carruthers appeared in the net, looking bemused.

“Well?” I said, going over to him.

He reached in his pocket for the jotter and handed it to me through the veils. I flipped it open and started down the list of church officials, looking for a name. Nothing. I turned the page to the church livings.

“The head of the Flower Committee in 1940 was a Mrs. Lois Warfield,” Carruthers said, frowning.

“Are you all right?” Warder said anxiously. “Did something happen?”

“No,” I said, scanning the church livings. Hertfordshire, Surrey, Northumberland. There it was. St. Benedict’s, Northumberland.

“There was no Miss Sharpe on any of the committees,” Carruthers said, or on the church membership roster.”

“I know,” I said, scribbling a message on one of the pages of the jotter. “Finch, ring up Mr. Dunworthy and tell him to come back to Oxford immediately. When he gets here, give him this.” I tore it out, folded it over, and handed it to him. “Then find Lady Schrapnell and tell her not to worry, Verity and I have everything under control and not to begin the consecration till we get back.”

“Where are you going?” Finch said.

“You promised you’d iron the choirboys’ surplices,” Warder said accusingly.

“We’ll try to be back by eleven,” I said, taking Verity’s hand. “If we’re not, stall.”

“Stall!” Finch said, horrified. “The Archbishop of Canterbury’s coming. And Princess Victoria. How am I supposed to stall?”

“You’ll think of something. I have the highest faith in you, Jeeves.”

He beamed. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Where shall I tell Lady Schrapnell you’ve gone?”

“To fetch the bishop’s bird stump,” I said, and Verity and I took off at a lope for the tube station.

The sky outside was gray and overcast. “Oh, I hope it doesn’t rain for the consecration,” Verity said as we ran.

“Are you joking?” I panted. “Lady Schrapnell would never allow it.”

The tube station was jammed. Masses of people, wearing hats and ties and carrying umbrellas, poured up the steps.

“A cathedral!” a girl in braids carrying a Gaia Party sign grumbled as she swept past me. “Do you know how many trees we could have planted in Christ Church Meadow for the cost of that building?”

“At any rate, we’re going out of town,” I called to Verity, who’d gotten separated from me. “The trains out of Oxford should be less crowded.”

We pushed our way over to the escalators. They were no better. I lost sight of Verity and finally found her a dozen steps below me. “Where’s everyone going?” I called.

“To meet Princess Victoria,” the large woman carrying a Union Jack on the step behind me said. “She’s travelling up from Reading.”

Verity had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Coventry!” I called to her, pointing over the heads of the crowd toward the Warwickshire Line.

“I know,” Verity shouted back, already headed down the corridor.

The corridor was jammed, and so was the platform. Verity pushed her way over to me. “You’re not the only one who’s good at solving mysteries, Sherlock,” she said. “I’ve even figured out what Finch is up to.”

“What?” I said, but a train was pulling in. The crowd surged forward, pushing us apart.

I fought my way over to her again. “Where are all these people going? Princess Victoria’s not in Coventry.”

“They’re going to the protest,” a boy in braids said. “Coventry’s holding a rally to protest the disgraceful theft of their cathedral by Oxford.”

“Really?” Verity said sweetly. “Where’s it being held? In the shopping center?” and I could have kissed her.

“You realize,” she said, pushing a hand-painted sign that read, “Architects Against Coventry Cathedral” out of her face, “that there’s probably a time-traveller from a hundred years in the future in this crowd who thinks this is all unbelievably quaint and charming.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “What is Finch up to?”

“He’s been—” she started, but the doors were opening and people were jamming onto the train.

We got separated again in the process, and I found myself half a car away from her, shoved into a seat between an old man and his middle-aged son.

“But why rebuild Coventry Cathedral, of all things?” the son was complaining. “If they had to rebuild something that had been destroyed, why not the Bank of England? That would have been of some use at least. What good’s a cathedral?”

“ ‘God works in a mysterious way,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘His wonders to perform.’ ”

Both of them glared at me.

“James Thomson,” I said. “The Seasons.”

They glared some more.

“Victorian poet,” I said, and subsided between them, thinking about the continuum and its mysterious ways. It had needed to correct an incongruity, and it had done so, putting into action its entire array of secondary defenses, and shutting down the net, shifting destinations, manipulating the slippage so that I would keep Terence from meeting Maud, and Verity would arrive at the exact moment Baine threw the cat in. To save the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

“Coventry,” the station sign read, and I fought my way out from between the bankers and off the train, motioning to Verity to get off, too. She did, and we fought our way up the escalators and out into Broadgate in front of the statue of Lady Godiva. It looked even more like rain. The protesters were putting their umbrellas up as they started for the shopping center.

“Should we ring her up first?” Verity said.

“No.”

“You’re sure she’ll be at home?”

“I’m sure,” I said, not at all certain.

But she was, though it took her a little time to open the door.

“Sorry, I’m having a bout of bronchitis,” Mrs. Bittner said hoarsely, and then saw who we were. “Oh,” she said.

She stood back so we could enter. “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.” She held out her veined hand to Verity. “You must be Miss Kindle. I understand you are a fan of mystery novels, too.”

“Only those of the Thirties,” Verity said apologetically.

Mrs. Bittner nodded. “They are quite the best.” She turned to me. “I read a great many mystery novels. I am particularly fond of those in which the criminal nearly gets away with the crime.”

“Mrs. Bittner,” I said, and didn’t know how to go on. I looked helplessly at Verity.

“You’ve puzzled it out, haven’t you?” Mrs. Bittner said. “I was afraid you would. James told me you were his two best pupils.” She smiled. “Shall we go into the drawing room?”

“I . . . I’m afraid we haven’t much time . . .” I stammered.

“Nonsense,” she said, starting down the corridor. “The criminal is always given a chapter in which to confess his sins.”

She led us into the room where I’d interviewed her. “Won’t you sit down?” she said, indicating a chintz-covered sofa. “The famed detective always gathers the suspects together in the drawing room,” she said, moving slowly toward a sideboard considerably smaller than the Merings’, steadying herself on the furniture, “and the criminal always offers them a drink. Would you care for some sherry, Miss Kindle? Would you care for some sherry, Mr. Henry? Or sirop de cassis? That’s what Hercule Poirot always drank. Dreadful stuff. I tried it once when I’d been reading Agatha Christie’s Murder in Three Acts. Tastes like cough medicine.”

“Sherry, thank you,” I said.

Mrs. Bittner poured two glasses of sherry and turned to hand them to us. “It caused an incongruity, didn’t it?”

I took the glasses from her, handed one to Verity, and sat down beside her. “Yes,” I said.

“I was so afraid it had. And when James told me last week about the theory regarding nonsignificant objects being removed from their space-time location, I knew it must have been the bishop’s bird stump.” She shook her head, smiling. “Everything else that was in the cathedral that night would have burned to ashes, but I could see by looking at it that it was indestructible.”

She poured herself a glass of sherry. “I tried to undo what I’d done, you know, but I couldn’t get the net to open, and then Lassiter—that was the head of faculty—put on new locks, and I couldn’t get into the lab. I should have told James, of course. Or my husband. But I couldn’t bear to.” She picked up the glass of sherry. “I told myself the net’s refusing to open meant that there hadn’t been an incongruity after all, that no harm had been done, but I knew it wasn’t true.”

She started for one of the chintz-covered chairs, moving slowly and carefully. I jumped up and took the glass of sherry for her till she had sat down.

“Thank you,” she said, taking it from me. “James told me what a nice young man you were.” She looked at Verity. “I don’t suppose either of you have ever done something you were sorry for afterward? Something you’d done without thinking?”

She looked down at her sherry. “The Church of England was shutting down the cathedrals that couldn’t support themselves. My husband loved Coventry Cathedral. He was descended from the Botoner family who built the original church.”

And so are you, I thought, realizing now who it was Mary Botoner had reminded me of, standing there in the tower arguing with the workman. You’re a descendant of the Botoners, too.

“The cathedral was his life,” she went on. “He always said that it wasn’t the church building that mattered, but what it symbolized, yet the new cathedral, ugly as it was, was everything to him. I thought if I could bring back some of the treasures from the old cathedral,” she said, “it would be good publicity. The tourists would flock to see them, and the cathedral wouldn’t have to be sold. I thought it would kill my husband if it had to be sold.”

“But hadn’t Darby and Gentilla proved it was impossible to bring things forward through the net?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I thought since the things had ceased to exist in their own space-time, they might come through. Darby and Gentilla had never tried to bring through anything that didn’t still exist in its own time.” She twisted the stem of the glass in her hands. “And I was fairly desperate.”

She looked up. “So I broke into the lab late one night, went back to 1940, and did it. And the next day, James telephoned to tell me that if I wanted a job, that Lassiter had authorized a series of drops to Waterloo, and then he told me—” She stopped, staring into the past. “—he told me that Shoji had had a breakthrough in temporal theory, that he’d discovered why it was impossible to bring things forward through the net, that such an action would cause an incongruity that could change the course of history, or worse.

“So you tried to take it back?” Verity said.

“Yes. And I went and saw Shoji and made him tell me as much as I could about incongruities without making him suspicious. It was all bad, but the worst was that he told me they’d been able to adapt the net to safeguard against them, and weren’t we lucky one hadn’t happened before we did, we could have caused the collapse of the entire space-time continuum.”

I looked over at Verity. She was watching Mrs. Bittner, her beautiful face sad.

“So I hid the swag, as they say in the mystery novels, and waited for the world to end. Which it did. The cathedral was deconsecrated and sold to the Church of the Hereafter and then turned into a shopping center.”

She stared into her sherry. “The irony is that it was all for nothing. My husband loved Salisbury. I had been so convinced that losing Coventry Cathedral would kill him, but it didn’t. He truly meant that about churches being only a symbol. He didn’t seem to mind even when they built a Marks and Spencer’s on the ruins.” She smiled warmly. “Do you know what he said when he heard Lady Schrapnell was rebuilding the old cathedral? He said, ‘I hope this time they get the spire on straight.’ ”

She set her glass down. “After Harold died, I came back here. And two weeks ago James telephoned and asked me if I could remember anything about the drops we’d done together, that there was an area of increased slippage in 2018, and he was afraid it was due to an incongruity. I knew then it was just a matter of time before I was found out, even though he had the wrong incongruity.” She looked up at us. “James told me about the cat and Tossie Mering. Did you manage to get Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother married to the mysterious Mr. C?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “She did marry him, but it was no thanks to us.”

“It was the butler,” Verity said, “under an assumed name.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Bittner said, clapping her veined hands together. “The old solutions are always the best. The butler, the case of mistaken identity, the least likely suspect—” She looked at us both meaningfully, “—the purloined letter.” She stood up. “I hid it in the attic.”

We started up the stairs. “I was afraid moving it might make things worse, she said, taking the steps slowly, “so I left the loot here when we went to Salisbury. I made certain it was well-hidden, and I took care to rent the house to people without children—children are so curious, you know—but I was always afraid someone would come up here and find it and do something that would change the course of history.” She turned back, holding onto the banister, and looked at me. “But it already had, hadn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything more. She seemed to be concentrating all her effort on climbing the stairs. When we reached the first floor, she led us down a corridor past a bedroom and opened a narrow door onto another, steeper flight of stairs. “This leads up to the attic,” she said, panting a little. “I’m sorry. I need to rest a bit before going on. There’s a chair in the bedroom.”

I ran to fetch it, and she sat down on it. “Would you like a glass of water?” Verity asked.

“No, thank you, dear,” she said. “Tell me about the incongruity I caused.”

“You weren’t the only person who considered the bishop’s bird stump indestructible,” I said. “So did the chairman of the Flower Committee named—”

“Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said.

I nodded. “She had been there the night of the raid, standing guard by the west door, and she knew the bishop’s bird stump couldn’t have been carried out. When it wasn’t found in the rubble or among the things the fire watch had saved, she concluded it had been stolen some time before the raid and that the thief must have known about the raid in advance, knowing he could get away with it. She was quite vocal with her theory—”

“She even wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Coventry papers,” Verity put in.

I nodded. “This next part is only a theory, like Miss Sharpe’s,” I said. “The only evidence we have is Carruthers’s testimony, the list of ladies’ church committees for 1940, and a letter to the editor that wasn’t in either of the Coventry papers.”

Mrs. Bittner nodded sagely. “The incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The Nazis made it a practice to obtain and read Allied newspapers, looking for any intelligence information that might be inadvertently revealed. I think Miss Sharpe’s letter and the words ‘advance warning of the raid’ must have caught the eye of someone in Nazi intelligence who was worried about the Nazi code system being compromised, and that inquiries were subsequently made, inquiries that revealed the High Command had dispatched RAF fighters to Coventry that night and had attempted to jam the pathfinder beams.”

“And the Nazis realized we had Ultra,” Verity said, “and changed the Enigma machine.”

“And we lost the campaign in North Africa,” I said, “and possibly the D-Day invasion—”

“And the Nazis won the war,” Mrs. Bittner said bleakly. “Only they didn’t. You stopped them.”

“The continuum stopped them with its system of secondary defenses, which is almost as good as Ultra’s,” I said. “The one thing that didn’t fit in this whole mess was the slippage on Verity’s drop. If there hadn’t been any slippage, that might have meant the continuum’s defenses had somehow broken down, but there had been. But not enough to fit Fujisaki’s theory that incongruities occur when the slippage required is more than the net can supply. The net could easily have supplied fourteen minutes of slippage, or four, which would have been all that would have been necessary to keep the incongruity from ever happening. So the only logical conclusion was that it had intended for Verity to go through at that exact moment—”

“Are you saying the continuum arranged for me to save Princess Arjumand?” Verity said.

“Yes,” I said. “Which made us think you’d caused an incongruity and we had to fix it, which is why we arranged a séance to get Tossie to Coventry to see the bishop’s bird stump and write in her diary that the experience had changed her life—”

“And Lady Schrapnell would read it,” Verity said, “and decide to rebuild Coventry Cathedral and send me back to Muchings End to find out what happened to the bishop’s bird stump, so I could save the cat—”

“So I could be sent back to return it and overhear a conversation about mystery novels in Blackwell’s and spend a night in a tower—”

“And solve the mystery of the bishop’s bird stump,” Mrs. Bittner said. She stood up and started up the stairs. “I’m glad you did, you know,” she said, leading the way up the narrow stairs. “There is nothing heavier than the weight of a secret crime.”

She opened the door to the attic. “I should have been found out soon at any rate. My nephew’s been lobbying me to move into a single-floor flat.”

Attics in books and vids are always picturesque places, with a bicycle, several large plumed hats, an antique rocking horse, and, of course, a steamer trunk for storing the missing will or the dead body in.

Mrs. Bittner’s attic didn’t have a trunk, or a rocking horse, at least that I could see. Though they might easily have been there, along with the lost Ark of the Covenant and the Great Pyramid of Giza.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Bittner said, looking round in dismay. “I’m afraid it’s more The Sittaford Mystery than ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

“Agatha Christie,” Verity explained. “Nobody noticed the evidence because it’d been stuck in a cupboard with a bag of golf clubs and tennis rackets and a lot of other things.”

“A lot of other things” was putting it mildly. The low-raftered room was crammed from end to end with cardboard cartons, stacked lawn chairs, old clothes hanging from an exposed pipe, jigsaw puzzles of the Grand Canyon and the Mars colony, a croquet set, squash rackets, dusty Christmas decorations, books, and an assortment of bedspread-draped furniture, all stacked on top of each other in sedimentary layers.

“Could you reach me down that chair?” Mrs. Bittner said, pointing at a Twentieth Century plastiform atrocity perched on top of a washing machine. “I have difficulty standing for very long.”

I got it down, disentangling a trowel and several coat hangers from its aluminum legs, and dusted it off for her.

She sat down, easing herself into it gingerly. “Thank you,” she said. “Hand that tin box to me.”

I handed it to her reverently.

She set it down beside her on the floor. “And those large pasteboard boxes. Just push them aside. And those suitcases.”

I did, and she stood up and walked down the little aisle my shifting the boxes had made and into darkness.

“Plug in a lamp,” she said. “There’s an outlet over there.” She pointed at the wall behind an enormous plastic aspidistra.

I reached for the nearest lamp, a massive affair with a huge pleated shade and a squat, heavily decorated metal base.

“Not that one,” she said sharply. “The pink one.”

She pointed at a tall, early Twenty-First Century fringed affair.

I plugged it in and switched on the hard-to-find knob, but it didn’t do much good. It lit the fringe and Verity’s Waterhouse face, but not much else.

Apparently Mrs. Bittner thought so, too. She went over to the ornate metal lamp. “The Masqued Murder,” she said.

Verity leaned forward. “Evidence disguised as something else,” she murmured.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Bittner said, and lifted the pleated shade off bishop’s bird stump.

It was too bad Lady Schrapnell wasn’t here. And Carruthers. All that time we had spent searching for it in the rubble, and it was here all along. Removed for safekeeping, as Carruthers had suggested, and not a mark on it. The Red Sea still parted; Springtime, Summer, Autumn, and Winter still held their respective garlands of apple blossoms, roses, wheat, and holly; John the Baptist, his head still on the platter, still stared reproachfully at King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Gryphons, poppies, pineapples, puffins, the Battle of Prestonpans, all of it intact and not even dusty.

“Lady Schrapnell will be so pleased,” Verity said. She squeezed down the aisle to look at it more closely. “Good heavens. That side must have been facing the wall. What are those? Fans?”

“Clams. Clams inscribed with the names of important naval battles,” I said. “Lepanto, Trafalgar, the Battle of the Swans.”

“It’s difficult imagining it changing the course of history,” Mrs. Bittner said, peering at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. “It doesn’t improve with age, does it? Like the Albert Memorial.”

“With which it has a good deal in common,” Verity said, touching an elephant.

“I don’t know,” I said, cocking my head to look at it sideways. “I’m beginning to feel a certain affection for it.”

“He’s time-lagged,” Verity said. “Ned, the elephant’s carrying a howdah full of pineapples and bananas to an eagle with a fish fork.”

“It’s not a fish fork,” I said. “It’s a flaming sword. And it’s not an eagle, it’s an archangel, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Or possibly the Zoo.”

“It is truly hideous,” Mrs. Bittner said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. After all those trips, I was probably a bit time-lagged myself. And there was a good deal of smoke.”

Verity turned to stare at her, and then at me.

“How many trips did you make?” she said finally.

“Four,” Mrs. Bittner said. “No, five. The first one didn’t count. I came through too late. The whole nave was on fire, and I was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation. I still have trouble with my lungs.”

Verity was still staring at her, trying to take it in. “You made five trips to the cathedral?”

Mrs. Bittner nodded. “I only had a few minutes between the time the fire watch left and the fire got out of hand, and the slippage kept putting me later than I wanted. Five was all I had time for.”

Verity looked disbelievingly at me.

“Hand me down the bandbox,” Mrs. Bittner told her. “The second time I nearly got caught.”

“That was me,” I said. “I saw you running toward the sanctuary.”

“That was you?” she said, laughing, her hand on her chest. “I thought it was Provost Howard, and I was going to be arrested for a looter.”

Verity handed her the bandbox, and she took off the lid and began rummaging through the tissue paper. “I took the bishop’s bird stump on the last trip. I was trying to reach the Smiths’ Chapel, but it was on fire. I ran across to the Dyers’ Chapel and got the bronze candlesticks off the altar, but they were too hot. I dropped the first one, and it rolled away under one of the pews.”

And I found it, I thought, and thought it had been blown there by concussion.

“I went after it,” she said, digging matter-of-factly through tissue paper, “but the rafters were coming down, so I ran back up the nave, and I saw that the organ was on fire, it was all on fire—the woodwork and the choir and the sanctuary—that beautiful, beautiful cathedral—and I couldn’t save any of it. I didn’t think, I just grabbed the nearest thing I could find, and ran for the net, spilling chrysanthemums and water everywhere.” She took out a wad of tissue paper and unwrapped a bronze candlestick. “That’s why there’s only one.”

Mr. Dunworthy had said she was absolutely fearless, and she must have been, darting back and forth between crashing beams and falling incendiaries, the net opening on who-knows-what and no guarantee it would stay open, no guarantee the roof wouldn’t fall in. I looked at her in admiration.

“Ned,” she ordered, “bring me that painting. The one with the bedspread over it.”

I did, and she pulled the bedspread off a painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Verity, standing beside me, clasped my hand.

“The rest of the things are over there,” Mrs. Bittner said. “Under the plastic.”

And they were. The embroidered altar cloth from the Smiths’ Chapel. An engraved pewter chalice. A Sixteenth-Century wooden chest. A small statue of St. Michael. A mediaeval enameled pyx. A silver candelabrum with the candles still in it. A misericord carved with one of the Seven Works of Mercy. The capper’s pall. A Georgian altar plate. And the wooden cross from the Girdlers’ Chapel, with the image of a child kneeling at the foot of it.

All the treasures of Coventry Cathedral.

“Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge; and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way back.”

Three men in a Boat

Jerome K. Jerome

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

Deliveries—Finch Stalls—Lady Schrapnell Is Missing—Realizing What It Means—A Letter—The Mystery of Princess Arjumand Solved—Proposing in English—Reasons to Get Married—The Mystery of Finch’s Mission Solved—A New Mystery—Lady Schrapnell Sees the Bishop’s Bird Stump—The San Francisco Earthquake—Fate—A Happy Ending

Verity was the first one to recover. “It’s forty-five minutes till the consecration,” she said, looking at her watch.. “We’ll never make it.”

“We’ll make it,” I said, grabbing up the handheld.

I rang up Mr. Dunworthy. “We’ve got it,” I said. “We need you to get us back to Oxford. Can you send a heli?”

“Princess Victoria’s attending the consecration,” he said, which didn’t seem to be an answer to my question.

“Security measures,” Verity explained. “No helis, aircraft, or zoomers allowed in the vicinity.”

“Can you arrange ground transport then?” I asked Mr. Dunworthy.

“The tube’s faster than any ground transport that we can send,” he said. “Why not just bring it on the tube?”

“We can’t,” I said. “We need at least,” I looked over at the treasures, which Verity was already carting down the attic stairs, “270 to three hundred cubic feet of transport space.”

“For the bishop’s bird stump?” he said. “It hasn’t grown, has it?”

“I’ll explain when I get there,” I said. I gave him Mrs. Bittner’s address. “Have a crew waiting for us when we get there,” I said. “Don’t let the consecration begin till we arrive. Is Finch there?”

“No, he’s over at the cathedral,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Tell him to stall,” I said. “And don’t let Lady Schrapnell find out about this if you can help it. Ring me back as soon as you’ve arranged for transport.”

I stuck the handheld in my blazer pocket, picked up the bishop’s bird stump, and started down the stairs with it. The handheld rang.

“Ned,” Lady Schrapnell said. “Where have you been? The consecration’s in less than three-quarters of an hour!”

“I know,” I said. “We’re coming as fast as we can, but we need transport. Can you arrange for a lorry? Or tube transport?”

“Tube transport is only for cargo,” she said. “I don’t want you to let the bishop’s bird stump out of your sight for one second. It’s been lost once. I don’t want it lost again.”

“Neither do I,” I said and rang off.

I picked up the bishop’s bird stump again. The handheld rang.

It was Mr. Dunworthy. “You will not believe what that woman wants us to do! She wants you to take the bishop’s bird stump to the nearest net and take it back in time to two days ago so it can be cleaned and polished before the consecration.”

“Did you tell her that’s impossible, that objects can’t be in two places at the same time?”

“Of course I told her, and she said—”

“ ‘Laws are made to be broken,’ ” I said. “I know. Are you sending us a lorry?”

“There’s not a single lorry in Coventry. Lady Schrapnell recruited every single one in four counties for the consecration. Carruthers is ringing up car and solar rental agencies.”

“But we’ve got to have three hundred cubic feet,” I said. “Can’t you send a lorry from Oxford?”

“Princess Victoria,” he said. “It would take hours to get there.”

“Because of all the traffic,” Verity interpreted.

“If there’s too much traffic for a lorry to get to us, how are we supposed to get to the cathedral?”

“Everyone will be at the cathedral by the time you arrive. Oh, good,” he said to someone else. “Carruthers has got hold of a rental agency.”

“Good,” I said, and thought of something. “Don’t send a solar. It’s overcast here, looks like it might rain at any minute.”

“Oh, dear. Lady Schrapnell’s determined to have the sun shining for the consecration,” he said, and rang off.

This time I made it all the way down to the second floor with the bishop’s bird stump before the handheld rang again. It was Mr. Dunworthy again. “We’re sending a car.”

“A car won’t be big enough for—” I began.

“It should be there in ten minutes,” he said. “T.J. needs to talk to you about the incongruity.”

“Tell him I’ll talk to him when I get back,” I said, and rang off.

The handheld rang. I switched it off and finished carrying the bishop’s bird stump down to the little foyer, which was already filled with things.

“They’re sending a car,” I said to Verity. “It should be here in ten minutes,” and went in the parlor to see Mrs. Bittner.

“They’re sending a car to take us to the consecration,” I told her. She was sitting in one of the chintz-covered chairs. “Can I fetch you your coat? Or your bag?”

“No, thank you,” she said quietly. “You’re certain it’s a good idea to take the bishop’s bird stump out into the world, that it won’t alter history?”

“It already has,” I said. “And so have you. You realize what you’ve done means, don’t you? Because of you, we’ve discovered a whole class of objects which can be brought forward through the net. Other treasures which were destroyed by fire. Artworks and books and—”

“Sir Richard Burton’s writings,” she said. She looked up at me. “His wife burnt them after he died. Because she loved him.”

I sat down on the sofa. “Do you not want us to take the bishop’s bird stump?” I said.

“No.” She shook her white head. “No. It belongs in the cathedral.”

I leaned forward and took her hands. “Because of you, the past won’t be as irretrievable as we thought it was.”

“Parts of the past,” she said quietly. “You’d best go bring the rest of the things down.”

I nodded and started back up to the attic. Halfway up the stairs I ran into Verity, carefully carrying down the capper’s pall on her outstretched arms.

“It’s simply amazing,” she said in a very good imitation of Mrs. Mering’s voice, “the treasures people have in their attics.”

I grinned at her and went on up. I brought down the children’s cross and the altar plate and was on my way down with the Sixteenth-Century wooden chest when Verity called up the stairs to me. “The car’s here.”

“It’s not a solar, is it?” I called down to her.

“No,” she said. “It’s a hearse.”

“Does it have the coffin in it?”

“No.”

“Good. Then it should be large enough,” I said, and carried out the chest.

It was an ancient fossil-fueled hearse which looked like it had been used in the Pandemic, but it was at least large and opened at the back. The driver was staring at the heap of treasures. “Having a jumble sale, are you?”

“Yes,” I said, and put the chest in the back.

“It’ll never all fit,” he said.

I shoved the chest as far forward as it would go and took the silver candelabrum Verity handed me. “It’ll fit,” I said. “I am an old hand at packing. Give me that.”

It all fit, though the only way we could make it work was by putting the statue of St. Michael in the front seat. “Mrs. Bittner can sit up front,” I told Verity, “but you and I will have to sit in the back.”

“What about the bishop’s bird stump?” she said.

“It can sit on my lap.”

I went back inside to the parlor. “We’ve got the car loaded,” I said to Mrs. Bittner, “are you ready?” even though it was obvious she wasn’t. She was still sitting quietly in the chintz-covered chair.

She shook her head. “I will not be going with you after all,” she said. “My bronchitis—”

“Not going?” Verity said from the door. “But you’re the one who saved the treasures. You should go and see them in the cathedral.”

“I have already seen them in the cathedral,” she said. “They cannot look any more beautiful than they did that night, among the flames.”

“Your husband would want you there,” Verity said. “He loved the cathedral.”

“It is only an outward symbol of a larger reality,” she said. “Like the continuum.”

The driver stuck his head in the door. “I thought you said you were in a hurry.”

“We’re coming,” I said over my shoulder.

“Please come,” Verity said, kneeling beside the chair. “You should be there.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Bittner said. “You don’t see the guilty party accompanying Harriet and Lord Peter on their honeymoon, do you? No. The guilty party is left alone to contemplate his sins and consider the consequences of his actions, which is what I intend to do. Although in my case, the consequences are not quite what one would have expected. They take a bit of getting used to. I have been wearing sackcloth and ashes so long.”

She flashed us a sudden smile, and I saw all at once what Jim Dunworthy and Shoji Fujisaki and Bitty Bittner had all fallen in love with.

“You’re certain you won’t come?” Verity said, fighting back tears.

“Next week. When my bronchitis is better,” she said. “I’ll let you two give me a personal tour.”

“You said you had to be in Oxford by eleven,” the driver said. “You’ll never make it.”

“We’ll make it,” I said, and helped Mrs. Bittner to her feet so she could walk us out to the car.

“You’re certain you’ll be all right?” Verity said.

Mrs. Bittner patted Verity’s hand. “Perfectly all right. Everything has turned out far better than could have been expected. The Allies have won World War II,” she smiled that Zuleika Dobson smile again, “and I have got that hideous bishop’s bird stump out of my attic. What could be better?”

“I couldn’t see over the cross, so I put it up front,” the driver said. “You two will have to sit in the back.”

I kissed Mrs. Bittner on the cheek. “Thank you,” I said and crawled in. The driver handed me the bishop’s bird stump. I set it on my lap. Verity crawled in across from me, waving to Mrs. Bittner, and we were off and running.

I turned the handheld back on and rang up Mr. Dunworthy. “We’re on our way,” I said. “We should be there in about forty minutes. Tell Finch he needs to keep stalling. Have you arranged to have a crew there to meet us?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. Is the archbishop there yet?”

“No, but Lady Schrapnell is, and she’s having a fit. She wants to know where you found the bishop’s bird stump and what sort of flowers are supposed to go in it. For the order of service.”

“Tell her yellow chrysanthemums,” I said.

I rang off. “All taken care of,” I said to Verity.

“Not quite, Sherlock,” she said, sitting against the side of the hearse with her knees hunched up. “There are still a few things that need explaining.”

“I agree,” I said. “You said you knew what Finch’s related mission was. What is it?”

“Bringing back nonsignificant objects,” she said.

“Nonsignificant objects? But we’ve only just found out that’s possible,” I said. “And nonsignificant objects didn’t have anything to do with our incongruity.”

“True,” she said, “but for over a week, T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy thought they did and were trying all sorts of things.”

“But nothing burned down in Muchings End or Iffley while we were there. What did Finch bring through? Cabbages?”

The handheld rang. “Ned,” Lady Schrapnell said. “Where are you?”

“On our way,” I said. “Between—” I leaned forward to our driver. “Where are we?”

“Between Banbury and Adderbury,” he said.

“Between Banbury and Adderbury,” I said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

“I still don’t see why we couldn’t have shipped it back to the past,” Lady Schrapnell said. “It would have been so much simpler. Is the bishop’s bird stump in good shape?”

There was no answer to that. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said again, and rang off.

“All right, it’s my turn to ask the questions,” Verity said. “There’s still something I don’t understand. How did getting Tossie to Coventry on the fifteenth of June to see the bishop’s bird stump and fall in love with Baine fix the incongruity?”

“It didn’t,” I said. “That isn’t why Tossie was there.”

“But her seeing the bishop’s bird stump inspired Lady Schrapnell to rebuild Coventry and send me back to read the diary, which led me to rescue Princess Arjumand—”

“Which was all part of the self-correction. But the principal reason Tossie had to be there on the fifteenth was so she could be caught flirting with the Reverend Mr. Doult.”

“Oh!” she said. “By the girl with the penwipers.”

“Very good, Harriet,” I said. “The girl with the penwipers. Whose name was Miss Delphinium Sharpe.”

“The woman in charge of the Flower Committee.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “When she saw Tossie flirting with the Reverend Mr. Doult, she was, you may remember, extremely upset. She flounced off with her penwipers, and as we were leaving the church, she was walking up Bayley Lane, her long nose in the air. I saw the Reverend Mr. Doult hurrying after her to placate her. And, now this is the part I’m not certain of, but my guess is, in the course of the argument that followed, she burst into tears, and he ended up proposing. Which meant that the Reverend Mr. Doult didn’t stay in the cathedral position, but obtained a church living in some rural vicarage.”

“That’s why you wanted the list of church livings.”

“Very good, Harriet. He was much quicker off the mark than I expected. He married her in 1891 and got a parish the following year in Northumberland.”

“So she was nowhere near Coventry on the night of the fourteenth of November, 1940,” she said. “And, being busy with parish jumble sales and scrap metal drives, paid no attention to a certain bishop’s bird stump being missing.”

“So she didn’t write a letter to the editor,” I said, “and everyone else just assumed it had burned up in the fire.”

“And Ultra’s secret was safe.” She frowned. “And the whole thing, my rescuing Princess Arjumand and us going to Oxford to see Madame Iritosky and your preventing Terence from meeting Maud and loaning him the money for the boat and the séance and everything, it was all part of the self-correction? Everything?”

“Everything,” I said, and then thought about what I’d said. Just how elaborate had the self-correction been and what all had been involved? Professor Peddick’s and Professor Overforce’s feud? The Psychic Research Society? The donation of the sugared-violets box to the jumble sale? The fur-bearing ladies in Blackwell’s?

“I still don’t understand,” Verity said. “If all the continuum needed to do was to keep Delphinium Sharpe from writing a letter to the editor, there had to be simpler ways to do it.”

“It’s a chaotic system,” I said. “Every event is connected to every other. To make even a small change would require far-reaching adjustments.”

But how far-reaching? I wondered. Had the Luftwaffe been involved? And Agatha Christie? And the weather?

“I know it’s a chaotic system, Ned,” Verity was saying. “But there was an air raid going on. If the self-correction’s an automatic mechanism, a direct hit would have corrected the incongruity much more simply and directly than some scheme involving cats and trips to Coventry.”

A direct hit from a high-explosive bomb would have eliminated any threat Delphinium Sharpe posed to Ultra, and there wouldn’t have been any consequences. Over five hundred people had been killed in Coventry that night.

“Perhaps Delphinium Sharpe, or one of the other people in the west door that night, had some other part to play in history,” I said, thinking of the stout ARP warden and the woman with the two children.

“I’m not talking about Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said. “I’m talking about the bishop’s bird stump. If the Smiths’ Chapel had taken a direct hit, Miss Sharpe would have believed the bishop’s bird stump was destroyed and wouldn’t have written her letter. Or it could have taken a direct hit before Lizzie Bittner came through, so she couldn’t cause the incongruity in the first place.”

She was right. A direct hit was all it would have taken. Unless the high-explosive bomb would alter something else. Or unless the bishop’s bird stump had some other part to play in the plan. Or the continuum had some other, subtler reason for using the correction it had.

Plans, intentions, reasons. I could hear Professor Overforce now. “I knew it! This is nothing but an argument for a Grand Design!”

A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

“History is character,” Professor Peddick had said. And character had certainly played a part in the self-correction—Lizzie Bittner’s devotion to her husband and the Colonel’s refusal to wear a coat in rainy weather, Verity’s fondness for cats and Princess Arjumand’s fondness for fish and Hitler’s temper and Mrs. Mering’s gullibility. And my time-laggedness. If they were part of the self-correction, what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?

“There’s something else I don’t understand,” Verity said. “The incongruity was repaired when Tossie eloped with Baine, right?”

I nodded.

“Then why was Delphinium Sharpe there? Didn’t T.J. say the probabilities collapsed into the true course of events as soon as the incongruity was repaired?”

“But the incongruity hadn’t been repaired when we were there,” I said. “Baine had thrown Tossie in the water, but they hadn’t run off together yet. And until they did, the incongruity still wasn’t completely repaired.”

“Of course they had. They’d run off together on June eighteenth, 1888. And it was a foregone conclusion once he kissed her, so why were we sent to Coventry at all? It obviously wasn’t to make Tossie elope with Baine.”

I knew the answer to that one at least. “To find the bishop’s bird stump,” I said. “I needed to see the doors and the empty wrought-iron stand to realize what had happened.”

“But why?” she said, still frowning. “It could have fixed it without even letting us know it had.”

“Out of pity?” I said. “Because it knew Lady Schrapnell would kill me if I didn’t find it in time for the consecration?”

But she was right. The bishop’s bird stump could have continued to sit in Mrs. Bittner’s attic, gathering dust, now that the incongruity was fixed and the Nazis hadn’t found out about Ultra. So why had I been sent to the lab in 2018 and to Blackwell’s and the air raid and been given such obvious clues if it hadn’t mattered whether the bishop’s bird stump was found or not? Would its eventual discovery after Mrs. Bittner’s death have caused some other incongruity? Or was there some reason it needed to be in the cathedral for the consecration?

“We’re coming up on Oxford,” the driver said. “Where do you want me to go?”

“Just a minute,” I said and rang up Mr. Dunworthy.

Finch answered. “Thank goodness,” he said. “Take Parks Road to Holywell and Longwell and then turn south on the High and turn off onto Merton’s playing fields. Take the access road. We’ll be waiting for you at the vestry door. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you get that?” I asked the driver.

He nodded. “You’re taking this lot to the cathedral?”

“Yes.”

“Waste of money and everybody’s time, if you ask me,” he said. “I mean, what good is a cathedral?”

“You’d be surprised,” Verity said.

“Turn in here,” I said, looking for Merton’s pedestrian gate. “Finch, we’re here,” I said into the handheld, and to the driver again, “Go round to the east end. The vestry door’s on the south side.”

He pulled up next to the vestry door, where Finch had a dozen people waiting for us. One of them opened the back door, and Verity scrambled out and started giving orders. “The altar cloth goes in the Smiths’ Chapel,” she said, “and so does this candlestick. Take care you don’t get the reconstructions mixed up with the real things. Ned, hand me the capper’s pall.”

I laid it over her outstretched arms, and she started up the steps with it.

I picked up the handheld. “Finch, where are you?”

“Right here, sir,” he said at the door of the hearse. He was still in his butler’s frock coat, though his sleeve was now dry.

I handed him the enameled pyx. “The consecration hasn’t begun yet, has it?”

“No, sir,” he said. “There was an unfortunate jam-up in St. Aldate’s. Fire engines and ambulances completely blocking the street. It turned out to have all been an unfortunate mix-up,” he said, completely poker-faced, “but it took some time to clear up. No one was able to get near Christ Church Meadow for nearly an hour. And then the bishop was delayed. His driver took a wrong turn and ended up in Iffley. And now there seems to be some mix-up over the tickets.”

I shook my head admiringly. “Jeeves would have been proud of you. To say nothing of Bunter. And the Admirable Crichton.” I lifted out the bishop’s bird stump.

“Can I take that for you, sir?”

“I want to deliver this myself.” I nodded with my head at the children’s cross. “That goes in the Girdlers’ Chapel. And the statue of St. Michael goes in the choir.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Mr. Lewis is looking for you. He has something he needs to discuss with you concerning the continuum.”

“Fine,” I said, wrestling with the misericord. “As soon as this mess is over.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “And at some point, sir, I need to speak with you about my mission.”

“Just tell me one thing,” I said, sliding the misericord out and handing it over to two first-year students. “Was your mission bringing back nonsignificant objects?”

He looked appalled. “It most certainly was not.”

I picked up the bishop’s bird stump. “Do you know where Lady Schrapnell is?”

“She was in the vestry a moment ago, sir.” He looked up at the sky. “Oh dear, it’s looking more and more like rain. And Lady Schrapnell wanted everything to be just as it was on the day of the raid.”

I carried the bishop’s bird stump up the steps and in the vestry door, and this was appropriate: carrying the bishop’s bird stump in through the same door Provost Howard had carried the candlesticks and the crucifix and the Regimental Colors out of. The treasures of Coventry.

I opened the door and took it into the vestry. “Where’s Lady Schrapnell?” I asked an historian I recognized from Jesus.

She shrugged and shook her head. “No,” she called to someone in the sanctuary. “We still need hymnals for the last five rows of pews in the north aisle. And three Books of Common Prayer.”

I went out into the choir. And chaos. People were running about, shouting orders, and there was a loud sound of hammering from the Mercers’ Chapel.

“Who took the Book of the Epistles?” a curate shouted from the lectern. “It was here just a moment ago.”

There was a chord from the organ, and the opening notes of “God Works in a Mysterious Way His Wonders to Perform.” A thin woman in a green apron was sticking long pink gladiolas in a brass vase in front of the pulpit, and a stout woman in glasses with a sheet of paper was going up to person after person, asking them something. Probably she was looking for Lady Schrapnell, too.

The organ stopped, and the organist shouted up to someone in the clerestory, “The trumpet stop’s not working.” Choirboys in linen surplices and red cassocks were wandering about. Warder must have got the surplices ironed, I thought irrelevantly.

“I don’t see what it matters whether the inside of the choir stalls is finished,” a blonde with a long nose was saying to a boy lying half under one of the choir stalls. “Nobody will be able to see it from the congregation.”

“ ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ ” the boy said. “ ‘Ours is but to do or die.’ Hand me that laser, will you?”

“Pardon me,” I said. “Can either of you tell me where Lady Schrapnell is?”

“The last time I saw her,” the boy said from under the choir stall, “she was in the Drapers’ Chapel.”

But she wasn’t in the Drapers’ Chapel, or the sanctuary, or up in the clerestory. I went down into the nave.

Carruthers was there, sitting in a pew folding orders of service.

“Have you seen Lady Schrapnell?” I said.

“She was just here,” he said disgustedly. “Which is how I got stuck doing this. She suddenly decided at the last minute that the orders of service had to be reprinted.” He looked up. “Good Lord, you found it! Where was it?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Which way did she go?”

“Vestry. Wait. Before you go, I want to ask you something. What do you think of Peggy?”

“Peggy?”

“Warder,” he said. “Don’t you think she’s the sweetest, most adorable creature you’ve ever seen?”

“Don’t you have the orders of service folded yet?” Warder said, coming up. “Lady Schrapnell wants them for the ushers.”

“Where is she?” I asked her.

“The Mercers’ Chapel,” Warder said, and I made my escape.

But Lady Schrapnell wasn’t in the Mercers’ Chapel or the baptistry, and there were signs of activity near the west door. I was going to have to return the bishop’s bird stump myself.

I carried it across to the Smiths’ Chapel, thinking, now the wrought-iron stand will have disappeared, but it was there, right where it was supposed to be, in front of the parclose screen. I set the bishop’s bird stump carefully on it.

Flowers. It needed flowers. I went back up to the pulpit and the woman in the green apron. “The vase in front of the parclose screen of the Smiths’ Chapel needs flowers in it,” I said. “Yellow chrysanthemums.”

“Yellow chrysanthemums!” she said, snatching up a handheld and looking at it in alarm. “Did Lady Schrapnell send you? The order didn’t say anything about yellow chrysanthemums.”

“It’s a last-minute addition,” I said. “You haven’t seen Lady Schrapnell, have you?”

“Girdlers’ Chapel,” she said, jamming gladiolas in the pulpit vase. “Chrysanthemums! Where am I supposed to get yellow chrysanthemums?”

I started down the transept aisle. It was jammed with choirboys and people in academic dress. “All right!” a young man the spitting image of the Reverend Mr. Arbitage said. “Here’s the order of procession. First, the censer, followed by the choir. Then the members of the history faculty, by college. Mr. Ransome, where is your robe? The instructions clearly said full academic regalia.”

I sidled back along one of the pews to the north aisle and started up the nave. And saw Mr. Dunworthy.

He was at the entrance to the Girdlers’ Chapel, standing against one of the arches and holding onto it for support. He was holding a sheet of paper, and as I watched, it fluttered from his hand onto the floor.

“What is it?” I said, hurrying up to him. “Are you all right?”

I put my arm round him. “Come here,” I said, leading him to the nearest pew. “Sit down.” I retrieved the piece of paper and sat down next to him. “What is it?”

He smiled a little wanly at me. “I was just looking at the children’s cross,” he said, pointing to where it hung in the Girdlers’ Chapel. “And realizing what it means. We were so busy trying to solve the incongruity and pull Carruthers out and work with Finch, it never hit me till now what we’ve discovered.”

He reached for the sheet of paper I had picked up. “I have been making a list,” he said.

I looked at the sheet of paper in my hand. “The library at Lisbon,” it read. “The Los Angeles Public Library. Carlyle’s The French Revolution. The library at Alexandria.”

I looked at him.

“All destroyed by fire,” he said. “A maid burnt the only copy of Carlyle’s The French Revolution by mistake.” He took the paper from me. “This is what I was able to think of in just a few minutes.”

He folded up the list. “St. Paul’s Cathedral was vaporized by a pinpoint bomb,” he said. “All of it. The painting of The Light of the World, Nelson’s tomb, the statue of John Donne. To think that they might—”

The curate came up. “Mr. Dunworthy,” he said. “You are supposed to be in line.”

“Have you seen Lady Schrapnell?” I asked the curate.

“She was in the Drapers’ Chapel a moment ago,” he said. “Mr. Dunworthy, are you ready?”

“Yes,” Mr. Dunworthy said. He took off his mortarboard, tucked the list inside, and put it back on again. “I am ready for anything.”

I headed up the nave to the Drapers’ Chapel. The transept aisle was full of milling dons, and Warder was in the choir, trying to line up the choirboys. “No, no, no!” she was shouting. “Don’t sit down! You’ll wrinkle your surplices. I’ve just ironed them. And line up. I don’t have all day!”

I edged past her and over to the Drapers’ Chapel. Verity was there, standing in front of the stained-glass window, her beautiful head bent over a sheet of paper.

“What’s that?” I asked, going over to her. “The order of service?”

“No,” she said. “It’s a letter. Remember how, after we found Maud’s letter, I suggested to the forensics expert that she see if any letters Tossie might have sent to other people existed?” She held it up. “She found one.”

“You’re joking,” I said. “And I suppose it’s got Baine’s name in it.”

“No, Tossie’s still calling him her ‘beloved husband.’ And she signs it ‘Toots.’ But there are some very interesting things in it,” she said, sitting down in one of the carved pews. “Listen to this: ‘My darling Terence—’ ”

“Terence?” I said. “What on earth’s she doing writing to Terence?”

“He wrote to her,” she said. “That letter’s lost. This is Tossie’s reply.”

“Terence wrote her?”

“Yes,” Verity said. “Listen: ‘My darling Terence, Words cannot properly express how happy your letter of the third made me.’ ‘Happy’ is underlined. ‘I had given up all hope of ever hearing of my precious Princess Arjumand in this world!!’ ‘World’—”

“Is underlined,” I said.

“And there are two exclamation points,” Verity said. She read on: “ ‘We were already far out to sea when I discovered her missing. My beloved husband did everything in his power to convince the captain to return to port at once, but he cruelly refused, and I thought I would never see my dearum precious Juju again in this life or know of her Fate.’ ”

“Pretty much the whole thing’s underlined,” Verity said, “and Fate is capitalized.” She read, “ ‘You cannot imagine my joy when I received your letter. It was my great fear that she had perished in the briny deep, and now to hear that she is not only alive but with you!’ ”

“What?” I said.

“The entire thing’s underlined from here on out,” Verity said. “ ‘To think of my delicate darling travelling all the way from Plymouth to Kent when Muchings End would have been much closer! But perhaps it is for the best. Mama has written that Papa recently acquired a new golden veiltail ryunkin. And I know that you will give her a good home.

“ ‘Thank you for your kind offer to send Princess Arjumand to me in the care of Dawson, but my beloved husband and I agree that, given her dislike of water, it is best that she remain in your care. I know that you and your bride Maud will love and cherish her as I have. Mama wrote me of your marriage. Though it seems to me to have been a bit hasty, and I sincerely hope that it was not done on the rebound, I am gladder than I can say that you have been able to forget me, and it is my fervent hope that you will be as happy as I and my beloved husband are! Kiss Princess Arjumand and stroke her dear sweet fur for me, and tell her that her muvver finks of her dearum dearums darling evewy day. Gratefully, Toots Callahan.’ ”

“Poor Cyril,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Verity said. “They were made for each other.”

“So are we,” I said.

She ducked her head.

“So, how’s about it, Harriet?” I said. “We make a jolly good detectin’ team, eh what? What say we make the partnership permanent?”

“No!” Warder shouted. “I told you not to sit down. Look at those wrinkles! Those surplices are linen!”

“Well, Watson?” I said to Verity. “What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “What if it’s just time-lag? Look at Carruthers. He thinks he’s in love with Warder—”

“That is absolutely out of the question!” Warder snapped at a small boy. “You should have thought of that before you put your surplice on!”

“Look at her! What if, now that this is all over,” Verity said, looking earnestly up at me, you’re able to get some rest, you recover from your time-lag, and decide the entire thing was a dreadful mistake?”

“Nonsense,” I said, backing her against the wall. “Also balderdash, pishtosh, stuff-and-nonsense, humbug, and pshaw! To say nothing of poppycock! In the first place, you know perfectly well that the first time I saw you, wringing out your sleeve on Mr. Dunworthy’s carpet, it was ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the life—webs flying, mirrors splintering, threads and glass all over the place.”

I put my hand on the wall above her head and leaned toward her. “In the second place,” I said, “it’s your patriotic duty.”

“My patriotic duty?”

“Yes. We’re part of a self-correction, remember? If we don’t get married, something dire’s likely to happen: the Nazis will realize we have Ultra, or Lady Schrapnell will give her money to Cambridge, or the continuum will collapse.”

“There you are,” Finch said, hurrying in with a handheld and a large pasteboard box. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mr. Dunworthy said you and Miss Kindle were to have one, but I didn’t know if that meant one or two.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but after a week in the Victorian era I was no longer bothered by the fact. “One,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “One,” he said into the handheld and set it down on a monument. “Mr. Dunworthy said that in light of your valuable contributions, you were to have first pick. Did you have a preference in color?” he said, opening the box.

“Yes,” Verity said. “Black. With white paws.”

“What?” I said.

“I told you he was bringing back nonsignificant objects,” Verity said.

“I should hardly call them nonsignificant,” Finch said, and lifted out a kitten.

It was the exact image of Princess Arjumand, down to the white pantaloons on her back feet, only in miniature.

“Where?” I said. “How? Cats are an extinct species.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, handing the kitten to Verity, “but there was an overabundance of them in Victorian times, with the result that farmers frequently drowned litters of kittens in an attempt to keep the population down.”

“And when I brought Princess Arjumand through,” Verity said, holding the kitten in her hand and petting it, “T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy decided to see if the kittens, once they had been put in a bag and thrown in the pond, would be nonsignificant.”

“So you were wandering all over the countryside looking for pregnant cats,” I said, looking in the box. There were two dozen kittens inside, most with their eyes still closed. “Are any of these Mrs. Marmalade’s?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, pointing at several little balls of fur. “These three tabbies and this calico. They are of course all too young to be weaned, but Mr. Dunworthy said to tell you you could have yours in five weeks. Princess Arjumand’s are slightly older since they were not found for nearly three weeks.”

He took the kitten away from Verity. “The cat will not actually belong to you,” Finch said, “and you will need to return it to the lab for cloning and regular breeding. There are not enough yet for a viable gene pool, but we have contacted the Sorbonne, Caltech, and the University of Thailand, and I will be returning to Victorian England for additional specimens.” He put the kitten back in the box.

“Can we come and see it?” Verity said.

“Certainly,” Finch said. “And you will need to be trained in its care and feeding. I recommend a diet of milk and—”

“Globe-eyed nacreous ryunkins,” I said.

Finch’s handheld bleeped. He looked at it and scooped up the pasteboard box. “The archbishop’s here, and the usher guarding the west door says it’s starting to rain. We’re going to have to let the crowd in. I must find Lady Schrapnell. Have you seen her?”

We both shook our heads.

“I’d best go find her,” he said, scooping up the pasteboard box. He bustled off.

“In the third place,” I said to Verity, picking up where I had left off, “I happen to know from that day in the boat that you feel exactly the same way I do, and if you’re waiting for me to propose in Latin—”

“There you are, Ned,” T.J. said. He was carrying a small screen and a portable comp hookup. “I need to show you something.”

“The consecration’s about to start,” I said. “Can’t it wait?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Verity said, “I’ll be right back,” and slipped out of the chapel.

“What is it?” I said to T.J.

“It probably isn’t anything,” T.J. said. “It’s very likely a mathematical error. Or a glitch in the system.”

“What is it?” I repeated.

“All right, do you remember how you asked me to shift the focus of the incongruity to Coventry 1940, and I did, and I told you it matched the Waterloo soup-kettle sim nearly perfectly.”

“Yes,” I said warily.

“Yes, well, ‘nearly’ is the operative word.” He brought one of his blurry gray models up on the screen. “It matched very well in the peripheral slippage, and along the main areas here, and here,” he said, pointing at indistinguishable areas. “But not in the slippage surrounding the site. And although there was slippage at the site of Mrs. Bittner’s bringing the bishop’s bird stump through, it wasn’t radically increased.”

“There wouldn’t have been room for radically increased slippage, would there?” I said. “Lizzie Bittner had to go in within a very narrow window of time—between the time the treasures were last seen and their destruction by the fire. She only had a few minutes. Increased slippage would have put her right in the middle of the fire.”

“Yes, well, even taking that into consideration, there is still the problem of the surrounding slippage,” he said, pointing at nothing. “So,” he said, flicking some more keys, “I tried moving the focus forward.” A nondescript gray picture came up.

“Forward?”

“Yes. Of course, I didn’t have enough data to pick a space-time location like you did, so what I did was to consider the surrounding slippage to be peripheral and to extrapolate new surrounding slippage, and then extrapolate a new focus from that.”

He called up another gray picture. “Okay, this is the model of Waterloo. I’m going to superimpose it over the model with the new focus.” He did. “You can see it matches.”

I could. “Where does that put the focus?” I said. “What year?”

“2678,” he said.

2678. Over six hundred years in the future.

“The fifteenth of June, 2678,” he said. “As I said, it’s probably nothing. An error in the calculations.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then Mrs. Bittner’s bringing the bishop’s bird stump through isn’t the incongruity.”

“But if it isn’t the incongruity . . . ?”

“It’s part of the self-correction as well,” T.J. said.

“The self-correction of what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something that hasn’t happened yet. Something that’s going to happen in—”

“—in 2678,” I said. “What’s the focus’s location?” I asked, wondering if it would be as far-flung as the date. Addis Ababa? Mars? The Lesser Magellanic Cloud?

“Oxford,” he said. “Coventry Cathedral.”

Coventry Cathedral. On the fifteenth of June. Verity had been right. We were intended to find the bishop’s bird stump and return it to the cathedral. And all of it, the selling of the new cathedral and Lady Schrapnell’s rebuilding of the old one and our discovery that nonsignificant treasures could be brought forward through the net were all part of the same huge self-correction, some Grand—

“I’m going to double-check all the calculations and run some logic tests on the model,” T.J. said. “Don’t worry. It’ll probably turn out to be nothing more than a flaw in the Waterloo sim. It’s only a rough model.”

He touched some keys, and the gray disappeared. He began folding up the screen.

“T.J.,” I said. “What do you think determined the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo? Napoleon’s handwriting or his hemorrhoids?”

“Neither,” he said. “And I don’t think it was any of the things we did sims on—Gneisenau’s retreat to Wavre or the lost messenger or the fire at La Sainte Haye.”

“What do you think it was?” I asked curiously.

“A cat,” he said.

“A cat?”

“Or a cart or a rat or—”

“—the head of a church committee,” I murmured.

“Exactly,” he said. “Something so insignificant no one even noticed it. That’s the problem with models—they only include the details people think are relevant, and Waterloo was a chaotic system. Everything was relevant.”

“And we’re all Ensign Kleppermans,” I said, “suddenly finding ourselves in positions of critical importance.”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning, “and we all know what happened to Ensign Klepperman. And what’s going to happen to me if I don’t get over to the vestry. Lady Schrapnell wants me to light the candles in the chapels.” He hastily grabbed up the screen and the comp setup. “I’d better get busy lighting. It looks like they’re about to begin.”

It did. The choirboys and dons were more or less lined up, the woman in the green apron was gathering up scissors and buckets and flower-wrappings, the boy had come out from under the choir stall. “Is the trumpet stop working now?” a voice called down from the clerestory, and the organist shouted back, “Yes.” Carruthers and Warder were standing by the south door, their arms full of orders of service and each other. I went out into the nave, looking for Verity.

“Where have you been?” Lady Schrapnell said, bearing down on me. “I have been looking all over for you.” She put her hands on her hips. “Well,” she demanded. “I thought you said you’d found the bishop’s bird stump. Where is it? You haven’t lost it again, have you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s in front of the parclose screen of the Smiths’ Chapel where it’s supposed to be.”

“I want to see it,” she said and started for the nave.

There was a fanfare, and the organist launched into “O God Who Doeth Great Things and Unsearchable.” The choirboys opened their hymnals. Carruthers and Warder pulled apart and took up their positions by the south door.

“I don’t think there’s time,” I said. “The consecration’s about to start.”

“Nonsense,” she said, barging through the choirboys. “There’s plenty of time. The sun isn’t out yet.”

She pushed through the dons, parting them like the Red Sea, and started down the north aisle to the Smiths’ Chapel.

I followed her, hoping the bishop’s bird stump hadn’t mysteriously disappeared again. It hadn’t. It was still there, on its wrought-iron flower stand. The woman in the green apron had filled it with a lovely arrangement of white Easter lilies.

“There it is,” I said, presenting it proudly. “After untold trials and tribulations. The bishop’s bird stump. What do you think?”

“Oh, my,” she said, and pressed her hand to her bosom. “It really is hideous, isn’t it?”

“What?” I said.

“I know my great-great-great-great-grandmother is supposed to have liked it, but my God! What is that supposed to be?” she said, pointing at the base. “Some kind of dinosaur?”

“The Signing of the Magna Carta,” I said.

“I’m almost sorry I had you waste so much time looking for it,” she said. She looked thoughtfully at it. “I don’t suppose it’s breakable?” she said hopefully.

“No,” I said.

“Well, I suppose we have to have it for authenticity’s sake. I certainly hope the other churches don’t have anything this hideous in them.”

“Other churches?” I said.

“Yes, haven’t you heard?” she said. “Now that we’re able to bring objects forward through the net, I have all sorts of projects planned. The San Francisco earthquake, the MGM back lot, Rome before the fire Julius Caesar set—”

“Nero,” I said.

“Yes, of course. You will have to bring back the fiddle Nero played.”

“But it didn’t burn in the fire,” I said. “Only objects that have been reduced to their component parts—”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Laws are made to be broken. We’ll start with the fourteen Christopher Wren churches that were burned in the Blitz, and then—”

“We?” I said weakly.

“Yes, of course. I’ve already specifically requested you.” She stopped and glared at the bishop’s bird stump. “Why are those lilies? They are supposed to be yellow chrysanthemums.”

“I think lilies are extremely appropriate,” I said. “After all, the cathedral and all its treasures have been raised from the dead. The symbolism—”

She wasn’t impressed with the symbolism. “The order of service says yellow chrysanthemums,” she said. “ ‘God is in the details.’ ” She stormed off to find the poor defenseless woman in the green apron.

I stood there, looking at the bishop’s bird stump. Fourteen Christopher Wren churches. And the MGM back lot. To say nothing of what she might come up with when she Realized What It Meant.

Verity came up. “What’s wrong, Ned?” she said.

“I am fated to spend my entire life working for Lady Schrapnell and attending jumble sales,” I said.

“Pish-tosh!” she said. “You are fated to spend your life with me.” She handed me the kitten. “And Penwiper.”

The kitten didn’t weigh anything. “Penwiper,” I said, and it looked up at me with gray-green eyes.

“Mere,” it said, and began to purr, a very small purr. A purrlet.

“Where did you get this kitten?” I said to Verity.

“I stole it,” she said. “Don’t look like that. I intend to take it back. And Finch will never miss it.”

“I love you,” I said, shaking my head. “If I’m fated to spend my life with you, does that mean you’ve decided to marry me?”

“I have to,” she said. “I just ran into Lady Schrapnell. She’s decided what this cathedral needs is—”

“A wedding?” I said.

“No, a christening. So they can use the Purbeck marble baptismal font.”

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to,” I said. “I could sic Lady Schrapnell on Carruthers and Warder, and you could make a run for it to someplace safe. Like the Battle of Waterloo.”

There was a fanfare, the organ launched into “The Heavens Are Declaring the Glory of God,” and the sun came out. The east windows burst into blue and red and purple flame. I looked up. The clerestory was one long unbroken band of gold, like the net at the moment of opening. It filled the cathedral with light, illuminating the silver candlesticks and the children’s cross and the underside of the choir stalls, the choirboys and workmen and eccentric dons, the statue of St. Michael and the Dance of Death and the orders of service. Illuminating the cathedral itself—a Grand Design made of a thousand thousand details.

I looked at the bishop’s bird stump, cradling the kitten in the crook of my arm. The stained-glass window behind outlined the bishop’s bird stump in glorious colors, and the window of the Dyers’ Chapel opposite tinted the camels and the cherubs and the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots emerald and ruby and sapphire.

“It is hideous, isn’t it?” I said.

Verity took my hand. “Placet,” she said.