To Say Nothing of the Dog (72 page)

“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?”