I started through the quad and up the stairs to Mr. Dunworthy’s room, but I was apparently still disoriented because Finch took my arm again and led me across the garden quad to Beard.
“Mr. Dunworthy’s had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak or the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy’s had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.”
He opened the door to what had been the buttery. It now looked like a physician’s waiting room, with a row of cushioned chairs against the wall and a pile of fax-mags on a small side table. Finch’s desk stood next to the inner door and practically in front of it, no doubt so Finch could fling himself between it and Lady Schrapnell.
“I’ll see if he’s in,” Finch said and started round the desk.
“Absolutely not!” Mr. Dunworthy’s voice thundered from within. “It’s completely out of the question!”
Oh, Lord, she was here. I shrank back against the wall, looking wildly for somewhere to hide.
Finch grabbed my sleeve, and hissed, “It’s not her,” but I had already deduced that.
“I don’t see why not,” a female voice had answered, and it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell, because it was sweet rather than stentorian, and I couldn’t make out what she said after “why not.”
“Who is it?” I whispered, relaxing in Finch’s grip.
“The calamity,” he whispered back.
“What on earth made you think you could bring something like that through the net?” Mr. Dunworthy bellowed. “You’ve studied temporal theory!”
Finch winced. “Shall I tell Mr. Dunworthy you’re here?” he asked hesitantly.
“No, that’s all right,” I said, sinking down on one of the chintz-covered chairs. “I’ll wait.”
“Why on earth did you take it into the net with you in the first place?” Mr. Dunworthy shouted.
Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me.
“I don’t need anything to read,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you.”
“I thought you might sit on the mag,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.”
I stood up and let him put the opened mag on the seat and then sat down again.
“If you were going to do something so completely irresponsible,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “why couldn’t you have waited till after the consecration?”
I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was rather pleasant listening to someone else being read out for a change, and by someone besides Lady Schrapnell, even though it was unclear what exactly the calamity was guilty of. Particularly when Mr. Dunworthy yelled, “That is no excuse. Why didn’t you simply pull the cab out of the water and leave it on the bank? Why did you have to carry it into the net with you?”
Cab-toting seemed even less likely than rat-pinching, and neither one seemed in need of rescue from a watery grave. Rats especially. They were always swimming away from sinking ships, weren’t they? And had they had taxis in the Nineteenth Century? Horse-drawn hansom cabs, but they were too heavy to carry even if they would fit into the net.
In books and vids, those being eavesdropped upon always thoughtfully explain what they are talking about for the edification of the eavesdropper. The eavesdroppee says, “Of course, as you all know, the cab to which I refer is Sherlock Holmes’s hansom cab which had been accidentally driven off a bridge during a heavy fog while following the Hound of the Baskervilles, and which I found it necessary to steal for the following reasons,” at which point said theft is fully explained to the person crouched behind the door. Sometimes a floor plan or map is thoughtfully provided next to the frontispiece.
No such consideration is given the croucher in real life. Instead of outlining the situation, the calamity said, “Because bane came back to make sure,” which only confused the issue further.
“Heartless monster,” she said, and it was unclear whether she was referring to the bane that had come back or to Mr. Dunworthy. “And it would only have gone back to the house, and he’d have tried it again. I didn’t want him to see me because he’d know I wasn’t a contemp and there wasn’t anyplace to hide but the net. He’d have seen me in the gazebo. I didn’t think—”
“Exactly, Miss Kindle,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “You didn’t think.”
“What are you going to do?” the calamity said. “Are you going to send it back? You’re going to drown it, aren’t you?”
“I do not intend to do anything until I have considered all the possibilities,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“Utterly heartless,” she said.
“I am extremely fond of cabbies,” he said, “but there is a good deal at stake here. I must consider all the consequences and possibilities before acting. I realize that’s an alien notion to you.”
Cabbies? I wondered why he was so fond of them. I have always found them entirely too talkative, especially the ones during the Blitz, who apparently paid no attention to the admonition that “Loose lips sink ships.” They were always telling me how someone had been buried alive in the rubble or got blown up—“Head was all the way across the street in a shop window. Milliner’s. Riding in a taxi just like you are now.”
“Are you sending me back?” she said. “I told them I was going out sketching. If I don’t come back, they’ll think I’ve drowned.”
“I don’t know. Until I decide, I want you in your rooms.”
“Can I take it with me?”
“No.”
There was a sinister-sounding silence, and then the door opened, and there stood the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.
Finch had said Nineteenth Century, and I’d expected hoop skirts, but she had on a long, greenish gown that clung to her slim body as if it were wet. Her auburn hair trailed about her shoulders and down her back like water weeds, and the whole effect was that of a Waterhouse nymph, rising like a wraith out of the dark water.
I stood up, gawping as foolishly as the new recruit, and took off my ARP helmet, wishing I had cleaned up when the nurse told me to.
She took hold of her long, trailing sleeve and wrung it out on the carpet. Finch grabbed a fax-mag and spread it under her.
“Oh, good, Ned, you’re here,” Mr. Dunworthy said from the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”
The nymph looked at me, and her eyes were a dark clear greenish-brown, the color of a forest pool. She narrowed them. “You’re not sending that, are you?” she said to Mr. Dunworthy.
“I’m not sending anyone. Or anything, until I’ve thought about it. Now go change out of those wet clothes before you catch cold.”
She gathered up her dripping skirts with one hand, and started out. At the door she turned back, her rosy lips open to impart some final benediction, some last word to me perhaps of love and devotion. “Don’t feed her. She’s had an entire place,” she said, and drifted out the door.
I started after her, bewitched, but Mr. Dunworthy had his hand on my arm. “So Finch found you all right,” he said, steering me around behind Finch’s desk and into the inner office, “I was afraid you’d be off in 1940 at one of those church bazaars Lady Schrapnell keeps sending you to.”
Outside the window I could see her crossing the quad, dripping gracefully on the pavement, a lovely . . . what were they called? Dryads? No, those were the ones that lived in trees. Sirens?
Mr. Dunworthy came over to the window. “This is all Lady Schrapnell’s fault. Kindle’s one of my best historians. Six months with Lady Schrapnell, and look at her!” He waved his hand at me. “Look at you, for that matter. The woman’s like a high-explosive bomb!”
The siren passed out of my vision and into the mist she had emerged from, only that wasn’t right. Sirens lived on rocks and shipwrecked sailors. And it sounded like dryads. Delphides? No, those were the ones who went about predicting doom and disaster.
“. . . had no business sen
ding her in the first place,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying. “I tried to tell her, but would she listen? Of course not. ‘No stone unturned,’ she says. Sends her off to the Victorian era. Sends you off to jumble sales to buy pincushions and tea towels!”
“And calves’ foot jelly,” I said.
“Calves’ foot jelly?” he said, looking at me curiously.
“For the sick,” I said. “Only I don’t think the sick eat it. I wouldn’t eat it. I think they give it to the next jumble sale. It makes the rounds from year to year. Like fruitcake.”
“Yes, well,” he said, frowning. “So now a stone has been turned, and she’s created a serious problem, which is what I wanted to see you about. Sit down, sit down,” he said, motioning me toward a leather armchair.
Finch got there first with a fax-mag, murmuring, “So difficult to get soot out of leather.”
“And take off your hat. Good Lord,” Mr. Dunworthy said, adjusting his spectacles, “you look dreadful Where have you been?”
“The soccer field,” I said.
“I gather it was a somewhat rough game.”
“I found him in the pedestrian gate by Merton’s playing fields,” Finch explained.
“I thought he was in Infirmary.”
“He climbed out the window.”
“Ah,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “But how did he get in this condition?”
“I was looking for the bishop’s bird stump,” I said.
“On Merton’s playing fields?”
“In the cathedral ruins just before he was brought to Infirmary,” Finch said helpfully.
“Did you find it?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“No,” I said, “and that’s the reason I came to see you. I wasn’t able to finish searching the ruins, and Lady Schrapnell—”
“—is the least of our worries. Which is something I never thought I’d find myself saying,” he said ruefully. “I gather Mr. Finch has explained the situation?”
“Yes. No,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better review it for me.”
“A crisis has developed regarding the net. I’ve notified Time Travel and—Finch, did Chiswick say when he’d be here?”
“I’ll check on it, sir,” he said, and went out.
“A very serious situation,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “One of our historians—”
Finch came back in. “He’s on his way over,” he said.
“Good,” Dunworthy said. “Before he gets here, the situation is this: One of our historians stole a fan and brought it back through the net with her.”
A fan. Well, that made a good deal more sense than a rat. Or a cab. And it explained the pinching part. “Like Lady Windermere’s mother,” I said.
“Lady Windermere’s mother?” Mr. Dunworthy said, looking sharply at Finch.
“Advanced time-lag, sir,” Finch said. “Disorientation, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, tendency to sentimentalize, impaired ability to reason logically,” he said, emphasizing the last two words.
“Advanced?” Dunworthy said, “How many drops have you made?”
“Fourteen this week. Ten jumble sales and six bishops’ wives. No, thirteen. I keep forgetting Mrs. Bittner. She was in Coventry. Not the Coventry I was in just now. Coventry today.”
“Bittner,” Mr. Dunworthy said curiously. “This wasn’t Elizabeth Bittner, was it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “The widow of the last bishop of Coventry Cathedral.”
“Good Lord, I haven’t seen her in years,” he said. “I knew her back in the early days when we were first experimenting with the net. Wonderful girl. The first time I saw her I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Too bad she had to fall in love with Bitty Bittner. She was absolutely devoted to him. How did she look?”
Hardly like a girl, I thought. She’d been a frail, white-haired old lady who had seemed ill-at-ease through the whole interview. She had probably thought Lady Schrapnell was going to recruit her and send her off to the Middle Ages. “She looked very well,” I said. “She said she had some difficulty with arthritis.”
“Arthritis,” he said, shaking his head. “Hard to imagine Lizzie Bittner with arthritis. What did you go and see her for? She wasn’t even born when the old Coventry Cathedral burned down.”
“Lady Schrapnell thought the bishop’s bird stump might have been stored in the crypt of the new cathedral and that since Mrs. Bittner was there when the cathedral was sold, she might have supervised the cleaning out of the crypt and have seen it.”
“And had she?”
“No, sir. She said it had been destroyed in the fire.”
“I remember when they had to sell Coventry Cathedral,” he said. “People had lost interest in religion, attendance was down at the services . . . Lizzie Bittner,” he said fondly. “Arthritis. I suppose her hair’s not red anymore either?”
“Preoccupation with irrelevancies,” Finch said loudly. “Miss Jenkins said Mr. Henry had a severe case of time-lag.”
“Miss Jenkins?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“The nurse who examined Mr. Henry at Infirmary.”
“Lovely creature,” I said. “A ministering angel, whose gentle hands have soothed many a fevered brow.”
Finch and Mr. Dunworthy exchanged looks.
“She said it was the worst case of time-lag she’d ever seen,” Finch said.
“Which is why I came to see you,” I said. “She’s prescribed two weeks of uninterrupted bed rest, and Lady Schrapnell—”
“Will never allow that,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “The cathedral’s consecration is only seventeen days away.”
“I tried to tell the nurse that, sir, but she wouldn’t listen. She told me to go to my rooms and go to bed.”
“No, no, first place Lady Schrapnell would look. Finch, where is she?”
“In London. She just phoned from the Royal Free.”
I started up out of the chair.
“I told her there’d been a mistake in communications,” Finch said, “that Mr. Henry’d been taken to the Royal Masonic.”
“Good. Ring up the Royal Masonic and tell them to keep her there.”
“I’ve already done so,” Finch said.
“Excellent,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Sit down, Ned. Where was I?”
“Lady Windermere’s fan,” Finch said.
“Only it wasn’t a fan the historian brought through the net,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “It was—”
“Did you say brought through the net?” I said. “You can’t bring anything through the net from the past. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Apparently not,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
There was a scuffling sound in the outer office. “I thought you said she was at the Royal Free,” Mr. Dunworthy said to Finch, and a short, harried looking man burst in. He was wearing a lab coat and carrying a bleeping handheld, and I recognized him as the head of Time Travel.
“Oh, good, you’re here, Mr. Chiswick,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I want to talk to you about an incident concerning—”
“And I want to talk to you about Lady Schrapnell,” Chiswick said. “The woman’s completely out of control. She pages me night and day, wanting to know why we can’t send people more than once to the same time and place, why we can’t process more drops per hour even though she has systematically stripped me of my research staff and my net staff and sent them running all over the past looking at almsboxes and analyzing flying buttresses.” He waved the bleeping handheld. “That’s her now. She’s paged me six times in the last hour, demanding to know where one of her missing historians is! Time Travel agreed to this project because of the opportunity the money afforded us to advance our research into temporal theory, but that research has come to a complete stop. She’s appropriated half my labs for her artisans, and tied up every computer in the science area.”
He stopped to punch keys on the still bleeping handheld, and Mr. Dunworthy took the opportunity to say, “The theory of time travel is what I wanted to discuss with you. One of
my historians—”
Chiswick wasn’t listening. The handheld had stopped bleeping, and now it was spitting out inch upon inch of paper. “Look at this!” he said, tearing off a foot and brandishing it before Mr. Dunworthy. “She wants me to have one of my staff telephone every hospital in the greater London area and find this missing historian of hers. Henry, his name is, Ned Henry. One of my staff. I don’t have any staff! She’s taken every single one of them except Lewis, and she tried to take him! Luckily, he—”
Mr. Dunworthy broke in. “What would happen if an historian brought something from the past forward through the net?”
“Did she ask you that?” he said. “Of course she did. She’s gotten it into her head to have this bishop’s bird stump she’s so obsessed with if she has to go back in time and steal it. I’ve told her and told her, bringing anything from the past to the present would violate the laws of the space-time continuum, and do you know what she said? ‘Laws are made to be broken.’”
He swept on, unchecked, and Mr. Dunworthy leaned back in his desk chair, took off his spectacles, and examined them thoughtfully.
“I tried to explain to her,” Chiswick said, “that the laws of physics aren’t mere rules or regulations, that they’re laws, and that the breaking of them would result in disastrous consequences.”
“What sort of disastrous consequences?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“That is impossible to predict. The space-time continuum is a chaotic system, in which every event is connected to every other in elaborate, nonlinear ways that make prediction impossible. Bringing an object forward through time would create a parachronistic incongruity. At best, the incongruity might result in increased slippage. At worst, it might make time travel impossible. Or alter the course of history. Or destroy the universe. Which is why such an incongruity is not possible, as I tried to tell Lady Schrapnell!”
“Increased slippage,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “An incongruity would cause an increase in slippage?”
“Theoretically,” Mr. Chiswick said. “Incongruities were one of the areas Lady Schrapnell’s money was to enable us to research, research which now has gone completely by the wayside in favor of this idiotic cathedral! The woman’s impossible! Last week she ordered me to decrease the amount of slippage per drop. Ordered me! She doesn’t understand slippage either.”
To Say Nothing of the Dog Page 4