To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  “Like in Schrodinger’s box,” I said, thinking of the famous thought experiment with the Geiger counter and the bottle of cyanide gas. And the cat.

  “Exactly,” Verity said happily. “The course of events that will happen if the incongruity’s corrected, and if it’s not, both exist side by side, sort of. When the self-correction’s completed, they collapse into one course of events or the other. But until that happens, there may be discrepancies between the observed and recorded events. Only the only record we have is Tossie’s diary, and we can’t read that, so there’s no way to tell whether Terence and Maud’s not meeting is a discrepancy or not.”

  She bit into another biscuit. “That’s why I was gone so long. After I talked to T.J., I went over to the Bodleian to start a search on Terence and then over to Oriel to ask the forensics expert to look for references to him in the diary and to see if she’d found out Mr. C’s name.”

  “And had she?” I said, thinking perhaps this was why Verity seemed so happy.

  “No. She’d recovered one entire passage, which unfortunately was a description of a dress Tossie was having made. Four paragraphs of pintucks, Brussels lace, French embroidery, openwork insets, and—”

  “Ruffles,” I said.

  “Ruffles and more ruffles,” she said disgustedly. “And not a word about the cat or the trip to Coventry or the bishop’s bird stump. I don’t suppose you have any chocolate stashed away? Or cheese? I’m so hungry. I intended to go back to Balliol and eat dinner after I talked to the forensics expert, but on the way there, I ran into Lady Schrapnell.”

  “Lady Schrapnell?” I said. I’d nearly forgotten her in all the other crises. “She doesn’t know where I am, does she? You didn’t tell her, did you?”

  “Of course not,” she said, taking a swig of the cocoa. “I didn’t tell her about the cat either. She demanded to know what I was doing there, and I told her I needed a new costume for day after tomorrow. Warder was livid.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And then she stood there while I was being fitted, telling me all about you and how you’d gone off somewhere and Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t tell her where you were, and how T.J. Lewis refused to go back to 1940 to check on the bishop’s bird stump just because the Twentieth Century was a ten for blacks, which was ridiculous, how dangerous could an air raid be?” She drained the last of the cocoa and peered into the pot. “And how the workmen were being completely impossible about the choir and told her the choir stalls wouldn’t be completed for another month and how that was completely out of the question, the consecration was in thirteen days.”

  She poured the last drops of cocoa into her cup. “She wouldn’t leave, even when Warder took me into the prep room to try on the dress. I had to have her go out and stall Lady Schrapnell while I telephoned the Bodleian and got the results of the search on Terence.”

  “And? Was he supposed to meet Maud?”

  “I don’t know,” she said cheerfully. “The search didn’t turn up anything. No medals, knighthoods, elections to Parliament, arrests, convictions, news stories. No mention at all in the official records.”

  “No marriage license?”

  She shook her head and reached for the last biscuit. “His parish church was destroyed in the Blitz, and I didn’t have time to do a global, but I left a message for Mr. Dunworthy with Warder, telling him to do one as soon as he got back from Coventry, but if Terence isn’t mentioned in the official records, it means he didn’t affect history, which means the meeting doesn’t matter. Which goes along with what T.J. said about the discrepancies, which is that only the immediate area surrounding the incongruity is destabilized. And the meeting was four days from the time I rescued the cat, and Oxford Railway Station’s over thirty miles from Muchings End, which is hardly the immediate vicinity. So it isn’t a discrepancy, and the incongruity isn’t getting worse.”

  “Umm,” I said, wishing I were as convinced as she was.

  “But if Tossie marries Terence instead of Mr. C, that would definitely be a discrepancy, so we need to steal the diary and find out who he is and get them married as soon as possible, and in the meantime we need to keep Terence away from Tossie. And find the bishop’s bird stump,” she added, licking biscuit crumbs off her fingers.

  “What?” I said. “I thought you didn’t tell Lady Schrapnell where I was.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I told her you’d found out where the bishop’s bird stump was and were off fetching it!”

  “You what?” I said, sitting down on Cyril.

  “She was determined to find you,” she said. “The craftsmen have refused to make a reproduction of the bishop’s bird stump, and she’s furious. It was only a matter of time till she checked Warder’s drop records and came after you,” she said reasonably, “and that’s all we need.”

  She had a point. “But what’s going to happen when she finds out I don’t have the slightest idea where the bishop’s bird stump is and never did? The consecration’s in two weeks, and I’m not supposed to be doing any drops.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said, “and we won’t need to go anywhere. Poirot says all you need to solve a mystery is ‘the little gray cells.’”

  “Poirot?” I said. “Who’s Poirot? The curate?”

  “No,” she said. “Hercule Poirot. Agatha Christie. He says—”

  “Agatha Christie?” I said, completely lost.

  “The mystery writer. Twentieth Century. My assignment, before Lady Schrapnell took over Oxford and my life, was the 1930s, and it’s an absolutely grim time: the rise of Hitler, worldwide depression, no vids, no virtuals, no money to go to the cinema. Nothing at all to do except read mystery novels. Dorothy Sayers, E.C. Benson, Agatha Christie. And crossword puzzles,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “Crossword puzzles?” I said.

  “Are not particularly useful to our present situation. But mystery novels are. Of course they’re usually about murder, not robbery, but they always take place in a country house like this, and the butler did it, at least for the first hundred mystery novels or so. Everyone’s a suspect, and it’s always the least likely person, and after the first hundred or so, the butler wasn’t anymore—the least likely person, I mean—so 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, even though that had already been done in The Moonstone. The hero did it, only he didn’t know it. He was sleepwalking, in his nightshirt, which was rather racy stuff for Victorian times, and the crime was always unbelievably complicated. In mystery novels. I mean, nobody ever just grabs the vase and runs, or shoots somebody in a fit of temper, and at the very end, when you think you’ve got it all figured out, there’s one last plot twist, and the crime’s always very carefully thought out, with disguises and alibis and railway timetables and they have to include a diagram of the house in the frontispiece, showing everyone’s bedroom and the library, which is where the body always is, and all the connecting doors, and even then you don’t have a prayer of figuring it out, which is why they have to bring in a world-famous detective—”

  “Who solves it with little gray cells?” I said.

  “Yes. Hercule Poirot, that’s Agatha Christie’s detective, and he says it isn’t at all necessary to go running about measuring footprints and picking up cigarette ends to solve mysteries like Sherlock Holmes. That’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective—”

  “I know who Sherlock Holmes is.”

  “Oh. Well, anyway, Poirot says all you need is to use ‘the little gray cells’ and think about the problem.”

  “And we’ll be able to find the bishop’s bird stump. Here. In 1888,” I said, unconvinced.

  “Well, it won’t be here, but we’ll be able to find out where it is from here,” she said, beaming. She settled herself on the bed. “Now, when was the last ti
me you saw it?”

  I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

  “Couldn’t we do this in the morning?” I said.

  “Everyone will be around then,” she said, “and the sooner we find it, the sooner we can stop worrying about Lady Schrapnell barging in and demanding to know where it is. I’ve never actually seen it, you know. I’ve only heard stories. Is it truly as hideous as everyone says? It doesn’t depict the Finding of the Infant Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughters, does it, like that awful thing we saw at Iffley?”

  She stopped. “I’m babbling, aren’t I? Just like Lord Peter. That’s Dorothy Sayers’s detective. Lord Peter Wimsey. He and Harriet Vane solve mysteries together. It’s terribly romantic, and I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Babbling, I mean. Drops have that effect on me.”

  She looked ruefully at me. “And you’re suffering from time-lag and supposed to be resting. I am so sorry.”

  She scrambled off the bed and picked up her paper-wrapped parcel. “It’s sort of a cross between caffeine and alcohol. The effect drops have on me. Do they affect you that way? Sort of giddy and talkative?” She gathered up her shoes and stockings. “We’ll both feel better in the morning.”

  She opened the door and peered out into the blackness. “Get some sleep,” she whispered. “You look dreadful. You need to get your rest so you can help me keep Tossie and Terence apart in the morning. I’ve got it all worked out. I’ll make Terence help me set up the fortune-telling tent.”

  “Fortune-telling tent?” I said.

  “Yes, and you can help Tossie with the jumble sale.”

  “. . . there is no more admirably educational experience

  for a young fellow starting out in life than going to stay

  at a country house under a false name. . . .”

  P. G. Wodehouse

  CHAPTER 13

  Another Visitor—Variations on a Theme—The Birds—Importance of Butlers—An Old-Fashioned English Breakfast—Wildlife—The Bishop’s Bird Stump—The One Little Fact—The Mystery of the Maid’s Name Solved—I Am Prepped—The Mystery of the Origin of the Jumble Sale Solved—My Time in the States—Victorian Handicrafts—My Boater—Mr. C—A Surprise

  Verity was not my final visitor. A half hour after she left there was another sound of scratching on the door, so faint I would not have heard it if I had been asleep.

  I wasn’t asleep. Verity, with her news of increased slippage and discrepancies, had pretty much put paid to that. Not to mention Lady Schrapnell and the bishop’s bird stump.

  And Cyril had somehow managed, in spite of his short legs, to sprawl over the entire width of the bed and both pillows so that there was only a narrow edge left, which I had a tendency to roll off of. I wrapped my feet round the bedpost and anchored the coverlet with my hands and thought about Lord Lucan and Schrödinger’s cat.

  It had been put into a box in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, along with a doomsday device: a bottle of cyanide gas, a hammer hooked to a Geiger counter, and a chunk of uranium.If the uranium emitted an electron, it would trigger the hammer which would break the bottle. That would release the gas that would kill the cat that lived in the box that Schrödinger built.

  And since there was no way to predict whether the uranium had emitted an electron or not, the cat was neither dead nor alive, but both, existing as side-by-side probabilities which would collapse into a single reality when the box was opened. Or the incongruity was repaired.

  But that meant there was a fifty percent probability that the incongruity wouldn’t be repaired. And for each moment the cat stayed in the box, the probability that the uranium would emit said electron became greater, and so did the likelihood that when the box was opened, the cat would be dead.

  And the first line of defense had already failed. The coincidences of Tossie’s meeting Terence and my meeting Terence and our rescuing Professor Peddick and his meeting the Colonel proved that. And discrepancies were the next step.

  But Terence hadn’t affected history, at least not directly, or his name would have been in the official records, and Oxford Railway Station was thirty miles and four days from Muchings End. And T.J. had said the immediate vicinity.

  But what seemed to have escaped Verity in her time-lagged state was that even if their meeting wasn’t in the immediate vicinity, Mrs. Mering’s decision to take Tossie to Madame Iritosky’s was, and that was what had led to her meeting Terence and to Terence’s running into Professor Peddick and being asked to meet the aged relicts. And running into me. And what did immediate vicinity mean anyway? T.J. hadn’t said. It might be years and hundreds of miles.

  I lay there in the dark, going round and round, like Harris in the Hampton Court Maze. Baine hadn’t intended to drown Princess Arjumand, but if she hadn’t drowned and become nonsignificant, why hadn’t the net refused to open for Verity? And if she had drowned, why had it opened for me?

  And why had I come through at Oxford? To keep Terence from meeting Maud? I didn’t see how that could possibly contribute to a self-correction. Or had it been to keep the cat away from Muchings End? I remembered dropping her basket at Folly Bridge when Cyril charged at me, and it nearly rolling into the river before Terence caught it. And my grabbing the carpetbag as it toppled, and sending Cyril into the drink. Had the course of history been trying to correct itself by drowning the cat, and I’d kept interfering?

  But she couldn’t have been intended to drown. Baine hadn’t been trying to drown her when he threw her in. If Verity hadn’t interfered, he would have dived in, morning coat and all, and saved her. Perhaps he’d thrown her out too far, and she’d been carried away by the current and drowned, in spite of Baine’s best efforts. But that still didn’t explain—

  There was a faint scratching at the door. It’s Verity, I thought. She forgot to explain Hercule Poirot’s detecting methods. I opened the door.

  There was no one there. I opened the door wider and looked down the hall in both directions. Nothing but blackness. It must have been one of Mrs. Mering’s spirits.

  “Mere,” a small voice said.

  I looked down. Princess Arjumand’s gray-green eyes shone up at me. “More,” she said, and sauntered past me, tail in the air, jumped on the bed, and lay down in the middle of my pillow.

  This left me no room at all. Plus, Cyril snored. This in itself could have been got used to, but as the night progressed, it got louder and louder, till I was afraid it was going to wake the dead. Or Mrs. Mering. Or both.

  And he seemed to do variations on a theme—a low rumble, like distant thunder, a snore, an odd whuffling sound which ruffled his jowls, a snort, a snuffle, a wheeze.

  None of this bothered the cat, who had settled herself on my Adam’s apple again and was purring (without variations) in my ear. I kept dozing off from cat-induced lack of oxygen and then waking up, lighting matches, and trying to read my pocket watch by them at II, III, and a quarter to IV.

  I dozed off again at half-past V only to be awakened by the birds chirping the arrival of the sun. I had always been led to believe this was an idyllic, melodious sound, but this sounded more like a full-scale, Nazi air raid. I wondered if the Merings had an Anderson shelter.

  I fumbled for a match, realized I could read my pocket watch without it, and got up. I pulled on my clothes, put on my shoes, and began trying to rouse Cyril.

  “Come along, boy, time to go back to the stable,” I said, interrupting him in mid-whuffle with a shake. “You don’t want Mrs. Mering to catch you in here. Come along. Wake up.”

  Cyril opened one bleary eye, closed it again, and began to snore loudly.

  “Don’t try to pull that!” I said. “It won’t work. I know you’re awake.” I poked him in his midsection. “Come along. You’ll get us both thrown out.” I tugged on his collar. He opened the eye again and staggered to his feet. He looked like I felt
. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was swaying gently, like a drunk after a night on the tiles.

  “Good boy,” I said encouragingly. “That’s it. Off the bed. Down we go.”

  Princess Arjumand chose that moment to yawn, stretch luxuriously, and settle comfortably into a nest of bedclothes. The message couldn’t have been clearer.

  “You’re not helping,” I said to her. “I know it’s not fair, Cyril, but life is not fair. I, for instance, am supposed to be on holiday. Resting. Sleeping.”

  Cyril took the word “sleeping” for a command and sank back onto the pillows.

  “No,” I said. “Up. Now. I mean it, Cyril. Come. Heel. Wake up.”

  One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning. Outside, the grounds had the rosy flush of dawn, the grass bright with diamond dew, the roses just op’ing their sweet faces, all of which indicated I was still suffering from severe to terminal time-lag, which meant when I saw Verity at breakfast I would still be completely under her spell, even though she had told Lady Schrapnell I knew where the bishop’s bird stump was.

  In the meantime, the bird Luftwaffe must have gone back to refuel, and the world lay silent in the early light, a silence as much a part of the past as Victorian country houses and boating on the Thames, the stillness of a world that had yet no ken of airplanes and traffic jams, of incendiaries and pinpoint bombs, the still and holy hush of an idyllic world gone by.

  It was too bad I wasn’t in a position to appreciate it. Cyril weighed a ton, and set up a pathetic and piercing whine as soon as I set him down. I almost tripped over the slumbering stable-boy on the way out, and, back inside the house, I nearly collided with Baine in the upper hall.

  He was setting polished boots in neat pairs outside the bedroom doors. In the second before he saw me, I wondered when he slept.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I said, dropping the subjects of my sentences like Colonel Mering in my nervousness. “Went downstairs looking for something to read.”