It didn’t matter. I had already seen enough.
I flung myself through the door and through the tower door and up the firelit stairs, wondering what on earth I was going to say to Lady Schrapnell. In that one bright bomb-lit instant I had seen everything: the brasses on the walls, the polished eagle on the lectern, the blackening pillars. And in the north aisle, in front of the parclose screen, the empty wrought-iron flower stand.
It had been removed for safekeeping, after all. Or donated as scrap. Or sold at a jumble sale.
“Ned!” Verity shouted. “Hurry! The net’s opening!”
Lady Schrapnell had been wrong. The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there.
“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and change,
you can’t beat a sea trip.”
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
CHAPTER 25
Back in the Tower—The Cask of Amontillado—In the Scullery, the Kitchen, the Stables, and Trouble—Jane Is Completely Incomprehensible—The Prisoner of Zenda—A Swoon, Not Mrs. Mering This Time—Terence’s New Understanding of Poetry—A Letter—A Surprise—One Last Swoon, Involving Furniture—An Even Bigger Surprise
Third time is not necessarily a charm. The net shimmered, and we were in pitch-blackness again. The din had disappeared, though there was still a strong smell of smoke. It was at least twenty degrees cooler. I took one arm away from around Verity and cautiously felt to the side. I touched stone.
“Don’t move,” I said. “I know where we are. I was here before. It’s Coventry’s belltower. In 1395.”
“Nonsense,” Verity said, starting up the steps. “It’s the Merings’ wine cellar.”
She opened the door two steps above us a crack, and light filtered in, revealing wooden steps and racks of cobwebbed bottles below.
“It’s daylight,” she whispered. She opened the door a little wider and stuck her head out, looking both ways. “This passage opens off the kitchen. Let’s hope it’s still the sixteenth.”
“Let’s hope it’s still 1888,” I said.
She peeked out again. “What do you think we should do? Should we try to get out to the drop?”
I shook my head. “There’s no telling where we’d end up. Or whether we could get back.” I looked at her ragged, soot-streaked white dress. “You need to get out of those clothes. Especially the raincoat, which is circa 2057. Give it to me.”
She shrugged out of it.
“Can you get up to your room without being seen?”
She nodded. “I’ll take the back stairs.”
“I’ll go try to ascertain our space-time location. I’ll meet you in the library in a quarter of an hour, and we’ll go from there.”
She handed me the raincoat. “What if we’ve been gone a week? Or a month? Or five years?”
“We’ll claim we’ve been on the Other Side,” I said, but she didn’t laugh.
She said bleakly, “What if Tossie and Terence are already married?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. “Or fall in.”
She smiled back at me, one of those heart-turning smiles no amount of rest was ever going to render me immune to. “Thank you for coming to find me,” she said.
“At your service, miss,” I said. “Go put on a clean dress.”
She nodded. “Wait a few minutes so we won’t be seen together.”
She opened the door and slid out, and I realized suddenly I hadn’t told her what I’d gone all the way to the Fourteenth Century and back to tell her about.
“I found out how Tossie’s diary—” I started, but she was already down the corridor and starting up the back stairs.
I peeled off the coveralls. My coat and trousers had been fairly well protected by them, but my hands, and presumably my face, were a mess. I wiped them on the lining of the coveralls, wishing wine cellars came equipped with mirrors. Then I rolled the coveralls into a bundle with the raincoat, and jammed them far back behind a rack of claret.
I took a cautious look and went out into the passage. There were four doors along it, one of which had to lead to the outside. The last one was covered in green baize, which meant it led to the main part of the house. I opened the first.
The scullery. It was full of Cinderella-like stacks of dirty dishes and piles of pots, and a row of unpolished shoes. The shoes had to mean it was after bedtime and before the family was up, which was good—it meant Verity wouldn’t run into anyone on her way to her bedroom—but on second thought, it didn’t make any sense. That first night, when I sneaked Cyril back to the stable, I had nearly run into Baine putting the polished shoes outside the doors, and it had still been dark out. And he hadn’t collected them till after everyone had gone to bed. But it was clearly morning. Sun was streaming in on the pots and pans.
There was no newspaper and nothing else that might give a clue to our space-time location.
One of the pots had a copper bottom. I peered into it. There was a large smear of soot on my cheek and across my mustache. I pulled out my handkerchief, spit on it, dabbed at my face, smoothed my hair, and went back out into the passage, calculating. If this was the scullery, the next door must be the kitchen, and the one after that the door to the outside.
Wrong. It was the kitchen, and Jane and the cook were in it, whispering together in the corner. They moved apart guiltily. The cook went over to an enormous black stove and began stirring something briskly, and Jane put a piece of bread on a toasting fork and held it over the fire.
“Where’s Baine?” I said.
Jane jumped about a foot. The bread fell off the toasting fork and into the ashes, flaring up brightly.
“What?” she said, holding the toasting fork in front of her like a rapier.
“Baine,” I repeated. “I need to speak with him. Is he in the breakfast room?”
“No,” she said frightenedly. “I swear by the Blessed Mother, I don’t know where he is, sorr. He didn’t tell us anything. You don’t think the mistress will dismiss us, do you?”
“Dismiss you?” I said, bewildered. “Why? What have you done?”
“Nothing. But she’ll say we must have known all about it, what with gossiping in the servants’ hall and all that,” she said, waving the toasting fork for emphasis. “That’s what happened to my sister Margaret when young Mr. Val run off with Rose the scullery maid. Mrs. Abbott sacked the whole lot.”
I took the toasting fork away from her. “Known all about what?”
“Never even guessed,” the cook said from the stove. “All those fine airs and giving orders. It just goes to show you.”
This wasn’t getting anywhere, and I was running out of time. I decided to try the direct approach. “What time is it?” I asked.
Jane looked frightened all over again.
“Nine o’clock,” the cook said, consulting a watch pinned to her bosom.
“Nine o’clock, and I’ve got to be taking it up to them,” Jane said and burst into tears. “He said not to be taking it up till the morning post’d come, so as to give them enough time, and it’s always here by nine o’clock.” She wiped her eyes on the tail of her apron and straightened, steeling herself. “I’d best be going up and see if it’s been.”
I was going to ask, “Take what up?” but was afraid it would bring on a fresh round of tears and incoherencies. And there was no telling what the response might be if I asked them what day it was. “Tell Baine to bring me a copy of the Times. I’ll be in the library,” I said, and went outside.
At least it was still summer, and, on closer inspection, June. The roses were still in bloom, and the peonies, destined to serve as prototypes for countless penwipers, were still just coming out. As was Colonel Mering, carrying a burlap sack toward the fishpond. As oblivious and absorbed with his goldfish as he very likely was, I still didn’t want to have an encounter with him until I knew how much time had elapsed.
Accordingly, I ducked around the side of the house. I’d go round to
the groom’s door, through the stable, and from there to the French doors and the parlor. I slipped in the groom’s door. And nearly tripped over Cyril. He was lying on a burlap sack with his chin on his paws.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the time, would you?” I said. “And the date?”
And here was another sign that something was wrong. Cyril didn’t get up. He simply raised his head, looked at me with an expression like the Prisoner of Zenda, and lay it back down again.
“What is it, Cyril? What’s wrong?” I said, and reached to tug on his collar. “Are you ill?” And saw the chain.
“Good Lord,” I said to him. “Terence hasn’t married her, has he?”
Cyril continued to gaze hopelessly at me. I unhooked the chain. “Come along, Cyril,” I said. “We’ll go straighten this out.”
He staggered to his feet and trotted after me resignedly. I went out of the stables and around to the front of the house to find Terence. He was down at the Merings’ dock, sitting in the boat and staring at the river, his head sunk nearly as low as Cyril’s had been when he’d been left to guard the boat.
“What are you doing out here?” I said.
He looked up dully. “‘The mirror crack’d from side to side,’” he said. “‘Out flew the web and floated wide,’” which didn’t exactly clarify things.
“Cyril was chained up in the stable,” I said to him.
“I know,” Terence said without moving his gaze. “Mrs. Mering caught me sneaking him upstairs last night.”
So at least a full day and night had passed since our departure, and I’d better think of an explanation for my absence quickly before Terence asked me where I’d been.
But he simply went on gazing out at the river. “He was right, you know. About how it happens.”
“How what happens?”
“Fate,” he said bitterly.
“Cyril was chained up,” I said.
“He’s got to become accustomed to being in the stable,” he said dully. “Tossie doesn’t approve of animals in the house.”
“Animals?” I said. “This is Cyril we’re talking about. And what about Princess Arjumand? She sleeps on the pillows.”
“I wonder if she woke up that morning, happy as a lark, no idea her doom was going to come upon her.”
“Who?” I said. “Princess Arjumand?”
“I hadn’t a clue, you know, even when we were pulling into the station. Professor Peddick was talking about Alexander the Great and the battle of Issus, something about the decisive moment and everything depending on it, and I’d no idea.”
“You got Professor Peddick safely back to Oxford, didn’t you?” I said, suddenly worried. “He didn’t get off the train to go look for gravel bottoms?”
“No,” he said. “I delivered him into the arms of his loved ones. Into the arms of his loved ones,” he repeated anguishedly. “And just in time. Professor Overforce was about to deliver his funeral oration.”
“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. Glean 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 eaves-droppees 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.”
To Say Nothing of the Dog Page 50