To Say Nothing of the Dog

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wherever I was, it wasn’t the lab. The room looked like one of Balliol’s old lecture rooms. There was a blackboard on one wall and, above it, the mounting for an old-fashioned pull-down map, and on the door were a number of taped-up notices.

But it was obviously being used as a lab. On a long metal table was a row of primitive digital-processor computers and monitors, all linked together with gray and yellow and orange cords and a clutch of adaptors.

I looked back at the net I had just come through. It was nothing but a chalked circle, with a large masking-tape “X” in the center. Behind it, and attached to it by an even more dangerous-looking tangle of cords and copper wires, was a frightening assortment of capacitors, metal boxes studded with dials and knobs, lengths of PVC pipe, thick cables, jacks, and resistors, all taped together with wads of wide silver tape, which had to be the mechanism of the net, though I could not have imagined trying to cross the street in such a contraption, let alone going back in time.

A horrible thought struck me. What if this was the lab after all? What if the incongruity had altered more than Terence and Maud’s marriage and the bombing of Berlin?

I strode over to the door, hoping against hope the printed notices didn’t say 2057. And weren’t in German.

They weren’t. The top one said, “Parking is forbidden on the Broad, Parks Road, and in the Naffield College car park. Violators will be towed,” which sounded fascist, but then the Parking Authority always sounded fascist. And there were no swastikas on it, or on the railway schedule beside it. A large notice on pink paper read, “Fees for Hilary term are now past due. If you have not paid, please see the bursar immediately.”

And, inevitably, below it, “Orphans of the Pandemic Jumble Sale and St. Michael’s at the North Gate Charity Drive. April fifth, 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Bargains. White elephants. Treasures.”

Well, it definitely wasn’t Nazi England. And the Pandemic had still happened.

I examined the notices. Not a sign of a year on any of them, no dates at all, except for the upcoming jumble sale at St. Michael’s at the North Gate, and even that wasn’t certain. I’d seen notices over a year old on the notice board at Balliol.

I went over to the windows, pried the tape off one corner, and pulled the paper aside. I was looking out at Balliol’s front quad at a beautiful spring day. The lilacs outside the chapel were in bloom, and in the center of the quad a huge beech tree was just leafing out.

There was a chestnut tree in the center of the quad now, and it was at least thirty years old. Before 2020, then, but after the Pandemic, and the railway schedule meant it was before the Underground had reached Oxford. And after the invention of time travel. Between 2013 and 2020.

I went back over to the computers. The middle monitor was blinking, “Push ‘reset.’ ”

I did, and the veils above the net descended with a thunk. They weren’t transparent, they were dusty dark-red velvet that looked like they belonged in amateur theatricals.

“Destination?” the screen was blinking now. I had no idea what system of coordinates they’d used in the Twenties. Mr. Dunworthy had told me stories about the point-and-shoot time travel they’d done in the early days, without Pulhaski coordinates, without safeguards or parameter checks or any idea of where they were going or whether they’d get back. The good old days.

But at least the computer spoke English and not some primitive code. I typed in, “Current location?”

The screen went blank and then began blinking, “Error.”

I thought a minute and then typed in, “Help screen.”

The screen went blank again and stayed blank. Wonderful.

I began punching function keys. The screen began blinking, “Destination?”

There was a sound at the door. I looked round wildly for someplace to hide. There wasn’t any. Except the net, which was no place at all. I dived into the red velvet curtains and yanked them together.

Whoever was at the door was having difficulty getting in. There was a good deal of rattling and jimmying before the door opened.

I retreated to the center of the net and stood very still. There was the sound of the door’s closing, and then silence.

I stood there, listening. Nothing. Had whoever it was changed their mind and gone out again? I took a careful step toward the edge and pulled the curtains a millimeter apart. A beautiful young woman was standing by the door, biting her lip and looking straight at me.

I fought the impulse to jerk back. She hadn’t seen me. I wasn’t sure she was seeing the net either. She seemed lost in some inner vision of her own.

She was wearing a calf-length white dress that could have been from any decade from the 1930s on. Her red hair was long and looped up in the knotted ponytail of the Millennium era, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Historians in the Fifties wore them, too, along with braids and snoods and coronets, anything to keep the long hair they had to have for their drops out of the way.

The young woman looked younger than Tossie, but probably wasn’t. She was wearing a wedding ring. She vaguely reminded me of someone. It wasn’t Verity, though her determined expression made me think of Verity. And not Lady Schrapnell or any of her ancestors. Somebody I’d met at one of my jumble sales?

I squinted at her, trying to get a fix. Her hair was wrong. Should it be lighter? Reddish-blonde, perhaps?

She stood there a long minute with the look Verity had had-frightened, angry, determined — and then walked rapidly in the direction of the computers and out of my line of sight.

Silence again. I listened for the quiet click of keys, hoping she wasn’t setting up a drop. Or typing in directions for the veils to rise.

I couldn’t see from this angle. I moved carefully to the next break in the curtain and peered through. She was standing in front of the comps, staring at them, or, rather, past them, through them, with that same look of determination.

And something else I’d never seen on Verity’s face, not even when Terence had told us he and Tossie were engaged, an edge of reckless desperation.

There was a sound at the door. She turned and immediately started toward the door. And out of range again. And the person at the door obviously had a key. By the time I’d moved back to my original vantage point, he was standing in the open door, looking at her.

He was wearing jeans and a ragged sweater and spectacles. His hair was light brown and the longish indeterminate cut historians adopt because it can be maneuvered into almost any era’s style, and he looked familiar, too, though it was probably just the expression on his face, which I would have known anywhere. I should. It was the expression I had every time I looked at Verity.

He was holding a fat stack of papers and folders, and he still had the key to the lab in his hand.

“Hullo, Jim,” she said, her back to me, and I wished I could see her face, too.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a voice I knew as well as my own. Good Lord! I was looking at Mr. Dunworthy.

Mr. Dunworthy! He’d told me stories about the infancy of time travel, but I had always thought of him as, you know, Mr. Dunworthy. I hadn’t imagined him as skinny or awkward. Or young. Or in love with somebody he couldn’t have.

“I came to talk to you,” she said. “And to Shoji. Where is he?”

“Meeting with the head,” Mr. Dunwor-Jim said. “Again.” He went over to the table and dumped his load of papers and folders on the end of it.

I switched peepholes, wishing they’d stay put.

“Is this a bad time?” she said.

“The worst of times,” he said, looking through the stack for something. “We’ve got a new head of the history faculty since you left to marry Bitty. Mr. Arnold P. Lassiter. “P” for Prudence. He’s so cautious we haven’t done a drop in three months. ‘Time travel is an endeavor that should not be undertaken without a complete knowledge of how it works.’ Which means filling up forms and more forms. He wants complete analyses on every drop — the ones he’s willing to authorize, that is, which are few and far between — parameter checks, slippage graphs, impact probability stats, security checks—” He stopped rummaging. “How did you get into the lab?”

“It was unlocked,” she said, which was a lie. I twisted my head around, trying to find an angle from which I could see her face.

“Wonderful,” Jim said. “If Prudence finds out, he’ll have a fit.” He found the folder he wanted and pulled it out of the stack. “Why isn’t Bitty the Bishop with you?” he said, almost belligerently.

“He’s in London, appealing the C of E’s ruling.”

Jim’s face changed. “I heard about Coventry’s being declared nonessential,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lizzie.”

Coventry. Lizzie. This was Elizabeth Bittner he was talking to, the wife of the last bishop of Coventry. The frail, white-haired lady I’d interviewed in Coventry. No wonder I’d thought her hair should be lighter.

“Nonessential,” she said. “A cathedral nonessential. Religion will be ruled nonessential next, and then Art and Truth. Not to mention History.” She walked toward the blacked-out windows and out of range.

Will you stand still? I thought.

“It’s so unfair,” she said. “They kept Bristol, you know. Bristol!”

“Why didn’t Coventry make the cut?” Jim said, moving so I couldn’t see him either.

“The C of E ruled that all churches and cathedrals have to be seventy-five percent self-supporting, which means tourists. And the tourists only come to see tombs and treasures. Canterbury’s got Becket, Winchester’s got Jane Austen and a black Tournai marble font, and St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields is in London, which has the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s. We used to have treasures. Unfortunately, they were all destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940,” she said bitterly.

“There’s the baptistry window of the new cathedral,” Jim said.

“Yes. Unfortunately there’s also a church that looks like a factory warehouse and stained-glass windows that face the wrong way and the ugliest tapestry in existence. Mid-Nineteenth Century was not a good period in art. Or architecture.”

“They come to see the ruins of the old cathedral, don’t they?”

“Some of them. Not enough. Bitty tried to convince the Appropriations Committee that Coventry’s a special case, that it has historical importance, but it didn’t work. World War II was a long time ago. Scarcely anybody remembers it.” She sighed. “The appeal’s not going to work either.”

“What happens then? Will you have to close?”

She must have shaken her head. “We can’t afford to close. The diocese is too far in debt. We’ll have to sell.” She abruptly moved back into my line of sight, her face set. “The Church of the Hereafter made an offer. It’s a New Age sect. Ouija boards, manifestations, conversations with the dead. It’ll kill him, you know.”

“Will he be completely out of a job?”

“No,” she said wryly. “Religion’s nonessential, which means clergy are hard to come by. Rats deserting a sinking ship and all that. They’ve offered him the position of senior canon at Salisbury.”

“Good,” Jim said, too heartily. “Salisbury’s not on the nonessential list, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It has plenty of treasures. And Turner. It’s too bad he couldn’t have come to Coventry to paint. But you don’t understand. Bitty can’t bear to sell it. He’s descended from Thomas Botoner, who helped build the original cathedral. He loves the cathedral. He’d do anything to save it.”

“And you’d do anything for him.”

“Yes,” she said, looking steadily at him. “I would.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you. I have a favor to ask.” She stepped eagerly toward him, and they both moved out of my line of sight.

“I was thinking if we could take people back through the net to see the cathedral,” she said, “to see it burn down, they’d realize what it meant, how important it was.”

“Take people back?” Jim said. “We have trouble getting Prudence to approve research drops, let alone tourist excursions.”

“They wouldn’t be tourist excursions,” she said, sounding hurt. “Just a few select people.”

“The Appropriations Committee?”

“And some vid reporters. If we had the public on our side — if they saw it with their own eyes, they’d realize—”

Jim must have been shaking his head, because she stopped and switched tactics. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to the air raid,” she said rapidly. “We could go to the ruins afterward, or — or to the old cathedral. It could be in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be anybody in the cathedral. If they could just see the organ and the Dance of Death miserere and the Fifteenth-Century children’s cross for themselves, they’d realize what it meant to have lost Coventry Cathedral once, and they wouldn’t let it happen again.”

“Lizzie,” Jim said, and there was no mistaking that tone. And she had to know it was impossible. Oxford had never allowed sightseeing trips, not even in the good old days, and neither had the net.

She did know it. “You don’t understand,” she said despairingly. “It’ll kill him.”

The door opened, and a short scrawny kid with Asian features came in. “Jim, did you run the parameter—”

He stopped, looking at Lizzie. She must have cut a real swath in Oxford. Like Zuleika Dobson.

“Hullo, Shoji,” Lizzie said.

“Hullo, Liz,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“How’d the meeting with Prudence go?” Jim said.

“About like you’d expect,” Shoji said. “Now it’s the slippage he’s worried about. What’s its function? Why does it fluctuate so much?” His voice became prissy and affected, imitating Lassiter’s voice, “ ‘We must consider all possible consequences before we initiate action.’ ” He reverted to his own voice. “He wants a complete analysis of slippage patterns on all past drops before he’ll authorize any new ones.” He crossed out of my line of sight and over to the computers.

“You’re joking,” Jim said, following him. “That’ll take six months. We’ll never go anywhere.”

“I think that’s the general idea,” Shoji said, sitting down at the middle computer and beginning to type. “If we don’t go anywhere, there’s no risk. Why are the veils down?”

There was no record of a time traveller from the future or the past suddenly materializing in Balliol’s lab. Which either meant I hadn’t been caught or I’d come up with an extremely convincing story. I tried to think of one.

“If we don’t go anywhere,” Jim said, “how are we supposed to learn anything about time travel? Did you tell him science involves experiments?”

Shoji began hitting keys on the keyboard. “ ‘This is not a chemistry class we are talking about, Mr. Fujisaki,’ ” he said in the prissy voice as he typed. “ ‘This is the space-time continuum.’ ”

The curtains began, awkwardly, to rise.

“I know it’s the continuum,” Jim said, “but—”

“Jim,” Lizzie said, still out of sight but not for long, and both of them turned to look at her. “Will you ask him at least?” she said. “It means—”

And I found myself in a corner of Blackwell’s Book Store. Its dark woods and book-lined walls are not only instantly recognizable but timeless, and for a moment I thought I’d made it back to 2057, and getting to the lab was going to be a simple matter of sprinting up the Broad to Balliol, but as soon as I poked my head round the bookcase, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. Outside Blackwell’s bow windows it was snowing. And there was a Daimler parked in front of the Sheldonian.

Not Twenty-First Century, and now that I looked around, not the end of Twentieth either. No terminals, no paperbacks, no print-and-binds. Hardbacks, mostly without dust jackets, in blues and greens and browns.

And a shop assistant bearing down on me with a notebook in her hand and a yellow pencil behind her ear.

It was too late to duck back into a corner. She’d already seen me. Luckily, men’s clothes, unlike women’s, haven’t changed that much over the years, and boating blazers and flannels can still be seen in Oxford, though usually not in the dead of winter. With luck, I could pass as a first-year student.

The shop assistant was wearing a slimmish navy-blue dress Verity would probably have been able to date to the exact month, but the mid-Twentieth Century decades all look alike to me. 1950? No, her pencil-decked hair was put up in a severe knob, and her shoes laced. Early 1940s?

No, the windows were intact, there weren’t any blackout curtains and no sandbags piled up by the door, and the clerk looked far too prosperous to be post-war. The Thirties.

Verity’s regular assignment was the Thirties. Maybe the net had mistakenly sent me to the coordinates of one of her old drops. Or maybe she was here.

No, she couldn’t be here. My clothes might pass, but not her long, high-necked dress and piled-up hair.

The range of times and places she could be without creating an incongruity just by her appearance was very limited, and most of them were civilized, thank goodness.

“May I help you, sir?” the shop assistant said, looking at my mustache disapprovingly. I’d forgotten about it. Had men been clean-shaven in the 1930s? Hercule Poirot had had a mustache, hadn’t he?

“May I help you, sir?” she repeated, more severely. “Is there a particular book you are looking for?”

“Yes,” I said. And what books would they have had in Blackwell’s in Nineteen-Thirty-What? The Lord of the Rings? No, that was later. Goodbye Mr. Chips? That had been published in 1934, but what was this? I couldn’t see a date on that salespad of the shop assistant’s, and the last thing we needed, with the continuum falling down around our ears, was another incongruity.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” I said to be safe. “By Gibbon.”

“That would be on the first floor,” she said. “In History.”

I didn’t want to go up to the first floor. I wanted to stay close to the drop. What was on this floor? Eighty years from now, it would be metafiction and self-writes, but I doubted they had either here. Through the Looking Glass? No, what if children’s lit was already in a separate shop?

“The stairs up to the first floor are just there, sir,” she said, removing her pencil from behind her ear and pointing with it.

“Have you Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat?” I said.

“I will have to check,” she said, and started toward the rear.

“To Say Nothing of the Dog,” I called after her, and, as soon as she had rounded a bookcase, darted back to my corner.

I had been half-hoping the net would be open, or faintly shimmering in preparation, but there was nothing in the ceiling-to-floor rows of books to indicate it had ever been there. Or to give me a clue to what year I was in.

I began taking down books and opening them to the title page. 1904. 1930. 1921. 1756. That’s the trouble with books. They’re timeless. 1892. 1914. No date. I flipped the page over. Still no date. I flipped the page back again and read the title. No wonder. Herodotus’s History, which the Colonel and Professor Peddick had been reading only yesterday.

The bell over the door jangled. I peered carefully round the corner, hoping it was Verity. It was three middle-aged women in fur stoles and angle-brimmed hats.

They stopped just inside the door, brushing snow lovingly off their furs as if they were pets, and talking in high nasal tones.

“…and eloped with him!” the one on the right said. Her fur looked like a flattened version of Princess Arjumand. “So romantic!”

“But a farmer!” the middle one said. Her fur looked more like Cyril and was nearly as wide.

“I don’t care if he is a farmer,” the third one said. “I’m glad she married him.” She had the best fur of all, an entire string of foxes with their heads still on and bright little glass eyes. “If she hadn’t, she’d still be trapped in Oxford, serving on church committees and running jumble sales. Now, what was it I wanted to buy? I said to Harold this morning, I must remember to buy that when I go to Blackwell’s. Now, what could it have been?”

“I must get something for my godchild for her birthday,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said. “What should I get? Alice, I suppose, though I’ve never understood why children like it. Going from place to place with no rhyme or reason. Appearing and disappearing.”

“Oh, look!” the string of foxes said. She had picked up a book with a green dust jacket from a display table. Her fox-colored gloved hand was over the title, but I could see the author’s name: Agatha Christie.

“Have you read her latest?” she said to the others.

“No,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said.

“Yes,” the Princess Arjumand said, “and it—”

“Stop,” the string of foxes said, raising her gloved hand in warning. “Don’t tell me the ending.” She turned back to Cyril. “Cora always ruins the ending. Do you remember The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?”

“That was different. You wanted to know what all the fuss in the papers was about, Miriam,” the Princess Arjumand said defensively. “I couldn’t explain it without telling who the murderer was. At any rate, this one isn’t anything like Roger Ackroyd. There’s this girl who someone is attempting to murder, or at least that’s what one’s supposed to think. Actually—”

“Don’t tell me the ending,” the Little Foxes said.

“I didn’t intend to,” the Princess Arjumand said with dignity. “I was simply going to say that what you think is the crime, isn’t, and things aren’t at all what they seem.”

“Like in The Fountain Pen Mystery,” the Cyril-draped one said. “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The first one had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed, and the murderer—”

“Don’t tell me,” the Little Foxes said, clapping fox-gloved hands to her ears.

“The butler did it,” the Cyril said.

“I thought you hadn’t read it,” the Little Foxes said, taking her hands down from her ears.

“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s always the butler,” and the lights went out. But it was daytime, and even if something had happened to the electricity, there would still be enough light from Blackwell’s bow windows to see by.

I put my hand out to the bookshelf in front of me and felt it cautiously. It felt clammy and hard, like stone. I took a cautious step toward it. And nearly pitched forward into emptiness.

My foot was half over a void. I reeled back, staggered, and sat down hard on more stone. A staircase. I felt around, patting the rough stone wall, reaching down. A winding staircase, with narrow wedge-shaped steps, which meant I was in a tower. Or a dungeon.

The air had a cold, mildewy smell, which probably meant it wasn’t a dungeon. A dungeon would smell a good deal worse. But if it were a tower, light should be filtering in from a slit window somewhere above, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. A dungeon.

Or, I thought hopefully, the erratic bouncing had given me such a case of time-lag I’d gone completely blind.

I fumbled in my pockets for a match and struck it on the wall. No such luck. Rock walls, stone steps loomed up around me. Definitely a dungeon. Which meant I probably wasn’t in Oxford in 2018. Or 1933.

The Seventeenth Century had been big on dungeons. Ditto the Sixteenth through the Twelfth. Before that England had run mostly to pigsties and stick huts. Wonderful. Trapped in a Norman dungeon in the Middle Ages.

Or a corner of the Tower of London, in which case tourists would come trooping up the stairs in a few minutes. But somehow I didn’t think so. The steps, in the brief light of the match, had looked unworn, and when I felt along the wall, there weren’t any safety railings.

“Verity!” I shouted down into the blackness. My voice echoed off stone and silence.

I stood, bracing myself against the wall with both hands, and started carefully up, feeling for the edge of the narrow step with my foot. One step. Two. “Verity! Are you here?”

Nothing. I felt for the next step. “Verity!”

I put my foot on the step. It gave under my weight. I started to fall, flailing wildly, trying to catch myself and scraping my hand. I slid two steps and came down hard on one knee.

And if Verity was here, she had to have heard that. But I called again. “Verity!”

There was an explosion of sound, a violent flapping and whirring of wings that sounded like it was diving straight for me. Bats. Wonderful. I flung an arm I couldn’t see in front of my face.

The flapping intensified, but though my eyes strained through the darkness, I couldn’t see.

The flapping was coming straight at me. A wing brushed my arm. Wonderful. The bats couldn’t see either. I flailed at the darkness, and the flapping grew more frantic and then subsided, flying off above me, and I sat down very slowly and silently.

All right. Clearly the intelligent thing to do was sit here and wait for the net to open. And hope I wasn’t permanently stuck like Carruthers.

“And meanwhile Verity’s lost somewhere!” I shouted and was instantly sorry. The bats attacked again, and it was a good five minutes before they subsided.

I sat still and listened. Either this dungeon was completely soundproofed, or I wasn’t anywhere in the last three centuries. The world hasn’t been truly silent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Even the Victorian era had had trains and steam launches to contend with, and in the cities, the rattle and clop of traffic which would shortly become a roar. And both Twentieth and Twenty-First Century have an electronic hum that’s always present. Here, now that the bats had gone back to bed, there was no sound at all.

So what now? I’d probably kill myself if I tried any more exploration, and probably miss the net’s opening in the process. Assuming it was going to open.

I felt in my pocket for another match and my watch. Half past X. Warder had had a half-hour intermittent on the drop at Muchings End and I had only been in the lab twenty minutes, in Blackwell’s possibly fifteen. Which meant the net might open at anytime. Or not at all, I thought, remembering Carruthers.

And in the meantime, what? Sit here and stare at the darkness? Worry about Verity? Try to figure out what had happened to the bishop’s bird stump?

According to Verity, detectives weren’t required to go anywhere or do anything. They could sit in an easy chair (or a dungeon) and solve the mystery just by using “the little gray cells.” And I had more than enough mysteries to occupy me: Who on earth would have wanted to steal the bishop’s bird stump? Who was Mr. C and why the bloody hell hadn’t he shown up yet? What was Finch up to? What was I doing in the middle of the Middle Ages?

But the answer to that one was obvious. Verity and I had failed, and the continuum was starting to collapse. Carruthers trapped in Coventry and then the slippage on the return drops and then Verity — I should never have let her go through. I should have realized what was happening when the net wouldn’t open. I should have realized what was going to happen when Tossie didn’t meet Mr. C.

It was one of T.J.’s worst-case Waterloo scenarios, an incongruity too devastating for the continuum to be able to fix it. “See here,” T.J. had said, pointing at the formless gray image, “and here, you have radically increased slippage, but it can’t contain the incongruity, and you can see here where the backups start to fail, and the net begins to malfunction as the course of history starts to alter.”

The course of history. Terence marries Tossie instead of Maud, and a different pilot flies the mission to Berlin, and he miscalculates the target or is hit by flak, or he thinks he hears something wrong with the engine and turns back, and the other planes, thinking he’s received orders, follow him, or because of him they get lost, the way the German pilots had two nights before, or somehow the lack of their grandson’s presence in the world affects the history of airplane development or the amount of gasoline in England or the weather. And the raid never happens.

The Luftwaffe doesn’t retaliate by bombing London. It doesn’t bomb Coventry. So there is no restoration project. And no Lady Schrapnell to send Verity back to 1888. And the paradoxes multiply and reach critical mass and the net begins to break down, trapping Carruthers in Coventry, sending me farther and farther afield. This is the cat that dropped the bomb that brought down the house that Jack built.

It was getting colder. I pulled the lapels of my blazer together, wishing it was the tweed.

But if it was a worst-case scenario, why hadn’t there been any increased slippage on Verity’s drop? “See here,” T.J. had said, bringing up sim after sim after sim, “every single incongruity has this area of radically increased slippage around the focus.” Except ours.

Nine minutes’ slippage on that first drop, between two and thirty on all the others, an average of fourteen for all drops to the Victorian era. Only two areas of increased slippage, and one of those was due to Ultra.

I took my coat off and wrapped it around me like a blanket, shivering and thinking about Ultra.

Ultra had had a system of backups, too. The first line of defense was secrecy. But if there was a breach, they put their secondary system of defenses into action, like they had done in North Africa.

They’d been using Ultra to locate and sink convoys carrying fuel oil to Rommel, which could have roused suspicions that codes were being broken, so a spotter plane had been sent up each time to be seen by the convoy, so the Nazis could blame the sinking on having been spotted.

Except once, when heavy fog kept the plane from finding the convoy, and, in their panic to make certain the oil didn’t make it to Rommel, the RAF and the Royal Navy had both shown up to sink it, and nearly blown the cover.

So the head of Ultra put a backup plan into operation, planting rumors in the port of Malta, sending an easily decodable message to a nonexistent agent, arranging for it to be intercepted. The message thanked the agent for his information on the convoy and gave him a raise. And the Nazis had spent the next six months tracking down rumors and looking for the agent. And not suspecting we had Ultra.

And if that plan had failed, they would have tried something else. And even if all the plans had failed, they would have failed after, not during the breach.

No matter how bad the incongruity was, the continuum should have tried to prevent it. Instead, it had added nine minutes’ slippage, nine minutes that had sent Verity through at the exact moment to save the cat, when five minutes either way would have prevented it from happening at all. It was as if the continuum had taken one look at the incongruity and fainted dead away, like Mrs. Mering.

Verity had said to look for the one little fact that didn’t fit, but none of it fit: Why, if the continuum was trying to repair itself, hadn’t it sent me through at Muchings End so I could have returned the cat before Mrs. Mering went off to consult Madame Iritosky? Why had it sent me through three days late and just in time to prevent Terence from meeting Maud? And the biggest little fact of all, why had the net allowed the incongruity at all when it was supposed to shut down automatically?

“You understand these are all hypothetical scenarios,” TJ. had said. “In all these cases, the net refused to open.”

It was impossible to get anywhere near Waterloo. Or Ford’s Theater. Or Franz-Joseph Street. If the cat was so pivotal to the course of history, why wasn’t it impossible to get anywhere near Muchings End? Why wasn’t there increased slippage on Verity’s drop, where it was needed, and so much in Oxford in April, 2018? And how, if the slippage was keeping everything away, had I gotten through?

It would have been nice if the answer had been there, in the lab in 2018, but it was obvious that, whatever had caused the slippage, it wasn’t anything Jim Dunworthy or Shoji Fujisaki had done. They weren’t doing any drops.

Doubtless, if Hercule Poirot were here, he’d have come up with a neat solution not only to the Mystery of the Baffling Incongruity, but also that of the Little Princes in the Tower, Jack the Ripper, and who blew up St. Paul’s. But he wasn’t, and neither was the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey, and if they were, I’d have taken their coats away from them and put them over my knees.

Somehow, during that reverie, I had realized I was staring at an unevenness in the pitch-blackness opposite that might be the mortar between the stones, and that it meant light was coming from somewhere.

I flattened myself against the wall, but the light, or, rather, very slight absence of darkness, didn’t flicker or grow, like a torch coming down from somewhere above.

And it wasn’t the reddish-yellow of a lantern. It was only a grayer shade of black. And I must really be time-lagged, because it took another five minutes for the other possibility to occur to me: that the reason for the pitch-blackness was that it was night and I was in a tower, after all. And the way out was down.

And a near-fall and scraping of my right hand catching myself to realize that if I waited another half hour I’d be able to see where I was going and get out of here without killing myself.

I sat back down on the step, leaned my head against the wall, and watched the grayness grow.

I had made an assumption that darkness meant a dungeon, and as a consequence, I had been looking at things all wrong. Was that what we were doing in regard to the incongruity, too? Had we assumed something we shouldn’t have?

History was full of mistaken assumptions — Napoleon’s assuming Ney had taken Quatre Bras, Hitler’s assuming the invasion would come at Calais, King Harold’s Saxons’ assuming William the Conqueror’s men were retreating instead of leading them into a trap.

Had we made a mistaken assumption about the incongruity? Was there some way of looking at it which explained everything — from the lack of slippage on Verity’s drop to the excess of it in 2018? Some way of looking at it in which everything fit — Princess Arjumand and Carruthers and the bishop’s bird stump and all those bloody jumble sales and curates, to say nothing of the dog — and it all made sense?

I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, it was fully daylight and there were voices coming up the stairs.

I looked wildly round the narrow tower, as if there might actually be somewhere to hide, and then sprinted up the stairs.

I had gone at least five steps before I realized I needed to count the steps so I would know where the drop was. Six, seven, eight, I counted silently, rounding the next curve of the steps. Nine, ten, eleven. I stopped, listening.

“Hastyeh doon awthaslattes?” the woman said.

It sounded like Middle English, which meant I’d been right about this being the Middle Ages.

“Goadahdahm Boetenneher, thahslattes ayrnacoom,” the man said.

“Thahslattes maun bayendoon uvthisse wyke,” the woman said.

“Tha kahnabay,” he said.

I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had heard this conversation a number of times before, most recently in front of the south door of St. Michael’s. The woman was demanding to know why something wasn’t done. The man was making excuses. The woman, who must be an early ancestor of Lady Schrapnell’s, was saying she didn’t care, it had to be done in time for the jumble sale.

“Thatte kahna bay, Goadahdahm Boetenneher,” he said. “Tha wolde hahvneedemorr holpen thanne isseheer.”

“So willetby, Gruwens,” the woman said.

There was a clank of stone on stone, and the woman snapped, “Lokepponthatt, Gruwens! The steppe bay lossed.”

She was yelling at him for the loose step. Good. I hoped she read him out properly.

“Ye charge yesette at nought,” she said.

“Ne gan speken rowe,” the workman said placatingly.

They were still coming up. I looked up the tower’s shaft, wondering if there might be a room or a platform above.

“Tha willbay doone bylyve, Goadahdahm Boetenneher.”

Botoner. Could the woman be Ann Botoner, or Mary, who had built the spire of Coventry Cathedral? And could this be the tower?

I started up again, trying not to make any noise and counting the steps. Nineteen, twenty.

There was a platform, overlooking an open space. I looked down at it. The bells. Or where the bells would be when they were installed. I had just ascertained my space-time location. It was the tower of Coventry Cathedral, the year it was built. 1395.

I couldn’t hear them. I went back to the stairs and took two tentative steps down. And nearly ran into them.

They were right below me. I could see the top of a white-coiffed head. I leaped back up to the level of the platform, and on up the stairs, and nearly stepped on a pigeon.

It squawked and flew up, flapping like a bat at me and then past me and down onto the platform.

“Shoo!” Dame Botoner shouted. “Shoo! Thah divils minion!”

I waited, poised for flight and trying not to pant, but they didn’t come any farther. Their voices echoed oddly, as if they had gone over to the far side of the platform, and after a minute I crept back down to where I could see them.

The man was wearing a brown shirt, leather leggings, and a pained expression. He was shaking his head. “Nay, Goadudahm Marree,” he said. “It wool bay fortnicht ahthehlesst.”

Mary Botoner. I looked wonderingly at this ancestor of Bishop Bittner’s. She was wearing a reddish-brown shift, cut out in the wide sleeves to show a yellow underdress, and fastened with a metal belt that sank somewhat low. Her linen coif was pulled tight around her plump, middle-aged face, and she reminded me of someone. Lady Schrapnell? Mrs. Mering? No, someone older. With white hair?

She was pointing to things and shaking her head. “Thahtoormaun baydoon ah Freedeywyke,” she said.

The workman shook his head violently. “Tha kahna bay, Goaduhdahm Boetenneher.”

The woman stamped her foot. “So willetbay, Gruwens.” She swept round the platform to the stairs.

I ducked back out of sight, ready to go up again, but the discussion was apparently over.

“Bootdahmuh Boetenneher—” the workman pleaded, following her.

I crept after them, keeping one turn above.

“Gottabovencudna do swich—” the workman said, trailing after her.

I was nearly back to the site of the drop.

“Whattebey thisse?” the woman said.

I cautiously came down one step, and then another, till I could see them. Mary Botoner was pointing at something on the wall.

“Thisse maun bey wroughtengain,” she said, and, above her head, like a halo, I saw a faint shimmer.

Not now, I thought, not after waiting a whole night.

“Bootdahmuh Boetenneher—” the workman said.

“So willet bey,” Mary Botoner said, jabbing her bony finger at the wall.

The shimmer was growing brighter. One of them would look up in a moment and see it.

“Takken under eft!” she said.

Come on, come on. Tell her you’ll fix it, I thought.

“Thisse maun bey takken bylyve,” she said, and started, finally, down the stairs. The workman rolled his eyes, tightened his rope belt round his ample middle, and started after her.

Two steps. Three. Mary Botoner’s coiffed head disappeared round the curve of the tower and then bobbed back into sight. “Youre hyre isse neyquitte till allisse doone.”

I couldn’t wait any longer, even if it meant they saw me. People in the Middle Ages had believed in angels — with luck, they’d think I was one.

The shimmer began to glow. I shot down the steps, jumping over the pigeon, who took off into the air with a wild squawking.

“Guttgottimhaben,” the workman said, and they both turned to look up at me.

Mary Botoner crossed herself. “Holymarr remothre—”

And I dived for the already closing net and sprawled flat onto the blessed tiled floor of the lab.