“‘Did my heart love till now?’” he quoted, extending his hand dramatically down toward Verity. “‘Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.’” He disappeared down the upstairs corridor.
I looked at Verity. She stood with her hands on the newel post and was gazing sadly after Terence.
By tomorrow she’ll be back in the 1930s, I thought, Realizing What It Meant. She would be back to documenting the Depression and reading mystery novels, her beautiful red hair in a pageboy, and her long legs, which I had never seen, encased in silk stockings with a seam down the back. And I would never see her again.
No, I would probably see her at the consecration. If I were still allowed to come. If Lady Schrapnell didn’t permanently assign me to jumble sale duty when I told her that the bishop’s bird stump hadn’t been in the cathedral.
And if I did see Verity at the consecration, what exactly was I supposed to say to her? All Terence had to apologize for was thinking he’d been in love. I had to apologize for being such a liability in the scheme of things that I’d had to be shut up in a dungeon during the denouement. Not exactly something to be proud of. It was just as well I’d be stuck behind the fancy goods stall.
“I’m going to miss all this,” Verity said, her eyes still on the stairs. “I should be glad it’s all worked out so well, and that the continuum’s not going to collapse . . .” She turned her beautiful naiad’s eyes on me. “You do think the incongruity’s repaired, don’t you?”
“There’s a train at 9:43,” Terence said, racketing down the stairs with a valise in one hand and his hat in the other. “Baine thoughtfully left a Bradshaw in my room. Arrives at 11:02. Come along, Cyril, we’re going to go get engaged. Where’s he got to? Cyril!” He disappeared into the parlor.
“Yes,” I said to Verity. “Completely repaired.”
“Ned, you can arrange to have the boat sent back to Jabez, can’t you?” Terence said, reappearing with Cyril. “And the rest of my things sent to Oxford?”
“Yes,” I said. “Go.”
He pumped my hand. “Goodbye. ‘Friend, ahoy! Farewell, farewell!’ I’ll see you next term.”
“I . . . I’m not certain about that,” I said, and realized how much I was going to miss him. “Goodbye, Cyril.” I leaned down to pat him on the head.
“Nonsense. You’re looking much better since we’ve been at Muchings End. You’ll be entirely cured by Michaelmas term. We’ll have such jolly times on the river,” Terence said, and was gone, Cyril trotting happily after him.
“I want them out of this house immediately,” Mrs. Mering’s voice said, overwrought, and we both looked up the stairs.
A door slammed overhead. “Absolutely out of the question!” Mrs. Mering said, and then the low sound of voices murmuring. “. . . and tell them . . .”
More murmuring. “I want you to go downstairs immediately and tell them. This is all due to them!”
More murmuring, and then, “If she’d been a proper chaper-one this would never ha—”
A door shutting cut her off, and a minute later Colonel Mering came down the stairs, looking extremely embarrassed.
“All been too much for my poor dear wife,” he said, looking at the carpet. “Her nerves. Very delicate. Rest and absolute quiet is what she needs. Think it best you go to your aunt in London, Verity, and you back to—” He looked at a loss.
“To Oxford,” I said.
“Ah, yes, to your studies. Sorry about this,” Colonel Mering said to the carpet. “Glad to arrange for the carriage.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said.
“No trouble,” he said. “Will have Baine tell—” he stopped, looking lost.
“I’ll see that Miss Brown gets to the station,” I said.
He nodded. “Must go see to my dear wife,” he said, and started up the stairs.
Verity went after him. “Colonel Mering,” she said, following him halfway up the stairs. “I don’t think you should disown your daughter.”
He looked embarrassed. “Afraid Malvinia’s quite determined. Dreadful shock, you know. Butler and all that.”
“Baine—I mean, Mr. Callahan—did prevent Tossie’s cat from eating your Black Moor,” she said.
Wrong thing to say. “He didn’t prevent it from eating my globe-eyed nacreous ryunkin,” he said angrily. “Cost two hundred pounds.”
“But he did take Princess Arjumand with him so she can’t eat any more of your goldfish,” she said persuasively, “and he prevented Madame Iritosky from stealing Aunt Malvinia’s ruby necklace. And he’s read Gibbon.” She put her hands on the newel post and looked up at him. “And she is your only daughter.”
Colonel Mering looked down at me for support. “What do you think, Henry? Will this butler fellow make her a good husband?”
“He has her best interests at heart,” I said firmly.
The Colonel shook his head. “Afraid my wife is quite determined never to speak to her again. Said from this moment forth, Tossie is dead to her.” He went sadly up the stairs.
“But she’s a spiritist,” Verity said, pursuing him. “She is quite capable of speaking to the dead.”
His face lit up. “Capital idea! Could have a seance.” He went happily up the stairs. “Loves seances. Could rap out, Forgive.’ Bound to work. Never thought all that medium poppycock would be of any use.”
He rapped loudly three times on the banister. “Capital idea!”
He started down the corridor and then stopped and put his hand on Verity’s arm. “Should pack and depart for the station as soon as possible. Your own best interests at heart. Nerves, you know.”
“I quite understand,” Verity said and opened the door to her room. “Mr. Henry and I shall be gone directly.” She shut her door behind her.
Colonel Mering disappeared down the corridor. A door opened and shut, but not before Mrs. Mering’s voice had boomed out like the Red Queen’s, “. . . gone yet? I thought I told you—”
Time to depart.
I went upstairs and into my room. I opened the wardrobe and got out my carpetbag. I set it on the bed and then sat down beside it and thought about what had just happened. The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.
But why had it sent us to Coventry’s air raid, a crisis point, where presumably we could do a lot more damage? Or was Coventry a crisis point?
Its being off-limits had seemed to indicate it was a crisis point, and logically Ultra’s involvement should make it one, but perhaps the raid was only off-limits when we were looking for the bishop’s bird stump, because Verity and I had already been there. Perhaps it had been off-limits to give us a clear field.
To do what? To watch Provost Howard take candlesticks and Regimental Colors to the police station and see that the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t among the things saved? To see that it wasn’t in the church during the raid?
I would have given anything not to have seen that, not to have to tell Lady Schrapnell. But it was definitely not there. I wondered who had stolen it and when.
It had to have been that afternoon. Carruthers said the Flower Committee biddy Miss Sharpe had said she’d seen the bishop’s bird stump when she left the cathedral after the Advent Bazaar and Soldiers’ Christmas Parcel Effort meeting, that she’d stopped and pulled three dead flowers out of it.
Everything started to shift, the way it had when Finch said, “You’re on Merton’s playing fields,” and I grabbed for the bedpost like it was the pedestrian gate.
A door slammed. “Jane!” Mrs. Mering’s voice said from the corridor. “Where is my black bombazine?”
“Here, mum,” Jane’s voice said.
“O, this won’t do at all!” Mrs. Mering’s voice again. ?
??It’s entirely too heavy for June. We shall have to order mourning clothes from Swan and Edgar’s. They had a lovely soft black crepe with jet trim on the bodice and a pleated underskirt.”
A pause, either for weeping or wardrobe-planning.
“Jane! I want you to take this note over to Notting Hill. And not a word to Mrs. Chattisbourne. Do you hear?” Slam.
“Yes, mum,” Jane said timidly.
I stood there, still clutching the bedpost, trying to recall the idea, the odd sensation I’d had a moment ago, but it was gone, as quickly as it had come, and that must have been what had happened to Mrs. Mering there in the cathedral. She hadn’t had a message from the spirit world, or from Lady Godiva either. She had looked at Baine and Tossie, and for an instant things had shifted into their true orientation, and she had seen what was happening, what was going to happen.
And then she must have lost it, because otherwise she’d have dismissed Baine on the spot and sent Tossie off on a Grand Tour of Europe. It must have gone as instantly as it came, the way mine just had, and that odd, chipped-tooth-probing look of hers had been her trying to remember what had triggered it.
The butler did it. “If I can ever do anything to repay you for returning Princess Arjumand, I should be more than obliged,” Baine had said, and he certainly had repaid me. In spades. “The butler did it,” Verity had said, and he certainly had.
Only not Verity. The fur-bearing woman in Blackwell’s. “The butler always does it,” she said, and the other one, the one with the Cyril-like fur draped over her shoulders, had said, “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The real crime had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed.” The real crime. A crime the person was unaware of having committed. And something else. About someone marrying a farmer.
“But a butler!” Mrs. Mering’s anguished voice cried from down the corridor, followed by placating murmurs.
“Never should have let them stay in the first place!” Colonel Mering said.
“If she hadn’t met Mr. St. Trewes,” Mrs. Mering wailed, “she’d never have been thinking about marriage.” Her voice died away into sobbing murmurs, and it was nice to know other people second-guessed their actions, but it was definitely time to go.
I opened the bureau and looked at the clothes Baine had neatly stacked inside. The shirts all belonged to Elliott Chattisbourne and the Victorian era. And the collars and cuffs and nightshirt. I wasn’t as certain of the socks, but I must have been wearing the pair I’d come through in or the net wouldn’t have opened. Unless of course I was going to cause an incongruity, in which case there wouldn’t even be any increased slippage.
And if the continuum had been trying to get rid of Verity and me, why hadn’t the net just refused to open the first time we tried to come back from Oxford after we’d reported in? Why hadn’t it refused to open when Verity tried to take Princess Arjumand through? Baine wasn’t trying to drown the cat. He’d have been delighted to find Verity standing there by the gazebo with Princess Arjumand, delighted she’d waded in and rescued her. Why hadn’t it refused to open when Verity tried to come through to Muchings End in the first place? It didn’t make sense.
I opened the bottom drawer. Baine had thoughtfully folded my too-small shirts and waxed my too-small patent leather shoes. I put them in the carpetbag and looked round the room for any other stray items. Not the straight razors, thank goodness. Nor the silver-backed brushes.
My straw boater was lying on the nightstand. I started to put it on and then thought better of it. It was hardly the occasion for jauntiness.
None of it made sense. Why, if the continuum hadn’t wanted us meddling, had it landed me forty miles away? And Carruthers in a marrows field? Why had it refused to open for Carruthers for three weeks after the raid? Why had it sent me to 2018 and 1395 and Verity to 1940? And, the most important question of all, why had it brought us back now?
“An American!” Mrs. Mering shrieked from the end of the corridor. “It’s all Mr. Henry’s fault. His disgraceful American ideas of class equality!”
Definitely time to go. I closed the carpetbag and went out into the corridor. I stopped at Verity’s door and raised my hand to knock, and then thought better of that, too.
“Where is Jane?” Mrs. Mering’s voice rang out. “Why isn’t she back yet? Irish servants! This is all your fault, Mesiel. I wanted to hire—”
I made a speedy and quiet exit down the stairs. Colleen/Jane was standing at the foot of them, twisting her apron in her hands.
“Has she dismissed you?” I asked her.
“No, sorr, not yet,” she said, looking up nervously in the direction of Mrs. Mering’s room. “But she’s that angry.”
I nodded. “Has Miss Brown come down?”
“Yes, sorr. She said to tell you she would wait for you at the station.”
“The station?” I said, and then realized she meant the drop. “Thank you, Jane. Colleen. And good luck.”
“Thank you, sorr.” She started up the stairs, crossing herself as she went.
I opened the front door, and there stood Finch, in his morning coat and butler’s derby, his hand already reaching for the knocker.
“Mr. Henry,” he said. “Just the person I came to see.”
I shut the door behind me and led him over to where we couldn’t be observed from the windows.
“I’m so glad I caught you before you left, sir,” he said. “I have a dilemma.”
“I’m hardly the person to ask,” I said.
“You see, sir, my mission’s nearly completed, and I might be able to depart as early as tomorrow morning, but Mrs. Chattisbourne is having a tea tomorrow afternoon to plan the St. Anne’s Day Sale of Work. It’s terribly important to her, and so I’d planned to stay on to see that everything went well. That kitchen maid of hers, Gladys, has the mind of a rabbit, and—”
“And you’re afraid you’ll miss the consecration if you stay a few more days?” I said.
“No. I asked Mr. Dunworthy and he said it was quite all right, they could bring me through at the same time. No, my dilemma is this.” He held out a square envelope with the initials M.M. embossed in gold script on it. “It’s an offer of employment from Mrs. Mering. She wants me to come and be her butler.”
So that was why Colleen/Jane had her cloak on. With Mrs. Mering’s only daughter gone, run off to elope with the butler, and her heart broken, the first thing she had done was to send Colleen/Jane over to the Chattisbournes’ to filch Finch.
“It’s a very good offer, sir,” Finch said. “There are a number of advantages to taking it.”
“And you’re thinking of staying in the Victorian era permanently?”
“Of course not, sir! Although,” he said wistfully, “there are moments when I feel I have found my true métier here. No, my dilemma is that Muchings End is much more convenient to my mission than the Chattisbournes’. If I am reading the signs correctly, I should be able to complete my mission tonight and it won’t matter, but it might turn out to take several days. And if that were the case, my mission—”
“What is your mission anyway, Finch?” I said, exasperated.
He looked pained. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say. I was sworn to secrecy by Mr. Lewis, and I have also witnessed events you are not yet aware of, and have access to information you have not, and I dare not jeopardize the success of either of our missions by speaking out of turn. As you know, sir, ‘Loose lips sink ships.’”
I had that odd, disorienting sensation again, of things upending and reorienting themselves, and I tried to grab hold of it, like I had grabbed onto the pedestrian gate.
“Loose lips sink ships.” I knew who had said that. I had, thinking about Ultra and Coventry and secrets as crisis points. It was something about Ultra, and what would have happened if the Nazis had found out we had broken their code—no, it was no use. Just as things were starting to shift, it was gone again.
“If the miss
ion should go several days,” Finch was saying, “Muchings End is much closer both to the vicarage and the drop. And it’s not as if I would be leaving Mrs. Chattisbourne in the lurch. I have already found an excellent butler for her through an agency in London. I intend to telegraph him of the vacant position just before I leave. But it doesn’t seem fair to accept the position with Mrs. Mering when I will not be staying. I suppose I could attempt to find a second but—”
“No,” I said. “Take the position. And don’t give any notice when you leave. Just disappear. Mrs. Mering needs to suffer the slings and arrows of unreliable domestic help so she can learn to appreciate her new son-in-law. Plus, it will teach her not to steal her friends’ servants.”
“Oh, good, sir,” he said. “Thank you. I shall tell her I can take the position after Mrs. Chattisbourne’s tea party.” He started up to the door again. “And don’t worry, sir. It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
He raised the knocker, and I hurried out to the gazebo. At the last minute, I remembered the coveralls and the Burberry and went back down to the wine cellar to collect them and put them in my carpetbag to take through. The coveralls had an ARP patch on them and Burberry hadn’t begun manufacturing his raincoats till 1903, fifteen years from now, and the last thing we needed was another incongruity.
I shut up the carpetbag and started out to the drop again, wondering if Verity would be there or if she would have gone on ahead to Oxford to avoid awkward goodbyes.
But she was there, in the white hat, with her bags on either side of her, as if she were on a railway platform.
I came up beside her. “Well,” I said, setting down my carpetbag.
She looked at me from behind her white veil, and I thought, it truly is too bad I didn’t singlehandedly save the universe. Since I hadn’t, I looked at the peonies behind the gazebo and said, “When’s the next train?”
“Five minutes,” she said. “If it opens.”
“It will open,” I said. “Tossie’s married Mr. C, Terence is getting engaged to Maud, their grandson will fly a night raid to Berlin, the Luftwaffe will leave off bombing aerodromes and begin bombing London, and all’s right with the continuum.”