CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Well, it wasn’t exactly the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, with Hercule Poirot gathering everyone together in the drawing room to reveal the murderer and impress everyone with his astonishing deductive powers.

And it definitely wasn’t a Dorothy Sayers, with the detective hero saying to his heroine sidekick, “I say, we make a jolly good detectin’ team. How about makin’ the partnership permanent, eh, what?” and then proposing in Latin.

We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.

Not that there wasn’t whimpering. Mrs. Mering was doing a good deal of that, not to mention weeping, wailing, and clutching the letter to her bosom.

“O, my precious daughter!” she sobbed. “Mesiel, don’t just stand there. Do something.”

The Colonel looked around uneasily. “What can I do, my dear? According to Tossie’s letter, they are already afloat.”

“I don’t know. Stop them. Have the marriage annulled. Wire the Royal Navy!” She stopped, grabbed her heart, and cried, “Madame Iritosky tried to warn me! She said, ‘Beware of the sea!’ ”

“Pah! Seems to me if she’d truly had any contact with the Other Side, she could have given a better warning than that!” Colonel Mering said.

But Mrs. Mering wasn’t listening. “That day at Coventry. I had a premonition — oh, if I had only realized what it meant, I might have saved her!” She let the letter flutter to the floor.

Verity stooped and picked it up. “ ‘I will write when we are settled in America,’ ” she said softly. “ ‘Your repentant daughter, Mrs. William Patrick Callahan.’ William Patrick Callahan.” She shook her head.

“What do you know?” she said softly. “The butler did it.”

As she said it, I had the oddest sensation, like one of Mrs. Mering’s premonitions, or a sudden shifting underfoot, and I thought suddenly of anti-cathedral protesters and Merton’s pedestrian gate.

“The butler did it.” And then something else. Something important. Who had said that? Verity, explaining the mystery novels? “It was always the least likely suspect,” she had said in my bedroom that first night. “For the first hundred books or so, the butler did it, and after that he was the most likely, and 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, and…”

But that wasn’t it. Someone else had said, “The butler did it.” But who? Not anyone here. Mystery novels hadn’t even been invented, except for The Moonstone. The Moonstone. Something Tossie had said about The Moonstone, about being unaware you were committing a crime. And something else. Something about disappearing into thin air.

“And the neighbors!” Mrs. Mering wailed. “What will Mrs. Chattisbourne say when she finds out? And the Reverend Mr. Arbitage!”

There was a long moment during which only the sound of her sobbing could be heard, and then Terence turned to me and said, “Do you realize what this means?”

“Oh, Terence, you poor, poor boy!” Mrs. Mering sobbed. “And you would have had five thousand pounds a year!” and allowed herself to be led weeping from the room by Colonel Mering.

We watched them climb the stairs. Halfway up, Mrs. Mering swayed in her husband’s arms. “We shall have to hire a new butler!” she said despairingly. “Where shall I ever find a new butler? I blame you entirely for this, Mesiel. If you had let me hire English servants instead of Irish—” She broke down, weeping.

Colonel Mering handed her his handkerchief. “There, there, my dear,” he said, “don’t take on so.”

As soon as they were out of sight, Terence said, “Do you Realize What This Means? I’m not engaged. I’m free to marry Maud. ‘Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ ”

Cyril clearly Realized What It Meant. He sat up alertly and began to wag his entire body.

“You do know, don’t you, old fellow?” Terence said. “No more sleeping in the stable for you.”

And no more baby talk, I thought. No more putting up with Princess Arjumand.

“It’s the soft life for you from now on,” Terence said. “Sleeping in the house and riding on trains and all the butcher’s bones you like! Maud adores bulldogs!”

Cyril smiled a wide, drooling smile of pure happiness.

“I must go up to Oxford immediately. When’s the next train? Pity Baine’s not here. He’d know.” He leaped up the stairs. At the top, he leaned down over the railing and said, “You do think she’ll forgive me, don’t you?”

“For being engaged to the wrong girl?” I said. “A minor infraction. Happens all the time. Look at Romeo. He’d been in love with some Rosalind person. It never seemed to bother Juliet.”

“ ‘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.”