CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

When, oh, when will I ever learn to ascertain my space-time location on arrival? Granted, I had a number of things on my mind, most particularly what I intended to say to Verity when I got the time, and what I needed to do right now, but that was no excuse.

“Where’s Mr. Dunworthy?” I said to Warder the minute we came through. I didn’t wait for the veils to rise. I grabbed Verity’s hand and fought my way through them to the console.

“Mr. Dunworthy?” Warder said blankly. She was dressed up, in a print dress and a curly hairdo that made her look almost pleasant.

“He’s in London,” Carruthers said, coming in. He was dressed up as well and had washed all the soot off. “I see you found Verity.” He smiled at her. “You didn’t happen to see if the bishop’s bird stump was there while you were in Coventry, did you?”

“Yes,” I said. “What’s Mr. Dunworthy doing in London?”

“Lady Schrapnell had a last-minute notion the bishop’s bird stump might have been stored in the same place as the treasures from the British Museum were during the Blitz, in an unused tunnel of the Underground.”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “Ring him up and tell him to come back here immediately. T.J. didn’t go with him, did he?” I said, looking at the bank of stack screens he’d run his Waterloo models on.

“No,” he said. “He’s changing his clothes. He should be back in a minute. What’s this all about?”

“Where’s Lady Schrapnell?” I said.

“Lady Schrapnell?” Warder said, as if she’d never heard of her.

“Yes. Lady Schrapnell,” I said. “Coventry Cathedral. The bane of our existence. Lady Schrapnell.”

“I thought you were trying to avoid her,” Carruthers said.

“I am trying to avoid her right now,” I said. “But in a few hours, I may want her. Do you know where she is?”

He and Warder exchanged glances. “At the cathedral, I would imagine.”

“One of you needs to find out for certain,” I said. “Ask her what her schedule for the rest of the day is.”

“Her schedule?” Carruthers said.

Warder, at the same time, said, “You go find her if you want her,” and it would obviously take more than a few curls to make her pleasant. “I’m not running the chance of her giving me something else to do! She’s already got me ironing all the altar cloths and—”

“Never mind,” I said. I didn’t need Lady Schrapnell right now, and there were other, more important things to check. “I need you to do something else for me. I need copies of the Coventry Standard and the Midlands Daily Telegraph for November fifteenth through—” I turned to Carruthers. “When did you come back from Coventry? What day?”

“Three days ago. Wednesday.”

“What day in Coventry?”

“December the twelfth.”

“From November the fifteenth through December the twelfth,” I said to Warder.

“That’s out of the question!” Warder said. “I’ve got the altar cloths to iron and three rendezvouses to bring in. And all the choir’s surplices to press. Linen! There are any number of fabrics she could have had the choir wear that wouldn’t wrinkle walking up the nave to the choir, but Lady Schrapnell had to have linen! ‘God is in the details,’ she said. And now you expect me to get copies of newspapers—”

“I’ll do it,” Verity said. “Do you want facsimiles or articles only, Ned?”

“Facsimiles,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll do them at the Bod. I’ll be back directly,” she said, flashed me one of her naiad smiles, and was gone.

“Carruthers,” I said. “I need you to go to Coventry.”

“Coventry?” Carruthers said, backing up abruptly and crashing into Warder. “I’m not going back there. I had enough trouble getting out last time.”

“You don’t have to go to the air raid,” I said. “What I need—”

“And I’m not going anywhere in the vicinity. Remember the marrows field? And those bloody dogs? Forget it.”

“I don’t need you to go back in time,” I said. “All I need is some facts from the church archives. You can take the tube. I want you to find out—”

T.J. came in, and he was dressed up too, in a white shirt and his short academic robe. I wondered if Lady Schrapnell had imposed some sort of dress code.

“Just a minute, Carruthers,” I said. “T.J., I need you to do something. The model you did of the incongruity. I want you to change the focus.”

“Change the focus?” he said blankly.

“The site where the incongruity occurred,” I said.

“Don’t tell me there’s been another incongruity,” Warder said. “That’s all we need right now. I’ve got fifty linen surplices to press, three rendezvouses—”

“You said a self-correction could extend into the past, right, T.J.?” I said, ignoring her.

T.J. nodded. “Some of the models showed preemptive self-corrections.”

“And that the only instance you found of a significant object being removed from its space-time location was as part of a self-correction.”

He nodded again.

“And you said that our incongruity didn’t match any of the Waterloo models. I want you to see if it matches with the focus changed.”

T.J. obligingly sat down at the bank of computers and pushed the sleeves of his robe up. “To what?”

“Coventry Cathedral,” I said. “November the fourteenth—”

“November the fourteenth?” T.J. and Carruthers interrupted in unison. Warder gave me one of those “how-many-drops-have-you-had?” looks.

“November the fourteenth,” I said firmly. “1940. I don’t know the exact time. Sometime after 7:45 PM. and before eleven. My guess is half-past nine.”

“But that’s during the air raid,” Carruthers said, “the place none of us could get anywhere near.”

T.J. said, “What’s this all about, Ned?”

“The Fountain Pen Mystery and Hercule Poirot,” I said. “We’ve been looking at this the wrong way round. What if the rescue of the cat wasn’t the incongruity? What if it was part of the continuum’s self-correction and the real incongruity had happened earlier? Or later?”

T.J. began feeding in figures.

“There wasn’t any increased slippage on Verity’s drop,” I said, “even though five minutes either way would have kept her from rescuing Princess Arjumand. So would the net’s failure to open, but neither line of defense worked. And why did the slippage on my drop send me to Oxford to meet Terence, keep him from meeting Maud, and loan him the money for the boat so he could go meet Tossie? What if it was because the continuum wanted those things to happen? And what if all the signs we saw as indications of breakdown — my being bounced to the Middle Ages, Carruthers being trapped in Coventry — were all part of the self-correction, as well?”

A table of coordinates came up. T.J. scanned the columns, fed in more figures, scanned the new patterns. “Only the focus?” he said.

“You said discrepancies only occurred in the immediate vicinity of the site,” I said to T.J. “But what if the site wasn’t Muchings End? What if it was the raid on the cathedral, and what Verity and I saw was a discrepancy, was the course of events that would have happened if the incongruity hadn’t been repaired?”

“Interesting,” T.J. said. He rapidly fed in more figures.

“Only the focus,” I said. “Same events, same slippage.”

“This will take a while,” he said, feeding in more figures.

I turned to Carruthers. “Here’s what I need you to find out in Coventry.” I reached round Warder for a handheld and spoke into it. “I want the names of the cathedral staff, lay and clerical, in 1940,” I said, “and the cathedral’s marriage records for 1888 through—” I hesitated a moment, thinking, and then said, “—1888 through 1915. No, 1920, to be on the safe side.”