“Where is he?” I heard the seraphim say again, and her voice sounded uncomfortably like Lady Schrapnell’s.

“Where is who?” Finch said.

“You know perfectly well who,” she said in stentorian tones. “And don’t tell me he’s in hospital. I’ve had enough of your wild goose chases. He’s here, isn’t he?”

Oh, Lord.

“Come away from that door and let me pass,” Lady Schrapnell roared. “He is here.”

I dropped the luggage with a thud and looked wildly about for somewhere to hide.

“No, he’s not,” Finch said bravely. “He’s over at Radcliffe Infirmary.”

There was nowhere to hide, at least in this century. I ducked under the veils and sprinted for the console, praying the seraphim had truly made all the necessary preparations.

“I said, let me pass,” Lady Schrapnell said. “Badri, make him come away from the door. Mr. Henry’s here, and I intend to see that he goes to look for my bishop’s bird stump instead of malingering in the present, pretending to have time-lag.”

“But he does have time-lag,” Finch said. “A very serious case. His vision’s blurred, he has Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds, and his reasoning faculties are severely impaired.”

The console screen said, “Ready. Hit ‘send.’ ” I measured the distance to the net.

“He’s in no condition to make any drops,” Finch said.

“Nonsense,” Lady Schrapnell said. “Now come away from that door this instant.”

I took a deep breath, punched “send,” and dived head-first for the net.

“Please believe me,” Finch said desperately. “He’s not here. He’s over at Christ Church.”

“Get out of my way!” she said, and there was the sound of a scuffle.

I skidded face-first onto the X. The veils lowered on my foot. I yanked it inside.

“Mr. Henry, I know you’re in here!” Lady Schrapnell said, and the door burst open.

“I told you,” Finch said. “He’s not here.”

And I wasn’t.

CHAPTER FOUR

I came through face-down on railroad tracks, stretched across them like Pearl White in a Twentieth-Century serial, except that she didn’t have so much luggage. The portmanteau, et al, were scattered around me, along with my boater, which had fallen off when I dived for the net.

Lady Schrapnell’s voice was still booming in my ears, and I got to my feet and looked about cautiously, but there was no sign of her. Or of a boat or a river. The railway tracks were on a grassy embankment, with trees growing below and beside them.

The first rule of time travel is “Ascertain exact time-space location,” but there didn’t seem to be any way of doing that. It was clearly summer — the sky overhead was blue and there were flowers growing between the ties — but no signs of civilization other than the train tracks. So sometime after 1804.

In vids, there is always a newspaper lying on the ground with a helpful headline like “Pearl Harbor Bombed!” or “Mafeking Relieved!” and a clock above it in a shop window thoughtfully showing the time.

I looked at my watch. It wasn’t there, and I squinted at my wrist, trying to remember whether Warder had taken it off me when she was trying shirts on. I remembered she’d tucked something in my waistcoat pocket. I pulled it out, on a gold chain. A pocket watch. Of course. Wristwatches were an anachronism in Nineteenth Century.

I had trouble getting the pocket watch open and then difficulty reading the extinct Roman numerals, but eventually I made it out. A quarter past X. Allowing for the time I’d spent getting the watch open and lying on the tracks, bang on target. Unless I was in the wrong year. Or the wrong place.

As I didn’t know where I was supposed to have come through, I didn’t know if I was in the right place or not, but if there’s a small amount of temporal slippage, there usually isn’t much locational slippage either.

I stood up on a rail to look down the tracks. To the north, the tracks headed into deeper woods. In the opposite direction, the woods seemed thinner, and there was a dark plume of smoke. A factory? Or a boathouse?

I should gather up my bags and go see, but I continued to stand on the rail, taking in the warm summer air and the sweet scent of clover and new-mown hay.

I was a hundred and sixty years away from pollution and traffic and the bishop’s bird stump. No, that wasn’t true. The bishop’s bird stump had been given to Coventry Cathedral in 1852.

Depressing thought. But there wasn’t any Coventry Cathedral. St. Michael’s Church hadn’t been made a bishopric till 1908. And there wasn’t a Lady Schrapnell. I was more than a century away from her snapped orders and from vicious dogs and from bombed-out cathedrals, in a more civilized time, where the pace was slow and decorous, and the women were softspoken and demure.

I gazed about me at the trees, the flowers. Buttercups grew between the tracks, and a tiny white flower like a star. The nurse at Infirmary had said I needed rest, and who couldn’t rest here? I felt totally recovered just standing here on the tracks. No blurring of vision. No air-raid sirens.

I had spoken too soon. The air-raid siren started up again and then as abruptly stopped. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and then took several long, deep breaths.

I wasn’t cured yet, but I soon would be, breathing in this clear, pure air. I gazed up at the cloudless sky, at the plume of black smoke. It seemed higher in the sky and nearer — a farmer burning weeds?

I longed to see him, leaning on his rake, untouched by modern worries, modern haste, longed to see his rose-covered cottage with its white picket fence, its cozy kitchen, its soft feather bed, its—

The air-raid siren sounded again in short sharp blasts. Like a factory whistle. Or a train.

Adrenaline is an extremely effective drug. It galvanizes the body into action and has been known to produce impossible feats of strength. And speed.

I snatched up the satchel, the hamper, the portmanteau, the carpetbag, the boxes, and my hat, which had somehow fallen off again, chucked them all down the near side of the embankment, and chucked myself after them before the plume of black smoke had cleared the trees.

The covered basket that Finch had been so concerned about was still on the tracks, sitting squarely on the far rail. The adrenaline leaped across, scooped it up, and rolled down the embankment as the train thundered past in a deafening roar.

Definitely not totally recovered. I lay at the bottom of the embankment for a considerable time contemplating that fact and trying to start breathing.

After a while I sat up. The embankment had been fairly high, and the basket and I had rolled a considerable way before coming to a stop in a mass of nettles. As a result, the view was very different than that from the tracks, and I could glimpse, beyond a thicket of alders, a corner of some white wooden structure and a glimpse of fretwork. It could definitely be a boathouse.

I disentangled the basket and myself, climbed up the embankment, and looked carefully up and down the tracks. There was no smoke in either direction, and no sound at all. Satisfied, I sprinted across the tracks, gathered up my etc., looked in both directions, bolted back across, and set off through the woods toward the boathouse.