“I thought cats could swim.”

“Not in the middle of the Thames. If I hadn’t done something, it would have been swept away in the current.”

“The Lady of Shalott,” I murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. Why would he want to murder his mistress’s cat?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he has something against cats. Or perhaps it isn’t just cats, and we’ll all be murdered in our beds some night. Perhaps he’s Jack the Ripper. He was operating in 1888, wasn’t he? And they never did find out his true identity. All I know is, I couldn’t just stand there and let Princess Arjumand drown. It’s an extinct species.”

“So you dived in and saved it?”

“I waded in,” she said defensively, “and caught hold of her and brought her back on shore, but as soon as I did, I realized no Victorian lady would have waded in like that. I hadn’t even taken off my shoes. I didn’t think. I just acted. I ducked in the net, and it opened,” she said. “I was only trying to get out of sight. I didn’t mean to cause a problem.”

A problem. She had done something temporal theory said was impossible. And possibly caused an incongruity in the continuum. No wonder Mr. Dunworthy had asked Chiswick all those questions and been grilling poor T.J. Lewis. A problem.

A fan was one thing, a live cat was another. And even a fan won’t go through. Darby and Gentilla had proved that, back when time travel had first been invented. They’d built the net as a pirate ship for plundering the treasures of the past, and they’d tried it on everything from the Mona Lisa to King Tut’s tomb and then, when that didn’t work, on more mundane items, like money. But nothing except microscopic particles would come through. When they tried to take any object, even a halfpence or a fish fork, out of its own time, the net wouldn’t open. It didn’t let germs through either, or radiation, or stray bullets, which Darby and Gentilla and the rest of the world should have been grateful for, but weren’t particularly.

The multinationals who’d been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists, who’d come up with the theories of slippage and the Law of Conservation of History to explain it, and it had been accepted as a law that if one tried to bring something forward through the net, it wouldn’t open. Till now.

“When you tried to bring the cat through, the net opened, just like that?” I said. “You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the drop, no delays or jolts?”

She shook her head. “It was just like any other jump.”

“And the cat was all right?”

“She slept through the whole thing. Fell asleep in my arms in the drop and didn’t even wake up when we got to Mr. Dunworthy’s office. Apparently that’s how time-lag affects cats. It puts them right out.”

“You went to see Mr. Dunworthy?”

“Of course,” she said defensively. “I took the cat to him as soon as I realized what I’d done.”

“And he decided to try to send it back?”

“I pumped Finch, and he told me they were going to check all the drops to the Victorian era, and if there weren’t any indications of excessive slippage, that meant the cat had been returned before its disappearance could cause any damage, and they were going to send it back.”

But there was excessive slippage, I thought, remembering Mr. Dunworthy asking Carruthers about Coventry. “What about the trouble we were having in Coventry?”

“Finch said they thought it was unrelated, that it was due to Coventry’s being an historical crisis point. Because of its connection to Ultra. It was the only area of excessive slippage. There wasn’t any on any of the Victorian drops.” She looked up at me. “How much slippage was there on your drop?”

“None,” I said. “I was spang on target.”

“Good,” she said, and looked relieved. “There was only five minutes on mine when I came back. Finch said the first place an incongruity would manifest itself was in the increased slip—”

“Oh, I do love country churchyards,” Tossie’s voice said, and I leaped away from Verity like a Victorian lover. Verity remained serene, opening her parasol and standing up with a calm grace.

“They’re so delightfully rustic,” Tossie said and hove into view, flags flying. “Not at all like our dreadful modern cemeteries.” She stopped to admire a tombstone that had nearly fallen over. “Baine says churchyards are unsanitary, that they contaminate the water table, but I think it’s wonderfully unspoilt. Just like a poem. Don’t you, Mr. St. Trewes?”

“ ‘Beneath those rugged elms that yew trees shade,’ ” Terence obligingly quoted, “ ‘where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap—’ ”

The bit about “the mouldering heap” seemed to confirm Baine’s theory, but neither Terence nor Tossie noticed, Terence particularly, who was declaiming, “ ‘Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’ ”

“I do love Tennyson, don’t you, Cousin?” Tossie said.

“Thomas Gray,” Verity said. “ ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ ”

“Oh, Mr. Henry, you must come and see the inside of the church,” Tossie said, ignoring her. “There’s the dearest decorated vase. Isn’t it, Mr. St. Trewes?”

He nodded vaguely, gazing at Tossie, and I saw Verity frown. “We must see it, by all means,” she said, and caught up her skirts with a gloved hand. “Mr. Henry?”

“By all means,” I said, offering her my arm, and we all went into the church, past a large sign that read, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

The church was chilly and smelled faintly of old wood and mildewing hymnals. It was decorated with stout Norman pillars, a vaulted Early English sanctuary, a Victorian rose window, and a large placard that proclaimed “Keep out of chancel” on the altar railing.

Tossie blithely ignored it and the Norman slate baptismal font and swept up to a niche in the wall opposite the pulpit. “Isn’t it the cunningest thing you’ve ever seen?”

There was no question she was related to Lady Schrapnell, and no question where Lady Schrapnell had got her taste from, though Tossie at least had the excuse of being a Victorian, and part of an era that had built not only St. Pancras Railway Station, but the Albert Memorial.

The vase that sat in the niche looked like both, though on a less grandiose scale. It only had one level and no Corinthian pillars. It did, however, have twining ivy and a bas-relief of either Noah’s ark or the battle of Jericho.

“What is it supposed to be depicting?” I asked.

“The Slaughter of the Innocents,” Verity murmured.

“It’s Pharaoh’s Daughters Bathing in the Nile,” Tossie said. “Look, there’s Moses’ basket peeping out from among the rushes. I do wish we had this in our church,” Tossie said. “The church at Muchings End hasn’t anything in it but a lot of old things. It’s just like that poem by Tennyson,” Tossie said, clasping her hands together. “Poem to a Greek Vase.”

And the last thing we needed was Terence quoting Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I looked desperately at Verity, trying to think of something to get us out of here and somewhere we could talk. The dogtoothed ornamentation? Cyril? Verity was looking round calmly at the stone vaulting, as if we had all the time in the world.

“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ ” Terence said. “ ‘That is all ye know—’ ”

“Do you suppose it’s haunted?” Verity said.

Terence stopped quoting. “Haunted?”

“Haunted?” Tossie said happily and gave a miniature version of a scream, a sort of screamlet. “Of course it is. Madame Iritosky says that there are certain places that act as portals between one world and the next,” she said.

I glanced at Verity, but she looked serene, untroubled by Tossie’s having just described the net.

“Madame Iritosky says that spirits often hover near the portal by which their souls passed to the Other Side,” Tossie explained to Terence. “That’s why séances fail so often, because they’re not close enough to a portal. That’s why Madame Iritosky always holds her séances at home, instead of travelling to people’s homes. And a churchyard would be a logical portal.” She looked up at the ribbed vaulting and gave another screamlet. “They could be here with us now!”