CHAPTER SEVEN

Cyril was there, in the same position in which we had left him, his head disconsolately pressed against his paws, his brown eyes reproachful.

“Cyril!” Terence said. “Where’s the boat?”

Cyril sat up and looked round in surprise.

“You were supposed to guard the boat,” Terence said sternly. “Who took it, Cyril?”

“Could it have drifted off, do you think?” I said, thinking about the half-hitch.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Terence said. “It’s obviously been stolen.”

“Perhaps Professor Peddick came and got it,” I said, but Terence was already halfway across the bridge.

When we caught up to him, he was looking downstream at the river. There was no one on it except for a mallard duck.

“Whoever stole it must have taken it back up the river,” Terence said, and ran the rest of the way across the river and back up to the lock.

The lock-keeper was standing on top of the lock, poking at the sluice with his boathook.

“Did our boat go back through the lock?” Terence shouted to him.

The lock-keeper put his hand to his ear and shouted back, “What?”

“Our boat!” Terence shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Did it go back through the lock?”

“What?” he bellowed back.

“Did our boat,” Terence said, pantomiming the shape of a boat, “go back—” he made a sweeping motion upriver, “through the lock?” He pointed exaggeratedly at the lock.

“Boats go through the lock?” the lock-keeper shouted. “Of course boats go through the lock. What else do you think it’s for?”

I glanced around, looking for someone, anyone else who might have seen the boat, but Iffley was completely deserted. Not even the churchwarden was in evidence, putting up “No shouting” signs. I remembered Tossie had said he was having his tea.

“No! Our boat!” Terence shouted. He pointed first at himself and then at me. “Did it go back through the lock?”

The lock-keeper looked indignant. “No, you can’t go through the lock without a boat! What sort of foolery are you up to?”

“No,” Terence shouted. “Someone’s stolen the boat we hired!”

“Wire?” The lock-keeper shook his head. “The nearest telegraph’s in Abingdon.”

“No. Not wire. Hired!”

“Liar?” he said and raised his pole threateningly. “ ‘Oo you callin’ a liar?”

“No one,” Terence said, backing up. “Hired! The boat we hired!”

The lock-keeper shook his head again. “What you want’s Folly Bridge. Man name of Jabez.”

Cyril and I wandered back down to the bridge, and I stood there, leaning over it and thinking about what Verity had told me. She’d saved a cat from drowning and then stepped into the net with it, and the net had opened.

So it must not have caused an incongruity, because if it would have, the net wouldn’t have opened. That’s what had happened the first ten times Leibowitz had tried to go back to assassinate Hitler. The eleventh he’d ended up in Bozeman, Montana in 1946. And nobody’s ever been able to get close to Ford’s Theater or Pearl Harbor or the Ides of March. Or Coventry.

I thought T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy were probably right about the increased slippage around Coventry, and I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to us before. Coventry was obviously a crisis point.

Not because the raid had done significant damage. The Luftwaffe had only damaged, not destroyed, the aircraft and munitions factories, and they were up and running again within three months. They’d destroyed the cathedral, of course, which had enlisted outrage and sympathy from the States, but even that hadn’t been critical. The Blitz had already stirred up plenty of American support, and Pearl Harbor was only three weeks away.

What was critical was Ultra, and the Enigma machine which we’d smuggled out of Poland and were using to decipher the Nazis’ codes, and which, if the Nazis had found out we had it, could have changed the course of the entire war.

And Ultra had warned us of the raid on Coventry. Only obliquely, until late in the afternoon of the fourteenth, which had made it impossible to do more than notify Command and take impromptu defensive measures, and those (because history’s a chaotic system) had cancelled each other out. Command had decided the main attack would be on London, no matter what Intelligence said, and sent their planes up accordingly, and the attempts to jam the pathfinder beams had failed because of an error in calculations.

But secrets are always pivotal events. A stray word could have endangered the safety of the Intelligence setup. And if something, anything, had happened to make the Nazis suspicious — if the cathedral had been miraculously saved or the entire RAF had shown up over Coventry, even if someone had talked — “Loose lips sink ships” — they would have changed their code-machines. And we would have lost the battles of El Alamein and the North Atlantic. And World War II.

Which explained why Carruthers and the new recruit and I had ended up in the rubble and the marrows field. Because around a crisis point, even the tiniest action can assume importance all out of proportion to its size. Consequences multiply and cascade, and anything — a missed telephone call, a match struck during a blackout, a dropped piece of paper, a single moment — can have empire — tottering effects.

The Archduke Ferdinand’s chauffeur makes a wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Street and starts a world war. Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard steps outside for a smoke and destroys a peace. Hitler leaves orders not to be disturbed because he has a migraine and finds out about the D-Day invasion eighteen hours too late. A lieutenant fails to mark a telegram “urgent” and Admiral Kimmel isn’t warned of the impending Japanese attack. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.”

And around those attractors, there was radically increased slippage and net closures.

Which must mean Muchings End wasn’t a crisis point, and the cat hadn’t changed history, particularly since it would only have required a few minutes’ slippage to prevent the whole thing. Verity wouldn’t even have had to have ended up in Bozeman, Montana. If she’d come through five minutes later, the cat would already have gone under. Five minutes earlier, and she’d have been inside the house and missed the whole thing.

And it wasn’t as if this were Queen Victoria’s cat (in spite of her name) or Gladstone’s or Oscar Wilde’s. It was hardly in a position to affect world events, and 1888 wasn’t a critical year. The Indian Mutiny had ended in 1859 and the Boer War wouldn’t start for another eleven years. “And it’s only a cat,” I said out loud.

Cyril looked up, alarmed.

“Not here,” I said. “It’s probably safely back at Muchings End by now,” but Cyril got up and began looking warily about.

“No! Thieves, not sheaves!” Terence was yelling, his voice drifting toward us over the water. “Thieves!”

“Sieves?” the lock-keeper bellowed back. “This is a lock, not an ironmonger’s.”

Eventually, he waved his arm dismissively at Terence and went inside the lockhouse.

Terence hurried over. “Whoever took it went that way,” he said. “The lock-keeper pointed downstream.”

I was not at all sure of that. It seemed to me just as likely that the gesture had meant, “Go on, I’ve had it with talking to you,” or even, “Get the bloody hell out of here!” And the opposite direction was better in regard to keeping Terence away from Tossie.