He nodded gloomily. “He’s an unstoppable force. Like William the Conqueror. History is the individual.” He sighed. “By the time we get there, she’ll already be engaged.”

“Engaged? To whom?” I said, hoping she’d mentioned other suitors and that one of them was the required Mr. C.

“I don’t know to whom,” he said. “A girl like Tossie — Miss Mering probably gets a dozen proposals a day. Where is he? We’ll never get to Muchings End at this rate.”

“Of course we will,” I said. “It’s Fate, remember? Romeo and Juliet, Héloïse and Abelard?”

“Fate,” Terence said. “But what a cruel Fate, that keeps me from her even for a day!” He turned to gaze dreamily downriver, and I escaped with the carpetbag.

Cyril trotted after me. “You stay here, Cyril,” I said firmly, and the three of us set off into the village.

I had no idea where the telegraph office might be or what one looked like, but there were only two shops. A greengrocer’s and a shop with fishing gear and flower vases in the window. I tried the fishing shop first. “Where can I send a telegram?” I asked a smiling old woman in a mobcap. She looked just like the sheep in Through the Looking Glass.

“Out for a trip on the river?” she said. “I’ve lovely plates with views of Iffley Mill painted on them. They’re inscribed, ‘Happy Memories of the Thames.’ Are you heading upriver or down?”

Neither, I thought. “Down,” I said. “Where is the telegraph office?”

“Down,” she said delightedly. “Then you’ve already seen it. Lovely, isn’t it?” She handed me a fringed yellow satin pillow with the mill and “Souvenir of Iffley” stencilled on it.

I handed it back. “Very nice. Where can I send a telegram?”

“From the postal office, but I always think it’s so much nicer to send a letter, don’t you?” She whipped out writing paper. Each sheet had “Greetings from Abingdon,” inscribed on the top. “Ha’pence a sheet and a penny for the envelope.”

“No, thank you. Where did you say the postal office was?”

“Just down the street. Opposite the abbey gate. Have you seen it? We’ve got a lovely replica of it. Or perhaps you’d like one of our china dogs. Handpainted. Or we’ve some lovely penwipers.”

I ended up buying a china bulldog that bore no resemblance to Cyril — or to a poodle for that matter — to get away, and sought out the gate and the postal office.

Professor Peddick wasn’t there, and the mobcapped old woman behind the counter didn’t know if he had been. “My husband’s gone home for his dinner. He’ll be back in an hour. Out for a trip on the river, are you?” she said, and tried to sell me a vase with a picture of Iffley Mill painted on it.

He hadn’t been in the greengrocer’s either. I bought a souvenir tooth glass inscribed “Holiday Greetings from the River Thames.” “Have you any salmon?” I asked.

“We do,” yet another mobcapped old woman said and set a tin on the counter.

“I meant fresh,” I said.

“You can catch it yourself,” she said. “Abingdon’s got the best fishing on the entire river,” and tried to sell me a pair of rubber fishing waders.

I came out of the shop and said to Cyril, who had been waiting patiently outside each door, “Where to now?”

Abingdon had been built around a mediaeval abbey. The ruins, including the granary and a croft, were still there, and they seemed like the likeliest places for Professor Peddick to be, but he wasn’t there. Or in the cloisters.

Neither was anyone else. I knelt down next to the cloister wall, set the bottle of milk on a stone, and opened the carpetbag.

Cyril sat down, looking disapproving.

“Princess Arjumand?” I said, lifting her out. “Want some breakfast?”

I set her down, and she walked a few feet across the grass and then took off like a shot and disappeared round the corner of a wall.

I told you so, Cyril said.

“Well, don’t just stand there. Go after her,” I said.

Cyril continued sitting.

He had a point. Our chasing after her in the woods hadn’t been a roaring success. “Well, what do you suggest then?”

He lay down, his muzzle against the milk bottle, and it wasn’t a bad idea. I got the saucer out of the carpetbag and poured some milk into it. “Here, cat,” I called, setting it out in front of the wall. “Breakfast!”

As I say, it wasn’t a bad idea. It did not, however, work. Neither did searching the ruins. Or the town square. Or the streets of half-timbered houses.

“You knew what cats were like,” I said to Cyril. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

But it was my fault. I had let her out, and she was probably on her way to London this morning to meet Gladstone and cause the fall of Mafeking.

We had come to the outskirts of the village. The road petered out and ended in a hay field crisscrossed with narrow streams.

“Perhaps she’s gone back to the boat,” I said hopefully to Cyril, but he wasn’t listening. He was looking at a dirt path leading off toward a bridge over a narrow stream.

And there by the bridge was Professor Peddick, knee-deep in the stream with his trousers rolled up, holding a large net. Behind him on the bank was a tin kettle with water in it and, no doubt, fish. And Princess Arjumand.

“Stay here,” I said to Cyril. “I mean it,” and crept up on the crouched cat, wishing I’d had the foresight to buy a net.

Princess Arjumand crept toward the kettle, her white paws silent in the grass, and the professor, as intent as the cat, stooped and lowered the net slowly toward the water. Princess Arjumand peered into the kettle and stuck her paw experimentally into the water.

I pounced, clapping the open carpetbag over her and scooping her up like the fish she was after. So did Professor Peddick, bringing the net down and up again with a wriggling fish in it.

“Professor Peddick!” I said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Stickleback,” he said, extracting the fish from the net and tossing it in the kettle. “Excellent pitches for trout along here.”

“Terence sent me to fetch you,” I said, extending a hand to help him up the bank. “He’s anxious to get on to Pangbourne.”

“‘Qui non vult fieri desidiosus amet,’ ” he said. “Ovid. ‘Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love,’ ” but he climbed out and sat down on the bank and put his shoes and socks back on. “Pity he never met my niece, Maudie. He’d have liked her.”

I picked up the tin kettle and the net. It had “Souvenir of the River Thames,” printed on the handle. Cyril was still sitting where I’d told him to stay. “Good boy!” I said, and he galloped over and crashed into my knees. Water slopped out of the kettle.

Professor Peddick stood up. “Onward. The day’s half over,” he said, and set off briskly for the village.

“You did send your telegram?” I asked him as we passed the postal office.

He put his hand inside his coat and pulled out two yellow slips. “The abbey has some small historical interest,” he said, sticking them back inside his coat. “It was pillaged by Cromwell’s men during the Protectorate.” He stopped at the gate. “There’s a Fifteenth-Century gateway here you should see.”

“I understand Professor Overforce considers the Protectorate a result of natural forces,” I said, and steered him, ranting, down to the dock where an old woman in a mobcap was trying to sell Terence a mug with a picture of Boulter’s Lock on the side.

“Such a nice reminder of your trip downriver,” she said. “Each time you take your tea, you’ll think of this day.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Terence said, and to me, “Where have you been?”

“Fishing,” I said. I climbed in the boat, set the carpetbag down, and reached out my hand to help Professor Peddick, who was bent over his kettle of fish, peering at them through his pince-nez.

“He did send his telegram, didn’t he?” Terence said to me.

I nodded. “I saw the yellow slips.”