“Ruffles,” I said.

“Ruffles and more ruffles,” she said disgustedly. “And not a word about the cat or the trip to Coventry or the bishop’s bird stump. I don’t suppose you have any chocolate stashed away? Or cheese? I’m so hungry. I intended to go back to Balliol and eat dinner after I talked to the forensics expert, but on the way there, I ran into Lady Schrapnell.”

“Lady Schrapnell?” I said. I’d nearly forgotten her in all the other crises. “She doesn’t know where I am, does she? You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“Of course not,” she said, taking a swig of the cocoa. “I didn’t tell her about the cat either. She demanded to know what I was doing there, and I told her I needed a new costume for day after tomorrow. Warder was livid.”

“I can imagine.”

“And then she stood there while I was being fitted, telling me all about you and how you’d gone off somewhere and Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t tell her where you were, and how T.J. Lewis refused to go back to 1940 to check on the bishop’s bird stump just because the Twentieth Century was a ten for blacks, which was ridiculous, how dangerous could an air raid be?” She drained the last of the cocoa and peered into the pot. “And how the workmen were being completely impossible about the choir and told her the choir stalls wouldn’t be completed for another month and how that was completely out of the question, the consecration was in thirteen days.”

She poured the last drops of cocoa into her cup. “She wouldn’t leave, even when Warder took me into the prep room to try on the dress. I had to have her go out and stall Lady Schrapnell while I telephoned the Bodleian and got the results of the search on Terence.”

“And? Was he supposed to meet Maud?”

“I don’t know,” she said cheerfully. “The search didn’t turn up anything. No medals, knighthoods, elections to Parliament, arrests, convictions, news stories. No mention at all in the official records.”

“No marriage license?”

She shook her head and reached for the last biscuit. “His parish church was destroyed in the Blitz, and I didn’t have time to do a global, but I left a message for Mr. Dunworthy with Warder, telling him to do one as soon as he got back from Coventry, but if Terence isn’t mentioned in the official records, it means he didn’t affect history, which means the meeting doesn’t matter. Which goes along with what T.J. said about the discrepancies, which is that only the immediate area surrounding the incongruity is destabilized. And the meeting was four days from the time I rescued the cat, and Oxford Railway Station’s over thirty miles from Muchings End, which is hardly the immediate vicinity. So it isn’t a discrepancy, and the incongruity isn’t getting worse.”

“Umm,” I said, wishing I were as convinced as she was.

“But if Tossie marries Terence instead of Mr. C, that would definitely be a discrepancy, so we need to steal the diary and find out who he is and get them married as soon as possible, and in the meantime we need to keep Terence away from Tossie. And find the bishop’s bird stump,” she added, licking biscuit crumbs off her fingers.

“What?” I said. “I thought you didn’t tell Lady Schrapnell where I was.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I told her you’d found out where the bishop’s bird stump was and were off fetching it!”

“You what?” I said, sitting down on Cyril.

“She was determined to find you,” she said. “The craftsmen have refused to make a reproduction of the bishop’s bird stump, and she’s furious. It was only a matter of time till she checked Warder’s drop records and came after you,” she said reasonably, “and that’s all we need.”

She had a point. “But what’s going to happen when she finds out I don’t have the slightest idea where the bishop’s bird stump is and never did? The consecration’s in two weeks, and I’m not supposed to be doing any drops.”

“I’ll help you,” she said, “and we won’t need to go anywhere. Poirot says all you need to solve a mystery is ‘the little gray cells.’ ”

“Poirot?” I said. “Who’s Poirot? The curate?”

“No,” she said. “Hercule Poirot. Agatha Christie. He says—”

“Agatha Christie?” I said, completely lost.

“The mystery writer. Twentieth Century. My assignment before Lady Schrapnell took over Oxford and my life, was the 1930s, and it’s an absolutely grim time: the rise of Hitler, worldwide depression, no vids, no virtuals, no money to go to the cinema. Nothing at all to do except read mystery novels. Dorothy Sayers, E.C. Benson, Agatha Christie. And crossword puzzles,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Crossword puzzles?” I said.

“Are not particularly useful to our present situation. But mystery novels are. Of course they’re usually about murder, not robbery, but they always take place in a country house like this, and the butler did it, at least for the first hundred mystery novels or so. Everyone’s a suspect, and it’s always the least likely person, and after the first hundred or so, the butler wasn’t anymore — the least likely person, I mean — so they had to switch to unlikely criminals. You know, the harmless old lady or the vicar’s devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn’t take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, even though that had already been done in The Moonstone. The hero did it, only he didn’t know it. He was sleepwalking, in his nightshirt, which was rather racy stuff for Victorian times, and the crime was always unbelievably complicated. In mystery novels. I mean, nobody ever just grabs the vase and runs, or shoots somebody in a fit of temper, and at the very end, when you think you’ve got it all figured out, there’s one last plot twist, and the crime’s always very carefully thought out, with disguises and alibis and railway timetables and they have to include a diagram of the house in the frontispiece, showing everyone’s bedroom and the library, which is where the body always is, and all the connecting doors, and even then you don’t have a prayer of figuring it out, which is why they have to bring in a world-famous detective—”

“Who solves it with little gray cells?” I said.

“Yes. Hercule Poirot, that’s Agatha Christie’s detective, and he says it isn’t at all necessary to go running about measuring footprints and picking up cigarette ends to solve mysteries like Sherlock Holmes. That’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective—”

“I know who Sherlock Holmes is.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, Poirot says all you need is to use ‘the little gray cells’ and think about the problem.”

“And we’ll be able to find the bishop’s bird stump. Here. In 1888,” I said, unconvinced.

“Well, it won’t be here, but we’ll be able to find out where it is from here,” she said, beaming. She settled herself on the bed. “Now, when was the last time you saw it?”

I was never going to get any sleep. I was going to have Alice in Wonderland conversation after Alice in Wonderland conversation until I died of exhaustion. Here, in the restful, idyllic Victorian era.

“Couldn’t we do this in the morning?” I said.

“Everyone will be around then,” she said, “and the sooner we find it, the sooner we can stop worrying about Lady Schrapnell barging in and demanding to know where it is. I’ve never actually seen it, you know. I’ve only heard stories. Is it truly as hideous as everyone says? It doesn’t depict the Finding of the Infant Moses by Pharaoh’s Daughters, does it, like that awful thing we saw at Iffley?”

She stopped. “I’m babbling, aren’t I? Just like Lord Peter. That’s Dorothy Sayers’s detective. Lord Peter Wimsey. He and Harriet Vane solve mysteries together. It’s terribly romantic, and I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Babbling, I mean. Drops have that effect on me.”

She looked ruefully at me. “And you’re suffering from time-lag and supposed to be resting. I am so sorry.”