That bombing raid had saved the RAF, which the Luftwaffe had badly outnumbered. If the Luftwaffe hadn’t switched to civilian bombing when they did, they would have won the Battle of Britain. And Hitler would have invaded.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

My second night at Muchings End was just as restful as the first. Terence came in to ask me what Tossie had said about him while we were at the Chattisbournes’ and didn’t I think her eyes were like “stars of twilight fair,” Cyril had to be carried down the stairs, and Baine brought me cocoa and asked me if it was true that everyone in America carried a firearm.

I told him no.

“I have also heard that Americans are less concerned with ideas of class, and that societal barriers are less rigid there.”

I wondered what class had to do with guns and if he was considering taking up a life of crime.

“It is certainly a place where everyone is free to seek his fortune,” I said. “And does.”

“Is it true the industrialist Andrew Carnegie was the son of a coal miner?” he asked, and when I said I thought so, poured my cocoa and thanked me again for finding Princess Arjumand. “It is a delight to see how happy Miss Mering is now that her pet is back.”

I thought she was happy because she’d trounced everyone at croquet, but I didn’t say so.

“If there is ever anything I can do, sir, to return the favor—”

You wouldn’t be willing to fly a bombing mission to Berlin, would you? I thought.

At the end of the croquet game, while Tossie was busy committing mayhem on Terence’s ball, Verity had whispered to me to be certain I destroyed Maud’s letter, that we were in no position to risk another incongruity. So as soon as Baine had left, I locked the door, opened the window, and held it over the flame of the kerosene lamp.

The paper flared up, curling at the edges. A fragment of it flew rapidly up, still burning, and over to the bouquet of dried flowers on the bureau. I leaped after it, crashing into the chair and making a wild grab that only sent it closer to the dried flowers.

Wonderful. In trying not to cause an incongruity, I was going to set the house on fire.

I made another slashing grab, and the burning paper twirled lightly out of my reach and settled slowly toward the floor. I dived under it, hands cupped to catch it, but it had already burnt up completely before it reached them, turned to ash and nonsignificance.

There was a scratching at the door, and I opened it to find Princess Arjumand and Verity. The cat promptly jumped up on the pillows and draped herself decoratively over them, and Verity perched on the end of the bed.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t think you have any business going through again. You’ve already made two trips in twenty-four hours, and—”

“I’ve already been,” she said, smiling happily. “And I’ve got good news.”

“Is it actually good news,” I said skeptically, “or are you just happy because of the time-lag?”

“It’s good news,” she said, and then frowned. “At least they say it is. I wanted to see what they’d found out about the grandson and the bombing raid. T.J. says the raid on Berlin isn’t a crisis point. He says there’s no increased slippage either at the airfield or in Berlin, and he ran sims on the bombing raid, and the absence of Terence’s grandson had no long-term effect in any of them. Can I have your cocoa?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why didn’t it?”

She scrambled off the bed and went over to the nightstand. “Because there were eighty-one planes involved and twenty-nine of them dropped bombs on Berlin,” she said, pouring cocoa. “One pilot wouldn’t have made a difference to the outcome, particularly since it wasn’t the amount of damage done that made Hitler retaliate, but the idea of bombs falling on the Fatherland. And there were three more raids after that.” She brought the cup and saucer over to the bed and sat down.

I had forgotten that there had been four raids. Good. That meant redundancy.

“And that’s not all,” she said, sipping cocoa. “Mr. Dunworthy says there’s every indication that Goering had already decided to bomb London, and the bombing raid was simply an excuse. So he said not to worry, he can’t see any way it would have changed the course of the war, but—”

I had known there was a “but.”

“—there is a crisis point associated with the bombing that we should know about. It’s August the twenty-fourth, the night the two German planes accidentally bombed London.”

I knew about that. It was one of Professor Peddick’s instances of individual action. And of accident and chance. The two German planes had been part of a big bombing raid on an aircraft factory at Rochester and the oil storage tanks at Thames Haven. The lead planes had been equipped with pathfinders, but the others hadn’t, and two of the planes had got separated from the others, run into flak, and decided to jettison their bombs and run for home. Unfortunately, they had been over London at the time, and their bombs had destroyed the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, and killed civilians.

In retaliation, Churchill had ordered the raid on Berlin, and in retaliation for that, Hitler had ordered the bombing of London in retaliation for the raid on Berlin. This is the cat that killed the rat that—

“Mr. Dunworthy and T.J. can’t find any connection between Terence’s grandson and the two German planes,” Verity said, sipping cocoa, “but they’re checking on it. And there’s the possibility, since he was an RAF pilot, that he did something — shot down a Luftwaffe plane or something — that was pivotal. They’re checking on that, too.”

“And in the meantime, what are we supposed to do?”

“Everything we can to contain the situation and, if possible, get Terence back to Oxford to meet Maud. So tomorrow I want you to talk to Professor Peddick and convince him he needs to return to Oxford to see his sister and his niece. I’ll work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I said. “I’ve been thinking, this is a chaotic system, which means cause and effect aren’t linear. Perhaps we’re just making things worse by trying to fix them. Look at the Titanic. If they hadn’t done anything to try to avoid the iceberg, they’d have—”

“Hit it head-on,” Verity said.

“Yes, and the ship would have been damaged, but it wouldn’t have sunk. It was their trying to turn it that made the iceberg scrape along the watertight compartments so that she went down like a stone.”

“So you think we should just let Tossie and Terence get engaged?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps if we stop trying to keep them apart, Terence will realize what Tossie’s really like and get over his infatuation.”

“Perhaps,” Verity said, eating cake seriously. “On the other hand, if somebody’d put enough lifeboats on the Titanic to begin with, nobody would have drowned.”

She finished her cocoa and took the cup and saucer back over to the nightstand.

“What about the slippage in 2018? Have they found out what’s causing that?” I said.

She shook her head. “Mrs. Bittner couldn’t remember anything. 2018 was the year Fujisaki did his first work on the possibility of incongruities occurring, and they made modifications to the net so it would shut down automatically if the slippage became too great, but that was in September. The area of increased slippage was in April.”