She opened the door and peered out. “Perhaps tomorrow morning Mr. C will come to help set up for the fête, and we won’t have to do anything,” she whispered.

“Or we’ll hit an iceberg,” I whispered back.

I realized as soon as I’d shut the door behind her that I hadn’t asked her about Finch.

I waited five minutes to make sure Verity had made it safely back to her room and then put on my bathrobe and tiptoed carefully down the corridor, carefully avoiding the obstacles in the dark: Laocoön, whose situation I could empathize with; fern; bust of Darwin; umbrella stand.

I tapped softly on Verity’s door.

She opened it immediately, looking upset. “You’re not supposed to rap,” she whispered, looking anxiously down the corridor to Mrs. Mering’s room.

“Sorry,” I whispered, sidling in the door.

Verity shut the door carefully. It made a soft snick. “What do you want?” she whispered.

“I forgot to ask you if you found out what Finch was doing here,” I whispered back.

“Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t tell me,” she said, looking worried. “He told me the same thing Finch told you, that it was a ‘related project.’ I think he was sent to drown Princess Arjumand.”

“What?” I said, forgetting I was supposed to whisper. “Finch? You’re joking.”

She shook her head. “The forensics expert translated part of one of the references to Princess Arjumand. It said ‘. . . poor drowned Princess Arjumand.’ ”

“But how do they know that wasn’t written while they were still looking for her? And why would they send Finch? He wouldn’t harm a fly.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps they don’t trust us to do it, and Finch was the only person available to send.”

I could believe that, given Lady Schrapnell’s penchant for recruiting anyone who wasn’t nailed down. “But Finch?” I said, unconvinced. “And if that’s what he’s supposed to be doing, why would they send him to Mrs. Chattisbourne’s instead of here?”

“They probably think Mrs. Mering will steal him away.”

“You have had too many drops. We will talk about this in the morning,” I said, looked out into the pitch-black hall, and slid out the door.

Verity shut the door silently behind me and I started back. Umbrella stand—

“Mesiel!” Mrs. Mering’s voice cried. The corridor sprang into light. “I knew it!” Mrs. Mering said, and advanced on me holding a kerosene lamp.

The top of the stairs was too far away to make a run for it, and anyway, Baine was coming up them, carrying a candle. There wasn’t even time to move away from my incriminating location in front of Verity’s door. This was hardly what Mr. Dunworthy meant by “containing the situation.”

I wondered if I could get away with saying I had just been downstairs to get a book. Without a candle. And where was said book? For a fantastic moment, I wondered if I could claim I was sleepwalking, like the hero in The Moonstone.

“I was—” I said, and was cut off by Mrs. Mering.

“I knew it!” she said. “You heard it, too, Mr. Henry, didn’t you?”

Tossie’s door opened and she peeked out, her hair in rag curlers. “Mama, what is it?”

“A spirit!” Mrs. Mering said. “Mr. Henry heard it, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I had just come out to investigate. I thought it was an intruder, but there was no one here.”

“Did you hear it, Baine?” Mrs. Mering demanded. “A rapping sound, very faint, and then a sort of whispering sound?”

“No, madam,” Baine said. “I was in the breakfast room, setting out the silver for breakfast.”

“But you heard it, Mr. Henry,” Mrs. Mering said. “I know you did. You were white as a sheet when I came out in the corridor. There was a rapping and then whispers and a sort of—”

“Ethereal moan,” I said.

“Exactly!” Mrs. Mering said. “I think there must be more than one spirit and they are speaking to one another. Did you see anything, Mr. Henry?”

“A sort of glimmer in white,” I said, in case she’d seen Verity shutting the door, “just for a moment, and then it vanished.”

“O!” Mrs. Mering said excitedly. “Mesiel! Come here! Mr. Henry has seen a spirit!”

Colonel Mering did not respond, and in the little silence before she called to him again, the faint sound of Cyril’s snoring wafted down the corridor. We weren’t out of the woods yet.

“There!” I said, pointing to the wall above Lady Schrapnell’s portrait. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes!” Mrs. Mering said, mashing her hand to her bosom. “What did it sound like?”

“The sound of bells,” I said, improvising, “and then a sort of sob—”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Mering said. “The attic. Baine, open the attic door. We must go up.”

At this point Verity finally made an appearance, clutching her wrapper and blinking sleepily. “What is it, Aunt Malvinia?”

“The spirit I saw two nights ago out by the gazebo,” Mrs. Mering said. “It is in the attic.”

Just then Cyril gave an enormous snuffling snort from the unmistakable direction of my room.

Verity instantly looked up at the ceiling. “I hear them!” she said. “Ghostly footsteps overhead!”

We spent the next two hours in the attic, tripping over cobwebs and looking for vanishing glimmers of white. Mrs. Mering didn’t find any, but she did find a ruby glass fruit compote, a lithograph of Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen, and a moth-eaten tigerskin rug for the jumble sale.

She insisted on poor Baine carrying them down on the spot. “Amazing, simply amazing, the treasures one finds in attics,” she said rapturously. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Henry?”

“Umm,” I said, yawning.

“I am afraid the spirit has departed,” Baine said, coming back up the attic stairs. “We may only frighten it by our further presence.”

“You are quite right, Baine,” she said, and we were able, finally, to go to bed.

I was afraid Cyril might be at it again when we came down the corridor, but there was no sound from my room. Cyril and Princess Arjumand were sitting bolt upright in the middle of the bed, engaged in a nose (such as it was for Cyril) to nose staring match.

“No staring,” I said, taking off my robe and crawling into bed. “No snoring. No sprawling.”

There was none of the above. Instead, they paced round the bed, sniffing each other’s tails (such as it was for Cyril) and looking daggers at each other.

“Lie down,” I hissed, and then lay there in the dark, worrying about what to do and thinking about the accidental bombing of London.

It made sense that that was a crisis point. There had only been two planes involved, and very little would have been required to shift the course of events: they might have spotted a landmark and realized where they were, or their bombs might have fallen on a marrows field or in the Channel, or they might have been hit by flak. Or something even smaller, some tiny event that no one was aware of. It was a chaotic system.

So there was no way to tell what we should do, or not do, and how it would affect Terence’s marrying Maud.

Cyril and Princess Arjumand were still pacing over the bed. “Lie down,” I said, and, amazingly, Cyril did, flopping at my feet. Princess Arjumand walked over to him, sat down next to his head, and smacked him smartly on the nose.

Cyril sat up, looking aggrieved, and Princess Arjumand stretched out in his place.

If only it were that simple. Action and reaction. Cause and effect. But in a chaotic system, the effect wasn’t always what one intended.

Look at the letter I’d tried to burn tonight. And the battleship Nevada. It had been damaged in the first wave of attack at Pearl Harbor, but not sunk, and it had fired up its boilers and tried to get underway and out of the harbor to where it could maneuver. And as a result it had nearly sunk in the channel, where it would have blocked the entire harbor entrance for months.

On the other hand, a radar technician at Opana Station had telephoned his superior officer at 7:05 AM., nearly fifty minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and reported a large number of unidentified planes coming in from the north. His superior officer had told him to ignore it, it was nothing at all, and gone back to bed.