“Yes,” she said. “Nine minutes.”

Nine minutes.

“What about the drops you did to May and August?”

“It varied. The average was sixteen minutes. That tallied with previous drops to the Victorian era.”

We were nearly to Muchings End. I pulled out my pocket watch and looked at it. “We should be home in time for tea,” I said, “and so there may not be any questions. If there are, we rowed up to Streatley to post signs for the jumble sale.” I pulled on my damp blazer, and Verity straightened her hair and put on her hat.

Sixteen minutes, and Verity’s drop had been nine. Even if her drop had had an average amount of slippage, she would have been too late, or too early, to rescue the cat and cause the incongruity. And at nine minutes, the slippage obviously hadn’t been stretched to its limits. So why hadn’t the net increased the slippage to the average? Or slammed shut before the incongruity could happen? And why had it slammed shut now, on Carruthers?

The dock was only a few hundred yards ahead. “With luck, no one will even know we’ve been on the river,” I said, and pulled in toward the dock.

“Our luck seems to be out,” Verity said.

I turned round in my seat. Tossie and Terence were running down to the riverbank, waving to us.

“Oh, Cousin, you’ll never guess what’s happened!” Tossie cried. “Mr. St. Trewes and I are engaged!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“It’s not your fault,” Verity said. We were arranging items in the jumble sale stall the next morning, our first chance to talk since the “thrilling news,” as Mrs. Mering put it.

“It was my fault,” Verity said, setting out a china wooden shoe with a blue-and-white windmill on it. “I should never have let T.J. send me on so many drops.”

“You were only trying to find out something that might help us,” I said, unwrapping an egg-boiler. “I was the one who left Terence and Tossie alone.” I set it on the counter. “And gave him the idea. You heard him last night. He wouldn’t have proposed if I hadn’t spouted that nonsense about ‘fleeting time’ and ‘miss’d opportunities.’ ”

“You were only doing what I told you to,” she said, opening a Japanese fan. “ ‘Turn the Titanic, Ned,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t hit the iceberg.’ ”

“Not set up yet?” Mrs. Mering said, and we both jumped. “It’s nearly time for the fête to open.”

“We’ll be ready,” Verity said, setting out a soup tureen in the shape of a head of lettuce. Mrs. Mering looked worriedly at the overcast sky. “O, Mr. Henry, you don’t think it will rain, do you?”

Of course not, I thought. Fate is against me.

“No,” I said, unwrapping an etching of Paolo and Francesca, another couple who had come to a bad end.

“O, good,” she said, dusting off a bust of Prince Albert. “O, there is Mr. St. Trewes. I must go speak to him about the Pony Ride.”

I watched her interestedly as she swooped down on Terence. She was wearing a blue garden party dress, with all the requisite Victorian puffs and frills and rosettes and insets of lace, but over it she had flowing robes striped in red, yellow, and purple, and round her forehead was a wide velvet band with a large ostrich feather stuck in it.

“She’s the fortuneteller,” Verity explained, setting out a pair of sewing scissors in the shape of a heron. “When she reads my fortune, I intend to ask her where the bishop’s bird stump is.”

“It may well be here,” I said, trying to find a place to set the Widow Wallace’s banjo. “It would fit right in.”

She looked at the array of things on the counter. “It certainly is a jumble,” she said, adding a mustache cup to the mess.

I looked critically at it. “It still lacks something,” I said. I went and snatched a penwiper from Tossie’s stall and stuck it between a paperweight and a set of tin soldiers. “There. It’s perfect.”

“Except for the fact that Tossie and Terence are engaged,” she said. “I should never have assumed she’d stay at the Chattisbournes’ all afternoon.”

“The question is,” I said, “not whose fault it is they got engaged, but what we’re going to do now.”

“What are we going to do now?” Verity said, rearranging a pair of Harlequin and Columbine figurines.

“Perhaps Terence will get a good night’s sleep, come to his senses, and decide it was all a horrible mistake,” I said.

She shook her head. “That won’t help us. Engagements in Victorian times were considered nearly as serious as marriage. A gentleman couldn’t just break an engagement without a dreadful scandal. Unless Tossie breaks it herself, there’s no way Terence can get out of the engagement.”

“Which means her meeting Mr. C,” I said. “Which means our finding out who he is, and the sooner the better.”

“Which means one of us reporting back to Mr. Dunworthy and finding out if the forensics expert has managed to decipher his name yet,” she said.

“And that will be me,” I said firmly.

“What if Lady Schrapnell catches you?”

“I will take that risk,” I said. “You are not going anywhere.”

“I think that’s probably a very good idea,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead. “I’ve been remembering some of the things I said in the boat yesterday.” She ducked her head. “I want you to know that I only said those things about Lord Peter Wimsey and your hat because of the time-lag and the hormonal imbalance, and not because—”

“Understood,” I said. “And I do not, when in my right mind, see you as a beautiful naiad, drawing me down and down into the deep to drown in your watery embrace. Besides,” I said, grinning, “Pansy Chattisbourne and I are already promised to one another.”

“Perhaps you’d like to buy her an engagement gift then,” she said and held up a ceramic affair decorated with gilt lace, pink ceramic gillyflowers, and an assortment of small holes.

“What is it?” I said.

“I have no idea,” she said. “You realize you’ll have to buy something, don’t you? Mrs. Mering will never forgive you if you don’t.”

She held up a wicker basket in the shape of a swan. “How about this?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “Cyril and I are not fond of swans.”

Verity set out a small lidded tin box that sugared violets had come in. “No one will buy this.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, unwrapping a waterstained copy of An Old-Fashioned Girl and setting it between two marble bookends carved in the likenesses of Dido and Aeneas, another couple who had gone up in smoke. Didn’t history have any famous couples who had got married, settled down, and lived happily ever after?

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,” I said. “At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

“Don’t look now,” Verity said, and her voice dropped to a whisper, “but here comes your betrothed.”

I turned to see Pansy Chattisbourne bearing down on me. “Oh, Mr. Henry,” she said, giggling, “do come help me set up the fancy goods stall,” and dragged me away to arrange antimacassars and tatted handkerchief cases.

“I made these,” Pansy said, showing me a pair of slippers crocheted in a design of pansies. “Heartsease. It means, ‘I am thinking of you.’ ”