Tossie hurried in, followed by Baine.

“Where’s Jane?” I said, glancing briefly at her. “Did you bring the smelling salts?”

“I brought Baine,” she said, her cheeks very pink from her haste.

Baine immediately took charge, kneeling in front of Mrs. Mering and taking off her hat. He unbuttoned her collar. “Mr. St. Trewes, open the window. Mr. Henry, if you could give me some room, please.”

“Careful,” I said, letting go of Mrs. Mering’s arm. “She has a tendency to list to starboard,” but he already had hold of both her shoulders. I stepped back next to Verity, still holding the folded newspaper.

“Now then,” he said, and pushed her head down between her knees.

“Baine!” Tossie said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Mering said, and tried to sit up.

“Take deep breaths,” Baine said, keeping his hand firmly on the back of her neck. “That’s it. Deep breaths. Good,” he said, and let her sit up.

“What—” she said, bewilderedly.

Baine produced a flask of brandy from his coat pocket and a china teacup. “Drink this,” he commanded, placing her gloved hands around it. “That’s it. Good.”

“Are you feeling better, Mama?” Tossie said. “What made you faint?”

Mrs. Mering took another sip of the brandy. “I don’t remember—” she said. “Whatever it was, I feel much better now.” She handed the teacup to Baine. “How much farther to Muchings End?”

Verity, standing next to me, whispered, “What happened?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. Terence was reading the newspaper,” I said, holding it up for illustration, “and she suddenly—” I stopped, staring, just like Macbeth.

It was the second story down, just under an article about boating congestion on the Thames.

“BALLIOL PROFESSOR DROWNED,” it read, and under it, in smaller caps, but still quite readable (this being the Oxford Chronicle and not the Times):

“HISTORY PROFESSOR MATTHEW PEDDICK KILLED IN RIVER ACCIDENT”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The remainder of the trip consisted of explanations and recriminations. “I thought you said he sent his sister a telegram,” Terence said.

“I thought he had,” I said. “I asked him, ‘Did you send your telegrams?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and waved the yellow receipt slips at me.”

“Well, he must have forgotten to pay for them or something. The funeral’s tomorrow at ten.”

“Madame Iritosky tried to warn me,” Mrs. Mering said, lying back against three cushions and a folded blanket Baine had been dispatched to fetch for her. “ ‘Beware the sea,’ she said. ‘Beware the sea!’ She was trying to tell me Professor Peddick had drowned!”

“But he didn’t drown,” I said. “It’s all a misunderstanding. He fell in the river, and Terence and I fished him out. Professor Overforce must have thought he drowned when he couldn’t find him.”

“Fell in the river?” Mrs. Mering said. “I thought your boat capsized.”

“It did,” Terence said, “but that was the next day. We heard this splash, and I thought it was Darwin, because there were a number of trees along the bank just there, but it wasn’t. It was Professor Peddick, and it was a lucky thing we came along just at the right moment to save him or he would have been done for. Fate. ‘Ah, happy fate, that grasped the skirts of happy chance!’ Because he was going down for the third time, and we had the very devil of a time—”

“Mr. St. Trewes!” Mrs. Mering, obviously recovering, said. “There are ladies present!”

Terence looked chagrined. “Oh, I do beg your pardon. In the excitement of telling the story, I—”

Mrs. Mering nodded dismissively. “You say Professor Peddick fell in the river?”

“Well, actually, Professor Overforce — they were discussing history, you see, and Professor Peddick said…”

I had stopped listening and was staring blankly at the wall, the way Mrs. Mering had stared with her premonition. Something someone had said — for a moment I had almost had it, the solution to the mystery, the significant clue, and Verity was right, we had been looking at it the wrong way round — but I had only had it for an instant, and then it had slipped away. It was something that one of them had said. Mrs. Mering? Terence? I squinted at Terence, trying to remember.

“…and then Professor Peddick said Julius Caesar wasn’t irrelevant and that was when Professor Overforce went in the drink.”

“Professor Overforce!” Mrs. Mering said, motioning to Verity for the smelling salts. “I thought you said Professor Peddick fell in.”

“Actually, it was more that he was pushed,” Terence said.

“Pushed!”

It was no use. Whatever my premonition had been, it was gone. And it was obviously time to intervene.

“Professor Peddick slipped and fell in,” I said, “and we rescued him and intended to take him back home, but he insisted on coming with us downriver. We stopped in Abingdon so he could send a telegram to his sister, telling her of his plans, but it obviously went astray, and when he turned up missing, she assumed that he was dead. Whereas he was really alive and with us.”

She took a deep whiff of the smelling salts. “With you,” she said, looking speculatively at Terence. “There was a cold gust of wind, and I looked up, and there you were, standing in the doorway in the darkness. How do I know you’re not all spirits?”

“Here. Feel,” Terence said, offering his arm. “ ‘Too, too solid flesh.’ ” She squeezed his sleeve gingerly. “There, you see,” he said. “Quite real.”

Mrs. Mering looked unconvinced. “The spirit of Katie Cook felt solid. Mr. Crookes put his arm round her waist at a séance, and he said she felt quite human.”

Yes, well, there was an explanation for that, and for the fact that spirits bore an unusual resemblance to people draped in cheesecloth, and with that sort of reasoning, we were never going to be able to prove we were alive.

“And they had Princess Arjumand with them,” Mrs. Mering said, warming to her theory, “who Madame Iritosky said had crossed over to the Other Side.”

“Princess Arjumand isn’t a spirit,” Verity said. “Baine caught her in the fishpond this morning, trying to catch Colonel Mering’s Black Moor. Isn’t that right, Baine?”

“Yes, miss,” he said, “but I was able to remove her before there was any harm done.”

I looked at him, wondering if he had removed her to the middle of the Thames, or if he’d been too frightened by the Verity incident to try it again.

“Arthur Conan Doyle says that spirits eat and drink in the afterlife just as we do here,” Mrs. Mering said. “He says the afterlife is just like our world, but purer and happier, and the newspapers would never print anything that isn’t true.”

And so on, until we changed trains at Reading, at which terminus the topic switched to how disgracefully Professor Peddick had behaved.

“To put his loved ones through such dreadful anguish,” Mrs. Mering said, standing on the platform watching Baine struggle with the luggage, “to leave them to sit by the window, anxiously watching for his return, and then, as the hours passed, to have all vestiges of hope fade, is the absolute height of cruelty! Had I but known how careless of his loved ones’ affections he was, I should never have opened our home and our hospitality to him. Never!”

“Should we wire ahead and warn Professor Peddick of the impending storm?” I whispered to Verity as we walked up the steps to the other train.