To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  I tried to think of what one said to a Victorian young lady when alone with her. Finch’s tapes hadn’t given any guidelines as to proper topics of conversation for a young man and a young lady who’d just met.

  Not politics, since I had no idea what they were in 1888, and young ladies weren’t supposed to bother their pretty heads about affairs of state. And not religion, since Darwin was still controversial. I tried to remember what people had said in the Victorian plays I’d seen, which consisted of The Admirable Crichton and The Importance of Being Earnest Class issues and witty epigrams. A butler with ideas was clearly not a popular idea in these parts, and I couldn’t think of any witty epigrams. Besides, humor is always fraught with peril.

  She had reached the last of the tombstones and was looking at me expectantly.

  The weather. But how was I supposed to address her? Miss Brown? Miss Verity? Milady?

  “Well,” she said impatiently. “Did you get it back all right?”

  It was not exactly the opening line I had expected. “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “Baine didn’t see you, did he?” she said. “Where did you leave it?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve confused me with someone else . . .”“It’s all right,” she said, looking toward the church. “They can’t hear us. Tell me exactly what happened when you brought it back through the net.”

  I must be having some sort of relapse of the time-lag. None of this was making any sense.

  “You didn’t drown it, did you?” she said angrily. “He promised he wasn’t going to drown it.”

  “Drown what?” I said.

  “The cat.”

  This was worse than talking to the nurse in Infirmary. “The cat? You mean Tossie—Miss Mering’s cat that’s lost? Princess Arjumand?”

  “Of course I mean Princess Arjumand.” She frowned. “Didn’t Mr. Dunworthy give her to you?”

  “Mr. Dunworthy?” I gaped at her.

  “Yes. Didn’t he give the cat to you to bring back through the net?”

  The light began to dawn. “You’re the naiad in Mr. Dunworthy’s office,” I said wonderingly. “But you can’t be. Her name was Kindle.”

  “That’s my name. Miss Brown is my contemp name. The Merings don’t have any relatives named Kindle, and I’m supposed to be a second cousin of Tossie’s.”

  The light was still breaking. “You’re the calamity,” I said, “who brought something forward through the net.”

  “The cat,” she said impatiently.

  A cat. Of course. That made much more sense than a cab or a rat. And it explained the peculiar look Mr. Dunworthy’d given me when I mentioned Lady Windermere’s fan. “It was a cat you brought through the net,” I said. “But that’s impossible. You can’t bring things forward through the net.”

  Now she was the one gaping. “You didn’t know about the cat? But I thought they were going to send the cat through with you,” and I wondered uneasily if they had intended to. Finch had told me to wait when I was standing there in the net. Had he gone to fetch the cat, and I’d made the jump before he could give it to me?

  “Did they tell you they were sending it back with me?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Mr. Dunworthy refused to tell me anything. He told me I’d caused enough trouble already, and he didn’t want me meddling any further. I just assumed it was you because I saw you in Mr. Dunworthy’s office.”

  “I was there to speak to Mr. Dunworthy about my time-lag,” I said. “Infirmary prescribed two weeks’ bed rest, so Mr. Dunworthy sent me here to get it.”

  “To the Victorian era?” she said, looking amused.

  I nodded. “I couldn’t get it in Oxford because of Lady Schrapnell—”

  She looked even more amused. “He sent you here to get away from Lady Schrapnell?”

  “Yes,” I said, alarmed. “She isn’t here, is she?”

  “Not exactly,” she said, “If you don’t have the cat, do you know who they sent it through with?”

  “No,” I said, trying to remember that conversation in the lab. “Contact someone,” Mr. Dunworthy had said. Andrews. I remembered now. Mr. Dunworthy had said, “Contact Andrews.”

  “They said something about contacting Andrews,” I said.

  “Did you hear them say anything else? When they were sending him through to? Whether the jump worked?”

  “No,” I said, “but I was dozing a good deal of the time. Because of the time-lag.”

  “When exactly did you hear them mention Andrews?”

  “This morning, while I was waiting for my jump,” I said.

  “When did you come through?”

  “This morning. At ten o’clock.”

  “Then that explains it,” she said, looking relieved. “I was worried when I got back and Princess Arjumand wasn’t there. I was afraid something had gone wrong, and sending her back through the net hadn’t worked, or that Baine had found her and thrown her in again. And when Mrs. Mering insisted on coming to Oxford to consult Madame Iritosky on her disappearance, and your young man showed up, I got truly worried. But everything’s all right. They obviously sent her through after we left for Oxford, and the visit was a good thing. It put us all out of the way so no one would see her being put back, and Baine’s here, so he can’t drown her before we get back. And the jump must have been successful, or you wouldn’t be here. Mr. Dunworthy said he was suspending all drops to the Nineteenth Century till the cat was returned. So everything’s all right. Mr. Dunworthy’s experiment worked, Princess Arjumand will be there waiting to greet us when we get back, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Wait,” I said, thoroughly confused. “I think you need to begin at the beginning. Sit down.”

  I indicated a wooden bench with a sign on it: “Do not deface.” Next to it was a carved heart with an arrow through it and under it, “Violet and Harold, ’59.” She sat down, arranging her white skirts gracefully about her.

  “All right,” I said. “You brought a cat forward through the net.”

  “Yes. I was at the gazebo, that’s where the drop is, just behind it in a little copse, it’s on a ten-minute on and off rendezvous. I’d just come through from reporting to Mr. Dunworthy, and I saw Baine, that’s the butler, carrying Princess Arjumand—”

  “Wait. What were you doing in the Victorian era?”

  “Lady Schrapnell sent me here to read Tossie’s diary. She thought there might be some clue in it as to the whereabouts of the bishop’s bird stump.”

  Of course. I might have known all this had something to do with the bishop’s bird stump. “But what does Tossie have to do with the bishop’s bird stump?” I had a sudden horrible thought. “Please tell me she isn’t the great-great-grandmother.”

  “Great-great-great-great. This is the summer she went to Coventry, saw the bishop’s bird stump—”

  “—and had her life changed forever,” I said.

  “An event she referred to repeatedly and in great detail in the voluminous diaries she kept for most of her life, which Lady Schrapnell read and became obsessed with rebuilding Coventry Cathedral, and had her life changed forever.”

  “And ours,” I said. “But if she read the diaries, why did she have to send you back to 1888 to read them?”

  “The volume in which Tossie originally recorded the life-changing experience—the one Tossie wrote in the summer of 1888—is badly water-damaged. Lady Schrapnell’s got a forensics expert working on it, but she’s only made limited progress, so Lady Schrapnell sent me to read it on the spot.”

  “But if she referred to it in great detail in the other diaries—?” I said.

  “She didn’t say exactly how it changed her life or on what date she went there, and Lady Schrapnell thinks there may be other details in the volume that are important. Unfortunately, or perhaps I should say fortunately, since Tossie writes the way she talks, she keeps her diary under better lock and key than the Crown Jewels, and so far I haven’t been able to get at it.”
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br />   “I’m still confused,” I said. “The bishop’s bird stump didn’t disappear till 1940. What use is a diary written in 1888?”

  “Lady Schrapnell thinks there might be a clue as to who gave it to the church. The donations records for Coventry Cathedral were burnt up during the air raid. She thinks whoever donated it, or their descendants, might have taken it away for safekeeping at the beginning of the war.”

  “Whoever donated it was probably trying to get rid of it.”

  “I know. But you know Lady Schrapnell. ‘No stone unturned.’ So I’ve been following Tossie around for two weeks, hoping she’ll leave her diary lying out. Or go to Coventry. She’s got to go soon. When I mentioned Coventry, she said she’d never been there, and we know she went sometime in June. But so far nothing.”

  “So you kidnapped her cat and demanded her diary as ransom?”

  “No,” she said. “I was coming back from reporting to Mr. Dunworthy, and I saw Baine, that’s the butler—”

  “Who reads books,” I said.

  “Who’s a homicidal maniac,” she said. “He was carrying Princess Arjumand, and when he got to the riverbank, a perfectly lovely June. The roses have been so pretty.”

  “What?” I said, disoriented again.

  “And the laburnum! Mrs. Mering has an arbor of laburnum that is ever so picturesque!”

  “Begging your pardon, Miss Brown,” Baine said, appearing out of nowhere. He gave a stiff little bow.

  “What is it, Baine?” Verity said.

  “It’s Miss Mering’s pet cat, ma’am,” he said uncomfortably. “I was wondering if Mr. St. Trewes’s being here meant that he had located it.”

  “No, Baine,” she said, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees. “Princess Arjumand is still missing.”

  “I was concerned,” he said and bowed again. “Do you wish the carriage to be brought around now?”

  “No,” she said frostily. “Thank you, Baine.”

  “Mrs. Mering requested that you return in time for tea.”

  “I am aware of that, Baine. Thank you.”

  He still hesitated. “It is half an hour’s drive to Madame Iritosky’s home.”

  “Yes, Baine. That will be all,” she said and watched him till he was nearly to the carriage before she burst out, “Cold-blooded murderer! ‘I was wondering if Mr. St. Trewes might have found the cat.’ He knows perfectly well he hasn’t. And all that about being concerned! Monster!”

  “Are you certain he was trying to drown her?” I said.

  “Of course I’m certain. He flung her as far out as he could throw her.”

  “Perhaps it’s a contemp custom. I remember reading they drowned cats in the Victorian era. To keep the population down, of all things.”

  “That’s newborn kittens, not full-grown cats. And not pets. Princess Arjumand’s the thing Tossie loves most, next to herself. The kittens they drown are farm cats, not pets. The farmer just up the road from Muchings End killed a batch last week, put them in a sack weighted with stones and threw it in his pond, which is barbaric but not malicious.This was malicious. After Baine threw her in, he dusted off his hands and walked back toward the house smiling. He clearly intended to drown her.”

  “I thought cats could swim.”

  “Not in the middle of the Thames. If I hadn’t done something, it would have been swept away in the current.”

  “The Lady of Shalott,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Why would he want to murder his mistress’s cat?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps he has something against cats. Or perhaps it isn’t just cats, and we’ll all be murdered in our beds some night. Perhaps he’s Jack the Ripper. He was operating in 1888, wasn’t he? And they never did find out his true identity. All I know is, I couldn’t just stand there and let Princess Arjumand drown. It’s an extinct species.”

  “So you dived in and saved it?”

  “I waded in,” she said defensively, “and caught hold of her and brought her back on shore, but as soon as I did, I realized no Victorian lady would have waded in like that. I hadn’t even taken off my shoes. I didn’t think. I just acted. I ducked in the net, and it opened,” she said. “I was only trying to get out of sight. I didn’t mean to cause a problem.”

  A problem. She had done something temporal theory said was impossible. And possibly caused an incongruity in the continuum. No wonder Mr. Dunworthy had asked Chiswick all those questions and been grilling poor T.J. Lewis. A problem.

  A fan was one thing, a live cat was another. And even a fan won’t go through. Darby and Gentilla had proved that, back when time travel had first been invented. They’d built the net as a pirate ship for plundering the treasures of the past, and they’d tried it on everything from the Mona Lisa to King Tut’s tomb and then, when that didn’t work, on more mundane items, like money. But nothing except microscopic particles would come through. When they tried to take any object, even a halfpence or a fish fork, out of its own time, the net wouldn’t open. It didn’t let germs through either, or radiation, or stray bullets, which Darby and Gentilla and the rest of the world should have been grateful for, but weren’t particularly.

  The multinationals who’d been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists, who’d come up with the theories of slippage and the Law of Conservation of History to explain it, and it had been accepted as a law that if one tried to bring something forward through the net, it wouldn’t open. Till now.

  “When you tried to bring the cat through, the net opened, just like that?” I said. “You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about the drop, no delays or jolts?”

  She shook her head. “It was just like any other jump.”

  “And the cat was all right?”

  “She slept through the whole thing. Fell asleep in my arms in the drop and didn’t even wake up when we got to Mr. Dunworthy’s office. Apparently that’s how time-lag affects cats. It puts them right out.”

  “You went to see Mr. Dunworthy?”

  “Of course,” she said defensively. “I took the cat to him as soon as I realized what I’d done.”

  “And he decided to try to send it back?”

  “I pumped Finch, and he told me they were going to check all the drops to the Victorian era, and if there weren’t any indications of excessive slippage, that meant the cat had been returned before its disappearance could cause any damage, and they were going to send it back.”

  But there was excessive slippage, I thought, remembering Mr. Dunworthy asking Carruthers about Coventry. “What about the trouble we were having in Coventry?”

  “Finch said they thought it was unrelated, that it was due to Coventry’s being an historical crisis point. Because of its connection to Ultra. It was the only area of excessive slippage. There wasn’t any on any of the Victorian drops.” She looked up at me. “How much slippage was there on your drop?”

  “None,” I said. “I was spang on target.”

  “Good,” she said, and looked relieved. “There was only five minutes on mine when I came back. Finch said the first place an incongruity would manifest itself was in the increased slip—”

  “Oh, I do love country churchyards,” Tossie’s voice said, and I leaped away from Verity like a Victorian lover. Verity remained serene, opening her parasol and standing up with a calm grace.

  “They’re so delightfully rustic,” Tossie said and hove into view, flags flying. “Not at all like our dreadful modern cemeteries.” She stopped to admire a tombstone that had nearly fallen over. “Baine says churchyards are unsanitary, that they contaminate the water table, but I think it’s wonderfully unspoilt. Just like a poem. Don’t you, Mr. St. Trewes?”

  “‘Beneath those rugged elms that yew trees shade,’” Terence obligingly quoted, “‘where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap—’”

  The bit about “the mouldering heap” seemed to confirm Baine’s theor
y, but neither Terence nor Tossie noticed, Terence particularly, who was declaiming, “‘Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’”

  “I do love Tennyson, don’t you, Cousin?” Tossie said.

  “Thomas Gray,” Verity said. “‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’”

  “Oh, Mr. Henry, you must come and see the inside of the church,” Tossie said, ignoring her. “There’s the dearest decorated vase. Isn’t it, Mr. St. Trewes?”

  He nodded vaguely, gazing at Tossie, and I saw Verity frown. “We must see it, by all means,” she said, and caught up her skirts with a gloved hand. “Mr. Henry?”

  “By all means,” I said, offering her my arm, and we all went into the church, past a large sign that read, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

  The church was chilly and smelled faintly of old wood and mildewing hymnals. It was decorated with stout Norman pillars, a vaulted Early English sanctuary, a Victorian rose window, and a large placard that proclaimed “Keep out of chancel” on the altar railing.

  Tossie blithely ignored it and the Norman slate baptismal font and swept up to a niche in the wall opposite the pulpit. “Isn’t it the cunningest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  There was no question she was related to Lady Schrapnell, and no question where Lady Schrapnell had got her taste from, though Tossie at least had the excuse of being a Victorian, and part of an era that had built not only St. Pancras Railway Station, but the Albert Memorial.

  The vase that sat in the niche looked like both, though on a less grandiose scale. It only had one level and no Corinthian pillars. It did, however, have twining ivy and a bas-relief of either Noah’s ark or the battle of Jericho.

  “What is it supposed to be depicting?” I asked.

  “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” Verity murmured.

  “It’s Pharaoh’s Daughters Bathing in the Nile,” Tossie said. “Look, there’s Moses’ basket peeping out from among the rushes. I do wish we had this in our church,” Tossie said. “The church at Muchings End hasn’t anything in it but a lot of old things. It’s just like that poem by Tennyson,” Tossie said, clasping her hands together. “Poem to a Greek Vase.”