“Ready?” Tossie called.
“Yes,” Verity nodded.
“I go first,” Tossie said, stooping gracefully and putting her ball on the grass.
Well, and how difficult could it be? I thought, watching Tossie line up her shot. A dignified Victorian game, played by children and young women in long, trailing dresses on lush green lawns. A civilized game.
Tossie turned, smiled prettily at Terence, and tossed her curls. “I hope. I make a good shot,” she said, and gave the ball a mighty whack that sent it through the first two hoops and halfway across the lawn.
She smiled surprisedly, asked, “Do I get another shot?” and whacked it again.
This time it nearly hit Cyril, who had lain down for a nap in the shade.
“Interference,” Tossie said. “It hit its nose.”
“Cyril hasn’t got a nose,” Verity said, placing her ball a mallet’s head behind the first hoop. “My turn.”
She didn’t hit her ball quite so violently as Tossie had, but it wasn’t a tap either. It went through the first hoop, and her next shot brought her within two feet of Tossie’s ball.
“Your turn, Mr. St. Trewes,” Tossie said, moving so her long skirt covered her ball. After his shot, when she walked over to him, her ball was a good yard farther away from Verity.
I went over to Verity. “She cheats,” I said.
She nodded. “I wasn’t able to find Tossie’s diary,” she said.
“I know. She had it with her. She read the dress description to the Chattisbourne girls.”
“Your turn, Mr. Henry,” Tossie said, leaning on her croquet mallet.
Verity had not said anything about the proper grip, and I hadn’t been paying attention. I put my ball down by the wicket and took hold of the mallet with a sort of cricket bat grip.
“Fault!” Tossie called. “Mr. Henry’s ball isn’t the proper length from the hoop. You lose a turn, Mr. Henry.”
“He does not,” Verity said. “Move your ball back the width of a mallet head.”
I did and then hit the ball more or less the right direction, though not through the hoop.
“My turn,” Tossie said and thwacked Verity’s ball completely off the court and into the hedge. “Sorry,” she said, simpered demurely, and did the same thing to Terence’s.
“I thought you said this was a civilized game,” I said to Verity, crawling under the hedge to retrieve her ball.
“I said simple,” she said.
I picked up the ball.
“Pretend you’re still looking for it,” Verity said under her breath. “After I searched Tossie’s room, I went through to Oxford.”
“Did you find out how much slippage there was on your drop?” I said, prying branches apart.
“No,” she said, looking solemn. “Warder was too busy.”
I was about to say that Warder always thought she was too busy, when she said, “The new recruit—I don’t know his name—the one who was working with you and Carruthers—is stuck in the past.”
“In the marrows field?” I said, thinking of the dogs.
“No, in Coventry. He was supposed to come through after he’d finished the rubble, but he hasn’t.”
“He probably couldn’t find the net,” I said, thinking of him messing with his pocket torch.
“That’s what Carruthers said, but Mr. Dunworthy and T.J. are worried it’s connected to the incongruity. They’ve sent Carruthers back to look for him.”
“It’s your turn, Verity,” Tossie said impatiently. She started over to us. “Haven’t you found it yet?”
“Here it is,” I called and emerged from under the hedge, holding it aloft.
“It went out here,” Tossie said, pointing with her foot to a spot several miles from where she hit it out.
“It’s like playing with the Red Queen,” I said, and handed Verity the ball.
My only goal on my next three turns was to get my ball on the same side of the court as Verity’s, a goal that was repeatedly thwarted by “Off with Her Head!” Mering.
“I’ve got it,” I said, limping over to Verity after one of Tossie’s shots had sent Terence’s ball straight into my shin, at which point Cyril had got up and moved to the far side of the lawn. “Mr. C is the physician who’s called in to doctor Tossie’s croquet casualties. What else did you find out?”
Verity lined up her shot carefully. “I found out who Terence married.”
“Please don’t say it was Tossie,” I said, standing on my good leg and rubbing my shin.
“No,” she said. She hit the ball neatly through the hoop. “Not Tossie. Maud Peddick.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” I said. “That means I didn’t ruin things by making Terence miss meeting Maud.”
She pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her sash and handed it surreptitiously to me.
“What’s this?” I said, sticking it in my breast pocket. “An excerpt from Maud’s diary?”
“No,” she said. “She’s apparently the only woman in the entire Victorian era who didn’t keep a diary. It’s a letter from Maud St. Trewes to her younger sister.”
“Your ball, Mr. Henry!” Tossie called.
“Second paragraph,” Verity said.
I gave the red ball an enthusiastic whack that sent it straight past Terence’s ball and into the center of the lilacs.
“I say, too bad!” Terence said.
I nodded and went crashing into the lilacs after it.
“Farewell, dear friend,” Terence called gaily, waving his mallet. “‘Farewell! For in that fatal word—howe’er we promise—hope—believe—there breathes despair.’”
I found the ball, picked it up, and moved into the thickest part of the lilacs. I unfolded the letter. It was written in a delicate, spidery hand. “Dearest Isabel,” it read, “I am so happy to hear of your engagement. Robert is a fine young man, and I only hope you will be as happy as Terence and I are. You worry that you met on the steps of an ironmonger’s, a singularly unromantic location. Do not fret. My darling Terence and I first met at a railway station. I was standing with my Aunt Amelia on the platform of Oxford Railway Station—”
I stood there looking down at the letter. The platform of Oxford Railway Station.
“—scarcely a romantic location, yet I knew instantly, there amidst the luggage vans and steamer trunks, that he was my true mate.”
Only she hadn’t. I had been there, and she and her aunt had hired a fly and gone on.
“Can’t you find it?” Terence called.
I hastily folded the letter and stuck it back in my pocket. “Here it is,” I said, and emerged from the bushes.
“It went out here,” Tossie said, indicating a totally fictitious point with her foot.
“Thank you, Miss Mering,” I said and, measuring one mallet head’s length from the edge with my mallet, placed it on the grass, and prepared to hit it again.
“Your turn is ended,” Tossie said, going over to her ball. “It’s my turn,” she said, giving it an enormous whack that sent my ball right back into the lilacs.
“Roquet,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Two strokes.”
“Isn’t she a topping girl?” Terence said, helping me look for my ball.
No, I thought, and even if she were, you’re not supposed to be in love with her. You’re supposed to be in love with Maud. You were supposed to meet her at the railway station, and this is my fault, my fault, my fault.
“Mr. Henry, it’s your turn,” Tossie said impatiently.
“Oh,” I said and hit blindly at the nearest ball.
“Your fault, Mr. Henry,” Tossie said impatiently. “You’re dead.”
“What?”
“You’re dead on that ball, Mr. Henry,” she said. “You’ve hit it once already. You can’t hit it again till you’ve gone through the hoop.”
“Oh,” I said, and aimed for the wicket instead.
“Not that hoop,” Tossie said, shaking her blonde curls at me. “I call a
fault for attempting to skip a hoop.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to focus.
“Mr. Henry is used to playing according to the American rules,” Verity said.
I went over and stood next to her, watching Tossie line up her shot, setting it up like a billiards shot, calculating how the balls would ricochet off each other.
“There’s worse,” Verity said. “One of their grandsons was an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain. He flew the first bombing raid on Berlin.”
“Terence!” Tossie said. “Your animal is in the way of my double roquet.”
Terence obediently went to shift Cyril. Tossie sighted along her mallet, measuring the angles at which the balls would collide, calculating the possibilities.
I stood there, watching Tossie line up her shot. Verity didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I knew all about that first bombing raid. It was in September of 1940, in the middle of the Battle of Britain, and Hitler had vowed that bombs would never fall on the Fatherland, and when they did, he had ordered the full-scale bombing of London. And then, in November, of Coventry.
Tossie swung her mallet. Her ball hit mine, ricocheted off, hit Verity’s, and went straight through the hoop.
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.
“Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar;
Break but one
Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar
Through all will run?”
John Greenleaf Whittier
CHAPTER 15
Nocturnal Visitors—A Fire—More Similarities to the Titanic—A Spirit—Sleepwalking—Pearl Harbor—Fish—A Conversation with a Workman—Finch—Up to No Good—Verity and I Go Boating on the River—Proposals in Latin, Advantages and Disadvantages of—Napoleon’s Health Problems—Sleep—Similarity Between Literature and Real LifeAn—Announcement
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 non-significance.
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. Ill 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.”
She opened the door and peered out. “Perhaps tomorrow morning Mr. C will come to help set up for the fete, 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.”
To Say Nothing of the Dog Page 29
