“What are you doing here?” he said in a voice I knew as well as my own. Good Lord! I was looking at Mr. Dunworthy.
Mr. Dunworthy! He’d told me stories about the infancy of time travel, but I had always thought of him as, you know, Mr. Dunworthy. I hadn’t imagined him as skinny or awkward. Or young. Or in love with somebody he couldn’t have.
“I came to talk to you,” she said. “And to Shoji. Where is he?”
“Meeting with the head,” Mr. Dunwor—Jim said. “Again.” He went over to the table and dumped his load of papers and folders on the end of it.
I switched peepholes, wishing they’d stay put.
“Is this a bad time?” she said.
“The worst of times,” he said, looking through the stack for something. “We’ve got a new head of the history faculty since you left to marry Bitty. Mr. Arnold P. Lassiter. “P” for Prudence. He’s so cautious we haven’t done a drop in three months. ‘Time travel is an endeavor that should not be undertaken without a complete knowledge of how it works.’ Which means filling up forms and more forms. He wants complete analyses on every drop—the ones he’s willing to authorize, that is, which are few and far between—parameter checks, slippage graphs, impact probability stats, security checks—” He stopped rummaging. “How did you get into the lab?”
“It was unlocked,” she said, which was a lie. I twisted my head around, trying to find an angle from which I could see her face.
“Wonderful,” Jim said. “If Prudence finds out, he’ll have a fit.” He found the folder he wanted and pulled it out of the stack. “Why isn’t Bitty the Bishop with you?” he said, almost belligerently.
“He’s in London, appealing the C of E’s ruling.”
Jim’s face changed. “I heard about Coventry’s being declared nonessential,” he said. “I’m sorry, Lizzie.”
Coventry. Lizzie. This was Elizabeth Bittner he was talking to, the wife of the last bishop of Coventry. The frail, white-haired lady I’d interviewed in Coventry. No wonder I’d thought her hair should be lighter.
“Nonessential,” she said. “A cathedral nonessential. Religion will be ruled nonessential next, and then Art and Truth. Not to mention History.” She walked toward the blacked-out windows and out of range.
Will you stand still? I thought.
“It’s so unfair,” she said. “They kept Bristol, you know. Bristol!”
“Why didn’t Coventry make the cut?” Jim said, moving so I couldn’t see him either.
“The C of E ruled that all churches and cathedrals have to be seventy-five percent self-supporting, which means tourists. And the tourists only come to see tombs and treasures. Canterbury’s got Becket, Winchester’s got Jane Austen and a black Tournai marble font, and St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields is in London, which has the Tower and Madame Tussaud’s. We used to have treasures. Unfortunately, they were all destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940,” she said bitterly.
“There’s the baptistry window of the new cathedral,” Jim said.
“Yes. Unfortunately there’s also a church that looks like a factory warehouse and stained-glass windows that face the wrong way and the ugliest tapestry in existence. Mid-Nineteenth Century was not a good period in art. Or architecture.”
“They come to see the ruins of the old cathedral, don’t they?”
“Some of them. Not enough. Bitty tried to convince the Appropriations Committee that Coventry’s a special case, that it has historical importance, but it didn’t work. World War II was a long time ago. Scarcely anybody remembers it.” She sighed. “The appeal’s not going to work either.”
“What happens then? Will you have to close?”
She must have shaken her head. “We can’t afford to close. The diocese is too far in debt. We’ll have to sell.” She abruptly moved back into my line of sight, her face set. “The Church of the Hereafter made an offer. It’s a New Age sect. Ouija boards, manifestations, conversations with the dead. It’ll kill him, you know.”
“Will he be completely out of a job?”
“No,” she said wryly. “Religion’s nonessential, which means clergy are hard to come by. Rats deserting a sinking ship and all that. They’ve offered him the position of senior canon at Salisbury.”
“Good,” Jim said, too heartily. “Salisbury’s not on the nonessential list, is it?”
“No,” she said. “It has plenty of treasures. And Turner. It’s too bad he couldn’t have come to Coventry to paint. But you don’t understand. Bitty can’t bear to sell it. He’s descended from Thomas Botoner, who helped build the original cathedral. He loves the cathedral. He’d do anything to save it.”
“And you’d do anything for him.”
“Yes,” she said, looking steadily at him. “I would.” She took a deep breath. “That’s why I came to see you. I have a favor to ask.” She stepped eagerly toward him, and they both moved out of my line of sight.
“I was thinking if we could take people back through the net to see the cathedral,” she said, “to see it burn down, they’d realize what it meant, how important it was.”
“Take people back?” Jim said. “We have trouble getting Prudence to approve research drops, let alone tourist excursions.”
“They wouldn’t be tourist excursions,” she said, sounding hurt. “Just a few select people.”
“The Appropriations Committee?”
“And some vid reporters. If we had the public on our side—if they saw it with their own eyes, they’d realize—”
Jim must have been shaking his head, because she stopped and switched tactics. “We wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to the air raid,” she said rapidly. “We could go to the ruins afterward, or—or to the old cathedral. It could be in the middle of the night, when there wouldn’t be anybody in the cathedral. If they could just see the organ and the Dance of Death miserere and the Fifteenth-Century children’s cross for themselves, they’d realize what it meant to have lost Coventry Cathedral once, and they wouldn’t let it happen again.”
“Lizzie,” Jim said, and there was no mistaking that tone. And she had to know it was impossible. Oxford had never allowed sightseeing trips, not even in the good old days, and neither had the net.
She did know it. “You don’t understand,” she said despairingly. “It’ll kill him.”
The door opened, and a short scrawny kid with Asian features came in. “Jim, did you run the parameter—”
He stopped, looking at Lizzie. She must have cut a real swath in Oxford. Like Zuleika Dobson.
“Hullo, Shoji,” Lizzie said.
“Hullo, Liz,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“How’d the meeting with Prudence go?” Jim said.
“About like you’d expect,” Shoji said. “Now it’s the slippage he’s worried about. What’s its function? Why does it fluctuate so much?” His voice became prissy and affected, imitating Lassiter’s voice, “‘We must consider all possible consequences before we initiate action.’” He reverted to his own voice. “He wants a complete analysis of slippage patterns on all past drops before he’ll authorize any new ones.” He crossed out of my line of sight and over to the computers.
“You’re joking,” Jim said, following him. “That’ll take six months. We’ll never go anywhere.”
“I think that’s the general idea,” Shoji said, sitting down at the middle computer and beginning to type. “If we don’t go anywhere, there’s no risk. Why are the veils down?”
There was no record of a time traveller from the future or the past suddenly materializing in Balliol’s lab. Which either meant I hadn’t been caught or I’d come up with an extremely convincing story. I tried to think of one.
“If we don’t go anywhere,” Jim said, “how are we supposed to learn anything about time travel? Did you tell him science involves experiments?”
Shoji began hitting keys on the keyboard. “‘This is not a chemistry class we are talking about, Mr. Fujisaki,’” he said in the prissy voice as he typed. �
��‘This is the space-time continuum.’”
The curtains began, awkwardly, to rise.
“I know it’s the continuum,” Jim said, “but—”
“Jim,” Lizzie said, still out of sight but not for long, and both of them turned to look at her. “Will you ask him at least?” she said. “It means—”
And I found myself in a corner of Blackwell’s Book Store. Its dark woods and book-lined walls are not only instantly recognizable but timeless, and for a moment I thought I’d made it back to 2057, and getting to the lab was going to be a simple matter of sprinting up the Broad to Balliol, but as soon as I poked my head round the bookcase, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. Outside Blackwell’s bow windows it was snowing. And there was a Daimler parked in front of the Sheldonian.
Not Twenty-First Century, and now that I looked around, not the end of Twentieth either. No terminals, no paperbacks, no print-and-binds. Hardbacks, mostly without dust jackets, in blues and greens and browns.
And a shop assistant bearing down on me with a notebook in her hand and a yellow pencil behind her ear.
It was too late to duck back into a corner. She’d already seen me. Luckily, men’s clothes, unlike women’s, haven’t changed that much over the years, and boating blazers and flannels can still be seen in Oxford, though usually not in the dead of winter. With luck, I could pass as a first-year student.
The shop assistant was wearing a slimmish navy-blue dress Verity would probably have been able to date to the exact month, but the mid-Twentieth-Century decades all look alike to me. 1950? No, her pencil-decked hair was put up in a severe knob, and her shoes laced. Early 1940s?
No, the windows were intact, there weren’t any blackout curtains and no sandbags piled up by the door, and the clerk looked far too prosperous to be post-war. The Thirties.
Verity’s regular assignment was the Thirties. Maybe the net had mistakenly sent me to the coordinates of one of her old drops. Or maybe she was here.
No, she couldn’t be here. My clothes might pass, but not her long, high-necked dress and piled-up hair.
The range of times and places she could be without creating an incongruity just by her appearance was very limited, and most of them were civilized, thank goodness.
“May I help you, sir?” the shop assistant said, looking at my mustache disapprovingly. I’d forgotten about it. Had men been clean-shaven in the 1930s? Hercule Poirot had had a mustache, hadn’t he?
“May I help you, sir?” she repeated, more severely. “Is there a particular book you are looking for?”
“Yes,” I said. And what books would they have had in Blackwell’s in Nineteen-Thirty-What? The Lord of the Rings? No, that was later. Goodbye Mr. Chips? That had been published in 1934, but what was this? I couldn’t see a date on that salespad of the shop assistant’s, and the last thing we needed, with the continuum falling down around our ears, was another incongruity.
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” I said to be safe. “By Gibbon.”
“That would be on the the first floor,” she said. “In History.”
I didn’t want to go up to the first floor. I wanted to stay close to the drop. What was on this floor? Eighty years from now, it would be metafiction and self-writes, but I doubted they had either here. Through the Looking Glass? No, what if children’s lit was already in a separate shop?
“The stairs up to the first floor are just there, sir,” she said, removing her pencil from behind her ear and pointing with it.
“Have you Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat?” I said.
“I will have to check,” she said, and started toward the rear.
“To Say Nothing of the Dog,” I called after her, and, as soon as she had rounded a bookcase, darted back to my corner.
I had been half-hoping the net would be open, or faintly shimmering in preparation, but there was nothing in the ceiling-to-floor rows of books to indicate it had ever been there. Or to give me a clue to what year I was in.
I began taking down books and opening them to the title page. 1904. 1930. 1921. 1756. That’s the trouble with books. They’re timeless. 1892.1914. No date. I flipped the page over. Still no date. I flipped the page back again and read the title. No wonder. Herodotus’s History, which the Colonel and Professor Peddick had been reading only yesterday.
The bell over the door jangled. I peered carefully round the corner, hoping it was Verity. It was three middle-aged women in fur stoles and angle-brimmed hats.
They stopped just inside the door, brushing snow lovingly off their furs as if they were pets, and talking in high nasal tones.
“. . . and eloped with him!” the one on the right said. Her fur looked like a flattened version of Princess Arjumand. “So romantic!”
“But a farmer!” the middle one said. Her fur looked more like Cyril and was nearly as wide.
“I don’t care if he is a farmer,” the third one said. “I’m glad she married him.” She had the best fur of all, an entire string of foxes with their heads still on and bright little glass eyes. “If she hadn’t, she’d still be trapped in Oxford, serving on church committees and running jumble sales. Now, what was it I wanted to buy? I said to Harold this morning, I must remember to buy that when I go to Blackwell’s. Now, what could it have been?”
“I must get something for my godchild for her birthday,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said. “What should I get? Alice, I suppose, though I’ve never understood why children like it. Going from place to place with no rhyme or reason. Appearing and disappearing.”
“Oh, look!” the string of foxes said. She had picked up a book with a green dust jacket from a display table. Her fox-colored gloved hand was over the title, but I could see the author’s name: Agatha Christie.
“Have you read her latest?” she said to the others.
“No,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said.
“Yes,” the Princess Arjumand said, “and it—”
“Stop,” the string of foxes said, raising her gloved hand in warning. “Don’t tell me the ending.” She turned back to Cyril. “Cora always ruins the ending. Do you remember The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?”
“That was different. You wanted to know what all the fuss in the papers was about, Miriam,” the Princess Arjumand said defensively. “I couldn’t explain it without telling who the murderer was. At any rate, this one isn’t anything like Roger Ackroyd. There’s this girl who someone is attempting to murder, or at least that’s what one’s supposed to think. Actually—”
“Don’t tell me the ending,” the Little Foxes said.
“I didn’t intend to,” the Princess Arjumand said with dignity. “I was simply going to say that what you think is the crime, isn’t, and things aren’t at all what they seem.”
“Like in The Fountain Pen Mystery,” the Cyril-draped one said. “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The first one had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed, and the murderer—”
“Don’t tell me,” the Little Foxes said, clapping fox-gloved hands to her ears.
“The butler did it,” the Cyril said.
“I thought you hadn’t read it,” the Little Foxes said, taking her hands down from her ears.
“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s always the butler,” and the lights went out.
But it was daytime, and even if something had happened to the electricity, there would still be enough light from Blackwell’s bow windows to see by.
I put my hand out to the bookshelf in front of me and felt it cautiously. It felt clammy and hard, like stone. I took a cautious step toward it. And nearly pitched forward into emptiness.
My foot was half over a void. I reeled back, staggered, and sat down hard on more stone. A staircase. I felt around, patting the rough stone wall, reaching down. A winding staircase, with narrow wedge-shaped steps, which meant I was in a tower. Or a dungeon.
The air had a cold, mildewy smell, which probabl
y meant it wasn’t a dungeon. A dungeon would smell a good deal worse. But if it were a tower, light should be filtering in from a slit window somewhere above, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. A dungeon.
Or, I thought hopefully, the erratic bouncing had given me such a case of time-lag I’d gone completely blind.
I fumbled in my pockets for a match and struck it on the wall.No such luck. Rock walls, stone steps loomed up around me. Definitely a dungeon. Which meant I probably wasn’t in Oxford in 2018. Or 1933.
The Seventeenth Century had been big on dungeons. Ditto the Sixteenth through the Twelfth. Before that England had run mostly to pigsties and stick huts. Wonderful. Trapped in a Norman dungeon in the Middle Ages.
Or a corner of the Tower of London, in which case tourists would come trooping up the stairs in a few minutes. But somehow I didn’t think so. The steps, in the brief light of the match, had looked unworn, and when I felt along the wall, there weren’t any safety railings.
“Verity!” I shouted down into the blackness. My voice echoed off stone and silence.
I stood, bracing myself against the wall with both hands, and started carefully up, feeling for the edge of the narrow step with my foot. One step. Two. “Verity! Are you here?”
Nothing. I felt for the next step. “Verity!”
I put my foot on the step. It gave under my weight. I started to fall, flailing wildly, trying to catch myself and scraping my hand. I slid two steps and came down hard on one knee.
And if Verity was here, she had to have heard that. But I called again. “Verity!”
There was an explosion of sound, a violent flapping and whirring of wings that sounded like it was diving straight for me. Bats. Wonderful. I flung an arm I couldn’t see in front of my face.
The flapping intensified, but though my eyes strained through the darkness, I couldn’t see.
The flapping was coming straight at me. A wing brushed my arm. Wonderful. The bats couldn’t see either. I flailed at the darkness, and the flapping grew more frantic and then subsided, flying off above me, and I sat down very slowly and silently.
To Say Nothing of the Dog Page 46
