To Say Nothing of the Dog (18 page)

“I will,” I said.

She retrieved the white parasol from underneath the kneeling rail and started toward the door, and then stopped and smiled. “And if you meet anyone named Chaucer or Churchill, send them along to Muchings—”

“Your carriage, miss,” Baine said, looming in the door.

“Thank you, Baine,” she said coldly and swept past him.

Terence was handing Tossie into the carriage. “I do hope we shall meet again, Mr. St. Trewes,” Tossie said, no longer pouting. “We take the train home this evening to Muchings End. Do you know it? It’s on the river, just below Streatley.”

Terence took off his boater and held it over his heart. “ ‘Till then, good-bye, fair one, adieu!’ ”

The carriage lurched forward. “Baine!” Tossie protested.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” Baine said and clucked the reins.

“Goodbye,” Tossie called back to us, waving a handkerchief and everything else on her person. “Goodbye, Mr. St. Trewes!” The landau rolled away.

Terence watched it till it was out of sight.

“We’d better go,” I said. “Professor Peddick will be waiting.”

He sighed, looking longingly after the dust cloud it had left. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We must start immediately for Muchings End,” he said, and started down the hill.

“We can’t,” I said, trotting after him. “We have to take Professor Peddick back to Oxford, and what about his agèd relicts? If they’re on the afternoon train, they’ll need to be met.”

“I’ll arrange with Trotters to meet them. He owes me a favor for that translation of Lucretius I did,” he said without stopping. “It will only take an hour to row Peddick back. We can put him off at Magdalen by four. That will still give us four hours of daylight. We should be able to make it past Culham Lock. That will put us at Muchings End by noon tomorrow.

And so much for my blithely promising Verity to keep Terence away from Tossie, I thought, following him down to the boat.

It wasn’t there.

“
This is the cat

That killed the rat

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.”

Mother Goose

C H A P T E R S E V E N

Importance of Locks in Victorian Era—“Loose lips sink ships”—Tristan and Isolde—Pursuit—The French Revolution—An Argument Against Tipping—A Traumatized Cat—Soot—The Bataan Death March—Sleep—The Boat Is Found at Last—An Unexpected Development—Importance of Meetings to History—Lennon and McCartney—I Search for a Tin-Opener—What I Found

Cyril was there, in the same position in which we had left him, his head disconsolately pressed against his paws, his brown eyes reproachful.

“Cyril!” Terence said. “Where’s the boat?”

Cyril sat up and looked round in surprise.

“You were supposed to guard the boat,” Terence said sternly. “Who took it, Cyril?”

“Could it have drifted off, do you think?” I said, thinking about the half-hitch.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Terence said. “It’s obviously been stolen.”

“Perhaps Professor Peddick came and got it,” I said, but Terence was already halfway across the bridge.

When we caught up to him, he was looking downstream at the river. There was no one on it except for a mallard duck.

“Whoever stole it must have taken it back up the river,” Terence said, and ran the rest of the way across the river and back up to the lock.

The lock-keeper was standing on top of the lock, poking at the sluice with his boathook.

“Did our boat go back through the lock?” Terence shouted to him.

The lock-keeper put his hand to his ear and shouted back, “What?”

“Our boat!” Terence shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Did it go back through the lock?”

“What?” he bellowed back.

“Did our boat,” Terence said, pantomiming the shape of a boat, “go back—” he made a sweeping motion upriver, “through the lock?” He pointed exaggeratedly at the lock.

“Boats go through the lock?” the lock-keeper shouted. “Of course boats go through the lock. What else do you think it’s for?”

I glanced around, looking for someone, anyone else who might have seen the boat, but Iffley was completely deserted. Not even the churchwarden was in evidence, putting up “No shouting” signs. I remembered Tossie had said he was having his tea.

“No!
Our
boat!” Terence shouted. He pointed first at himself and then at me. “Did it go back through the lock?”

The lock-keeper looked indignant. “No, you can’t go through the lock without a boat! What sort of foolery are you up to?”

“No,”
Terence shouted. “Someone’s stolen the boat we hired!”

“Wire?” The lock-keeper shook his head. “The nearest telegraph’s in Abingdon.”

“No. Not
wire. Hired!”

“Liar?” he said and raised his pole threateningly. “ ‘Oo you callin’ a liar?”

“No one,” Terence said, backing up.
“Hired!
The boat we hired!”

The lock-keeper shook his head again. “What you want’s Folly Bridge. Man name of Jabez.”

Cyril and I wandered back down to the bridge, and I stood there, leaning over it and thinking about what Verity had told me. She’d saved a cat from drowning and then stepped into the net with it, and the net had opened.

So it must not have caused an incongruity, because if it would have, the net wouldn’t have opened. That’s what had happened the first ten times Leibowitz had tried to go back to assassinate Hitler. The eleventh he’d ended up in Bozeman, Montana in 1946. And nobody’s ever been able to get close to Ford’s Theater or Pearl Harbor or the Ides of March. Or Coventry.

I thought T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy were probably right about the increased slippage around Coventry, and I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to us before. Coventry was obviously a crisis point.

Not because the raid had done significant damage. The Luftwaffe had only damaged, not destroyed, the aircraft and munitions factories, and they were up and running again within three months. They’d destroyed the cathedral, of course, which had enlisted outrage and sympathy from the States, but even that hadn’t been critical. The Blitz had already stirred up plenty of American support, and Pearl Harbor was only three weeks away.

What was critical was Ultra, and the Enigma machine which we’d smuggled out of Poland and were using to decipher the Nazis’ codes, and which, if the Nazis had found out we had it, could have changed the course of the entire war.

And Ultra had warned us of the raid on Coventry. Only obliquely, until late in the afternoon of the fourteenth, which had made it impossible to do more than notify Command and take impromptu defensive measures, and those (because history’s a chaotic system) had cancelled each other out. Command had decided the main attack would be on London, no matter what Intelligence said, and sent their planes up accordingly, and the attempts to jam the pathfinder beams had failed because of an error in calculations.

But secrets are always pivotal events. A stray word could have endangered the safety of the Intelligence setup. And if something, anything, had happened to make the Nazis suspicious—if the cathedral had been miraculously saved or the entire RAF had shown up over Coventry, even if someone had talked—“Loose lips sink ships”—they would have changed their code-machines. And we would have lost the battles of El Alamein and the North Atlantic. And World War II.

Which explained why Carruthers and the new recruit and I had ended up in the rubble and the marrows field. Because around a crisis point, even the tiniest action can assume importance all out of proportion to its size. Consequences multiply and cascade, and anything—a missed telephone call, a match struck during a blackout, a dropped piece of paper, a single moment—can have empire-tottering effects.

The Archduke Ferdinand’s chauffeur makes a wrong turn onto Franz-Josef Street and starts a world war. Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard steps outside for a smoke and destroys a peace. Hitler leaves orders not to be disturbed because he has a migraine and finds out about the D-Day invasion eighteen hours too late. A lieutenant fails to mark a telegram “urgent” and Admiral Kimmel isn’t warned of the impending Japanese attack. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.”

And around those attractors, there was radically increased slippage and net closures.

Which must mean Muchings End wasn’t a crisis point, and the cat hadn’t changed history, particularly since it would only have required a few minutes’ slippage to prevent the whole thing. Verity wouldn’t even have had to have ended up in Bozeman, Montana. If she’d come through five minutes later, the cat would already have gone under. Five minutes earlier, and she’d have been inside the house and missed the whole thing.

And it wasn’t as if this were Queen Victoria’s cat (in spite of her name) or Gladstone’s or Oscar Wilde’s. It was hardly in a position to affect world events, and 1888 wasn’t a critical year. The Indian Mutiny had ended in 1859 and the Boer War wouldn’t start for another eleven years. “And it’s only a cat,” I said out loud.

Cyril looked up, alarmed.

“Not here,” I said. “It’s probably safely back at Muchings End by now,” but Cyril got up and began looking warily about.

“No! Thieves, not sheaves!” Terence was yelling, his voice drifting toward us over the water. “Thieves!”

“Sieves?” the lock-keeper bellowed back. “This is a lock, not an ironmonger’s.”

Eventually, he waved his arm dismissively at Terence and went inside the lockhouse.

Terence hurried over. “Whoever took it went that way,” he said. “The lock-keeper pointed downstream.”

I was not at all sure of that. It seemed to me just as likely that the gesture had meant, “Go on, I’ve had it with talking to you,” or even, “Get the bloody hell out of here!” And the opposite direction was better in regard to keeping Terence away from Tossie.

“Are you certain?” I said. “I thought he pointed upstream.”

“No,” Terence said, already across the bridge. “Definitely downstream, and galloped off down the towpath.

“We’d better hurry,” I said to Cyril, “or we’ll never catch up to him,” and we set off after him, past the straggle of Iffley’s cottages and a line of tall poplars and up a low hill, from which we could see a long stretch of river. It glittered emptily. “Are you sure they went this way?”

He nodded without slackening his pace. “And we’ll find them and get the boat back. Tossie and I are meant to be together, and no obstacle can keep us apart. It’s fated, like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Héloïse and Abelard.”

I didn’t point out that all of the aforementioned had ended up dead or severely handicapped, because it was all I could do to keep up. Cyril wobbled after us, panting.

“When we catch up to them, we’ll go back and fetch Professor Peddick and take him back to Oxford and then row down below Abingdon and camp for the night,” Terence said. “It’s only three locks away. If we work at it, we should be able to make Muchings End by teatime tomorrow.”

Not if I could help it. “Won’t that be a rather tiring journey?” I said. “My physician said I wasn’t to overtire myself.”

“You can nap while I row. Tea’s the best time. They have to ask you to stay, it’s not like dinner or something, it doesn’t require a formal invitation or dressing or anything. We should be able to make Reading by noon.”

“But I’d hoped to see some of the sights along the river,” I said, racking my brain to think what they were. Hampton Court? No, that was below Henley. So was Windsor Castle. What had the three men in a boat stopped to look at? Tombs. Harris was always wanting to stop and look at somebody or other’s tomb.

“I’d hoped to see some tombs,” I said.

“Tombs?” he said. “There aren’t any interesting ones along the river, except for Richard Tichell’s at Hampton Church. He threw himself out of one of the windows of Hampton Court Palace. And at any rate, Hampton Church is past Muchings End. If Colonel Mering likes us, we might be asked to dinner. Do you know anything about Japan?”

“Japan?” I said.

“That’s where the fish are from,” he said obscurely. “The best thing, of course, would be if we were asked to stay a week, but he doesn’t like houseguests, says it disturbs them. The fish, I mean. And he went to Cambridge. Perhaps we could pretend to be spiritualists. Mrs. Mering’s mad for spirits. Did you pack evening clothes?”

The time-lag must be catching up with me. “Do spiritualists wear evening clothes?” I asked.

“No, long, flowing robe sort of things, with sleeves you can hide tambourines and cheesecloth and things in. No, for dinner, in case we’re asked.”

I had no idea whether there were evening clothes in my luggage or not. When we caught up to the boat,
if
we caught up to the boat, I needed to go through my bags and see exactly what Warder and Finch had sent with me.

“It’s too bad we haven’t found Princess Arjumand,” Terence said. “That would get us an invitation to stay. The lost lamb and the fatted calf and all that. Did you see Tossie when she ran down the bank and asked me if I’d found her? She was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. Her curls bright as gold and her eyes, ‘blue as the fairy-flax, her cheeks like the dawn of day!’ No, brighter! Like carnations! Or roses!”

We went on, Terence comparing Tossie’s various features to lilies, berries, pearls, and spun gold, Cyril thinking longingly of shade, and me thinking about Louis the Sixteenth.

It was true that Princess Arjumand wasn’t Queen Victoria’s cat and Muchings End wasn’t Midway Island, but look at Drouét. He hadn’t been anybody either, an illiterate French peasant who normally would never have made it into the history books.

Except that Louis the Sixteenth, escaping from France with Marie Antoinette, leaned out the window of his carriage to ask Drouét directions, and then, in one of those minor actions that change the course of history, tipped him a banknote. With his picture on it.