To Say Nothing of the Dog (4 page)

The nurse said, “He’s showing undue anxiety, which isn’t a usual symptom. I want to run a scan to see if I can find out the source of the anxiety.”

I could tell her right now the source of my anxiety, which was
not
undue, if she’d only listen, which wasn’t likely. And fierce though she was, she was no match for Lady Schrapnell.

I couldn’t stay here. When you have a scan, they strap you into a long enclosed tube for an hour and a half and communicate with you by microphone. I could hear Lady Schrapnell’s voice booming at me through the earphones,
“There
youare. Come out of that contraption immediately!”

I couldn’t stay here, and I couldn’t go back to my rooms. They were the first place she’d look. Perhaps I could find somewhere in the infirmary and sleep long enough to be able to think clearly what to do.

Mr. Dunworthy, I thought. If anyone could find me somewhere quiet and unlikely to hide, it would be Mr. Dunworthy. I put the paper gown, somewhat soot-smudged, back in the drawer, tugged on my boots, and climbed out the window.

Balliol was just down the Woodstock Road from Infirmary, but I didn’t dare risk it. I went round to the ambulance entrance, up to Adelaide and through a yard to Walton Street. If Somerville was open, I could cut through its quad to Little Clarendon and down Worcester to the Broad, and come in through Balliol’s back gate.

Somerville was open, but the journey took a good deal longer than I thought it would, and when I did reach the gate, something had happened to it. It had been twisted in on itself, and the ironwork scrolls had been bent into prongs and hooks and points, which kept catching on my coveralls.

At first I thought it was bomb damage, but that couldn’t be right. The Luftwaffe was supposed to hit London tonight. And the gate, including prongs and points, had been painted a bright green.

I tried sidling through crabwise, but the epaulet on my non-AFS uniform caught on one of the hooks, and when I tried to back out, I got even more entangled. I flailed about wildly, trying to free myself.

“Let me help you there, sir,” a polite voice said, and I turned around, as much as I was able, and saw Mr. Dunworthy’s secretary.

“Finch,” I said. “Thank God you’re here. I was just coming to see Mr. Dunworthy.”

He unhooked the epaulet and took hold of my sleeve. “This way, sir,” he said, “no, not that way, through here, that’s it. No, no,
this
ways,” and led me, finally, to freedom.

But on the same side I’d been when I started. “This is no good, Finch,” I said. “We’ve still got to get through that gate into Balliol.”

“That’s Merton, sir,” he said. “You’re on their playing fields.”

I turned and looked where he was pointing. Finch was right. There was the soccer field, and beyond it the cricket ground, and beyond that, in Christ Church Meadow, the scaffolding-and-blue-plastic-covered spire of Coventry Cathedral.

“How did Balliol’s gate get here?” I said.

“This is Merton’s pedestrian gate.”

I squinted at the gate. Right again. It was a turnstile gate, designed to keep bicycles out.

“The nurse said you were time-lagged, but I had no idea . . . No, this way.” He took hold of my arm and propelled me along the path.

“The nurse?” I said.

“Mr. Dunworthy sent me over to Infirmary to fetch you, but you’d already left,” he said, guiding me between buildings and out onto the High. “He wants to see you, though what use you’ll be to him in your condition I can’t quite see.”

“He wants to see
me?”
I said, confused. I had thought I was the one who wanted to see him. I thought of something else. “How did he know I was in Infirmary?”

“Lady Schrapnell phoned him,” he said, and I dived for cover.

“It’s all right,” Finch said, following me into the shop doorway I’d ducked into. “Mr. Dunworthy told her you’d been taken to the Royal Free Hospital in London. It’ll take her at least half an hour to get there.” He pulled me forcibly out of the doorway and across the High. “Personally, I think he should have told her you’d been taken to Manhattan General. How
do
you put up with her?”

You keep a sharp eye out, I thought, following Finch into the walkway next to St. Mary the Virgin’s and keeping close to the wall.

“She has no sense of the proper way of doing things,” he said. “Won’t go through the proper channels, won’t fill up requisition forms. She simply
raids
the place—paper clips, pens, handhelds.”

And historians, I thought.

“I never have any idea of what supplies to order, if I had time to order anything. I spend all my time trying to keep her out of Mr. Dunworthy’s office. She’s in there constantly, harping on something. Copings and brasses and lectionaries. Last week it was the Wade Tomb’s chipped corner. How did it get chipped and when did it get chipped, before the raid or during it, and what sort of edges does it have, rough or smooth? Must be completely authentic, she says. ‘God is—’ ”

“ ‘In the details,’ ” I said.

“She even tried to recruit me,” Finch said. “Wanted me to go back to the Blitz and look for the bishop’s bathtub.”

“Bird stump,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said,” he said, looking hard at me. “You’re having difficulty distinguishing sounds, aren’t you? The nurse said you were. And you’re obviously disoriented.” He shook his head. “You’re not going to be any use at all.”

“What does Mr. Dunworthy want to see me about?”

“There’s been an incident.”

“Incident” was the euphemism the AFS employed to mean a high-explosive bomb, houses reduced to rubble, bodies buried, fires everywhere. But surely Finch didn’t mean that sort of incident. Or perhaps I was still having Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds.

“An incident?” I said.

“Calamity, actually. One of his historians. Nineteenth Century. Pinched a rat.”

Oh, definitely Difficulty, although there had been rats in the Victorian era. But no one would have pinched one. It would pinch you back, or worse. “What did you say?” I asked cautiously.

“I said, ‘Here we are,’ ” Finch said, and we were. There was Balliol’s gate, though not the side one, the front gate and the porter’s lodge and the front quad.

I started through the quad and up the stairs to Mr. Dunworthy’s room, but I was apparently still disoriented because Finch took my arm again and led me across the garden quad to Beard.

“Mr. Dunworthy’s had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak
or
the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy’s had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.”

He opened the door to what had been the buttery. It now looked like a physician’s waiting room, with a row of cushioned chairs against the wall and a pile of fax-mags on a small side table. Finch’s desk stood next to the inner door and practically in front of it, no doubt so Finch could fling himself between it and Lady Schrapnell.

“I’ll see if he’s in,” Finch said and started round the desk.

“Absolutely not!” Mr. Dunworthy’s voice thundered from within. “It’s completely out of the question!”

Oh, Lord, she was here. I shrank back against the wall, looking wildly for somewhere to hide.

Finch grabbed my sleeve, and hissed, “It’s not her,” but I had already deduced that.

“I don’t see why not,” a female voice had answered, and it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell, because it was sweet rather than stentorian, and I couldn’t make out what she said after “why not.”

“Who is it?” I whispered, relaxing in Finch’s grip.

“The calamity,” he whispered back.

“What on earth made you think you could bring something like that through the net?” Mr. Dunworthy bellowed. “You’ve studied temporal theory!”

Finch winced. “Shall I tell Mr. Dunworthy you’re here?” he asked hesitantly.

“No, that’s all right,” I said, sinking down on one of the chintz-covered chairs. “I’ll wait.”

“Why on earth did you take it into the net with you in the first place?” Mr. Dunworthy shouted.

Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me.

“I don’t need anything to read,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you.”

“I thought you might
sit
on the mag,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.”

I stood up and let him put the opened mag on the seat and then sat down again.

“If you were going to do something so completely irresponsible,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “why couldn’t you have waited till after the consecration?”

I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was rather pleasant listening to someone else being read out for a change, and by someone besides Lady Schrapnell, even though it was unclear what exactly the calamity was guilty of. Particularly when Mr. Dunworthy yelled, “That is no excuse. Why didn’t you simply pull the cab out of the water and leave it on the bank? Why did you have to carry it into the net with you?”

Cab-toting seemed even less likely than rat-pinching, and neither one seemed in need of rescue from a watery grave. Rats especially. They were always swimming away from sinking ships, weren’t they? And had they had taxis in the Nineteenth Century? Horse-drawn hansom cabs, but they were too heavy to carry even if they would fit into the net.

In books and vids, those being eavesdropped upon always thoughtfully explain what they are talking about for the edification of the eavesdropper. The eavesdroppee says, “Of course, as you all know, the cab to which I refer is Sherlock Holmes’s hansom cab which had been accidentally driven off a bridge during a heavy fog while following the Hound of the Baskervilles, and which I found it necessary to steal for the following reasons,” at which point said theft is fully explained to the person crouched behind the door. Sometimes a floor plan or map is thoughtfully provided next to the frontispiece.

No such consideration is given the croucher in real life. Instead of outlining the situation, the calamity said, “Because bane came back to make sure,” which only confused the issue further.

“Heartless monster,” she said, and it was unclear whether she was referring to the bane that had come back or to Mr. Dunworthy. “And it would only have gone back to the house, and he’d have tried it again. I didn’t want him to see me because he’d know I wasn’t a contemp and there wasn’t anyplace to hide but the net. He’d have seen me in the gazebo. I didn’t think—”

“Exactly, Miss Kindle,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “You didn’t think.”

“What are you going to do?” the calamity said. “Are you going to send it back? You’re going to drown it, aren’t you?”

“I do not intend to do anything until I have considered all the possibilities,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Utterly heartless,” she said.

“I am extremely fond of cabbies,” he said, “but there is a good deal at stake here. I must consider
all
the consequences and possibilities before acting. I realize that’s an alien notion to you.”

Cabbies? I wondered why he was so fond of them. I have always found them entirely too talkative, especially the ones during the Blitz, who apparently paid no attention to the admonition that “Loose lips sink ships.” They were always telling me how someone had been buried alive in the rubble or got blown up—“Head was all the way across the street in a shop window. Milliner’s. Riding in a taxi just like you are now.”

“Are you sending
me
back?” she said. “I told them I was going out sketching. If I don’t come back, they’ll think
I’ve
drowned.”

“I don’t know. Until I decide, I want you in your rooms.”

“Can I take it with me?”

“No.”

There was a sinister-sounding silence, and then the door opened, and there stood the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

Finch had said Nineteenth Century, and I’d expected hoop skirts, but she had on a long, greenish gown that clung to her slim body as if it were wet. Her auburn hair trailed about her shoulders and down her back like water weeds, and the whole effect was that of a Waterhouse nymph, rising like a wraith out of the dark water.

I stood up, gawping as foolishly as the new recruit, and took off my ARP helmet, wishing I had cleaned up when the nurse told me to.

She took hold of her long, trailing sleeve and wrung it out on the carpet. Finch grabbed a fax-mag and spread it under her.

“Oh, good, Ned, you’re here,” Mr. Dunworthy said from the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”

The nymph looked at me, and her eyes were a dark clear greenish-brown, the color of a forest pool. She narrowed them. “You’re not sending
that,
are you?” she said to Mr. Dunworthy.

“I’m not sending anyone. Or anything until I’ve thought about it. Now go change out of those wet clothes before you catch cold.”

She gathered up her dripping skirts with one hand, and started out. At the door she turned back, her rosy lips open to impart some final benediction, some last word to me perhaps of love and devotion. “Don’t feed her. She’s had an entire place,” she said, and drifted out the door.

I started after her, bewitched, but Mr. Dunworthy had his hand on my arm. “So Finch found you all right,” he said, steering me around behind Finch’s desk and into the inner office, “I was afraid you’d be off in 1940 at one of those church bazaars Lady Schrapnell keeps sending you to.”

Outside the window I could see her crossing the quad, dripping gracefully on the pavement, a lovely . . . what were they called? Dryads? No, those were the ones that lived in trees. Sirens?

Mr. Dunworthy came over to the window. “This is all Lady Schrapnell’s fault. Kindle’s one of my best historians. Six months with Lady Schrapnell,and look at her!” He waved his hand at me. “Look at you, for that matter. The woman’s like a high-explosive bomb!”

The siren passed out of my vision and into the mist she had emerged from, only that wasn’t right. Sirens lived on rocks and shipwrecked sailors. And it sounded like dryads. Delphides? No, those were the ones who went about predicting doom and disaster.

“. . . had no business sending her in the first place,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying. “I tried to tell her, but would she listen? Of course not. ‘No stone unturned,’ she says. Sends her off to the Victorian era. Sends you off to jumble sales to buy pincushions and tea towels!”