To Say Nothing of the Dog (57 page)

The young woman looked younger than Tossie, but probably wasn’t. She was wearing a wedding ring. She vaguely reminded me of someone. It wasn’t Verity, though her determined expression made me think of Verity. And not Lady Schrapnell or any of her ancestors. Somebody I’d met at one of my jumble sales?

I squinted at her, trying to get a fix. Her hair was wrong. Should it be lighter? Reddish-blonde, perhaps?

She stood there a long minute with the look Verity had had—frightened, angry, determined—and then walked rapidly in the direction of the computers and out of my line of sight.

Silence again. I listened for the quiet click of keys, hoping she wasn’t setting up a drop. Or typing in directions for the veils to rise.

I couldn’t see from this angle. I moved carefully to the next break in the curtain and peered through. She was standing in front of the comps, staring at them, or, rather, past them, through them, with that same look of determination.

And something else I’d never seen on Verity’s face, not even when Terence had told us he and Tossie were engaged, an edge of reckless desperation.

There was a sound at the door. She turned and immediately started toward the door. And out of range again. And the person at the door obviously had a key. By the time I’d moved back to my original vantage point, he was standing in the open door, looking at her.

He was wearing jeans and a ragged sweater and spectacles. His hair was light brown and the longish indeterminate cut historians adopt because it can be maneuvered into almost any era’s style, and he looked familiar, too, though it was probably just the expression on his face, which I would have known anywhere. I should. It was the expression I had every time I looked at Verity.

He was holding a fat stack of papers and folders, and he still had the key to the lab in his hand.

“Hullo, Jim,” she said, her back to me, and I wished I could see her face, too.

“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 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.