“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!”
“And calves’ foot jelly,” I said.
“Calves’ foot jelly?” he said, looking at me curiously.
“For the sick,” I said. “Only I don’t think the sick eat it. I wouldn’t eat it. I think they give it to the next jumble sale. It makes the rounds from year to year. Like fruitcake.”
“Yes, well,” he said, frowning. “So now a stone has been turned, and she’s created a serious problem, which is what I wanted to see you about. Sit down, sit down,” he said, motioning me toward a leather armchair.
Finch got there first with a fax-mag, murmuring, “So difficult to get soot out of leather.”
“And take off your hat. Good Lord,” Mr. Dunworthy said, adjusting his spectacles, “you look dreadful. Where have you been?”
“The soccer field,” I said.
“I gather it was a somewhat rough game.”
“I found him in the pedestrian gate by Merton’s playing fields,” Finch explained.
“I thought he was in Infirmary.”
“He climbed out the window.”
“Ah,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “But how did he get in this condition?”
“I was looking for the bishop’s bird stump,” I said.
“On Merton’s playing fields?”
“In the cathedral ruins just before he was brought to Infirmary,” Finch said helpfully.
“Did you find it?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“No,” I said, “and that’s the reason I came to see you. I wasn’t able to finish searching the ruins, and Lady Schrapnell—”
“—is the least of our worries. Which is something I never thought I’d find myself saying,” he said ruefully. “I gather Mr. Finch has explained the situation?”
“Yes. No,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better review it for me.”
“A crisis has developed regarding the net. I’ve notified Time Travel and — Finch did Chiswick say when he’d be here?”
“I’ll check on it, sir,” he said, and went out.
“A very serious situation,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “One of our historians—”
Finch came back in. “He’s on his way over,” he said.
“Good,” Dunworthy said. “Before he gets here, the situation is this: One of our historians stole a fan and brought it back through the net with her.”
A fan. Well, that made a good deal more sense than a rat. Or a cab. And it explained the pinching part. “Like Lady Windermere’s mother,” I said.
“Lady Windermere’s mother?” Mr. Dunworthy said, looking sharply at Finch.
“Advanced time-lag, sir,” Finch said. “Disorientation, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, tendency to sentimentalize, impaired ability to reason logically,” he said, emphasizing the last two words.
“Advanced?” Dunworthy said. “How many drops have you made?”
“Fourteen this week. Ten jumble sales and six bishops’ wives. No, thirteen. I keep forgetting Mrs. Bittner. She was in Coventry. Not the Coventry I was in just now. Coventry today.”
“Bittner,” Mr. Dunworthy said curiously. “This wasn’t Elizabeth Bittner, was it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “The widow of the last bishop of Coventry Cathedral.”
“Good Lord, I haven’t seen her in years,” he said. “I knew her back in the early days when we were first experimenting with the net. Wonderful girl. The first time I saw her I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Too bad she had to fall in love with Bitty Bittner. She was absolutely devoted to him. How did she look?”
Hardly like a girl, I thought. She’d been a frail, white-haired old lady who had seemed ill-at-ease through the whole interview. She had probably thought Lady Schrapnell was going to recruit her and send her off to the Middle Ages. “She looked very well,” I said. “She said she had some difficulty with arthritis.”
“Arthritis,” he said, shaking his head. “Hard to imagine Lizzie Bittner with arthritis. What did you go and see her for? She wasn’t even born when the old Coventry Cathedral burned down.”
“Lady Schrapnell thought the bishop’s bird stump might have been stored in the crypt of the new cathedral and that since Mrs. Bittner was there when the cathedral was sold, she might have supervised the cleaning out of the crypt and have seen it.”
“And had she?”
“No, sir. She said it had been destroyed in the fire.”
“I remember when they had to sell Coventry Cathedral,” he said. “People had lost interest in religion, attendance was down at the services… Lizzie Bittner,” he said fondly. “Arthritis. I suppose her hair’s not red anymore either?”
“Preoccupation with irrelevancies,” Finch said loudly. “Miss Jenkins said Mr. Henry had a severe case of time-lag.”
“Miss Jenkins?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“The nurse who examined Mr. Henry at Infirmary.”
“Lovely creature,” I said. “A ministering angel, whose gentle hands have soothed many a fevered brow.”
Finch and Mr. Dunworthy exchanged looks.
“She said it was the worst case of time-lag she’d ever seen,” Finch said.
“Which is why I came to see you,” I said. “She’s prescribed two weeks of uninterrupted bed rest, and Lady Schrapnell—”
“Will never allow that,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “The cathedral’s consecration is only seventeen days away.”
“I tried to tell the nurse that, sir, but she wouldn’t listen. She told me to go to my rooms and go to bed.”
“No, no, first place Lady Schrapnell would look. Finch, where is she?”
“In London. She just phoned from the Royal Free.”
I started up out of the chair.
“I told her there’d been a mistake in communications,” Finch said, “that Mr. Henry’d been taken to the Royal Masonic.”
“Good. Ring up the Royal Masonic and tell them to keep her there.”
“I’ve already done so,” Finch said.
“Excellent,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Sit down, Ned. Where was I?”
“Lady Windermere’s fan,” Finch said.
“Only it wasn’t a fan the historian brought through the net,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “It was—”
“Did you say brought through the net?” I said. “You can’t bring anything through the net from the past. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Apparently not,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
There was a scuffling sound in the outer office. “I thought you said she was at the Royal Free,” Mr. Dunworthy said to Finch, and a short, harried-looking man burst in. He was wearing a lab coat and carrying a bleeping handheld, and I recognized him as the head of Time Travel.