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“I… I’m not certain about that,” I said, and realized how much I was going to miss him. “Goodbye, Cyril.” I leaned down to pat him on the head.
“Nonsense. You’re looking much better since we’ve been at Muchings End. You’ll be entirely cured by Michaelmas term. We’ll have such jolly times on the river,” Terence said, and was gone, Cyril trotting happily after him.
“I want them out of this house immediately,” Mrs. Mering’s voice said, overwrought, and we both looked up the stairs.
A door slammed overhead. “Absolutely out of the question!” Mrs. Mering said, and then the low sound of voices murmuring. “…and tell them…”
More murmuring. “I want you to go downstairs immediately and tell them. This is all due to them!”
More murmuring, and then, “If she’d been a proper chaperone this would never ha—”
A door shutting cut her off, and a minute later Colonel Mering came down the stairs, looking extremely embarrassed.
“All been too much for my poor dear wife,” he said, looking at the carpet. “Her nerves. Very delicate. Rest and absolute quiet is what she needs. Think it best you go to your aunt in London, Verity, and you back to—” He looked at a loss.
“To Oxford,” I said.
“Ah, yes, to your studies. Sorry about this,” Colonel Mering said to the carpet. “Glad to arrange for the carriage.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said.
“No trouble,” he said. “Will have Baine tell—” he stopped, looking lost.
“I’ll see that Miss Brown gets to the station,” I said.
He nodded. “Must go see to my dear wife,” he said, and started up the stairs.
Verity went after him. “Colonel Mering,” she said, following him halfway up the stairs. “I don’t think you should disown your daughter.”
He looked embarrassed. “Afraid Malvinia’s quite determined. Dreadful shock, you know. Butler and all that.”
“Baine — I mean, Mr. Callahan — did prevent Tossie’s cat from eating your Black Moor,” she said.
Wrong thing to say. “He didn’t prevent it from eating my globe-eyed nacreous ryunkin,” he said angrily. “Cost two hundred pounds.”
“But he did take Princess Arjumand with him so she can’t eat any more of your goldfish,” she said persuasively, “and he prevented Madame Iritosky from stealing Aunt Malvinia’s ruby necklace. And he’s read Gibbon.” She put her hands on the newel post and looked up at him. “And she is your only daughter.”
Colonel Mering looked down at me for support. “What do you think, Henry? Will this butler fellow make her a good husband?”
“He has her best interests at heart,” I said firmly.
The Colonel shook his head. “Afraid my wife is quite determined never to speak to her again. Said from this moment forth, Tossie is dead to her.” He went sadly up the stairs.
“But she’s a spiritist,” Verity said, pursuing him. “She is quite capable of speaking to the dead.”
His face lit up. “Capital idea! Could have a séance.” He went happily up the stairs. “Loves séances. Could rap out, ‘Forgive.’ Bound to work. Never thought all that medium poppycock would be of any use.”
He rapped loudly three times on the banister. “Capital idea!”
He started down the corridor and then stopped and put his hand on Verity’s arm. “Should pack and depart for the station as soon as possible. Your own best interests at heart. Nerves, you know.”
“I quite understand,” Verity said and opened the door to her room. “Mr. Henry and I shall be gone directly.” She shut her door behind her.
Colonel Mering disappeared down the corridor. A door opened and shut, but not before Mrs. Mering’s voice had boomed out like the Red Queen’s, “…gone yet? I thought I told you—”
Time to depart.
I went upstairs and into my room. I opened the wardrobe and got out my carpetbag. I set it on the bed and then sat down beside it and thought about what had just happened. The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.
But why had it sent us to Coventry’s air raid, a crisis point, where presumably we could do a lot more damage? Or was Coventry a crisis point?
Its being off-limits had seemed to indicate it was a crisis point, and logically Ultra’s involvement should make it one, but perhaps the raid was only off-limits when we were looking for the bishop’s bird stump, because Verity and I had already been there. Perhaps it had been off-limits to give us a clear field.
To do what? To watch Provost Howard take candlesticks and Regimental Colors to the police station and see that the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t among the things saved? To see that it wasn’t in the church during the raid?
I would have given anything not to have seen that, not to have to tell Lady Schrapnell. But it was definitely not there. I wondered who had stolen it and when.
It had to have been that afternoon. Carruthers said the Flower Committee biddy Miss Sharpe had said she’d seen the bishop’s bird stump when she left the cathedral after the Advent Bazaar and Soldiers’ Christmas Parcel Effort meeting, that she’d stopped and pulled three dead flowers out of it.
Everything started to shift, the way it had when Finch said, “You’re on Merton’s playing fields,” and I grabbed for the bedpost like it was the pedestrian gate.
A door slammed. “Jane!” Mrs. Mering’s voice said from the corridor. “Where is my black bombazine?”
“Here, mum,” Jane’s voice said.
“O, this won’t do at all!” Mrs. Mering’s voice again. “It’s entirely too heavy for June. We shall have to order mourning clothes from Swan and Edgar’s. They had a lovely soft black crepe with jet trim on the bodice and a pleated underskirt.”
A pause, either for weeping or wardrobe-pla
“Jane! I want you to take this note over to Notting Hill. And not a word to Mrs. Chattisbourne. Do you hear?” Slam.
“Yes, mum,” Jane said timidly.
I stood there, still clutching the bedpost, trying to recall the idea, the odd sensation I’d had a moment ago, but it was gone, as quickly as it had come, and that must have been what had happened to Mrs. Mering there in the cathedral. She hadn’t had a message from the spirit world, or from Lady Godiva either. She had looked at Baine and Tossie, and for an instant things had shifted into their true orientation, and she had seen what was happening, what was going to happen.
And then she must have lost it, because otherwise she’d have dismissed Baine on the spot and sent Tossie off on a Grand Tour of Europe. It must have gone as instantly as it came, the way mine just had, and that odd, chipped-tooth-probing look of hers had been her trying to remember what had triggered it.
The butler did it. “If I can ever do anything to repay you for returning Princess Arjumand, I should be more than obliged,” Baine had said, and he certainly had repaid me. In spades. “The butler did it,” Verity had said, and he certainly had.
Only not Verity. The fur-bearing woman in Blackwell’s. “The butler always does it,” she said, and the other one, the one with the Cyril-like fur draped over her shoulders, had said, “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The real crime had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed.” The real crime. A crime the person was unaware of having committed. And something else. About someone marrying a farmer.
“But a butler!” Mrs. Mering’s anguished voice cried from down the corridor, followed by placating murmurs.
“Never should have let them stay in the first place!” Colonel Mering said.
“If she hadn’t met Mr. St. Trewes,” Mrs. Mering wailed, “she’d never have been thinking about marriage.” Her voice died away into sobbing murmurs, and it was nice to know other people second-guessed their actions, but it was definitely time to go.