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“Women held little or no power in Victorian society,” the headrig said. Except Queen Victoria, I thought, and saw that Warder was coming toward me with a wet cloth. She scrubbed roughly at my face and hands and then smeared a white lotion above my upper lip.
“The role of the Victorian woman was that of nurse and helpmeet,” the headrig said, “of ‘the angel in the house.’ ”
“Don’t touch your lip,” Warder said, pulling the measuring tape from around her neck. “Your hair will have to do. There’s not enough time for fenoxidils.” She encircled my head with the tape. “Part it in the middle. I said, don’t touch your lip.”
“Women were thought to be too high-strung for formal education,” the subliminal said. “Their lessons were confined to drawing, music, and deportment.
“This whole thing’s ridiculous.” She wrapped the tape around my neck. “I should never have come to Oxford. Cambridge has a perfectly good degree in theatrical design. I could be costuming The Taming of the Shrew right now instead of doing three jobs at once.”
I stuck a finger between the tape and my Adam’s apple to prevent strangulation.
“Victorian women were sweet, softspoken, and submissive.”
“You know whose fault this is, don’t you?” she said, snapping the tape as she pulled it free. “Lady Schrapnell’s. Why on earth does she want to rebuild Coventry Cathedral anyway? She’s not even English. She’s an American! Just because she married a peer doesn’t mean she has the right to come over here to our country and start rebuilding our churches. They weren’t even married that long.”
She yanked my arm up and jammed the tape in my armpit. “And if she was going to rebuild something, why not something worthwhile, like Covent Garden Theatre? Or support the Royal Shakespeare or something? They were only able to mount two productions last season, and one of those was an old-fashioned nude production of Richard II from the 1990s. Of course, I suppose it would be asking too much of someone from Hollywood to appreciate art! Vids! Interactives!”
She took rapid, careless measurements of my chest, sleeve, and inseam, and disappeared, and I went back to my chairs, leaned my head against the wall, and thought about how peaceful it would be to be drowned.
This next part is a bit muddled. The headrig discussed Victorian table-settings, the All-Clear mutated into an air-raid siren, and the seraphim brought me a stack of folded trousers to try on, but I don’t remember any of it very clearly.
Finch lugged in a pile of Victorian luggage at one point — a portmanteau, a large carpetbag, a small satchel, a Gladstone bag, and two pasteboard boxes tied with string. I thought perhaps I was to choose from among them, like the trousers, but it developed that I was to take them all. Finch said, “I’ll fetch the rest,” and went out. The seraphim settled on a pair of white fla
“The oyster fork is placed on the soup spoon, tines angled toward the plate,” the headrig said. “The oyster spear is placed to its left. The shell is held steady in the left hand, and the oyster lifted whole from the shell, detaching it, if necessary, with the spear.”
I drowsed off several times and the seraphim shook me awake to try various articles of clothing on me and wipe off the white lotion.
I touched the new mustache gingerly. “How does it look?” I said.
“Lopsided,” the seraphim said, “but it can’t be helped. Did you pack a razor for him?”
“Yes,” Finch said, coming in with a large wicker hamper, “a pair of hairbrushes from the Ashmolean and a brush and soap mug. Here’s the money,” he said, handing me a wallet nearly the size of the portmanteau. “It’s mostly coins, I’m afraid. Bank notes from that era have deteriorated badly. There’s a bedroll, and I’ve packed the hamper full of provisions, and there are ti
“The fish fork is placed to the left of the meat and salad forks,” the headrig droned. “It is recognizable by its pointed, slanted tines.”
The seraphim handed me a shirt to try on. She was carrying a damp white dress over her arm. It had trailing sleeves. I thought about the water nymph, wringing it out on the carpet, the very picture of beauty. I wondered if water nymphs used fish forks and if they liked men with mustaches. Had Hylas had a mustache in the painting by Waterhouse? It was called Hylas and the… what? What were they called? It began with an “N.”
More muddled parts. I remember Finch coming in with more luggage, a covered wicker basket, and the seraphim tucking something in my waistcoat pocket, and Finch shaking me on the shoulder, asking me where Mr. Dunworthy was.
“He’s not here,” I said, but I was mistaken. He was standing next to the wicker basket, asking Finch what he’d found out.
“How much slippage was there on the drop?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“Nine minutes,” Finch said.
“Nine minutes?” he said, frowning. “What about her other drops?”
“Minimal. Two minutes to a half hour. The drop is in an isolated part of the grounds, so there isn’t much chance of being seen.”
“Except the one time it counted,” Mr. Dunworthy said, still frowning. “What about coming back?”
“Coming back?” Finch said. “There’s no slippage on return drops.”
“I am aware of that,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “but this is an unusual situation.”
“Yes, sir,” Finch said, and went over, conferred with Warder for a few minutes, and came back. “No slippage on the return drop.”
Mr. Dunworthy looked relieved.
“What about Hasselmeyer?” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“I have a message through to him.”
The door opened and T.J. Lewis hurried in with a thin stack of papers. “I’ve read the available research,” he said. “There’s not much. Setting up the necessary equipment to test for incongruities is extremely expensive. Time Travel was pla
“Fujisaki thinks they’re possible? What’s his theory?”
“He has two theories. One is that they’re not incongruities, that there are objects and events in the continuum that are nonsignificant.”
“How is that possible? In a chaotic system, every event is linked to every other.”
“Yes, but the system’s nonlinear,” T.J. said, looking at the papers, “with feedback and feedforward loops, redundancies and interference, so the effect of some objects and events is multiplied enormously, and in others it’s cancelled out.”
“And a parachronistic incongruity is an object whose removal has no effect?”
T.J. gri
“In which case the object shouldn’t be returned to its temporal location?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.
“In which case it probably can’t be returned,” T.J. said. “The continuum wouldn’t allow it. Unless it was nonsignificant in its returned state, too. Unfortunately, this sort of incongruity’s pretty much limited to air and soot. Anything larger has a significant effect.”
Even penwipers, I thought, leaning my head against the wall. I had bought an orange one shaped like a pumpkin at the Autumn Choir Festival and Salvage Drive and then forgotten it, and when I tried to come back, the net wouldn’t open. I wondered drowsily how it had come to open for the fan.
“What about living things?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.
“Harmless bacteria, possibly, but nothing else. The effect of life-forms on the continuum is exponentially greater than for inanimate objects, and exponentially greater again for intelligent life-forms because of the complexity of interactions they’re capable of. And of course nothing that could have an effect on the present or future. No viruses or microbes.”