Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

“What?” I said, but a train was pulling in. The crowd surged forward, pushing us apart.

I fought my way over to her again. “Where are all these people going? Princess Victoria’s not in Coventry.”

“They’re going to the protest,” a boy in braids said. “Coventry’s holding a rally to protest the disgraceful theft of their cathedral by Oxford.”

“Really?” Verity said sweetly. “Where’s it being held? In the shopping center?” and I could have kissed her.

“You realize,” she said, pushing a hand-painted sign that read, “Architects Against Coventry Cathedral” out of her face, “that there’s probably a time-traveller from a hundred years in the future in this crowd who thinks this is all unbelievably quaint and charming.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “What is Finch up to?”

“He’s been—” she started, but the doors were opening and people were jamming onto the train.

We got separated again in the process, and I found myself half a car away from her, shoved into a seat between an old man and his middle-aged son.

“But why rebuild Coventry Cathedral, of all things?” the son was complaining. “If they had to rebuild something that had been destroyed, why not the Bank of England? That would have been of some use at least. What good’s a cathedral?”

“ ‘God works in a mysterious way,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘His wonders to perform.’ ”

Both of them glared at me.

“James Thomson,” I said. “The Seasons.”

They glared some more.

“Victorian poet,” I said, and subsided between them, thinking about the continuum and its mysterious ways. It had needed to correct an incongruity, and it had done so, putting into action its entire array of secondary defenses, and shutting down the net, shifting destinations, manipulating the slippage so that I would keep Terence from meeting Maud, and Verity would arrive at the exact moment Baine threw the cat in. To save the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

“Coventry,” the station sign read, and I fought my way out from between the bankers and off the train, motioning to Verity to get off, too. She did, and we fought our way up the escalators and out into Broadgate in front of the statue of Lady Godiva. It looked even more like rain. The protesters were putting their umbrellas up as they started for the shopping center.

“Should we ring her up first?” Verity said.

“No.”

“You’re sure she’ll be at home?”

“I’m sure,” I said, not at all certain.

But she was, though it took her a little time to open the door.

“Sorry, I’m having a bout of bronchitis,” Mrs. Bittner said hoarsely, and then saw who we were. “Oh,” she said.

She stood back so we could enter. “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.” She held out her veined hand to Verity. “You must be Miss Kindle. I understand you are a fan of mystery novels, too.”

“Only those of the Thirties,” Verity said apologetically.

Mrs. Bittner nodded. “They are quite the best.” She turned to me. “I read a great many mystery novels. I am particularly fond of those in which the criminal nearly gets away with the crime.”

“Mrs. Bittner,” I said, and didn’t know how to go on. I looked helplessly at Verity.

“You’ve puzzled it out, haven’t you?” Mrs. Bittner said. “I was afraid you would. James told me you were his two best pupils.” She smiled. “Shall we go into the drawing room?”

“I… I’m afraid we haven’t much time…” I stammered.

“Nonsense,” she said, starting down the corridor. “The criminal is always given a chapter in which to confess his sins.”

She led us into the room where I’d interviewed her. “Won’t you sit down?” she said, indicating a chintz-covered sofa. “The famed detective always gathers the suspects together in the drawing room,” she said, moving slowly toward a sideboard considerably smaller than the Merings’, steadying herself on the furniture, “and the criminal always offers them a drink. Would you care for some sherry, Miss Kindle? Would you care for some sherry, Mr. Henry? Or sirop de cassis? That’s what Hercule Poirot always drank. Dreadful stuff. I tried it once when I’d been reading Agatha Christie’s Murder in Three Acts. Tastes like cough medicine.”

“Sherry, thank you,” I said.

Mrs. Bittner poured two glasses of sherry and turned to hand them to us. “It caused an incongruity, didn’t it?”

I took the glasses from her, handed one to Verity, and sat down beside her. “Yes,” I said.

“I was so afraid it had. And when James told me last week about the theory regarding nonsignificant objects being removed from their space-time location, I knew it must have been the bishop’s bird stump.” She shook her head, smiling. “Everything else that was in the cathedral that night would have burned to ashes, but I could see by looking at it that it was indestructible.”

She poured herself a glass of sherry. “I tried to undo what I’d done, you know, but I couldn’t get the net to open, and then Lassiter — that was the head of faculty — put on new locks, and I couldn’t get into the lab. I should have told James, of course. Or my husband. But I couldn’t bear to.” She picked up the glass of sherry. “I told myself the net’s refusing to open meant that there hadn’t been an incongruity after all, that no harm had been done, but I knew it wasn’t true.”

She started for one of the chintz-covered chairs, moving slowly and carefully. I jumped up and took the glass of sherry for her till she had sat down.

“Thank you,” she said, taking it from me. “James told me what a nice young man you were.” She looked at Verity. “I don’t suppose either of you have ever done something you were sorry for afterward? Something you’d done without thinking?”

She looked down at her sherry. “The Church of England was shutting down the cathedrals that couldn’t support themselves. My husband loved Coventry Cathedral. He was descended from the Botoner family who built the original church.”

And so are you, I thought, realizing now who it was Mary Botoner had reminded me of, standing there in the tower arguing with the workman. You’re a descendant of the Botoners, too.

“The cathedral was his life,” she went on. “He always said that it wasn’t the church building that mattered, but what it symbolized, yet the new cathedral, ugly as it was, was everything to him. I thought if I could bring back some of the treasures from the old cathedral,” she said, “it would be good publicity. The tourists would flock to see them, and the cathedral wouldn’t have to be sold. I thought it would kill my husband if it had to be sold.”

“But hadn’t Darby and Gentilla proved it was impossible to bring things forward through the net?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I thought since the things had ceased to exist in their own space-time, they might come through. Darby and Gentilla had never tried to bring through anything that didn’t still exist in its own time.” She twisted the stem of the glass in her hands. “And I was fairly desperate.”

She looked up. “So I broke into the lab late one night, went back to 1940, and did it. And the next day, James telephoned to tell me that if I wanted a job, that Lassiter had authorized a series of drops to Waterloo, and then he told me—” She stopped, staring into the past. “—he told me that Shoji had had a breakthrough in temporal theory, that he’d discovered why it was impossible to bring things forward through the net, that such an action would cause an incongruity that could change the course of history, or worse.