“You said you had to be in Oxford by eleven,” the driver said. “You’ll never make it.”
“We’ll make it,” I said, and helped Mrs. Bittner to her feet so she could walk us out to the car.
“You’re certain you’ll be all right?” Verity said.
Mrs. Bittner patted Verity’s hand. “Perfectly all right. Everything has turned out far better than could have been expected. The Allies have won World War II,” she smiled that Zuleika Dobson smile again, “and I have got that hideous bishop’s bird stump out of my attic. What could be better?”
“I couldn’t see over the cross, so I put it up front,” the driver said. “You two will have to sit in the back.”
I kissed Mrs. Bittner on the cheek. “Thank you,” I said and crawled in. The driver handed me the bishop’s bird stump. I set it on my lap. Verity crawled in across from me, waving to Mrs. Bittner, and we were off and running.
I turned the handheld back on and rang up Mr. Dunworthy. “We’re on our way,” I said. “We should be there in about forty minutes. Tell Finch he needs to keep stalling. Have you arranged to have a crew there to meet us?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Is the archbishop there yet?”
“No, but Lady Schrapnell is, and she’s having a fit. She wants to know where you found the bishop’s bird stump and what sort of flowers are supposed to go in it. For the order of service.”
“Tell her yellow chrysanthemums,” I said.
I rang off. “All taken care of,” I said to Verity.
“Not quite, Sherlock,” she said, sitting against the side of the hearse with her knees hunched up. “There are still a few things that need explaining.”
“I agree,” I said. “You said you knew what Finch’s related mission was. What is it?”
“Bringing back nonsignificant objects,” she said.
“Nonsignificant objects? But we’ve only just found out that’s possible,” I said. “And nonsignificant objects didn’t have anything to do with our incongruity.”
“True,” she said, “but for over a week, T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy thought they did and were trying all sorts of things.”
“But nothing burned down in Muchings End or Iffley while we were there. What did Finch bring through? Cabbages?”
The handheld rang. “Ned,” Lady Schrapnell said. “Where are you?”
“On our way,” I said. “Between—” I leaned forward to our driver. “Where are we?”
“Between Banbury and Adderbury,” he said.
“Between Banbury and Adderbury,” I said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“I still don’t see why we couldn’t have shipped it back to the past,” Lady Schrapnell said. “It would have been so much simpler. Is the bishop’s bird stump in good shape?”
There was no answer to that. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said again, and rang off.
“All right, it’s my turn to ask the questions,” Verity said. “There’s still something I don’t understand. How did getting Tossie to Coventry on the fifteenth of June to see the bishop’s bird stump and fall in love with Baine fix the incongruity?”
“It didn’t,” I said. “That isn’t why Tossie was there.”
“But her seeing the bishop’s bird stump inspired Lady Schrapnell to rebuild Coventry and send me back to read the diary, which led me to rescue Princess Arjumand—”
“Which was all part of the self-correction. But the principal reason Tossie had to be there on the fifteenth was so she could be caught flirting with the Reverend Mr. Doult.”
“Oh!” she said. “By the girl with the penwipers.”
“Very good, Harriet,” I said. “The girl with the penwipers. Whose name was Miss Delphinium Sharpe.”
“The woman in charge of the Flower Committee.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “When she saw Tossie flirting with the Reverend Mr. Doult, she was, you may remember, extremely upset. She flounced off with her penwipers, and as we were leaving the church, she was walking up Bayley Lane, her long nose in the air. I saw the Reverend Mr. Doult hurrying after her to placate her. And, now this is the part I’m not certain of, but my guess is, in the course of the argument that followed, she burst into tears, and he ended up proposing. Which meant that the Reverend Mr. Doult didn’t stay in the cathedral position, but obtained a church living in some rural vicarage.”
“That’s why you wanted the list of church livings.”
“Very good, Harriet. He was much quicker off the mark than I expected. He married her in 1891 and got a parish the following year in Northumberland.”
“So she was nowhere near Coventry on the night of the fourteenth of November, 1940,” she said. “And, being busy with parish jumble sales and scrap metal drives, paid no attention to a certain bishop’s bird stump being missing.”
“So she didn’t write a letter to the editor,” I said, “and everyone else just assumed it had burned up in the fire.”
“And Ultra’s secret was safe.” She frowned. “And the whole thing, my rescuing Princess Arjumand and us going to Oxford to see Madame Iritosky and your preventing Terence from meeting Maud and loaning him the money for the boat and the séance and everything, it was all part of the self-correction? Everything?”
“Everything,” I said, and then thought about what I’d said. Just how elaborate had the self-correction been and what all had been involved? Professor Peddick’s and Professor Overforce’s feud? The Psychic Research Society? The donation of the sugared-violets box to the jumble sale? The fur-bearing ladies in Blackwell’s?
“I still don’t understand,” Verity said. “If all the continuum needed to do was to keep Delphinium Sharpe from writing a letter to the editor, there had to be simpler ways to do it.”
“It’s a chaotic system,” I said. “Every event is connected to every other. To make even a small change would require far-reaching adjustments.”
But how far-reaching? I wondered. Had the Luftwaffe been involved? And Agatha Christie? And the weather?
“I know it’s a chaotic system, Ned,” Verity was saying. “But there was an air raid going on. If the self-correction’s an automatic mechanism, a direct hit would have corrected the incongruity much more simply and directly than some scheme involving cats and trips to Coventry.”
A direct hit from a high-explosive bomb would have eliminated any threat Delphinium Sharpe posed to Ultra, and there wouldn’t have been any consequences. Over five hundred people had been killed in Coventry that night.
“Perhaps Delphinium Sharpe, or one of the other people in the west door that night, had some other part to play in history,” I said, thinking of the stout ARP warden and the woman with the two children.
“I’m not talking about Delphinium Sharpe,” Verity said. “I’m talking about the bishop’s bird stump. If the Smiths’ Chapel had taken a direct hit, Miss Sharpe would have believed the bishop’s bird stump was destroyed and wouldn’t have written her letter. Or it could have taken a direct hit before Lizzie Bittner came through, so she couldn’t cause the incongruity in the first place.”
She was right. A direct hit was all it would have taken. Unless the high-explosive bomb would alter something else. Or unless the bishop’s bird stump had some other part to play in the plan. Or the continuum had some other, subtler reason for using the correction it had.
Plans, intentions, reasons. I could hear Professor Overforce now. “I knew it! This is nothing but an argument for a Grand Design!”
A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.
“History is character,” Professor Peddick had said. And character had certainly played a part in the self-correction-Lizzie Bittner’s devotion to her husband and the Colonel’s refusal to wear a coat in rainy weather, Verity’s fondness for cats and Princess Arjumand’s fondness for fish and Hitler’s temper and Mrs. Mering’s gullibility. And my time-laggedness. If they were part of the self-correction, what did that do to the notion of free will? Or was free will part of the plan as well?