“ ‘In the details,’ ” I said.

“She even tried to recruit me,” Finch said. “Wanted me to go back to the Blitz and look for the bishop’s bathtub.”

“Bird stump,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said,” he said, looking hard at me. “You’re having difficulty distinguishing sounds, aren’t you? The nurse said you were. And you’re obviously disoriented.” He shook his head. “You’re not going to be any use at all.”

“What does Mr. Dunworthy want to see me about?”

“There’s been an incident.”

“Incident” was the euphemism the AFS employed to mean a high-explosive bomb, houses reduced to rubble, bodies buried, fires everywhere. But surely Finch didn’t mean that sort of incident. Or perhaps I was still having Difficulty Distinguishing Sounds.

“An incident?” I said.

“Calamity, actually. One of his historians. Nineteenth Century. Pinched a rat.”

Oh, definitely Difficulty, although there had been rats in the Victorian era. But no one would have pinched one. It would pinch you back, or worse. “What did you say?” I asked cautiously.

“I said, ‘Here we are,’ ” Finch said, and we were. There was Balliol’s gate, though not the side one, the front gate and the porter’s lodge and the front quad.

I started through the quad and up the stairs to Mr. Dunworthy’s room, but I was apparently still disoriented because Finch took my arm again and led me across the garden quad to Beard.

“Mr. Dunworthy’s had to turn the Senior Common Room into an office. She has no respect at all for the sported oak or the notion of knocking, so Mr. Dunworthy’s had to devise an outer and inner office, though I personally think a moat would have been more effective.”

He opened the door to what had been the buttery. It now looked like a physician’s waiting room, with a row of cushioned chairs against the wall and a pile of fax-mags on a small side table. Finch’s desk stood next to the inner door and practically in front of it, no doubt so Finch could fling himself between it and Lady Schrapnell.

“I’ll see if he’s in,” Finch said and started round the desk.

“Absolutely not!” Mr. Dunworthy’s voice thundered from within. “It’s completely out of the question!”

Oh, Lord, she was here. I shrank back against the wall, looking wildly for somewhere to hide.

Finch grabbed my sleeve, and hissed, “It’s not her,” but I had already deduced that.

“I don’t see why not,” a female voice had answered, and it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell, because it was sweet rather than stentorian, and I couldn’t make out what she said after “why not.”

“Who is it?” I whispered, relaxing in Finch’s grip.

“The calamity,” he whispered back.

“What on earth made you think you could bring something like that through the net?” Mr. Dunworthy bellowed. “You’ve studied temporal theory!”

Finch winced. “Shall I tell Mr. Dunworthy you’re here?” he asked hesitantly.

“No, that’s all right,” I said, sinking down on one of the chintz-covered chairs. “I’ll wait.”

“Why on earth did you take it into the net with you in the first place?” Mr. Dunworthy shouted.

Finch picked up one of the ancient fax-mags and brought it over to me.

“I don’t need anything to read,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and eavesdrop along with you.”

“I thought you might sit on the mag,” he said. “It’s extremely difficult to get soot out of chintz.”

I stood up and let him put the opened mag on the seat and then sat down again.

“If you were going to do something so completely irresponsible,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “why couldn’t you have waited till after the consecration?”

I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. It was rather pleasant listening to someone else being read out for a change, and by someone besides Lady Schrapnell, even though it was unclear what exactly the calamity was guilty of. Particularly when Mr. Dunworthy yelled, “That is no excuse. Why didn’t you simply pull the cab out of the water and leave it on the bank? Why did you have to carry it into the net with you?”

Cab-toting seemed even less likely than rat-pinching, and neither one seemed in need of rescue from a watery grave. Rats especially. They were always swimming away from sinking ships, weren’t they? And had they had taxis in the Nineteenth Century? Horse-drawn hansom cabs, but they were too heavy to carry even if they would fit into the net.

In books and vids, those being eavesdropped upon always thoughtfully explain what they are talking about for the edification of the eavesdropper. The eavesdroppee says, “Of course, as you all know, the cab to which I refer is Sherlock Holmes’s hansom cab which had been accidentally driven off a bridge during a heavy fog while following the Hound of the Baskervilles, and which I found it necessary to steal for the following reasons,” at which point said theft is fully explained to the person crouched behind the door. Sometimes a floor plan or map is thoughtfully provided next to the frontispiece.

No such consideration is given the croucher in real life. Instead of outlining the situation, the calamity said, “Because bane came back to make sure,” which only confused the issue further.

“Heartless monster,” she said, and it was unclear whether she was referring to the bane that had come back or to Mr. Dunworthy. “And it would only have gone back to the house, and he’d have tried it again. I didn’t want him to see me because he’d know I wasn’t a contemp and there wasn’t anyplace to hide but the net. He’d have seen me in the gazebo. I didn’t think—”

“Exactly, Miss Kindle,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “You didn’t think.”

“What are you going to do?” the calamity said. “Are you going to send it back? You’re going to drown it, aren’t you?”

“I do not intend to do anything until I have considered all the possibilities,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“Utterly heartless,” she said.

“I am extremely fond of cabbies,” he said, “but there is a good deal at stake here. I must consider all the consequences and possibilities before acting. I realize that’s an alien notion to you.”

Cabbies? I wondered why he was so fond of them. I have always found them entirely too talkative, especially the ones during the Blitz, who apparently paid no attention to the admonition that “Loose lips sink ships.” They were always telling me how someone had been buried alive in the rubble or got blown up — “Head was all the way across the street in a shop window. Milliner’s. Riding in a taxi just like you are now.”

“Are you sending me back?” she said. “I told them I was going out sketching. If I don’t come back, they’ll think I’ve drowned.”

“I don’t know. Until I decide, I want you in your rooms.”

“Can I take it with me?”

“No.”

There was a sinister-sounding silence, and then the door opened, and there stood the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

Finch had said Nineteenth Century, and I’d expected hoop skirts, but she had on a long, greenish gown that clung to her slim body as if it were wet. Her auburn hair trailed about her shoulders and down her back like water weeds, and the whole effect was that of a Waterhouse nymph, rising like a wraith out of the dark water.

I stood up, gawping as foolishly as the new recruit, and took off my ARP helmet, wishing I had cleaned up when the nurse told me to.

She took hold of her long, trailing sleeve and wrung it out on the carpet. Finch grabbed a fax-mag and spread it under her.

“Oh, good, Ned, you’re here,” Mr. Dunworthy said from the door. “Just the person I wanted to see.”

The nymph looked at me, and her eyes were a dark clear greenish-brown, the color of a forest pool. She narrowed them. “You’re not sending that, are you?” she said to Mr. Dunworthy.

“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.”