To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis Page A

out of my way!” she said, and there was the sound of a scuffle.
    I skidded face-first onto the X. The veils lowered on my foot. I yanked it inside.
    “Mr. Henry, I know you’re in here!” Lady Schrapnell said, and the door burst open.
    “I told you,” Finch said. “He’s not here.”
    And I wasn’t.
     
     
     
     
    “ Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
    William Shakespeare.
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    An Abrupt Arrival—Difference Between Literature and Real Life—Similarity of Train Whistles to Air Raid Sirens—Benefits of Adrenaline—I Contemplate My Mission— Howard’s End —ATimely Newspaper—Two Ladies—A Late Arrival—Contact!—“Oxford, City of Dreaming Spires”—A Fashion Plate—Fate—The Mystery of Rabbits Hypnotized by Snakes Solved—An Introduction
     
     
    I came through face-down on railroad tracks, stretched across them like Pearl White in a Twentieth-Century serial, except that she didn’t have so much luggage. The portmanteau, et al, were scattered around me, along with my boater, which had fallen off when I dived for the net.
    Lady Schrapnell’s voice was still booming in my ears, and I got to my feet and looked about cautiously, but there was no sign of her. Or of a boat or a river. The railway tracks were on a grassy embankment, with trees growing below and beside them.
    The first rule of time travel is “Ascertain exact time-space location,” but there didn’t seem to be any way of doing that. It was clearly summer—the sky overhead was blue and there were flowers growing between the ties—but no signs of civilization other than the train tracks. So sometime after 1804.
    In vids, there is always a newspaper lying on the ground with a helpful headline like “Pearl Harbor Bombed!” or “Mafeking Relieved!” and a clock above it in a shop window thoughtfully showing the time.
    I looked at my watch. It wasn’t there, and I squinted at my wrist, trying to remember whether Warder had taken it off me when she was trying shirts on. I remembered she’d tucked something in my waistcoat pocket. I pulled it out, on a gold chain. A pocket watch. Of course. Wristwatches were an anachronism in Nineteenth Century.
    I had trouble getting the pocket watch open and then difficulty reading the extinct Roman numerals, but eventually I made it out. A quarter past X. Allowing for the time I’d spent getting the watch open and lying on the tracks, bang on target. Unless I was in the wrong year. Or the wrong place.
    As I didn’t know where I was supposed to have come through, I didn’t know if I was in the right place or not, but if there’s a small amount of temporal slippage, there usually isn’t much locational slippage either.
    I stood up on a rail to look down the tracks. To the north, the tracks headed into deeper woods. In the opposite direction, the woods seemed thinner, and there was a dark plume of smoke. A factory? Or a boathouse?
    I should gather up my bags and go see, but I continued to stand on the rail, taking in the warm summer air and the sweet scent of clover and new-mown hay.
    I was a hundred and sixty years away from pollution and traffic and the bishop’s bird stump. No, that wasn’t true. The bishop’s bird stump had been given to Coventry Cathedral in 1852.
    Depressing thought. But there wasn’t any Coventry Cathedral. St. Michael’s Church hadn’t been made a bishopric till 1908. And there wasn’t a Lady Schrapnell. I was more than a century away from her snapped orders and from vicious dogs and from bombed-out cathedrals, in a more civilized time, where the pace was slow and decorous, and the women were softspoken and demure.
    I gazed about me at the trees, the flowers. Buttercups grew between the tracks, and a tiny white flower like a star. The nurse at Infirmary had said I needed rest, and who couldn’t rest here? I felt totally recovered just standing here on the tracks. No blurring of vision. No air-raid sirens.
    I had spoken too soon. The