Read To Say Nothing of the Dog for Free Online

“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