Carruthers shook his head sadly. “And did the wives know?”
“They’d never even heard of it except for Mrs. Bittner, and she said it wasn’t there when they packed up everything before they sold the new cathedral.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “If it isn’t here either, that means it wasn’t in the cathedral when the raid happened, and you can tell Lady Schrapnell she won’t need to have a reconstruction of it in the cathedral for the consecration.”
“You tell her,” I said.
“Perhaps it was removed for safekeeping,” he said, looking at the windows. “Like the east windows.”
“The bishop’s bird stump?” I said incredulously. “Are you joking?”
“You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to keep from being blown up. Victorian art!” He shuddered.
“Besides,” I said, “I’ve already been to Lucy Hampton rectory—that’s where they took the windows—to check. It wasn’t there.”
“Oh,” Carruthers said. “Could it have been moved to somewhere else in the church?”
That was an idea. Perhaps one of the Altar Guild ladies, unable to stand the sight of it, had stuck it in a corner behind a pillar or something.
“Why is Lady Schrapnell so obsessed with this stump thing anyway?” Carruthers said.
“Why is she so obsessed with every detail of this project?” I said. “Before she assigned me to the bishop’s bird stump, it was monuments. She wanted a copy of every inscription on every monument in the cathedral, including the one on Captain Gervase Scrope’s tomb, which went on forever.”
Carruthers nodded sympathetically. “Organ pipes,” he said. “She’s had me all over the Middle Ages measuring organ pipes.”
“The real question, of course, is, why is she so obsessed with rebuilding Coventry Cathedral?” I said.
“Her great-great-something grandmother went to Coventry and—”
“I know, I know, the experience changed her great-great-something grandmother’s life, and when Lady Schrapnell found her diary, it changed her life, and she decided to rebuild the cathedral exactly as it was just before it burned down in honor of, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve heard that speech a number of times. Also the one about how God—”
“—is in the details,” Carruthers quoted. “I despise that speech.”
“The one I hate the most is the ‘leave no stone unturned’ speech. Give me a hand.” I pointed to the end of a large stone.
He stooped down and got hold of the other side of it.
“One, two, three,” I said, “lift,” and we heaved it across the aisle, where it rolled into what was left of a pillar and knocked it down.
The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t under the stone, but the wrought-iron stand it had stood on was, and one of the cross-pieces of the parclose screen, and, under a chunk of red sandstone, a half-charred stem of a flower. There was no telling what sort of flower, there weren’t even any leaves left, and it might have been a stick or an iron rod except for the inch or so of green at one end.
“It stood in front of a screen?” Carruthers said, crunching through the glass.
“This screen. On this stand,” I said, pointing at the wrought-iron stand. “As of November the ninth, the Prayers for the RAF Service and Baked Goods Sale. Two crocheted antimacassars, a pansy penwiper, and half a dozen rock cakes. Extremely aptly named.”
Carruthers was looking round at the glass. “Could the blast have knocked it to some other part of the nave?” he asked.
“It wasn’t high explosives that destroyed the cathedral, it was incendiaries.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked over at the verger, who was coming toward us. “Queen Victoria’s Bible, did you say?”
“Yes. Complete with the births, deaths, and nervous breakdowns of all those Georges,” I said. “Find out if anything was taken away for safekeeping to anywhere besides Lucy Hampton before the fire.”
He nodded and went back over to the verger, and I stood there looking at the wrought-iron stand and wondering what to do next.
The majority of the bombs that had fallen on the cathedral had been incendiaries, but Carruthers was right. Concussion can do peculiar things, and there had been a number of explosions in the vicinity, from HEs to gas mains going. The bishop’s bird stump might have been blown into the central aisle of the nave, or the choir.
I cleared away more masonry, trying to see what direction the glass from the Drapers’ Chapel had taken. Most of it seemed to have sprayed south and west. I should be looking in the other direction, toward the back of the nave.
I went back to the screen and started digging south and west from it. No stone unturned.
The bells began to strike the hour, and we all stopped what we were doing, even Mr. Spivens, and looked up at the tower. With the roof gone, we could see the spire, rising above the smoke and dust unharmed. The bells sounded beautiful, un-dimmed by the destruction that lay around us.
“Look, there’s a star,” Carruthers said.
“Where?” I said.
“There,” he pointed.
All I could see was smoke. I said so.
“There,” he said. “Above the spire. Above the smoky pall of war, above the wrack of destruction. Untouched by man’s inhumanity to man, a high herald of hope and beauty, of better times to come. A sparkling symbol of a resurrection it yet kens not.”
“It yet kens not?” I looked at him, worried. “A high herald of hope and beauty?”
One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. Carruthers had been on at least four drops in the past day, two of them within hours of each other, and who knew how many others researching the organ pipes. He’d said himself he hadn’t had any sleep.
I frowned, trying to remember the checklist of time-lag symptoms. Maudlin sentimentality, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, fatigue—but he’d heard the bells, and everyone associated with Lady Schrapnell’s reconstruction project was suffering from sleep deprivation. The only sleep I’d gotten in the past week was during the St. Crispin’s Day War Effort Bazaar. I’d dozed off during the “Welcome” and slept through half the “Introductions of the Organizing Committee.”
What were the other symptoms? Tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies. Slowness in answering. Blurred vision.
“The star,” I said. “What does it look like?”
“What do you mean what does it look like?” Carruthers said, not at all slow to answer. “It looks like a star.”
The bells stopped chiming, their echoes lingering in the smoky air.
“What do you think a star looks like?” Carruthers said, and stomped off toward the verger.
Irritability was a definite symptom. And the net guidelines specifically stated that time-lag sufferers were to be immediately “removed from the environment” and from duty, but if I did that, I would have to explain to Lady Schrapnell what we were doing in Oxford instead of Coventry.
Which was why I was here poking about in the rubble in the first place, because I didn’t want to try and explain why I hadn’t landed at eight o’clock on the fourteenth in front of the cathedral like I’d been supposed to, and it was no good trying to explain that it was because of the slippage because Lady Schrapnell didn’t believe in slippage. Or time-lag.
No, so long as Carruthers wasn’t completely incoherent, it was better to stay here, find the bishop’s bird stump, and then go back and be able to tell Lady Schrapnell, yes, it had been in the cathedral during the raid, and then get some sleep. Sleep, that knits the ragged sleeve of non-AFS uniforms, that soothes the sooty brow and shuts out sorrow, blessing the weary soul with blissful, healing rest—
Carruthers came over, looking neither fatigued nor distracted. Good.
“Ned!” he said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”
r /> “You must have been. I’ve been calling for five minutes,” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”
I must have misheard that, too, or else Carruthers was more time-lagged than I’d thought. “Dookie?” I said cautiously.
“Yes, Dookie!” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”
Oh, no, I was going to have to get him back to Oxford without making the verger suspicious, get him to Infirmary, and then try to get back here to finish searching the cathedral and probably end up in a marrows field halfway to Liverpool.
“Ned, can’t you hear me?” Carruthers was saying worriedly. “I said, ‘Did she have Dookie with her?’”
“With whom?” I said, wondering how I was going to convince him he needed to be taken out. Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged. “Lady Schrapnell?”
“No,” he said, very irritably. “Her Majesty. The Queen. When she commissioned us to come up here. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ and all that.” He pointed to the verger, who was heading toward us. “He asked me if she had Dookie with her when we saw her, and I didn’t have any idea who that was.”
I didn’t either. Dookie. It seemed unlikely that that would have been her nickname for the King. For her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, perhaps? No, Edward had already abdicated by 1940, and the Queen wasn’t calling him anything.
The Queen’s dog, I thought, but that didn’t help particularly. In her later years as the Queen Mum, she’d had Welsh corgis, but what had she had during World War II? A Yorkshire terrier? A toy spaniel? And what gender, if any? And what if Dookie was her maid instead? Or a nickname for one of the princesses?
The verger came up. “You were asking about Dookie,” I said. “Afraid Dookie wasn’t with Her Majesty. Up at Windsor for the duration. Terrified of the bombs, you see.”
“It takes some of them that way,” the verger said, looking over toward where Mr. Spivens and the new recruit were. “Weak nerves.”
The new recruit had finally figured out how the pocket torch worked. He’d switched it on and was playing the beam on the blackened walls of the chancel and on Mr. Spivens, who was apparently digging a tunnel into the rubble next to the steps.
“Blackout?” I mentioned to Carruthers.
“Oh, Lord,” Carruthers said. “Put that out!” he shouted, and clambered over toward him.
“Week before last I go up on the roofs, and what do I find?” the verger said, looking over at the chancel, where Carruthers had grabbed the torch away from the new recruit and was switching it off. “My brother-in-law, careless as you please, striking a match. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I say. ‘Lighting my cigarette,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you light some flares while you’re at it,’ I say, ‘and set them out so the Luftwaffe will be certain to know where to find us?’ ‘It was only one match,’ he says. ‘What harm could it do?’”
He looked around bleakly at what the Luftwaffe had so obviously found, and I wondered if he considered his brother-in-law accountable, but he said instead, “Poor Provost Howard.” He shook his head. “It was a blow to him, losing the cathedral. Wouldn’t go home. Stayed here all night.”
“All night?” I said.
He nodded. “Watching for looters, I suppose.” He looked sadly at the rubble. “Not that there was much left to pinch. Still, if anything did survive, you don’t want people making off with it.”
“No,” I agreed.
He shook his head sadly. “You should have seen him, walking up and down across the rubble, back and forth. ‘Go home and have a lie down,’ I told him. ‘Let me and Mr. Spivens take a turn.’”
“So someone’s been here the whole time since the fire,” I persisted.
“Pretty near,” he said, “except when I went home to tea. And this morning it started to rain and I sent my brother-in-law home for my mackintosh and an umbrella, but he never came back, so I had to go home and get them myself. Getting dark,” he added, looking nervously at the sky to the east. “The jerries will be back soon.”
Actually they wouldn’t. The Luftwaffe had decided to go after London tonight instead. But it was getting dark. The far end of the church, where Carruthers was yelling at the new recruit over blackout regulations, was in gloom, and the blown-out east window gaped on a darkening blue-black haze of smoke crisscrossed by searchlights.
“We’d best do what we can before night falls,” I said, and went back over to where I’d been digging and surveyed the rubble, trying to guess how far the bishop’s bird stump had been knocked by the blast. If it hadn’t been carted off by looters. The verger had been gone for at least an hour having his tea, during which time anyone could have walked in through the nonexistent south door and carried off anything they liked. Including the bishop’s bird stump.
I must be getting light-headed from lack of sleep. No one, even badly shell-shocked, would steal it. Or buy it at a jumble sale. This was the bishop’s bird stump. Even the munitions scrap iron drive would turn it down. Unless of course someone recognized its potential as a psychological weapon against the Nazis.
So it had to be here somewhere, along with the rest of the parclose screen and the section of memorial tablet that read, “—ernal,” and I’d better get busy if I was going to find them before dark. I picked up a kneeling cushion, still smouldering and smelling strongly of feathers, laid it in the aisle, and started digging toward the back of the nave.
I found a kneeling rail, a single bronze candlestick, and a charred hymnal, open to “From All That Dwell Below the Skies.” There was a sheet of paper stuck inside the back cover.
I pulled it out. It was an order of service for Sunday the tenth of November. I opened the folded sheet, blackened fragments flaking away as I did.
I squinted, trying to read it in the gloom, wishing I had the new recruit’s pocket torch. “. . . and red carnations on the High Altar,” it read, “were given in remembrance of Lieutenant David Halberstam, RAF. The pulpit arrangement of pink begonias and the bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums in the bishop’s bird stump were donated and arranged by the Flower Committee of the Ladies’ Altar Guild, Chairwoman Lo—”
The rest of the chairwoman was burnt away, but at least we had proof that the bishop’s bird stump had been in the cathedral five days ago. So where was it now?
I kept digging. It got darker, and the moon that had been such an aid to the Luftwaffe the night before came up and promptly disappeared into the murk of smoke and dust.
This part of the church seemed to have fallen in all in one piece, and I almost immediately ran out of things I could lift by myself. I looked over at Carruthers, but he was deep in royal conversation with the verger and, presumably, getting some information out of him. I didn’t want to bother him.
“Give me a hand!” I called to the new recruit instead. He was squatting next to Mr. Spivens, watching him burrow into the tunnel. “Over here!” I shouted, gesturing to him.
Neither of them paid any attention. Mr. Spivens had nearly disappeared into the tunnel, and the new recruit was fiddling with his pocket torch again.
“Hullo!” I shouted, “Over here!” and several things happened at once. Mr. Spivens reappeared, the new recruit reared back and fell over, the pocket torch came on, its beam sweeping the sky like one of the searchlights, and a long dark animal shot out of the tunnel and across the top of the rubble. A cat. Mr. Spivens took off after it, barking wildly.
I went over to where the new recruit was sitting gazing interestedly after them, switched off the torch, helped him up, and said, “Come help me with these timbers.”
“Did you see that cat?” he said, looking over to where it had disappeared under the chancel steps. “It was a cat, wasn’t it? They’re smaller than I thought they’d be. I thought they’d be more the size of a wolf. And they’re so fast! Were all of them black like that?”
“All of them that had been crawling about in a burnt-out cathedral, I should think,” I said.
“A real cat!” he said
, dusting off his non-AFS coveralls and following me. “It’s just so amazing, seeing a creature that’s been extinct for nearly forty years. I’ve never seen one before.”
“Take hold of that end,” I said, pointing at a length of stone gutter.
“It’s all so amazing,” he said. “Actually being here, where it all started.”
“Or ended,” I said dryly. “Not that one, the one on top.”
He lifted, his knees straight, staggering a little. “It’s just so exciting! Lady Schrapnell said working on Coventry Cathedral would be a rewarding experience, and it is! Seeing this and knowing that it isn’t really destroyed, that it’s rising out of the ashes at this very minute, resurrected and restored to all its former glory.”
He sounded time-lagged, but probably wasn’t. All of Lady Schrapnell’s new recruits sound time-lagged.
“How many drops have you done?” I asked.
“This is my first,” he said, his face eager, “and I still can’t quite believe it. I mean, here we are in 1940, searching for the bishop’s bird stump, unearthing a treasure of the past, the beauty of a bygone era.”
I looked at him. “You’ve never actually seen the bishop’s bird stump, have you?”
“No,” he said, “but it must be truly amazing. It changed Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother’s life, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s changed all of our lives.”
“Here!” Carruthers called from the Drapers’ Chapel, He was on his knees. “I’ve found something.”
He was in the wrong direction for blast, and at first all I could see was a tangle of timbers, but Carruthers was pointing at something in the midst of the tangle.
“I see it!” the verger said. “It looks like metal.”
“Use your torch,” Carruthers said to the new recruit.
The recruit, who’d forgotten how to switch it on, messed with it for a bit and then switched it on in Carruthers’s face.