To Say Nothing of the Dog

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

And let it be 2057, not 2018. I looked up, and yes, it was. Warder was bending over me, extending a hand to help me up.

When she saw it was me, she stood up and put her hands on her hips.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“What am I doing here?” I said, picking myself up. “What the bloody hell was I doing in 1395? What was I doing in Blackwell’s in 1933? I want to know where Verity is.”

“Get out of the net,” she said, already moving back to the console and beginning to type. The veils on the net began to rise.

“Find out where Verity is,” I said, following her. “She went through yesterday, and something went wrong. She—”

She moved her hand in a gesture of silencing. “Eleven December,” she said into the console’s ear. “Two P.M.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “Verity’s missing. There’s something wrong with the net.”

“In a minute,” she said, staring at the screen. “Six P.M. Ten P.M. Carruthers is stuck in Coventry,” she said, her eyes never moving from the screen, “and I’m trying to—”

“Verity may be stuck in a dungeon. Or the middle of the Battle of Hastings. Or the lion’s cage at the Zoo.” I pounded on the console. “Find out where she is.”

“In a minute,” she said. “Twelve December. Two AM. Six A.M.—”

“No!” I said, grabbing the ear of the console away from her. “Now!”

She stood up angrily. “If you do anything to jeopardize this rendezvous—”

Mr. Dunworthy and T.J. came in, their heads together worriedly over a handheld. “—another area of increased slippage,” T.J. was saying. “See, here it—”

“Give me that ear,” Warder said furiously, and they both looked up.

“Ned,” Mr. Dunworthy said, hurrying over. “How did Coventry go?”

“It didn’t,” I said.

Warder snatched the ear back and began feeding times into it.

“No Mr. C, no ‘life-changing experience,’ ” I said. “Verity tried to come through to tell you, but she didn’t make it. Tell Warder she’s got to find her.”

“I’m running the accelerated,” Warder said.

“I don’t care what you’re running,” I said. “It can wait. I want you to find out where she is now!”

“In a minute, Ned,” Mr. Dunworthy said quietly. He took my arm. “We’re trying to pull Carruthers out.”

“Carruthers can wait!” I said. “You know where he is, for God’s sake! Verity could be anywhere!”

“Tell me what’s happened,” he said, still calmly.

“The net’s starting to break down,” I said. “That’s what’s happened. Verity went through to tell you we failed at Coventry, and right after she’d gone through, Finch came through and said she hadn’t come through to the lab. So I tried to come through and tell you, but I ended up here in 2018, and then in Blackwell’s in 1933, and then in a—”

“You were in the lab in 2018?” Mr. Dunworthy said, looking at T.J. “That’s where the area of slippage was. What did you see, Ned?”

“—and then in the tower of Coventry Cathedral in 1395,” I said.

“Destination malfunction,” T.J. said worriedly.

“Two P.M. Six P.M.,” Warder said, her eyes on the screen.

“The net’s breaking down,” I said, “and Verity’s out there somewhere. You’ve got to get a fix on her and—”

“Warder,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Stop the accelerated. We need—”

“Wait, I’m getting something,” she said.

“Now,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I want a fix on Verity Kindle.”

“In a min—”

And Carruthers appeared in the net.

He was wearing the same thing he’d been wearing last time I’d seen him, his AFS coveralls and nonregulation helmet, except that they weren’t covered with soot. “Well, it’s about time!” he said, taking his tin helmet off.

Warder ran over to the net, pushed through the veils, and flung her arms around his neck. “I was so worried!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I nearly got arrested for not having an identity card,” Carruthers said, looking slightly taken aback, “and I was this close to being blown up when a delayed HE went off, but otherwise I’m fine.” He disentangled himself from Warder’s arms. “I thought something had gone wrong with the net, and I was going to be stuck there for the duration of the war. Where the bloody hell have you been?”

“Trying to get you out,” Warder said, beaming at him. “We thought something had gone wrong with the net, too. Then I thought of running an accelerated to see if we could get past whatever the block was.” She linked her arm through his. “Are you certain you’re all right? Can I get you anything?”

“You can get me Verity. Now!” I said. “I want you to run a fix right now.”

Mr. Dunworthy nodded.

“All right!” Warder snapped, and stomped over to the console.

“You didn’t have any trouble coming back, did you?” T.J. said to Carruthers.

“Except that the bloody net wouldn’t open for three weeks, no,” Carruthers said.

“I mean, you didn’t go to another destination before you came here?”

Carruthers shook his head.

“And you haven’t any idea why the net wouldn’t open?”

“No,” Carruthers said. “A delayed HE went off a hundred yards from the drop. I thought perhaps it had done something to it.”

I went over to the console. “Anything yet?”

“No,” Warder said. “And don’t stand over me like that. It keeps me from concentrating.”

I went back over to Carruthers, who had sat down at T.J.’s sim setup and was pulling off his boots.

“One good thing came out of all this,” he said, peeling off a very dirty sock. “I can definitely report to Lady Schrapnell that the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t in the rubble. We cleared every inch of the cathedral, and it wasn’t there. But it was in the cathedral during the raid. The Head of the Flower Committee, this horrible old spinster sort named Miss Sharpe — you know the type, gray hair, long nose, hard as nails — saw it at five o’clock that afternoon. She was on her way home after a meeting of the Advent Bazaar and Soldiers’ Parcel Effort Committee, and she noticed some of the chrysanthemums in it were turning brown, and she stopped and pulled them out.”

I was only half listening. I was watching Warder, who was hitting keys, glaring at the screen, leaning back thoughtfully, hitting more keys. She has no idea where Verity is, I thought.

“So you think it was destroyed in the fire?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“I do,” Carruthers said, “and everyone else does, except for this dreadful old harpy Miss Sharpe. She insists it was stolen.”

“During the raid?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

“No. She says as soon as the sirens went, she came back and stood guard, so it must have been stolen after five and before eight, and whoever took it must have known there was going to be a raid that night.”

Numbers were coming up rapidly on the screen. Warder leaned forward, tapping keys rapidly. “Have you got the fix?”

“I’m getting it,” she said irritably.

“She had an absolute bee in her bonnet about it,” Carruthers said, peeling off his other sock and dumping it in his boot. “Interrogated everyone who’d been in or near the cathedral during the raid, accused the verger’s brother-in-law, even wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper about it. Generally made everyone’s lives miserable. I didn’t have to do any detective work on it. She was doing it all. If somebody had stolen the bishop’s bird stump, you can be certain she’d have found it.”

“I’ve got it,” Warder said. “Verity’s in Coventry.”

“Coventry?” I said. “When?”

“November fourteenth, 1940.”

“Where?” I said.

She tapped the keys, and the coordinates came up.

“That’s the cathedral,” I said. “What time?”

She worked the keys some more. “Five past eight P.M.”

“That’s the raid,” I said and started for the net. “Send me through.”

“If the net’s malfunctioning—” T.J. said.

“Verity’s there,” I said. “In the middle of an air raid.”

“Send him through,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“We’ve tried this before, remember?” Carruthers said. “Nobody could get near the place, including you. What makes you think—”

“Give me your coveralls and helmet,” I said.

He looked at Mr. Dunworthy and then started to strip them off.

“What was Verity wearing?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

Carruthers handed me the coveralls, and I pulled them on over my tweeds. “A long white high-necked dress,” I said, and realized I’d made an erroneous assumption. Her clothes wouldn’t create an incongruity in the middle of an air raid. No one would even notice them. Or if they did, they’d think she was in her nightgown.

“Here, take this,” T.J. said, handing me a raincoat.

“I want a five-minute intermittent,” I said, taking the raincoat and stepping into the net. Warder lowered the veils.

“If you come through in the marrows field,” Carruthers said, “the barn’s to the west.”

The net began to shimmer.

Carruthers said, “Watch out for the dogs. And the farmer’s wife—”

And found myself right back where I’d started from. And in pitch-blackness. The darkness meant I was there the next night, or any of a thousand nights, a hundred thousand nights, while the cathedral sat its way through the Middle Ages. And meanwhile Verity was in the middle of an air raid. And all I could do was stay put and wait for the bloody net to open again.

“No!” I said, and smashed my fist against the rough rock. And the world exploded around me.

There was a whoosh and then a crump, and ack-ack guns started up off to the east. The darkness flared bluish-white and then the aftercolor of red, and I could smell smoke below me.

“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the stairs to the bells, remembering this time to count the steps. There was just enough orangish light to see by, and a faint smell of smoke.

I reached the bell platform and shouted up the stairs. “Verity! Are you up here?”

Pigeons, no doubt descendants of the one I’d disturbed six hundred years ago, flapped wildly down the upper tower and into my face.

She wasn’t up there. I ran back down the stairs, shouting, till I reached the step where I’d come through, and began counting again.

Thirty-one, thirty-two. “Verity!” I shouted over the drone of planes and the wail of an air-raid siren that had, belatedly and unnecessarily, started up.

Fifty-three, fifty-four, I counted. “Verity! Where are you?”

I hit the bottom step. Fifty-eight. Remember that, I told myself and pushed the tower door open and came out into the west porch. The smell of smoke was stronger here, and had a rich, acrid scent to it, like cigar smoke.

“Verity!” I shouted, pushing open the heavy inner door of the tower. And came out into the nave.

The church was dark except for the rood light and a reddish light in the windows of the clerestory. I tried to estimate what time it was. Most of the explosions and sirens seemed to be off toward the north. There was a lot of smoke up near the organ, but no flames from the Girdlers’ Chapel, which had been hit early. So it couldn’t be later than half past eight, and Verity couldn’t have been here more than a few minutes.

“Verity!” I called, and my voice echoed in the dark church.

The Mercers’ Chapel had been hit in the first batch of incendiaries. I started up the main aisle toward the choir, wishing I’d brought a pocket torch.

The ack-ack stopped and then started up again with renewed effort, and the hum of the planes got louder. There was a thud, thud, thud of bombs just to the east, and flares lit the windows garishly. Half of them, the half that had had their stained glass removed for safekeeping, were boarded up or covered over with blackout paper, but three of the windows on the north were still intact, and the greenish flares made them light the church momentarily with a sickly red and blue. I couldn’t see Verity anywhere. Where would she have gone? I would have expected her to stay close to the drop, but perhaps the raid had frightened her and she’d taken shelter somewhere. But where?

The drone of the planes became an angry roar. “Verity!” I shouted over the din, and there was a clatter above on the roof, like hail pattering, then a pounding and muffled shouts.

The fire watch, up on the roof putting out the incendiaries. Had Verity heard them and hidden somewhere so they wouldn’t see her?

There was a crash overhead and then a whizzing, spitting sound. I looked up, and it was a good thing I did because I narrowly missed being hit by an incendiary.

It fell onto one of the pews, hissing and spitting molten sparks onto the wooden pew. I grabbed a hymnal out of the back of the next pew and knocked the incendiary off with it onto the floor. It rolled into the aisle and up against the end of the pew across the aisle.

I kicked it away, but the wood was already smoking. The incendiary spit and sparked, twisting like a live thing. It hit the kneeling rail and began to burn with a white-hot flame.

A stirrup pump, I thought, and looked around wildly, but they must have taken them all up on the roof. There was a bucket hanging by the south door. I ran back and grabbed it, hoping it had sand in it. It did.

I ran back up the nave and upended the bucket over the incendiary and the already-burning rail, and then stood back, waiting for it to spit.

It didn’t. I used my foot to push the incendiary into the very middle of the aisle and check to make sure the fire on the kneeling rail was out. I had dropped the sand bucket and it had rolled under one of the pews. For the verger to find tomorrow and burst into tears.

I stood there looking at it, thinking about what I’d just done. I’d acted without thinking, like Verity, going after the cat in the water. But there was no chance here of changing the course of history. The Luftwaffe was already correcting any possible incongruities.

I looked up at the Mercers’ Chapel. Flames were already licking through the carved wooden ceiling above it, and no amount of sand buckets would be able to put them out. In another two hours the entire cathedral would be in flames.

There was a dull boom as something landed outside the Girdlers’ Chapel, lighting it for an instant. In the seconds before the light faded, I could see the fifteenth-century wooden cross with the carving of a child kneeling at the foot of it. In another half hour, Provost Howard would see it, behind a wall of flames, and the whole east end of the church would be on fire.

“Verity!” I shouted, and my voice echoed in the darkened church. “Verity!”

“Ned!”

I whirled around. “Verity!” I shouted and bolted back down the main aisle. I skidded to a stop at the back of the nave. “Verity!” I shouted and stood still, listening.

“Ned!”

Outside the church. The south door. I took off between the pews, stumbling over the rails, and across to the south door.

There was a knot of people gathered outside, looking anxiously up at the roof, and two tough-looking youths with their hands in their pockets, leaning casually against a lamp-post on the corner, discussing a fire off to the west. “What’s that smell of cigars?” the taller one was asking, as calmly as if they were discussing the weather.

“Tobacconist’s corner of Broadgate,” the shorter one said. “We shoulda nipped in and pinched some cigs before it got going.”

“Did you see a girl come out of the cathedral?” I asked the nearest person, a middle-aged woman in a kerchief.

“It’s not going to catch, is it, do you think?” she said.

Yes, I thought. “The fire watch is up there,” I said. “Did you see a girl run out of the church?”

“No,” she said and went immediately back to looking up at the roof.

I ran down Bayley Lane and then back along the side of the church, but there was no sign of her. She must have come out one of the other doors. Not the vestry door. The fire watch came in and out that door. The west door.

I raced round to the west door. There was a cluster of people there, too, huddled inside the porch, a woman with three little girls, an old man wrapped in a blanket, a girl in a maid’s uniform. A gray-haired woman with a sharp nose and a WAS armband stood in front of the doors, her arms crossed.

“Did you see anyone come out of the church in the last few minutes?” I asked her.

“No one’s allowed inside the church except the fire watch,” she said accusingly, and her voice reminded me of someone’s, too, but I didn’t have time to try to work out whose.

“She has red hair,” I said. “She’s wearing a long white… she’s wearing a white nightgown.”

“Nightgown?” she said disapprovingly.

A short, stout ARP warden came up. “I’ve got orders to clear this area, he said. “The fire brigade needs all avenues to the cathedral cleared. Come along.”

The woman with the little girls picked up the littlest one and started out of the porch. The old man shuffled after her.

“Come along,” the warden said to the maid, who seemed paralyzed with fright. “You too, miss Sharpe.” He waved to the gray-haired woman.

“I have no intention of going anywhere,” she said, crossing her arms more militantly. “I am the vice-chairwoman of the Cathedral Ladies’ Altar Guild and the head of the Flower Committee.”

“I don’t care who you are,” the warden said. “I’ve got orders to clear these doors for the fire brigade. I’ve already cleared the south door, and now it’s your turn.”

“Warden, have you seen a young woman with red hair?” I interrupted.

“I have been assigned to guard this door against looters,” the woman said, drawing herself up. “I have stood here since the raid began and I intend to stand here all night, if necessary, to protect the cathedral.”

“And I intend to clear this door,” the warden said, drawing himself up.

I didn’t have time for this. I stepped between them. “I’m looking for a missing girl,” I said, drawing myself up. “Red hair. White nightgown.”

“Ask at the police station,” the warden said. He pointed back the way I’d come. “Down St. Mary’s Street.”

I took off at a trot, wondering who would win. My money was on the head of the Flower Committee. Who did she remind me of? Mary Botoner? Lady Schrapnell? One of the fur-bearing ladies in Blackwell’s?

The warden hadn’t done a very effective job of clearing the south door. The exact same knot of people was standing there, and the two youths were still holding up the lamp-post. I hurried along the south side of the cathedral toward Bayley Lane and straight into the processional.

I had read about what the police sergeant had called the “solemn little procession” when the fire watch had rescued what treasures they could grab and taken them across to the police station for safekeeping. And in my mind’s eye, I had thought of it as that — a decorous parade, with Provost Howard leading, trooping the colors of the Warwickshire Regiment, and then the others, carrying the candlesticks and chalice and wafer box at a measured pace, and the wooden crucifix bringing up the rear — so that at first I didn’t recognize it.

Because it wasn’t a processional, it was a rabble, a rout, Napoleon’s Old Guard frantically saving what they could from Waterloo. They stumbled down the road at a half-run, the canon with a candlestick under each arm and a load of vestments, a teenaged boy clutching a chalice and a stirrup pump for dear life, the provost charging with the colors thrust out before him like a lance and half-stumbling over the trailing flag.

I stopped, watching them just as if it were a parade, and that took care of one possibility Verity had proposed. None of them was carrying the bishop’s bird stump.

They ran back into the police station. They must have dumped their treasures unceremoniously on the first surface they found, because they were back outside in under a minute and running back toward the vestry door.

A balding man in a blue coverall met them halfway up the stairs, shaking his head. “It’s no good. There’s too much smoke.”

“I’ve got to get the Gospel and the Epistles,” Provost Howard said and pushed past him and through the door.

“Where the bloody hell is the fire brigade?” said the teenaged boy.

“The fire brigade?” the canon said, looking up at the sky. “Where the bloody hell is the RAF?”

The teenaged boy ran back down St. Mary’s to the police station to tell them to ring the fire brigade again, and I followed him.

The rescued treasures were sitting in a pathetic line on the sergeant’s desk, the regimental colors propped up against the wall behind. While the teenaged boy was telling the sergeant, “Well, try them again. The whole chancel roof’s on fire,” I looked at them. The candlesticks, the wooden crucifix. There was a little pile of worn brown Books of Common Prayer, as well, that hadn’t made the list, and a little bundle of offering envelopes and a choirboy’s surplice, and I wondered how many other rescued items Provost Howard had left out of his list. But the bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there.

The boy darted out. The sergeant picked up the phone. “Have you seen a young woman with red hair?” I said before he could dial the fire brigade.

He shook his head, holding his hand over the receiver. “Most likely place she’d be is in one of the shelters.”

A shelter. Of course. The logical place to be during an air raid. She’d have had more sense than to stay out in this. “Where’s the nearest shelter?”

“Down Little Park Street,” he said, cradling the phone. “Go back along Bayley and turn left.”

I nodded my thanks and took off again. The fires were getting closer. The whole sky was a smoky orange, and there were yellow flames shooting up in front of Trinity Church. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, which was getting brighter by the moment. It was getting colder, too, which seemed impossible. I blew on my icy hands as I ran.

I couldn’t find the shelter. A house had taken a direct hit in the middle of the block, a mound of smoking rubble, and next to it, a greengrocer’s shop was on fire. Everything else in the street was silent and dark.

“Verity!” I shouted, afraid I’d hear an answer from the rubble, and started back up the street, looking closely for a shelter sign on one of the buildings. I found it, lying in the middle of the road. I looked around helplessly, trying to determine which direction the blast might have blown it from. “Hello!” I shouted down stairway after stairway. “Is anyone there?”

I finally found it at the near end of the street, practically next to the cathedral, in a half-basement that offered no protection from anything, not even the cold.

It was a small, grubby room without any furniture. Possibly two dozen people, some of them in bathrobes, were sitting on the dirt floor against the sandbag-lined walls. A hurricane lamp hung at one end from a beam, swaying wildly every time a bomb landed, and under it a small boy in earmuffs and pajamas was playing a game of cards with his mother.

I scanned the dimness, looking for Verity, even though she obviously wasn’t there. Where was she?

“Has anyone seen a girl in a white nightgown?” I said. “She has red hair.”

They sat there as if they hadn’t heard me, looking numbly ahead.

“Have you any sixes?” the little boy said.

“Yes,” his mother said, handing him a playing card.

The bells of the cathedral began to chime, ringing out over the steady roar of the ack-ack guns and the whoosh and crump of the high explosives. Nine o’clock.

Everyone looked up at the sound. “That’s the cathedral’s bells,” the little boy said, craning his neck at the ceiling. “Have you any queens?”

“No,” his mother said, looking at her hand and then at the ceiling again. “Go fish. That’s how you know our cathedral’s all right, if you can hear the bells.”

I had to get out of here. I plunged out the door and up the steps to the street. The bells rang out brightly, chiming the hours. They would do that all night, tolling the hours, reassuring the people of Coventry, while the planes droned overhead and the cathedral burned to the ground.

The knot of people had moved across the street from the south door for a better view of the flames shooting up from the cathedral roof. The two youths were still at their lamp-post. I ran up to them.

“It’s no good,” the tall one was saying. “They’ll never get it out now.”

“I’m looking for a young woman, a girl—” I said.

“Ain’t we all?” the short one said, and they both laughed.

“She has red hair,” I persisted. “She’s wearing a white nightgown.”

This, of course, got a huge laugh.

“I think she’s in one of the shelters round here, but I don’t know where they are.”

“There’s one down Little Park,” the tall one said.

“I’ve already been to that one,” I said. “She’s not there.”

They both looked thoughtful. “There’s one up Gosford Street way, but you’ll never get there,” the short one said. “Land mine went off. Blocked the road.”

“She might be in the crypt,” the tall one said, and, at my expression, said, “The cathedral crypt. There’s a shelter down there.”

The crypt. Of course. Several dozen people had taken shelter down there the night of the raid. They’d stayed down there till eleven while the cathedral burned over their heads, and then been led out up the outside steps.

I tore past the gawkers to the south door and up the steps. “You can’t go in there!” the woman in the kerchief shouted.

“Rescue squad,” I shouted back and ran inside.

The west end of the church was still dark, but there was more than enough light in the sanctuary and the chancel. The vestries were ablaze, and the Girdlers’ Chapel and, above, the clerestories were pouring out bronze-colored smoke. In the Cappers’ Chapel, flames were licking at the oil painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Burning pages from the order of service were floating above the nave, drifting and dropping ash.

I tried to remember the layout from Lady Schrapnell’s blueprints. The crypt lay under the St. Lawrence Chapel in the north aisle, just to the west of the Drapers’ Chapel.

I started up the nave, ducking the fiery orders of service and trying to remember where the steps were. To the left of the lectern.

Far forward, in the choir, I caught a glimpse of something moving.

“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the nave.

The figure flitted through the choir toward the sanctuary. I caught its flash of white among the choir stalls.

Incendiaries clattered on the roof, and I glanced up and then back at the choir. The figure, if it had been a figure, had disappeared. Above the entrance to the Drapers’ Chapel, an order of service, caught in the updraft, danced and dipped.

“Ned!”

I whirled around. Verity’s faint voice seemed to come from behind me and far away, but was that a trick of the superheated air in the church? I ran along the choir. There was no one there or in the sanctuary. The order of service twirled in the draft from the Drapers’ Chapel and then caught fire and sank, burning, onto the altar.

“Ned!” Verity shouted, and this time there was no mistaking it. She was outside the church. Outside the south door.

I tore out and down the steps, shouting her name, past the roof-watchers and the lamp-post-loungers. “Verity!”

I saw her almost immediately. She was halfway down Little Park Street, talking earnestly to the stout ARP warden, the skirt of her torn long white dress trailing behind her.

“Verity!” I called, but the din was too great.

“No, you don’t understand,” she was screaming at the warden. “I don’t want a public shelter. I’m looking for a young man with a mustache—”

“Miss, my orders is to clear this area of all civilians,” the warden said.

“Verity!” I shouted, practically in her ear. I grabbed her arm.

She turned. “Ned!” she said, and flung herself into my arms. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Ditto,” I said.

“You’ve got no business being out here,” the warden said sternly. There was a whistle, and a long drawn-out scream, during which I couldn’t hear what he said. “This area is for official services only. Civilians aren’t supposed to be—” There was a sudden deafening bang and the warden disappeared in a shower of dust and bricks.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Warden! Warden!”

“Oh, no!” Verity said, waving her hands as if trying to push the billowing dust aside. “Where is he?”

“Under here,” I said, digging frantically through the bricks.

“I can’t find him,” Verity said, tossing bricks aside. “No, wait, here’s his hand! And his arm!”

The warden shook her arm off violently and stood up, brushing dust off the front of his coveralls.

“Are you all right?” we both said in unison.

“Of course I’m all right,” he said, coughing, “no thanks to you! Civilians! Don’t know what you’re doing. Could have killed someone, throwing bricks about like that. Interfering with the official duties of the ARP is an infraction punishable by—”

Planes began to drone overhead again. I looked up. The sky lit up with sharp flashes, and there was another, closer scream of a whistle.

“We’d better get out of this,” I said. “Down here!” and pushed Verity ahead of me down a basement stairway and into the narrow shelter of a doorway.

“Are you all right?” I shouted, looking at her. Her hair had come down on one side, and her torn dress was streaked with soot. So was her face, and her left hand had a smear of blood on it. “Are you hurt?” I said, lifting it.

“No,” she said. “I hit it on one of the arches in the church. It was dark, and I couldn’t s-see where I was going.” She was shivering. “How can it be so c-cold when the whole c-c-city’s on fire?”

“Here,” I said. “Put this on.” I took off the raincoat and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Courtesy of T.J.”

“Thanks,” she said shakily.

There was another crash, and dirt rained down on us. I pulled her farther back into the doorway and put my arms around her. “We’ll wait till this lets up a bit, and then go back to the cathedral and get out of this and back to a warmer climate,” I said lightly, trying to make her smile. “We’ve got a diary to steal and a husband to find for Tossie. You don’t suppose there’s somebody around here who’d be willing to exchange all this,” I waved my arm at the firelit sky, “for baby talk and Princess Arjumand? No, I suppose not.”

The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted. “Oh, Ned,” Verity said, and burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be making jokes in the middle of a raid. I—”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. Oh, Ned, we can’t go back to Muchings End. We’re stuck here.” She buried her face against my chest.

“Like Carruthers, you mean? They got him out. They’ll get us out, too.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, looking tearfully up at me. “We can’t get to the drop. The fire—”

“What do you mean?” I said. “The tower didn’t burn. It and the spire were the only things that didn’t. And I know that dragon from the Flower Committee’s guarding the west door, but we can get there from the south—”

“The tower?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t come through in the tower?”

“No. In the sanctuary. I stayed there for nearly an hour, hoping it would open again, and then the fires started, and I was afraid the fire watch would catch me, so I went outside and looked for you—”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I knew you’d come as soon as you found out where I was,” she said matter-of-factly.

“But—” I said, and decided not to tell her we’d tried to get here for two weeks and hadn’t been able to even get close.

“—and when I got back to the church, the sanctuary was on fire. And the net won’t open onto a fire.”

“You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t need it to. I came through in the tower, which only got a bit scorched. But we need to be able to get through the nave to the tower, so we’d better go.”

“Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the raincoat on over her arms and then took the tie belt off and used it to hitch her ripped, trailing skirt up to knee-length. “Will I pass for 1940 now?” she said, buttoning the coat.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

We went up the stairs and back toward the cathedral. The east end of the roof was blazing. And the fire brigade had finally arrived. A fire engine was parked on the corner, and we had to step over a tangle of hoses and orange-lit puddles to get to the south door.

“Where are the firemen?” Verity asked as we reached the knot of people by the south door.

“There’s no water,” a ten-year-old boy in a thin sweater said. “Jerries got the water mains.”

“They’ve gone round to Priory Row to find another hydrant.”

“No water,” Verity murmured.

We looked up at the cathedral. A good part of the roof was blazing now, shooting up in sparks at the near end near the apse, and there were flames in the blown-out windows.

“Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral,” a man behind us said.

The boy tugged at my arm. “She’s goin, ain’t she?”

She was going. By ten-thirty, when they finally found a working hydrant, the roof would be completely ablaze. The firemen would attempt to play a hose on the sanctuary and the Lady Chapel, but the water would give out almost immediately, and after that it would just be a matter of time as the roof blazed and the steel rods J.O. Scott had put in to prevent strain on the arches, began to buckle and melt in the heat, bringing the fifteenth-century arches and the roof down on the altar and the carved misereres and Handel’s organ and the wooden cross with the child kneeling at its foot.

Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral. I had always put it in the same class as the bishop’s bird stump — an irritating antiquity — and there were certainly more beautiful cathedrals. But standing here now, watching it burn, I understood what it had meant to Provost Howard to build the new cathedral, modernist — ugly as it was. What it had meant to Lizzie Bittner not to see it sold for scrap. And I understood why Lady Schrapnell had been willing to fight the Church of England and the history faculty and the Coventry City Council and the rest of the world to build it back up again.

I looked down at Verity. Tears were running silently down her face. I put my arm around her. “Isn’t there something we can do?” she said hopelessly.

“We’ll build it back up again. Good as new.”

But in the meantime we had to get back inside and into the tower. But how?

This crowd would never let us walk into a burning church, no matter what pretext I thought up, and the west door was being guarded by a dragon. And the longer we waited, the more dangerous it would be to get across the nave to the tower door.

There was a sound of clanging over the din of the ack-acks. “Another fire brigade!” someone shouted, and in spite of the fact that there was no water, everyone, even the two lamp-post-loungers, ran off toward the east end of the church.

“This is our chance,” I said. “We can’t wait any longer. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Wait,” I said, and tore two long strips from the already-ripped hem of her dress.

I stooped and dipped them in the puddle left by one of the hoses. The water was ice-cold. I wrung them out. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” I said, handing her one. “When we get inside, I want you to head straight for the back of the nave and then go along the wall. If we get separated, the tower door’s just inside the west door and to your left.”

“Separated?” she said, tying on the mask.

“Wind this round your right hand,” I ordered. “The door handles may be hot. The drop’s fifty-eight steps up, not counting the floor of the tower.”

I wrapped my hand in the remaining strip. “Whatever happens, keep going. Ready?”

She nodded, her greenish-brown eyes wide above the mask.

“Get behind me,” I said. I cautiously opened the right side of the door a crack. No flame roared out, only a billow of bronze-colored smoke. I reared back from it and then looked inside.

Things weren’t as bad as I’d been afraid they might be. The east end of the church was obscured by smoke and flames, but the smoke was still thin enough at this end to be able to see through, and it looked like this part of the roof was still holding. The windows, except for one in the Smiths’ Chapel, had been blown out, and the floor was covered with shards of red and blue glass.

“Watch out for the glass.” I pushed Verity ahead of me. “Take a deep breath and go! I’m right behind you,” I said and opened the door all the way.

She took off running, with me right behind her, flinching away from the heat. She reached the door and yanked it open.

“The door to the tower’s to your left!” I shouted, though she couldn’t possibly have heard me above the furious roar of the fire.

She stopped, holding the door open.

“Go up!” I shouted. “Don’t wait for me!” and started to sprint the last few yards. “Go up!”

There was a rumble, and I turned and looked toward the sanctuary, thinking one of the clerestory arches was collapsing. There was a deafening roar, and the window in the Smiths’ Chapel shattered in a spray of sparkling fragments.

I ducked, shielding my face with my arm, thinking in the instant before it knocked me to my knees, “It’s a high explosive. But that’s impossible. The cathedral didn’t sustain any direct hits?’

It felt like a direct hit. The blast rocked the cathedral and lit it with a blinding white light.

I staggered up off my knees, and then stopped, staring out across the nave. The force had knocked the cathedral momentarily clear of smoke, and in the garish white afterlight I could see everything: the statue above the pulpit engulfed in flames, its hand raised like a drowning man’s; the stalls in the children’s chapel, their irreplaceable misereres burning with a queer yellow light; the altar in the Cappers’ Chapel. And the parclose screen in front of the Smiths’ Chapel.

“Ned!”

I started toward it. I only got a few steps. The cathedral shook, and a burning beam came crashing down in front of the Smiths’ Chapel, falling across the pews.

“Ned!” Verity cried desperately. “Ned!”

Another beam, no doubt reinforced with a steel girder by J.O. Scott, crashed down across the first, sending up a blackish swell of smoke that cut off the whole north side of the church from view.

It didn’t matter. I had already seen enough.

I flung myself through the door and through the tower door and up the firelit stairs, wondering what on earth I was going to say to Lady Schrapnell. In that one bright bomb-lit instant I had seen everything: the brasses on the walls, the polished eagle on the lectern, the blackening pillars. And in the north aisle, in front of the parclose screen, the empty wrought-iron flower stand.

It had been removed for safekeeping, after all. Or donated as scrap. Or sold at a jumble sale.

“Ned!” Verity shouted. “Hurry! The net’s opening!”

Lady Schrapnell had been wrong. The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t there.