“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.
“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and change, you can’t beat a sea trip.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Third time is not necessarily a charm. The net shimmered, and we were in pitch-blackness again. The din had disappeared, though there was still a strong smell of smoke. It was at least twenty degrees cooler. I took one arm away from around Verity and cautiously felt to the side. I touched stone.
“Don’t move,” I said. “I know where we are. I was here before. It’s Coventry’s belltower. In 1395.”
“Nonsense,” Verity said, starting up the steps. “It’s the Merings’ wine cellar.”
She opened the door two steps above us a crack, and light filtered in, revealing wooden steps and racks of cobwebbed bottles below.
“It’s daylight,” she whispered. She opened the door a little wider and stuck her head out, looking both ways. “This passage opens off the kitchen. Let’s hope it’s still the sixteenth.”
“Let’s hope it’s still 1888,” I said.
She peeked out again. “What do you think we should do? Should we try to get out to the drop?”
I shook my head. “There’s no telling where we’d end up. Or whether we could get back.” I looked at her ragged, soot-streaked white dress. “You need to get out of those clothes. Especially the raincoat, which is circa 2057. Give it to me.”
She shrugged out of it.
“Can you get up to your room without being seen?”