I nodded solemnly at the verger, winked at Carruthers, and went back to my digging. The rest of the collapsed arch was underneath the roof slates, along with a tangle of electrical cords and a broken memorial tablet that read, “May you know rest et—,” a wish which apparently had not been granted.
I cleared a space three feet wide around the pillar. Nothing. I crawled over the rubble, looking for the rest of the pillar, found a fragment of it, and began digging again.
Carruthers came over. “The verger wanted to know what the Queen looked like,” he said. “I told him she was wearing a hat. She did, didn’t she? I can never remember which one wore the hats.”
“They all did. Except Victoria. She wore a lace cap affair,” I said. “And Camilla. She wasn’t queen long enough. Tell him Her Majesty saved Queen Victoria’s Bible when Buckingham Palace was bombed. Carried it out in her arms like a baby.”
“She did?” Carruthers said.
“No,” I said, “but it’ll keep him from asking why you’re wearing a bomb squad helmet. And it might get him talking about what was saved last night.”
Carruthers pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his coveralls. “The altar candlesticks and cross from the high altar and the Smiths’ Chapel were saved by Provost Howard and the fire watch and taken to the police station. Also a silver paten and chalice, a wooden crucifix, a silver wafer box, the Epistles, the Gospels, and the regimental colors of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Seventh Battalion,” he read.
It matched the list in Provost Howard’s account of the raid. “And not the bishop’s bird stump,” I said, surveying the rubble. “Which means it’s here somewhere.”
“No luck finding it?” Carruthers asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance anyone arrived earlier and has already found it?”
“Nobody of ours,” Carruthers said. “Davis and Peters couldn’t even get to the right year. It took me four tries to get this close. The first time I came through I landed on the nineteenth. The second time I ended up in the middle of December. The third time I ended up spot-on target, right month, right day, ten minutes before the raid started. And in the middle of a field of marshmallows halfway to Birmingham.”
“Marshmallows?” I said, thinking that I couldn’t have heard right. Marshmallows didn’t grow in fields, did they?
“Marrows,” Carruthers said, sounding irritated. “In a field of vegetable marrows. And it wasn’t anything to joke about. The farmer’s wife thought I was a German paratrooper and locked me in the barn. I had the devil of a time getting out.”
“What about the new recruit?” I said.
“He came through right before I did. I found him wandering about in the Warwick Road, no idea of where to go. If I hadn’t found him he’d have fallen in a bomb crater.”
Which might not have been a bad thing, considering. The new recruit had given up watching Mr. Spivens and was back trying to figure out how to switch on his pocket torch.
“It took us two hours to get here,” Carruthers said. “How about you, Ned? How many tries before you got this close?”
“Just the one. I only just got pulled off jumble sales to try when you weren’t having any luck.”
“Jumble sales?”
“Lady Schrapnell got the idea the bishop’s bird stump might have been sold at one of the cathedral’s jumble sales,” I said. “You know, to raise money for the war effort. Or given to a scrap iron drive, so she sent me to every church and community function from September on. I say, you don’t know what a penwiper’s used for, do you?”
“I don’t even know what a penwiper is.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “I’ve bought seven. Two dahlias, a rose, a kitten, a hedgehog, and two Union Jacks. One’s got to buy something, and since I couldn’t bring anything I bought back through the net with me, it had to be something I could slip onto the fancy goods table without being caught, and penwipers are small. Except for the rose. It was nearly as big as a soccer ball, made out of layers and layers of bright fuchsia wool sewn together, and pinked round the edges. And what I can’t see is what on earth the use of something like that would be, except of course for people to buy at jumble sales. They all had them, the Evacuated Children Charity Fair, the ARP Gas Mask Fund Baked Goods Sale, the St. Anne’s Day Sale of Work—”
Carruthers was looking at me oddly. “Ned,” he said, “how many drops have you made in the past week?”
“Ten,” I said, trying to remember. “No, twelve. There was the Trinity Church Harvest Fête, the Women’s Institute Victory Drive Sale of Work, the Spitfire Benefit Tea. Oh, and the bishops’ wives. Thirteen. No, twelve. Mrs. Bittner wasn’t a drop.”
“Mrs. Bittner?” Carruthers said. “The wife of the last bishop of Coventry?”
I nodded. “She’s still alive. And still living in Coventry. Lady Schrapnell sent me out to interview her.”
“What could she possibly know about the old cathedral? She wouldn’t even have been born when it burned.”
“Lady Schrapnell had the idea that if the bishop’s bird stump survived the fire, it might have been put in storage somewhere in the new cathedral, so she sent me to interview the bishops’ wives because, and I quote, ‘Men don’t know where anything’s kept.’”
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.