To Say Nothing of the Dog (3 page)

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’ face.

“Not on me,” Carruthers said. “Under there!” He snatched it away from him and shone it on the pile of timbers, and I caught a glint of metal. My heart leaped.

“Get those timbers off there,” I said, and we all went at the pile.

“Here it comes,” the verger said, and Carruthers and the new recruit hauled it up out of the rubble.

The metal was black with soot, and it was badly crushed and twisted, but I knew what it was, and so did the verger. “It’s one of the sand buckets,” he said, and burst into tears.

It was physically impossible for the verger to be suffering from time-lag, unless it was somehow contagious. He was giving a good imitation of it, though.

“I saw that bucket only last night,” he blubbered into a very sooty handkerchief, “and now look at it.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Carruthers said, patting him awkwardly. “It’ll be as good as new,” which I doubted.

“The handle’s blown clean off,” the verger said. He blew his nose loudly. “I filled that bucket with sand myself. Hung it up by the south door myself.”

The south door was at the other end of the church, with the full length of the nave and rows and rows of solid oak pews between it and the Drapers’ Chapel.

“We’ll find the handle,” Carruthers said, which I also doubted, and they knelt as if in prayer and started digging through the timbers.

I left them and the new recruit, who was peering under the steps, presumably looking for cats, and went back over to where the roof had fallen in in one piece.

And stood there in what had been the center aisle, trying to reason out where to look. The blast had knocked the sand bucket nearly half the length of the church in the opposite direction of the blast from the Smiths’ Chapel window. Which meant the bishop’s bird stump could be anywhere.

And it was dark. The searchlights had come on, sweeping the sky in long arcs, and off to the north an orange-brown glow from a fire Posts One through Seventeen hadn’t yet got under control lit the sky, but neither of them gave any light, and the moon was nowhere to be seen.

We wouldn’t be able to work much longer, and Lady Schrapnell would meet us in the net, demanding to know where we’d been and why we hadn’t found the bishop’s bird stump. She’d send me back to try again, or, worse, she’d put me back on jumble sale duty, with all those dreadful penwipers and embroidered tea cloths and hard-as-rock cakes.

Perhaps I could simply stay here, enlist in the Infantry and get sent to somewhere safe and quiet, like the beaches of Normandy. No, D-Day wasn’t until 1944. To North Africa. El Alamein.

I shoved aside a burnt end of a pew and lifted the stone beneath it. Under it was pavement, the sandstone floor of the Dyers’ Chapel. I sat down on a piece of coping.

Mr. Spivens trotted over and began scrabbling at the pavement. “It’s no use, boy,” I said. “It’s not here.” I thought despairingly of the sweet-pea penwipers I would have to purchase.

Mr. Spivens sat down at my feet, looking up at me sympathetically.

“You’d help if you could, wouldn’t you, boy?” I said. “It’s no wonder they call you man’s best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—”

And found myself yanked back to Oxford and hauled off to Infirmary before I’d even finished patting him on the head.

“If everyone minded their own business,” said the Duchess in a hoarse growl,“ the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

Lewis Carroll.

C H A P T E R T W O

The Spanish Inquisition—Oxford, City of Dreaming Spires—Escape—Entanglement—Extrication—Explication—The Playing Fields of Merton—Eavesdropping—Difference Between Literature and Real Life—Some Sort of Nymph—An Important Clue—Lady Windermere’s Fan—A Good Idea

“Your partner says you’re suffering from advanced time-lag, Mr. Henry,” the nurse said, fastening a tach bracelet round my wrist.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m aware that I may have got a bit carried away on the dog thing, but I must get back to Coventry immediately.”

It was bad enough that I’d landed fifteen hours later than I was supposed to have. Now I’d also left the cathedral only partly searched, which was as bad as not searching at all, and even if I was able to get back there at something close to the time I’d left at, there would still be all those missing moments, during which the verger, led by the cat, might have found the bishop’s bird stump and given it for safekeeping to his brother-in-law, whence it would pass out of history altogether.

“It’s essential I return to the ruins,” I said. “The bishop’s bird stump—”

“Preoccupation with irrelevancies,” the nurse said into her handheld. “Appearance dirty and disheveled.”

“I was working in a burnt-out cathedral,” I said. “And I must get back there. The—”

She popped a temp into my mouth and stuck a monitor on my wrist.

“How many drops have you made in the last two weeks?” she said.

I watched her punch the reads into her handheld, trying to remember what the legal limit on drops was. Eight? Five?

“Four,” I said. “The person you should be examining is Carruthers. He’s even dirtier than I am, and you should have heard him, going on about the stars and the ‘future ye ken not.’ ”

“What symptoms are you experiencing? Disorientation?”

“No.”

“Drowsiness?”

That was more difficult. Everyone under Lady Schrapnell’s lash was automatically sleep deprived, but I doubted that the nurse would take that into consideration, and at any rate it didn’t manifest itself so much as drowsiness as a sort of “walking dead” numbness, like people bombarded night after night in the Blitz had suffered from.

“No,” I said finally.

“Slowness in Answering,” she said into the handheld. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“1940,” I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

She typed some more. “Have you been experiencing any difficulty in distinguishing sounds?”

“No,” I said, smiling at her. Infirmary nurses usually resemble something out of the Spanish Inquisition, but this one had an almost kindly face, the sort an assistant torturer, the one who straps you to the rack or holds the door to the Iron Maiden open for you, might have.

“Blurring of vision?” she asked.

“No,” I said, trying not to squint.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Slowness in Answering or not, this question required some thought. Two was the most likely number, being easily confused with both three and one, but she might have chosen five to confuse me, and if that was the case, should I answer four, since the thumb isn’t technically a finger? Or might she be holding her hand behind her back?

“Five,” I said finally.

“How is that possible when according to you, you only made four drops?”

No matter how far my guess had been from the actual number of extended fingers, this was surely an inappropriate response. I considered asking her to repeat the question, but decided she would type in Difficulty in Distinguishing Sounds. I decided on a frontal attack.

“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of the situation,” I said. “The cathedral’s consecration is seventeen days from now, and Lady Schrapnell—”

The nurse handed me a stiff card and went back to making incriminating remarks into the handheld. I looked at the card, hoping it wasn’t something I was supposed to read as a further test of Blurring. Especially as it appeared to be blank.

“It’s essential that the bishop’s bird stump—” I said.

The nurse flipped the card over. “Tell me what you see.”

It appeared to be a postal card of Oxford. Seen from Headington Hill, her dear old dreaming spires and mossy stones, her hushed, elm-shaded quads where the last echoes of the Middle Ages can still be heard, murmuring of ancient learning and scholarly tradition, of—

“That’s about enough of that,” she said, and wrenched the card out of my hand. “You have an advanced case of time-lag, Mr. Henry. I’m prescribing two weeks’ bed rest. And no time travel.”

“Two weeks?” I said. “But the consecration’s in seventeen days—”

“Let other people worry about the consecration. You need to focus on getting rest.”

“You don’t understand—”

She folded her arms. “I certainly don’t. I suppose your devotion to duty is admirable, but why you should want to risk your health to rebuild an archaic symbol of an outmoded religion is beyond me.”

I
don’t
want to, I thought. Lady Schrapnell wants to, and what Lady Schrapnell wants, Lady Schrapnell gets. She had already overcome the Church of England, Oxford University, a construction crew of four thousand who informed her daily it was impossible to build a cathedral in six months, and the objections of everyone from Parliament to the Coventry City Council, to rebuild her “archaic symbol.” I didn’t stand a chance.

“Do you know what fifty billion pounds could do for medicine?” the nurse said, typing things into the handheld. “We could find a cure for Ebola II, we could vaccinate children all over the world against HIV, we could purchase some decent equipment. With what Lady Schrapnell is spending on the stained-glass windows alone, Radcliffe Infirmary could build an entire new facility with the latest in equipment.” The handheld spit out a strip of paper.

“It isn’t devotion to duty, it’s—”

“It’s criminal carelessness, Mr. Henry.” She tore off the strip and handed it to me. “I want you to follow these instructions to the letter.”

I looked bleakly at the list. The first line read, “Fourteen days’ uninterrupted bed rest.”

There was nowhere in Oxford I could get uninterrupted bed rest, or in England, for that matter. When Lady Schrapnell found out I was back, she’d track me down and interrupt me with a vengeance. I could see her storming in, flinging the covers off, and leading me by the ear over to the net.

“I want you to eat a high-protein diet and drink at least eight glasses of fluid daily,” the nurse said. “No caffeine, no alcohol, no stimulants.”

A thought struck me. “Could I be admitted to Infirmary?” I said hopefully. If anyone could keep Lady Schrapnell out, it would be those Grand Inquisitors, the ward nurses. “Put in isolation or something?”

“Isolation?” she said. “Certainly not. Time-lag isn’t a disease, Mr. Henry. It’s a biochemical imbalance brought about by disruption of the internal clock and the inner ear. You don’t need medical treatment. All you need is rest and the present.”

“But I won’t be able to sleep—”

Her handheld began to bleep. I jumped.

“Exaggerated Nervousness,” she said, typing it into the handheld, and to me, “I want to run a few tests. Take off your clothes and put this on,” she said, taking a paper gown out of a drawer and dumping it on my legs. “I’ll be back directly. The fastening tapes go in the back. And wash up. You’re covered in soot.”

She went out and shut the door. I got off the examining table, leaving a long black smear where I’d been sitting, and went over to the door.

“Worst case of time-lag I’ve ever seen,” she was saying to someone. I hoped it wasn’t Lady Schrapnell. “He could write rhymed verse for the dailies.”

It wasn’t Lady Schrapnell. I knew because I couldn’t hear whoever it was answer.