Страница 111 из 131
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?”
She nodded. “I’ll take the back stairs.”
“I’ll go try to ascertain our space-time location. I’ll meet you in the library in a quarter of an hour, and we’ll go from there.”
She handed me the raincoat. “What if we’ve been gone a week? Or a month? Or five years?”
“We’ll claim we’ve been on the Other Side,” I said, but she didn’t laugh.
She said bleakly, “What if Tossie and Terence are already married?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. “Or fall in.”
She smiled back at me, one of those heart-turning smiles no amount of rest was ever going to render me immune to. “Thank you for coming to find me,” she said.
“At your service, miss,” I said. “Go put on a clean dress.”
She nodded. “Wait a few minutes so we won’t be seen together.”
She opened the door and slid out, and I realized suddenly I hadn’t told her what I’d gone all the way to the Fourteenth Century and back to tell her about.
“I found out how Tossie’s diary—” I started, but she was already down the corridor and starting up the back stairs.
I peeled off the coveralls. My coat and trousers had been fairly well protected by them, but my hands, and presumably my face, were a mess. I wiped them on the lining of the coveralls, wishing wine cellars came equipped with mirrors. Then I rolled the coveralls into a bundle with the raincoat, and jammed them far back behind a rack of claret.
I took a cautious look and went out into the passage. There were four doors along it, one of which had to lead to the outside. The last one was covered in green baize, which meant it led to the main part of the house. I opened the first.
The scullery. It was full of Cinderella-like stacks of dirty dishes and piles of pots, and a row of unpolished shoes. The shoes had to mean it was after bedtime and before the family was up, which was good — it meant Verity wouldn’t run into anyone on her way to her bedroom — but on second thought, it didn’t make any sense. That first night, when I sneaked Cyril back to the stable, I had nearly run into Baine putting the polished shoes outside the doors, and it had still been dark out. And he hadn’t collected them till after everyone had gone to bed. But it was clearly morning. Sun was streaming in on the pots and pans.
There was no newspaper and nothing else that might give a clue to our space-time location.
One of the pots had a copper bottom. I peered into it. There was a large smear of soot on my cheek and across my mustache. I pulled out my handkerchief, spit on it, dabbed at my face, smoothed my hair, and went back out into the passage, calculating. If this was the scullery, the next door must be the kitchen, and the one after that the door to the outside.
Wrong. It was the kitchen, and Jane and the cook were in it, whispering together in the corner. They moved apart guiltily. The cook went over to an enormous black stove and began stirring something briskly, and Jane put a piece of bread on a toasting fork and held it over the fire.
“Where’s Baine?” I said.
Jane jumped about a foot. The bread fell off the toasting fork and into the ashes, flaring up brightly.
“What?” she said, holding the toasting fork in front of her like a rapier.
“Baine,” I repeated. “I need to speak with him. Is he in the breakfast room?”
“No,” she said frightenedly. “I swear by the Blessed Mother, I don’t know where he is, sorr. He didn’t tell us anything. You don’t think the mistress will dismiss us, do you?”
“Dismiss you?” I said, bewildered. “Why? What have you done?”
“Nothing. But she’ll say we must have known all about it, what with gossiping in the servants’ hall and all that,” she said, waving the toasting fork for emphasis. “That’s what happened to my sister Margaret when young Mr. Val run off with Rose the scullery maid. Mrs. Abbott sacked the whole lot.”