"Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

“We’re from London,” Carruthers said. “A special detachment sent up to help out.”

“How’d your lot get through?” the verger said, picking up his shovel aggressively. “The roads are all blocked.”

It was time to lend assistance. I went over to where they were standing. “We came round Radford way,” I said, fairly sure the verger wouldn’t have been out that direction. “A milk lorry gave us a lift.”

“I thought there were barricades up,” the verger said, still clutching his shovel.

“We had special passes,” Carruthers said.

Mistake. The verger was likely to ask to see them. I said hastily, “The Queen sent us.”

That did it. The verger’s tin helmet came off, and he came to attention, his shovel like a staff. “Her Majesty?”

I placed my ARP helmet over my heart. “She said she couldn’t look Coventry in the face till she’d done something to help. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ she said to us. ‘You must go up to Coventry straightaway and offer them whatever help you can.’”

“She would,” the verger said, shaking his bald head reverently. “She would. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral.’ It sounds just like her.”

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.