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

“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 changedher 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.

The bishop’s bird stump wasn’t under the stone, but the wrought-iron stand it had stood on was, and one of the crosspieces of the parclose screen, and, under a chunk of red sandstone, a half-charred stem of a flower. There was no telling what sort of flower, there weren’t even any leaves left, and it might have been a stick or an iron rod except for the inch or so of green at one end.

“It stood in front of a screen?” Carruthers said, crunching through the glass.

“This screen. On this stand,” I said, pointing at the wrought-iron stand. “As of November the ninth, the Prayers for the RAF Service and Baked Goods Sale. Two crocheted antimacassars, a pansy penwiper, and half a dozen rock cakes. Extremely aptly named.”

Carruthers was looking round at the glass. “Could the blast have knocked it to some other part of the nave?” he asked.

“It wasn’t high explosives that destroyed the cathedral, it was incendiaries.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked over at the verger, who was coming toward us. “Queen Victoria’s Bible, did you say?”

“Yes. Complete with the births, deaths, and nervous breakdowns of all those Georges,” I said. “Find out if anything was taken away for safekeeping to anywhere besides Lucy Hampton before the fire.”

He nodded and went back over to the verger, and I stood there looking at the wrought-iron stand and wondering what to do next.

The majority of the bombs that had fallen on the cathedral had been incendiaries, but Carruthers was right. Concussion can do peculiar things, and there had been a number of explosions in the vicinity, from HEs togas mains going. The bishop’s bird stump might have been blown into the central aisle of the nave, or the choir.

I cleared away more masonry, trying to see what direction the glass from the Drapers’ Chapel had taken. Most of it seemed to have sprayed south and west. I should be looking in the other direction, toward the back of the nave.

I went back to the screen and started digging south and west from it. No stone unturned.

The bells began to strike the hour, and we all stopped what we were doing, even Mr. Spivens, and looked up at the tower. With the roof gone, we could see the spire, rising above the smoke and dust unharmed. The bells sounded beautiful, undimmed by the destruction that lay around us.

“Look, there’s a star,” Carruthers said.

“Where?” I said.

“There,” he pointed.

All I could see was smoke. I said so.

“There,”he said. “Above the spire. Above the smoky pall of war, above the wrack of destruction. Untouched by man’s inhumanity to man, a high herald of hope and beauty, of better times to come. A sparkling symbol of a resurrection it yet kens not.”

“It yet kens not?” I looked at him, worried. “A high herald of hope and beauty?”