He looked around bleakly at what the Luftwaffe had so obviously found, and I wondered if he considered his brother-in-law accountable, but he said instead, “Poor Provost Howard.” He shook his head. “It was a blow to him, losing the cathedral. Wouldn’t go home. Stayed here all night.”

“All night?” I said.

He nodded. “Watching for looters, I suppose.” He looked sadly at the rubble. “Not that there was much left to pinch. Still, if anything did survive, you don’t want people making off with it.”

“No,” I agreed.

He shook his head sadly. “You should have seen him, walking up and down across the rubble, back and forth. ‘Go home and have a lie down,’ I told him. ‘Let me and Mr. Spivens take a turn.’ ”

“So someone’s been here the whole time since the fire,” I persisted.

“Pretty near,” he said, “except when I went home to tea. And this morning it started to rain and I sent my brother-in-law home for my mackintosh and an umbrella, but he never came back, so I had to go home and get them myself. Getting dark,” he added, looking nervously at the sky to the east. “The jerries will be back soon.”

Actually they wouldn’t. The Luftwaffe had decided to go after London tonight instead. But it was getting dark. The far end of the church, where Carruthers was yelling at the new recruit over blackout regulations, was in gloom, and the blown-out east window gaped on a darkening blue-black haze of smoke crisscrossed by searchlights.

“We’d best do what we can before night falls,” I said, and went back over to where I’d been digging and surveyed the rubble, trying to guess how far the bishop’s bird stump had been knocked by the blast. If it hadn’t been carted off by looters. The verger had been gone for at least an hour having his tea, during which time anyone could have walked in through the nonexistent south door and carried off anything they liked. Including the bishop’s bird stump.

I must be getting light-headed from lack of sleep. No one, even badly shell-shocked, would steal it. Or buy it at a jumble sale. This was the bishop’s bird stump. Even the munitions scrap iron drive would turn it down. Unless of course someone recognized its potential as a psychological weapon against the Nazis.

So it had to be here somewhere, along with the rest of the parclose screen and the section of memorial tablet that read, “—ernal,” and I’d better get busy if I was going to find them before dark. I picked up a kneeling cushion, still smouldering and smelling strongly of feathers, laid it in the aisle, and started digging toward the back of the nave.

I found a kneeling rail, a single bronze candlestick, and a charred hymnal, open to “From All That Dwell Below the Skies.” There was a sheet of paper stuck inside the back cover.

I pulled it out. It was an order of service for Sunday the tenth of November. I opened the folded sheet, blackened fragments flaking away as I did.

I squinted, trying to read it in the gloom, wishing I had the new recruit’s pocket torch. “…and red carnations on the High Altar,” it read, “were given in remembrance of Lieutenant David Halberstam, RAF. The pulpit arrangement of pink begonias and the bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums in the bishop’s bird stump were donated and arranged by the Flower Committee of the Ladies’ Altar Guild, Chairwoman Lo—”

The rest of the chairwoman was burnt away, but at least we had proof that the bishop’s bird stump had been in the cathedral five days ago. So where was it now?

I kept digging. It got darker, and the moon that had been such an aid to the Luftwaffe the night before came up and promptly disappeared into the murk of smoke and dust.

This part of the church seemed to have fallen in all in one piece, and I almost immediately ran out of things I could lift by myself. I looked over at Carruthers, but he was deep in royal conversation with the verger and, presumably, getting some information out of him. I didn’t want to bother him.

“Give me a hand!” I called to the new recruit instead. He was squatting next to Mr. Spivens, watching him burrow into the tunnel. “Over here!” I shouted, gesturing to him.

Neither of them paid any attention. Mr. Spivens had nearly disappeared into the tunnel, and the new recruit was fiddling with his pocket torch again.

“Hullo!” I shouted, “Over here!” and several things happened at once. Mr. Spivens reappeared, the new recruit reared back and fell over, the pocket torch came on, its beam sweeping the sky like one of the searchlights, and a long dark animal shot out of the tunnel and across the top of the rubble. A cat. Mr. Spivens took off after it, barking wildly.

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.”