“None of Crippen’s wives managed to stay married to him for fifty years,” she said, watching a large and irritable man with sidewhiskers who kept bellowing, “Porter! Porter!” to no avail. The efficient Baine had commandeered all of them before the train even stopped and was directing the disposition of the Mering effects.

“What about him?” I said, pointing at a five-year-old boy in a sailor suit.

A young man in a boater and a mustache came bolting onto the platform and looked wildly around. Verity gripped my arm. He saw Tossie, standing with Mrs. Mering and Jane, and started toward her, smiling.

“Horace!” A girl waved from another group of three ladies, and Horace raced over to her and began apologizing profusely for being late to meet them.

I looked guiltily over at Terence, thinking about the fateful meeting I’d made him miss.

The young man left with the three ladies, the sidewhiskered man grabbed up his own bags and stormed off, which left Crippen, now warily eyeing a station guard.

But even if he or the young man with the boater had been suddenly smitten, Tossie wouldn’t have noticed them. She was too busy planning her wedding.

“I shall carry orange blossoms for my bouquet,” she said, “or white roses. Which do you think, Terence?”

“ ‘Two roses on one stem on one slender spray,’ ” Terence quoted, looking longingly at a woman carrying a terrier, “ ‘in sweet communion grew.’ ”

“O, but orange blossoms have such a sweet smell.”

“There are far too many trains,” Mrs. Mering said. “They cannot possibly need all these trains.

Baine finally got everything and everyone on the train and arranged in an even more opulent compartment, and we started for Coventry. After a few minutes, a guard, this one much younger and actually quite good-looking, came along the corridor and punched our tickets. Tossie, deep in planning her trousseau, didn’t so much as glance up, and what made us think that when we got to Coventry she would even notice Mr. C, engrossed as she was in her wedding plans with Terence? What made us think she would even notice the bishop’s bird stump?

She would. She had to. The trip to Coventry had changed her life and inspired her great-great-great-great-granddaughter to make ours miserable.

After a few miles, Baine arrived, spread white linen napkins on our laps, and served us a sumptuous luncheon, which cheered everyone considerably (except possibly Baine, who had made approximately two hundred trips between first and second class, bringing us cold roast beef and cucumber sandwiches and Mrs. Mering a fresh handkerchief, her other gloves, her sewing scissors, and, for no discernible reason, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide).

Terence looked out the window and announced it was clearing off, and then that he could see Coventry, and before Jane and Baine had time to gather up everything and fold up Mrs. Mering’s lap robe, we were standing on the platform in Coventry, waiting for Baine to unload our luggage and find us a carriage. It had not cleared off, nor did it look like it was going to. There was a fine mist in the air, and the city’s outline was blurred and gray.

Terence had thought of a poem suitable to the occasion and was declaiming it. “ ‘I waited for a train at Coventry,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘City of three spires…’ ” He stopped, looking puzzled. “I say, where are the three spires? I only see two.”

I looked where he was pointing. One, two, and a tall box-like structure stood out against the gray sky.

“St. Michael’s spire is being repaired,” Baine said, struggling under a load of rugs and shawls. “The porter informed me that the church is undergoing extensive restorations at the moment.”

“That explains why Lady Godiva spoke to us now,” Mrs. Mering said. “The spirits’ resting place must have been disturbed.”

The mist deteriorated into a drizzle, and Tossie gave a screamlet. “My travelling dress!” she cried.

Baine appeared, unfurling umbrellas. “I have obtained a closed carriage, madam,” he told Mrs. Mering, handing them to Terence and me to hold over the ladies.

Jane was put into a hack with the luncheon hamper and the rugs and shawls and told to meet us at the church, and we drove into town, the horses clattering along narrow brick-paved streets lined with old, half-timbered buildings that leaned out over the street. A Tudor inn with a painted sign hanging above the door, narrow brick shops selling ribbons and bicycles, narrower houses with mullioned windows and tall chimneys. The old Coventry. This would all be destroyed by fire along with the cathedral that November night in 1940, but it was hard to imagine it, clopping along the damp, placid streets.

The driver pulled the horses to a stop at the corner of St. Mary’s Street, the street Provost Howard and his little band had paraded down, carrying the candlesticks and crosses and the regimental flag they’d rescued from the burning cathedral.

“Cahnt gawna fur thuhsahth dawblottuff,” the driver said in an impenetrable dialect.

“He says he can’t take the carriage any farther,” Baine translated. “Apparently the route to the cathedral is blocked.”

I leaned forward. “Tell him to go back along this street to Little Park Street. That will take us to the west doors of the church.”

Baine told him. The driver shook his head and said something unrecognizable, but turned the horses around and started back up Earl Street.

“O, I can feel the spirits already,” Mrs. Mering said, clutching her bosom. “Something is about to happen. I know it.”

We turned up Little Park Street toward the cathedral. I could see the tower at the end of the street, and it was no wonder we hadn’t been able to see the third spire from the railway station. It was encased in wooden scaffolding from a third of the way up all the way to the top, and, except that it had gray cloth tarps draped across it instead of blue plastic, it looked the way it had looked last week when I’d seen it from Merton’s pedestrian gate. Lady Schrapnell was more authentic than she knew.

The piles of red sandstone blocks and heaps of sand in the churchyard looked the same, too, and I worried that the entire approach to the church might be blocked, but it wasn’t. The driver was able to pull the carriage up directly in front of the west doors. On them was a large, hand-lettered sign.

“Iffley’s churchwarden’s been here,” I said, and then saw what it said:

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Closed!” Tossie said.

“Closed?” I said and looked over at Verity. The color had drained from her face.

“Closed,” Mrs. Mering said. “It’s just as Madame Iritosky said. ‘Beware,’ and the letter ‘C.’ She was trying to warn us.”

As if to prove her point, it began to drizzle.

“It can’t be closed,” Verity murmured, looking disbelievingly at the sign.

“How can it be closed?”

“Baine,” Mrs. Mering said. “What time is the next train?”

Don’t let Baine know, I thought. If he didn’t know the schedule, we had at least a quarter of an hour while he trotted back to the station to check and back, a quarter of an hour in which to think of something.