Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

“A lot of other things” was putting it mildly. The low-raftered room was crammed from end to end with cardboard cartons, stacked lawn chairs, old clothes hanging from an exposed pipe, jigsaw puzzles of the Grand Canyon and the Mars colony, a croquet set, squash rackets, dusty Christmas decorations, books, and an assortment of bedspread-draped furniture, all stacked on top of each other in sedimentary layers.

“Could you reach me down that chair?” Mrs. Bittner said, pointing at a Twentieth Century plastiform atrocity perched on top of a washing machine. “I have difficulty standing for very long.”

I got it down, disentangling a trowel and several coat hangers from its aluminum legs, and dusted it off for her.

She sat down, easing herself into it gingerly. “Thank you,” she said. “Hand that tin box to me.”

I handed it to her reverently.

She set it down beside her on the floor. “And those large pasteboard boxes. Just push them aside. And those suitcases.”

I did, and she stood up and walked down the little aisle my shifting the boxes had made and into darkness.

“Plug in a lamp,” she said. “There’s an outlet over there.” She pointed at the wall behind an enormous plastic aspidistra.

I reached for the nearest lamp, a massive affair with a huge pleated shade and a squat, heavily decorated metal base.

“Not that one,” she said sharply. “The pink one.”

She pointed at a tall, early Twenty-First Century fringed affair.

I plugged it in and switched on the hard-to-find knob, but it didn’t do much good. It lit the fringe and Verity’s Waterhouse face, but not much else.

Apparently Mrs. Bittner thought so, too. She went over to the ornate metal lamp. “The Masqued Murder,” she said.

Verity leaned forward. “Evidence disguised as something else,” she murmured.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Bittner said, and lifted the pleated shade off bishop’s bird stump.

It was too bad Lady Schrapnell wasn’t here. And Carruthers. All that time we had spent searching for it in the rubble, and it was here all along. Removed for safekeeping, as Carruthers had suggested, and not a mark on it. The Red Sea still parted; Springtime, Summer, Autumn, and Winter still held their respective garlands of apple blossoms, roses, wheat, and holly; John the Baptist, his head still on the platter, still stared reproachfully at King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Gryphons, poppies, pineapples, puffins, the Battle of Prestonpans, all of it intact and not even dusty.

“Lady Schrapnell will be so pleased,” Verity said. She squeezed down the aisle to look at it more closely. “Good heavens. That side must have been facing the wall. What are those? Fans?”

“Clams. Clams inscribed with the names of important naval battles,” I said. “Lepanto, Trafalgar, the Battle of the Swans.”

“It’s difficult imagining it changing the course of history,” Mrs. Bittner said, peering at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. “It doesn’t improve with age, does it? Like the Albert Memorial.”

“With which it has a good deal in common,” Verity said, touching an elephant.

“I don’t know,” I said, cocking my head to look at it sideways. “I’m beginning to feel a certain affection for it.”

“He’s time-lagged,” Verity said. “Ned, the elephant’s carrying a howdah full of pineapples and bananas to an eagle with a fish fork.”

“It’s not a fish fork,” I said. “It’s a flaming sword. And it’s not an eagle, it’s an archangel, guarding the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Or possibly the Zoo.”

“It is truly hideous,” Mrs. Bittner said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. After all those trips, I was probably a bit time-lagged myself. And there was a good deal of smoke.”

Verity turned to stare at her, and then at me.

“How many trips did you make?” she said finally.

“Four,” Mrs. Bittner said. “No, five. The first one didn’t count. I came through too late. The whole nave was on fire, and I was nearly overcome by smoke inhalation. I still have trouble with my lungs.”

Verity was still staring at her, trying to take it in. “You made five trips to the cathedral?”

Mrs. Bittner nodded. “I only had a few minutes between the time the fire watch left and the fire got out of hand, and the slippage kept putting me later than I wanted. Five was all I had time for.”

Verity looked disbelievingly at me.

“Hand me down the bandbox,” Mrs. Bittner told her. “The second time I nearly got caught.”

“That was me,” I said. “I saw you running toward the sanctuary.”

“That was you?” she said, laughing, her hand on her chest. “I thought it was Provost Howard, and I was going to be arrested for a looter.”

Verity handed her the bandbox, and she took off the lid and began rummaging through the tissue paper. “I took the bishop’s bird stump on the last trip. I was trying to reach the Smiths’ Chapel, but it was on fire. I ran across to the Dyers’ Chapel and got the bronze candlesticks off the altar, but they were too hot. I dropped the first one, and it rolled away under one of the pews.”

And I found it, I thought, and thought it had been blown there by concussion.

“I went after it,” she said, digging matter-of-factly through tissue paper, “but the rafters were coming down, so I ran back up the nave, and I saw that the organ was on fire, it was all on fire — the woodwork and the choir and the sanctuary — that beautiful, beautiful cathedral — and I couldn’t save any of it. I didn’t think, I just grabbed the nearest thing I could find, and ran for the net, spilling chrysanthemums and water everywhere.” She took out a wad of tissue paper and unwrapped a bronze candlestick. “That’s why there’s only one.”

Mr. Dunworthy had said she was absolutely fearless, and she must have been, darting back and forth between crashing beams and falling incendiaries, the net opening on who-knows-what and no guarantee it would stay open, no guarantee the roof wouldn’t fall in. I looked at her in admiration.

“Ned,” she ordered, “bring me that painting. The one with the bedspread over it.”

I did, and she pulled the bedspread off a painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Verity, standing beside me, clasped my hand.

“The rest of the things are over there,” Mrs. Bittner said. “Under the plastic.”

And they were. The embroidered altar cloth from the Smiths’ Chapel. An engraved pewter chalice. A Sixteenth-Century wooden chest. A small statue of St. Michael. A mediaeval enameled pyx. A silver candelabrum with the candles still in it. A misericord carved with one of the Seven Works of Mercy. The capper’s pall. A Georgian altar plate. And the wooden cross from the Girdlers’ Chapel, with the image of a child kneeling at the foot of it.

All the treasures of Coventry Cathedral.

“Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge; and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way back.”

Verity was the first one to recover. “It’s forty-five minutes till the consecration,” she said, looking at her watch… “We’ll never make it.”

“We’ll make it,” I said, grabbing up the handheld.