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 to gas 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?”

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. Carruthers had been on at least four drops in the past day, two of them within hours of each other, and who knew how many others researching the organ pipes. He’d said himself he hadn’t had any sleep.

I frowned, trying to remember the checklist of time-lag symptoms. Maudlin sentimentality, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, fatigue — but he’d heard the bells, and everyone associated with Lady Schrapnell’s reconstruction project was suffering from sleep deprivation. The only sleep I’d gotten in the past week was during the St. Crispin’s Day War Effort Bazaar. I’d dozed off during the “Welcome” and slept through half the “Introductions of the Organizing Committee.”