“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.