To Say Nothing of the Dog (48 page)

“Where’s she going?” I said to Verity, watching Jane hurry down the platform to the rear of the train.

“To second-class,” she said. “Servants don’t travel with their employers.”

“How do they do without them?”

“They don’t,” she said, catching up her skirts and starting up the steps.

They certainly didn’t. Baine came back as soon as everything was aboard to bring Mrs. Mering a lap robe and ask if there was anything else she needed.

“A cushion,” she said. “These railway seats are so uncomfortable.”

“Yes, madam,” he said, and took off at a gallop. He returned in under a minute, disheveled and out of breath, with a brocade-covered cushion.

“The train from Reading is a corridor train, madam,” he panted, “but this one has only compartments. I will, however, attend you at each stop.”

“Were there no direct trains to Coventry?” she said.

“Yes, madam,” Baine said. “At 10:17. The train is about to leave, madam. Is there anything else?”

“Yes, the Baedeker. And a rug to put my feet on. The condition of these railway compartment floors is disgraceful.”

Mrs. Mering had obviously never been on the tube. It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

I had ridden on trains before, in the 1940s, most recently to Hampton Lucy to see if the bishop’s bird stump was there with the east windows, but those trains had been packed with soldiers, the windows had been covered with blackout curtains, and all the fittings had been removed to make ammunition. And, even if it hadn’t been wartime, they had been nothing to this.

The high-backed seats were upholstered in green velveteen, and the walls above were panelled in polished mahogany inlaid with a pattern of flowers. There were rich green plush curtains hung at the windows, and gas lamps in brackets on both sides, covered with etched-glass lampshades, and the luggage rack overhead, the hand rails, the arm rests, the curtain rings, were all of polished brass.

Definitely not the tube. And, as the train lurched slowly forward (with Baine making a last flying run to deliver the Baedeker and the rug and another back to second-class) and then picked up speed through the beautiful, misty countryside, definitely nothing to complain about.

That did not stop Mrs. Mering from complaining about the soot blowing in the window (Terence closed the window), about the stuffiness of the compartment (Terence opened the window again and drew the curtains), about the dimness of the day, the roughness of the ride, the hardness of the cushion Baine had brought her.

She gave a little screamlet each time the train stopped, started, or went round a curve, and a large one when the railway guard came in to take our tickets. He was even older than the porter, but Verity leaned forward to look at his name badge and subsided pensively in her seat after he’d gone.

“What was the guard’s name?” I asked her when I helped her down at Reading Station, where we were to change trains.

“Edwards,” she said, looking around the platform. “Do you see anyone who looks like he’d be willing to marry Tossie?”

“What about Crippen over there?” I said, nodding my head toward a pale, timid-looking young man who kept looking down the track and sticking his finger nervously in his collar.

“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:

“Closed for repairs.

1 June to 31 July.”

“The heart is its own fate.”

Philip James Bailey

C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N

A Fateful Day—Another Conversation with a Workman—I Sink to Promoting Jumble Sales—The Cathedral Ghost—A Tour—I Attempt to Find Out Two Workmen’s Names—The Bishop’s Bird Stump Is Found at Last—Tossie’s Reaction—The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots—Baine Expresses an Aesthetic Opinion—Tossie’s Reaction—The Albert Memorial, Beauties of—Penwipers—Prevalence of Flower Names in Victorian Times—A Premonition—I Attempt to Find Out the Curate’s Name—A Quarrel—An Abrupt Departure

“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.

But this was Baine we were talking about, clearly the forerunner of Jeeves, and Jeeves had always known everything.

“2:08, madam,” he said. “It goes to Reading. Or there’s an express at 2:46 to Goring.”

“We shall take the 2:08,” Mrs. Mering said. “Goring is so common.”

“But what about Lady Godiva?” Verity said desperately. “She must have had a reason for wanting you to come to Coventry.”

“I am not at all convinced it was her spirit, particularly under the circumstances,” Mrs. Mering said. “I believe Madame Iritosky was right about there being mischievous spirits at work. Baine, tell the driver to take us to the station.”

“Wait!” I shouted, and jumped out of the carriage and squarely into a puddle. “I will be right back,” I said. “Stay there,” and took off along the tower wall.

“Where on earth is he going?” I heard Mrs. Mering say. “Baine, go and tell Mr. Henry to come back here immediately.”

I sprinted round the corner of the church, holding my coat collar together against the wet.

I remembered from the rubble and the reconstruction that there was a door on the south side of the cathedral and another on the north, and if necessary I’d bang on the vestry door till someone answered.

But it wasn’t necessary. The south door was open, and a workman was standing in it, under the porch just out of the rain, arguing with a young man in a clerical collar.

“You promised the clerestory would be completed by the twenty-second and here it is the fifteenth and you’ve not even begun the varnishing of the new pews,” the curate, who was pale and rather pop-eyed, though that might have been from the workman, was saying.

The workman looked as though he had heard all this before and would hear it again. “We carn’t start the varnishin, guv, till they’re done in the clerestory ‘cuz o’ the dust.”

“Well, then, complete the work in the clerestory.”

He shook his head. “Carn’t. Bill as wuz puttin’ the steel girders in the beams is ‘ome sick.”

“Well, when will he be back? The work must be completed by next Saturday. That’s the date of our church bazaar.”

The workman gave him the identical shrug I had seen an electrician give Lady Schrapnell three weeks ago, and it occurred to me it was a pity she wasn’t here. She’d have cuffed him smartly on the ear, and the work would have been done by Friday. Or Thursday.

“Cud be tomorra, cud be next month. Don’t see wot you need new pews for anyways. I liked the aud box pews.”

“You
are not a member of the clergy,” the curate said, getting more pop-eyed,
“or
an expert on modern church architecture. Next month is
not
good enough. The renovations must be completed by the twenty-second.”

The workman spit on the damp porch and sauntered back into the church.

“Pardon me,” I said, running up to the curate before he could disappear, too. “I wondered if we might tour the church.”