He turned away and looked to a flat-runged ladder rising up to an arched opening high in the wall that looked like the mouth of a brick pizza oven. He set his hands on the vertical beams of the ladder and set his foot on the first rung. As he shifted his full weight onto it, the wood and metal of the tower began to move, and quickly the entire structure vibrated higher and higher toward the point of collapse. Then it was a clapper striking the first bell in the Westminster Quarters. The sound of the bells cracked around him, and he gripped the ladder until the five tolls were done.

His heart began to slow down and he kept climbing. When he reached the opening at the top of the ladder he looked out along the length of the chapel roof’s interior: mammoth wooden rafters above and the dark panels of the chapel ceiling below. From the roof beam a gangway on steel cables hung down a foot above the wooden spine of the chapel ceiling.

Each sloping panel beneath the gangway had a frame around the edge, with an iron eyebolt embedded in it. A clothesline tied to the eyebolt ran up over a pulley anchored into the roof and back down, and was secured to the side of the gangway with multiple wraps around a metal cleat. To clean the chandeliers, the maintenance men opened these panels, pulled the chandeliers up by their chains hand over hand, cleaned the bulbs and wrought iron, then lowered each one down again. For the first twenty years of the chapel’s life, this had been done every day to light the candles in each chandelier.

Ben went to his hands and knees and crawled out onto the gangway. It was expanded metal lath with treaded edges and it was painful on his palms and kneecaps. He imagined himself as a Spartan warrior, for whom this pain would be nothing. He thought of Alice getting up now, sleepy, careless of the fact of her body. He crawled out only a few feet because he wanted to make sure he heard Aston’s voice, and the Rector’s podium stood at the near end of the chapel.