“Be careful.”

We assured her we would be, but really, we were going to a church.

What could go wrong?

CHAPTER 27

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE impressive.

Saint Paul’s Cathedral was the heart of the Church for London’s faithful and had been for four hundred years. Over five hundred feet long, it should have stood as a shining beacon in a troubled city.

But the place looked awful. The spire, once the tallest in Christendom, had collapsed in a fire long before I was born and had never been replaced. The buttressed arches sagged, the stone walls cracking underneath. The stained glass, once beautiful, was dull and filthy.

To say nothing of the souls of those around it. The outer grounds of the cathedral had become an open-air market for Protestant booksellers and doomsday preachers. A man on a box screamed at us about the end times as we passed. A second, standing beside him in a ragged robe and bare feet, hollered about the Day of Judgment, trying—and failing—to drown out his opponent.

It wasn’t much better inside. The long stretch of the nave, called Paul’s Walk, had become something of a market, too, with merchants of all kinds doing business between the giant pillars that rose to the arched roof high above us. Others hung about, trading in the latest gossip of the city.

I shook my head. The last time I’d been here, I’d thought Saint Paul’s something special. But after seeing Notre-Dame in Paris, I found myself ashamed of this place. Tom, devout and full of English pride, seemed particularly embarrassed, and even a little cross. He muttered under his breath at the merchants; the ones who caught the look in his eyes found somewhere else to be.

Well, we weren’t here for worship, anyway. I found a boy sweeping the mud tracked in by visitors and asked him for Saint Erkenwald’s tomb.

“Round the chancel, my lord,” he said. “Directly behind the altar.”

We went up one dais, then another, into the chancel. Here were the first people we saw actually praying, or visiting the shrines, monuments, and tombs of those interred in the church. Past the chancel, on the eastern side, were three chapels, dedicated to Mary, Saint George, and Saint Dunstan. Hallowed halls, indeed.

Tom pointed. “There it is.” Right up against the divider that separated the chapels from the chancel was Saint Erkenwald’s resting place.

His tomb was a long, flat-topped burial vault. Behind it, against the divider, was a carved stone image of the side of some cathedral, all pillars, arches, and windows. The area was fenced off by a wrought-iron rail, topped with iron fleurs-de-lis. The rail was low enough that pilgrims could place offerings on the tomb. There were a few already: a pouch, knotted with rope; a silver shilling; a seashell, polished to gleaming.

And there was something else, too.

“Look.”

Next to the shilling was a bunch of pale yellow, five-petaled flowers. Their long, slender stems were tied together with string.