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“Of course, nothing can be built without peace,” replied Wren, “and no peace can be achieved without understanding. I come seeking a new understanding between my kind and yours. First: we recognize that the air is your domain, and we will build nothing in it without your permission.”
“And why would we give our permission?”
“Because this new building would be different from all the ones that came before. It would not be meant solely for the use of humans. It would be yours, too.”
Nesmith laughed. “And what would we want with a building?”
“Why, Nesmith,” said another pigeon, “if we had a building we could escape from the cold and the rain when the weather was bad. We could roost and lay eggs and stay warm.”
“Not with humans around to bother us!” replied Nesmith. “We need a space all our own.”
“What if I could promise you that?” said Wren. “I’ll make the cathedral so tall that humans won’t have any interest in using the top half at all.”
Wren did more than make promises. He returned day after day to discuss his plans, and even altered them to satisfy the pigeons’ whims. They demanded all sorts of nooks and crannies and belfries and arches that were all but useless to humans, but were cozier than a living room to pigeons, and Wren agreed. He even promised the pigeons their own entrance, high above the ground and inaccessible to the non-winged. In exchange, the pigeons promised not to stand in the way of construction, and once it was built, not to make too much noise during services or poop on the worshippers.
And so an historic accord was forged. The pigeons and humans called off their war and returned to merely annoying one another. Wren built his cathedral—their cathedral—a proud and towering place, and the pigeons never again tried to destroy it. In fact, they felt such pride in Saint Paul’s that they swore to protect it—and to this day they still do. When fires break out they swarm and beat the flames with their wings. They chase away vandals and thieves. During the great war, squadrons of pigeons redirected bombs in midair so that they fell clear of the building. It’s safe to say that Saint Paul’s would not be standing today without its winged caretakers.
Wren and the pigeons became lifelong friends. For the rest of his life, England’s most esteemed architect never went anywhere without a pigeon close at hand to advise him. Even after he died, the birds went to visit him, now and again, in the land below. To this day, you’ll find the cathedral they built still towering over London, peculiar pigeons keeping watch.
The Girl Who Could Tame Nightmares
Once there was a girl named Lavinia who wanted nothing more than to become a doctor like her father. She had a kind heart and a sharp mind and she loved helping people. She would have made an excellent doctor—but her father insisted it wasn’t possible. He had a kind heart, too, and merely wanted to save his daughter from disappointment; at that time there were no female doctors in America at all. It seemed inconceivable that she would be accepted to a medical school, so he urged her toward more practical ambitions. “There are other ways to help people,” he told her. “You could be a teacher.”
But Lavinia hated her teachers. At school, while the boys were learning science, Lavinia and the other girls were taught how to knit and cook. But Lavinia would not be discouraged. She stole the boys’ science books and memorized them. She spied through the keyhole as her father examined patients in his office, and she pestered him with endless questions about his work. She sliced open frogs she’d caught in the yard to examine their insides. One day, she vowed, she would discover a cure for something. One day she would be famous.
She could never have guessed how soon that day would arrive, or in what form. Her younger brother, Douglas, had always suffered from bad dreams, and lately they’d been getting worse. He often woke up screaming, convinced that monsters were coming to eat him.
“There are no monsters,” Lavinia said, comforting him one night. “Try thinking about some baby animals as you fall asleep, or Cheeky romping in a field.” She patted their old bloodhound, who lay curled at the foot of the bed. So Douglas tried thinking of Cheeky and baby chickens as he fell asleep the following night, but in his dreams the dog turned into a monster that bit the chicks’ heads off, and he woke up screaming once again.
Concerned that Douglas might be ill, their father looked in Douglas’s eyes and ears and throat and checked him all over for rashes, but he could find nothing physically wrong with the boy. The night terrors got so bad that Lavinia decided to examine Douglas herself, just in case their father had missed something.
“But you’re not a doctor,” Douglas protested. “You’re just my sister.”
“Hush up and hold still,” she said. “Now go ahhh.”
She peered into his throat, his nose, and his ears—and deep inside the latter, with the aid of a light, she spied a mass of strange black stuff. She poked her finger in and wiggled it about, and when she removed it, a string of sooty, threadlike stuff was wrapped around the tip. As she pulled her hand away, three long feet of it unraveled from Douglas’s ear.
“Hey, that tickles!” he said, laughing.
She balled the thread in her hand. It squirmed, ever so slightly, as if alive.
Lavinia showed it to her father. “How strange,” he remarked, holding it up to a light.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said, frowning. The thread was wriggling slowly out of his hand toward Lavinia. “I think it likes you, though.”
“Perhaps it’s a new discovery!” she said excitedly.
“I doubt it,” her father said. “In any case, it’s nothing for you to worry about.” He patted her on the head, put the thread into a drawer, and locked it.
“I’d like to examine it, too,” she said.
“It’s time for lunch,” he replied, shooing her out.
She stomped away to her room, annoyed. That might have been the end of it, if not for this: Douglas had no nightmares that night or any night after, and he credited his recovery entirely to Lavinia.
Their father wasn’t so sure. A short time later, though, a patient of his complained of insomnia due to bad dreams, and when nothing the doctor prescribed seemed to help, he reluctantly asked Lavinia to take a look in the patient’s ear. Just eleven and small for her age, she had to stand on a chair to see in. Sure enough, it was clogged with a mass of thready black stuff, which her father had not been able to see. She stuck her pinkie inside, wiggled it around, then wound out a thread from the patient’s ear. It was so long and so thoroughly attached to the inside of his head that, to pull it loose, she had to climb down from her stool, dig her heels into the floor, and yank with both hands. When it finally snapped free of his head, she fell backward onto the floor and the patient tumbled off the examination table.
Her father snatched up the black thread and stuffed it into his drawer with the other batch.
“But it’s mine,” Lavinia protested.
“It’s his, actually,” said her father, helping the man up from the floor. “Now go and play with your brother.”
The man returned three days later. He hadn’t had a single nightmare since Lavinia had removed the thread from his ear.
“Your daughter is a miracle worker!” he declared, speaking to Lavinia’s father but beaming straight at her.
