The nurse wasn’t listening. She’d raised her head and was listening to a drone of planes which was growing louder and louder.
Oh, no, Eileen thought, was St. Bart’s hit on the twenty-ninth?
They turned down another corridor, and then another, at the end of which the carts disappeared through a pair of double doors. “Wait here,” the nurse said, and went through them, too.
“You ain’t gonna have to file a report, are you?” Binnie asked.
“A report?”
“Yeah, about us takin’ the ambulance. We won’t ’ave to tell ’em our names, will we?”
“Where’d you two go?” Alf asked, appearing out of nowhere.
“Where’d we go?” Binnie said indignantly. “You were the one what disappeared.”
“I never. I went to find where to go, like you told me—”
“Shh,” Eileen said. “This is a hospital.”
Alf looked around. “What are you standin’ ’ere for? I thought you said you ’ad to go to St. Paul’s.”
“I do, but the nurse—”
“Then we better go before she comes back. The ambulance is this way,” Alf said.
“We can’t drive the ambulance to St. Paul’s,” Eileen said. “The hospital needs it.”
“But if they ain’t got nobody to drive it, it ain’t no good to ’em. We might as well take it,” Alf said, ever practical.
“And if we don’t, ’ow’ll you get there?” Binnie asked. “It’s miles, and the trains’ve stopped running.”
“They have? What time is it?” Eileen asked, glancing at her watch.
It was nearly eleven. Mike would have long since come back to Blackfriars looking for her. He’d have no idea where she’d gone. She had to get back there.
But how? The planes were growing steadily louder, and fires were already blocking nearly every street that led back to Blackfriars. And they’d have spread during the time they’d been here. Soon no one would be able to get anywhere near it or St. Paul’s. The entire City would be ablaze, and there’d be no way to get to Mike or Polly. Or to Mr. Bartholomew, whom they’d surely found by now. They’d each promised they wouldn’t go without the others, but what if the drop was only open for a short time? What if they hadn’t any choice but to go without her?
“Where did you say the ambulance was?” she asked.
“This way.” Alf plunged down a corridor.
“Wait,” Eileen said. “How do you know it’s still there? Someone else may have taken it out.”
Alf reached in his pocket and held the key up. “I took it out when I was lookin’ for you. So nobody could pinch it.”
“Alf!”
“There’s lots of thieves about during raids,” he said innocently.
“We better go before that nurse comes back and asks us our names,” Binnie said.
“This way,” Alf said, “quick,” and led them back through a maze of corridors to the one that led to the dispensary.
Binnie balked. “I don’t think we should go this way. What if that lady’s there?”
“What if she is?” Alf said. “We ain’t doin’ nothin’, only walkin’ past. This way’s the nearest.”
“All right,” Binnie agreed reluctantly, dropping her voice to a whisper, “but tiptoe.”
“Tiptoeing will look suspicious,” Eileen whispered back. “Just walk past normally. She won’t even notice us.”
Binnie didn’t look convinced. “She looked like she was the sort who don’t miss a trick.”
Alf nodded. “Like the ticket guard at Bank Station.”
“That’s your guilty conscience speaking,” Eileen said. “She was no such thing.” She started confidently down the corridor.
The door to the dispensary stood half open. Inside, the woman who’d helped her was counting out white tablets with a metal stick, her head bent over the tray. Don’t look up, Eileen willed as they passed.
She didn’t. Eileen opened the door, and they scooted through it. She’d counted on the darkness hiding them once they were outside, but the drive was nearly as bright as the corridor had been. The cloudy sky above them was orange-pink, and the hospital buildings cast odd, wrong-angled, blood-red shadows across the ambulance parked there.
Eileen made Alf and Binnie climb in back. “Get down so they can’t see you till we’re away from the hospital,” she said, putting the key in the ignition and hoping she could start it. It had been running when the rescue worker had handed it over to her.
She pulled on the choke and let the clutch out, praying for the engine to catch.
It did, and then promptly died. “Come on,” Alf said from the backseat. “’Urry.”
Eileen tried again, pulling the choke out slowly and easing up steadily on the clutch as the vicar had taught her. This time it didn’t quite die, and she glanced in the rear-vision mirror and began to back away from the door.
A fist pounded on the passenger-side window.
Eileen nearly jumped out of her skin and killed the engine.
A man in a white coat was standing there knocking. “We’re for it now,” Alf said.
“Step on it!” Binnie ordered, leaning over the seat. “Go!”
“I can’t!” Eileen said, trying desperately to start the engine.
It wouldn’t catch. The man, in his sixties, opened the door and leaned in. “Are you the young woman who brought in the ambulance driver?”
She nodded.
“Good,” he said, getting in. He was carrying a black leather bag. “Mrs. Mallowan told me you were out here. Thank goodness you hadn’t left. I’m Dr. Cross. I need you to take me to Moorgate.”
Both children had ducked down out of sight. “Moorgate?” Eileen said.
He nodded. “There’s a young woman at the tube station there. She’s too badly injured to be moved.” He shut the ambulance door. “We’ll have to treat her at the scene.”
“But I can’t—I’m not a real ambulance driver—”
“Mrs. Mallowan told me you’d been recruited to bring the injured driver and the lieutenant in.”
“She can’t take you,” Alf said, popping up from the back.
“Good Lord, a stowaway,” Dr. Cross said, and as Binnie appeared beside him, “Two stowaways.”
“We’re ’er assistants,” Binnie said. “She can’t take you to Moorgate. She’s got to go to St. Paul’s.”
“To pick up a patient?”
“Yeah,” Alf said.
“One of the fire watch was injured,” Eileen said.
“They’ll have to send another ambulance.”
He reached across and honked the horn. An attendant appeared in the doorway. “As soon as Dawkins gets back,” the doctor called to him, “send her to St. Paul’s!”
He turned to Eileen. “All right, let’s go.”
“We ain’t sure it’ll start,” Alf said.
“It wouldn’t before,” Binnie added.
And if I can’t start it, Dr. Cross will have to find some other transport, Eileen thought, and yanked roughly on the choke the way she had on her first driving lesson.
The ambulance started up immediately. She put it in gear and let out the clutch with a motor-killing jerk that didn’t do anything either. The motor was practically purring.
“Turn left onto the street,” the doctor directed, “and then left on Smithfield.”
Eileen began to back out of the courtyard. An ambulance was pulling in. Why couldn’t it have been here five minutes sooner?
She slowed, trying to think of something she could say to persuade him to take the other ambulance.
Two men in helmets and overalls were clambering out of the back. They pulled out a man on a stretcher. Attendants converged on them.
“Hurry,” the doctor said to Eileen. “We haven’t much time.”
Paradoxically one might say that the most important incident of that night was one that failed to happen.
—W. R. MATTHEWS, DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S,
WRITING AB
OUT THE NIGHT OF
29 DECEMBER 1940
St. Paul’s Cathedral—29 December 1940
“MR. DUNWORTHY,” POLLY BREATHED. SHE GRABBED FOR THE lamppost at the end of the steps of St. Paul’s, legs suddenly wobbly. Eileen had said he would come, and he had. And this was why she hadn’t been able to get a message to John Bartholomew, because she didn’t need to. Mr. Dunworthy had found them before they found him. It was only a spike in slippage, after all, and not some horrible catastrophe that had killed everyone in Oxford, and not their having changed the outcome of the war.
And not Mr. Dunworthy—and Colin—having lied to them.
Colin. If Mr. Dunworthy’s here. Colin may be, too, she thought, her heart lifting, and glanced at the people on either side of Mr. Dunworthy, but she couldn’t see him. Mr. Dunworthy was flanked by two elderly women who were staring raptly up at the dome.
“Mr. Dunworthy!” Polly called to him, shouting over the roar of the planes and anti-aircraft guns.
He turned, looking vaguely about to see where the voice was coming from.
“Over here, Mr. Dunworthy!” she shouted, and he looked directly at her.
It wasn’t him after all, even though the man looked exactly like him—his spectacles, his graying hair, his worried expression. But the face he turned to her showed no recognition, no relief at finding her. He looked stunned and then horrified, and she turned and glanced automatically behind her to see if the fire in Paternoster Row had reached St. Paul’s.
It hadn’t, though half the Row’s buildings were now ablaze. She looked back at the man, but he’d already turned and was working his way to the rear of the crowd, away from her, away from St. Paul’s.
“Mr. Dunworthy!” she called, not quite able to believe it wasn’t him, and ran across the forecourt after him. “Mr. Dunworthy!”
But as she followed, she became even more convinced she’d been mistaken. Mr. Dunworthy had never had that defeated stoop to his shoulders, that old man’s walk. The likeness of his features must have been a trick of the red, flickering light. And of her wishful thinking, like the times she’d thought she’d seen Colin.
But she had to be absolutely certain. “Mr. Dunworthy!” she called again, plowing through the crowd.
“Look!” a man shouted, and several hands shot up, pointing at the dome. “It’s falling!”
Polly glanced up. The fiery yellow star that was the incendiary wavered and began to slide down the dome and then tumbled off and disappeared into the maze of roofs below. The crowd erupted in cheers.
She turned back to Mr. Dunworthy, but in the moment it had taken her to glance at the incendiary, he’d vanished. She pushed her way through to the back of the crowd, which was already beginning to disperse, the people hurrying away from the cathedral as if they’d suddenly realized how close the fires were and how much danger they were in.
“Mr. Dunworthy! Stop! It’s me, Polly Sebastian!” she shouted. The guns and planes and even the wind had stopped for the moment, and her voice rang out clearly in the silence, but no one turned, no one slowed.
It wasn’t him, she thought, and I’ve been wasting valuable minutes I should have spent looking for John Bartholomew. He’ll be going back into the cathedral any moment.
She turned to look at St. Paul’s, but no one was going up the steps yet, and a knot of people were still gazing up at the dome.
“Have they put it out?” a boy shouted, and Polly looked up to see the silhouettes of two helmeted men at the dome’s base, bending over the incendiary, shoveling sand on it. More men were hurrying toward them with shovels and blankets.
The fire watch hadn’t been evacuated. Of course they hadn’t. They had to be there to put out the incendiary when it fell off. John Bartholomew had been up there on the roofs the entire time.
She had to get up there. She looked around to see where the chorister was. He stood at the foot of the steps—the women and the boy gathered around him as he gave directions to the shelter—blocking the way into the nave.
Polly kept the dispersing crowd between her and the chorister and crossed the courtyard, then walked quickly over to the churchyard and in through the door to the Crypt. She hurried down the steps, through the gate, and down the length of the Crypt, running at full tilt past the sandbags and Wellington’s tomb and the fire-watch’s cots, her footsteps echoing hollowly on the stone floor.
At the foot of the stairway she paused, panting, to risk a look back, but there was no sign of the chorister. She ran up the steps he’d brought her down and out onto the cathedral floor.
The nave was as bright as day, the gold of the dome and the arches shining richly in the orange light from the windows, the transepts and the pillars and the chairs in the center of the nave lit more brightly than they were in the daytime.
Good. It will make the door to the roofs easier to find, she thought.
She heard someone running up the north aisle. The chorister, she thought, ducking into the south aisle and behind a pillar. He’d seen her come in and intended to intercept her before she could get to the roofs. He’d head straight for the door that led up to them, and all she had to do was see where he went.
And keep from being caught, which would be difficult with so much light in here. She waited, pressed against the pillar, listening intently. His footsteps echoed, paused, echoed again.
Oh, no, he was checking in every bay and behind each pillar. She couldn’t stay here. There was nowhere to hide. She leaned against the pillar, took off her shoes, stuck them in her coat pockets, and waited for the pause that meant he was checking in one of the bays.
When it came, she ran silently down the south aisle to the chapel where she’d hidden before. She lifted the latch up slowly, trying not to make any noise, opened the gate, and slipped silently through. She debated leaving the gate open, decided that would be a dead giveaway, and pulled it shut. It clanked, but not loudly, and the chorister’s footsteps didn’t slow at the sound.
He was at the far end of the nave. Go to the door, she willed him, but he was crossing the nave to this side and coming quickly this way, pausing, coming again.
Polly retreated farther into the chapel, looking for a hiding place. Not the prayer stalls—there was too much light to hide in their shadow.
Under the altar cloth? she thought, and ran stocking-footed up the chapel’s aisle to the back row of stalls, and into the narrow, shadowed space between them and the wall behind them.
She crouched down out of sight, thinking, This is ridiculous. I’ve been here over two hours, and I’m no nearer the roofs than I was when I started. And this was a dreadful hiding place. She couldn’t hear his footsteps from here. All she could hear was the planes, which were coming over again.
She was about to abandon her hiding place when she heard the chorister at the gate. He rattled the latch, satisfied himself it was fastened, and went on.
He’s going into the vestibule, she thought, and then he’ll go check the door, but instead she heard the rattle of another gate, and then a clank, and footsteps ascending a staircase. The Wren Geometrical Staircase.
But it’s boarded up, she thought, and then remembered Mr. Humphreys saying they were debating whether to open it again, in spite of its fragility. Because the staircase led to the roofs.
I must have gone straight past it in the darkness when I ran into the church, she thought, cursing herself. If she’d remembered it, she could have found John Bartholomew by now.
The chorister climbed up a few more steps and then walked back down. She heard him latch the gate, and head up the aisle toward the dome.
It took every ounce of self-control she had not to plunge out of the chapel and over to the staircase. She waited till the chorister’s footsteps had died away, counted to ten, squeezed out of her hiding place, and tiptoed over to the gate. The south aisle and the nave beyond were full of smoke. It stung her eyes and made her want to cough. She forced the cough back, holding her breath, and looked up the nave toward
the dome—and saw flames.
Oh, God, the roofs caught fire after all, she thought, and then saw that the flames were from scraps of burning paper and pieces of wood swirling in the air below the dome.
They must be blowing in through the shattered stained-glass windows from the fires in Paternoster Row. The air was full of them. A burning order of worship danced down the nave and sank to the stone floor, still alight and dangerously close to the Christmas tree which stood next to the desk where she’d bought her guidebook. And even here, in the south aisle, the air was full of ash and glowing sparks. One landed on Polly’s coat, and she batted at it as she ran toward the spiral staircase. She opened the gate and started up the curving steps.
And heard flames crackling. The tree, she thought, and darted back down the steps and out into the nave, but it wasn’t the Christmas tree. It was the visitors’ desk. Flame and smoke curled up from the counter.
Perhaps it’s only the guidebooks, she thought. But as she watched, the wooden rack caught fire, the postcards Mr. Humphreys had shown her of the Wellington Monument and the Whispering Gallery going up like struck matches.
Where’s the fire watch? she thought. This is their job. I have to find John Bartholomew.
But by the time they found it, the fire might have spread. Scraps from the burning postcards were floating, still aflame, up the nave toward the wooden chairs, the wooden pulpit.
And what if this was a discrepancy, the result of Mike’s having saved Hardy or of her having influenced Marjorie to go meet her airman? What if, thanks to us, St. Paul’s did burn down? she thought.
The sixpenny print of The Light of the World caught fire, the edges curling up, the shut door in the picture burning away to black, to ash. Polly darted down the aisle to the nearest pillar, snatched up one of the pails of water, heaved the contents over the desk and the burning print, and then ran back to fill it again from the tin tub.
But the first pailful had put the fire out. She poured the second pail over the counter and the card rack for good measure, then pulled the postcards out of the rack and threw them and The Light of the World onto the floor several feet from the desk in case the fire wasn’t completely out.
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