The crypt. Of course. Several dozen people had taken shelter down there the night of the raid. They’d stayed down there till eleven while the cathedral burned over their heads, and then been led out up the outside steps.
I tore past the gawkers to the south door and up the steps. “You can’t go in there!” the woman in the kerchief shouted.
“Rescue squad,” I shouted back and ran inside.
The west end of the church was still dark, but there was more than enough light in the sanctuary and the chancel. The vestries were ablaze, and the Girdlers’ Chapel and, above, the clerestories were pouring out bronze-colored smoke. In the Cappers’ Chapel, flames were licking at the oil painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Burning pages from the order of service were floating above the nave, drifting and dropping ash.
I tried to remember the layout from Lady Schrapnell’s blueprints. The crypt lay under the St. Lawrence Chapel in the north aisle, just to the west of the Drapers’ Chapel.
I started up the nave, ducking the fiery orders of service and trying to remember where the steps were. To the left of the lectern.
Far forward, in the choir, I caught a glimpse of something moving.
“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the nave.
The figure flitted through the choir toward the sanctuary. I caught its flash of white among the choir stalls.
Incendiaries clattered on the roof, and I glanced up and then back at the choir. The figure, if it had been a figure, had disappeared. Above the entrance to the Drapers’ Chapel, an order of service, caught in the updraft, danced and dipped.
“Ned!”
I whirled around. Verity’s faint voice seemed to come from behind me and far away, but was that a trick of the superheated air in the church? I ran along the choir. There was no one there or in the sanctuary. The order of service twirled in the draft from the Drapers’ Chapel and then caught fire and sank, burning, onto the altar.
“Ned!” Verity shouted, and this time there was no mistaking it. She was outside the church. Outside the south door.
I tore out and down the steps, shouting her name, past the roof-watchers and the lamp-post-loungers. “Verity!”
I saw her almost immediately. She was halfway down Little Park Street, talking earnestly to the stout ARP warden, the skirt of her torn long white dress trailing behind her.
“Verity!” I called, but the din was too great.
“No, you don’t understand,” she was screaming at the warden. “I don’t want a public shelter. I’m looking for a young man with a mustache—”
“Miss, my orders is to clear this area of all civilians,” the warden said.
“Verity!” I shouted, practically in her ear. I grabbed her arm.
She turned. “Ned!” she said, and flung herself into my arms. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Ditto,” I said.
“You’ve got no business being out here,” the warden said sternly. There was a whistle, and a long drawn-out scream, during which I couldn’t hear what he said. “This area is for official services only. Civilians aren’t supposed to be—” There was a sudden deafening bang and the warden disappeared in a shower of dust and bricks.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Warden! Warden!”
“Oh, no!” Verity said, waving her hands as if trying to push the billowing dust aside. “Where is he?”
“Under here,” I said, digging frantically through the bricks.
“I can’t find him,” Verity said, tossing bricks aside. “No, wait, here’s his hand! And his arm!”
The warden shook her arm off violently and stood up, brushing dust off the front of his coveralls.
“Are you all right?” we both said in unison.
“Of course I’m all right,” he said, coughing, “no thanks to you! Civilians! Don’t know what you’re doing. Could have killed someone, throwing bricks about like that. Interfering with the official duties of the ARP is an infraction punishable by—”
Planes began to drone overhead again. I looked up. The sky lit up with sharp flashes, and there was another, closer scream of a whistle.
“We’d better get out of this,” I said. “Down here!” and pushed Verity ahead of me down a basement stairway and into the narrow shelter of a doorway.
“Are you all right?” I shouted, looking at her. Her hair had come down on one side, and her torn dress was streaked with soot. So was her face, and her left hand had a smear of blood on it. “Are you hurt?” I said, lifting it.
“No,” she said. “I hit it on one of the arches in the church. It was dark, and I couldn’t s-see where I was going.” She was shivering. “How can it be so c-cold when the whole c-c-city’s on fire?”
“Here,” I said. “Put this on.” I took off the raincoat and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Courtesy of T.J.”
“Thanks,” she said shakily.
There was another crash, and dirt rained down on us. I pulled her farther back into the doorway and put my arms around her. “We’ll wait till this lets up a bit, and then go back to the cathedral and get out of this and back to a warmer climate,” I said lightly, trying to make her smile. “We’ve got a diary to steal and a husband to find for Tossie. You don’t suppose there’s somebody around here who’d be willing to exchange all this,” I waved my arm at the firelit sky, “for baby talk and Princess Arjumand? No, I suppose not.”
The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted. “Oh, Ned,” Verity said, and burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be making jokes in the middle of a raid. I—”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. Oh, Ned, we can’t go back to Muchings End. We’re stuck here.” She buried her face against my chest.
“Like Carruthers, you mean? They got him out. They’ll get us out, too.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said, looking tearfully up at me. “We can’t get to the drop. The fire—”
“What do you mean?” I said. “The tower didn’t burn. It and the spire were the only things that didn’t. And I know that dragon from the Flower Committee’s guarding the west door, but we can get there from the south—”
“The tower?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t come through in the tower?”
“No. In the sanctuary. I stayed there for nearly an hour, hoping it would open again, and then the fires started, and I was afraid the fire watch would catch me, so I went outside and looked for you—”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I knew you’d come as soon as you found out where I was,” she said matter-of-factly.
“But—” I said, and decided not to tell her we’d tried to get here for two weeks and hadn’t been able to even get close.
“—and when I got back to the church, the sanctuary was on fire. And the net won’t open onto a fire.”
“You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t need it to. I came through in the tower, which only got a bit scorched. But we need to be able to get through the nave to the tower, so we’d better go.”
“Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the raincoat on over her arms and then took the tie belt off and used it to hitch her ripped, trailing skirt up to knee-length. “Will I pass for 1940 now?” she said, buttoning the coat.
“You look wonderful,” I said.
We went up the stairs and back toward the cathedral. The east end of the roof was blazing. And the fire brigade had finally arrived. A fire engine was parked on the corner, and we had to step over a tangle of hoses and orange-lit puddles to get to the south door.
“Where are the firemen?” Verity asked as we reached the knot of people by the south door.
“There’s no water,” a ten-year-old boy in a thin sweater said. “Jerries got the water mains.”
“They’ve gone round to Priory Row to find another hydrant.”
“No water,” Verity murmured.
We looked up at the cathedral. A good part of the roof was blazing now, shooting up in sparks at the near end near the apse, and there were flames in the blown-out windows.