All Clear

Blustery as it had been on the aisle roof, the surrounding walls had protected her from the brunt of the wind. And from the cold. As she climbed higher, freezing gusts whipped around her, flapping the tail of her coat and blowing her hair across her face. She leaned forward to grab at the leaded gutter and then the parapet. Her foot accidentally kicked the side of the ladder as she pulled herself over the edge, and it fell away and down with a muffled clang.

Polly clutched at the parapet with both hands, squinting against the driving wind, and pulled herself up over it and onto the roof. The wind was even icier up here, though it shouldn’t have been. It was filled with darting sparks and flecks of fire and ash. She slitted her eyes against them and pulled herself to standing, holding on to a stone projection, and looked out over the edge of the roof.

And gasped. There were flames below her as far as she could see, building after building, roof after roof on fire.

Oh, God, Mike and Eileen are down there somewhere in that, she thought.

Off to the right, a church spire was blazing like a torch. One of the Wren churches? Beyond it a scattering of just-fallen incendiaries sparkled like stars. It had no business being beautiful, but it was, the white searchlights piercing the billows of crimson and orange and gold smoke, the shining pink curve of the Thames, the burning windows glowing like row after row of Chinese lanterns. And nearer in, a solid ring of fire, closing inexorably on St. Paul’s.

“It can’t possibly survive,” Polly murmured, looking down at the flames. Pails of water and sandbags and stirrup pumps and a score of firewatchers can’t stop that.

“Where is it?” a man shouted behind her, and she whirled around.

One of the firewatchers was standing there. It was too dark to make out his features. “Where’d the incendiary fall?” he shouted at her over the wind. “Down there?”

He peered over the edge at the roof she’d just climbed up from.

“Are you John Bartholomew?” she shouted at him.

“What?” He straightened and looked at her, astonished. “You’re a girl. What the bloody hell are you doing up here?”

“I’m looking for—”

“How did you get up here? Civilians aren’t allowed on the roofs!”

“Peters!” he shouted, grabbed her arm, and pushed her ahead of him, the two of them half walking, half crawling over the steep roof to the base of the dome, where half a dozen men were flailing at the roof with wet burlap bags. Sparks sizzled as the sopping bags smothered them. The firewatcher pushed her toward the nearest man. “Peters! Look what I found over on the pocket roof.”

“How’d you get up here?” Peters demanded, looking about for someone to blame. “Who the bloody hell let her up here?”

“No one,” Polly said. “Is any of you John Bartholomew?” she called over to the other men, but the wind carried her words away, and a new batch of planes was approaching, droning off to the east.

The men all looked up alertly. “You can’t stay up here!” Peters bellowed at her. “You’re in danger.”

“I’m not leaving till I speak with John Bartholomew!”

He ignored her. “Nickleby, take her down and see that she stays there.”

Nickleby pulled on her arm.

She wrenched away from him. “Please,” she said to Peters. “It’s an emergency.”

“Emergency,” he repeated, looking out at the burning City, the encroaching fires. “Bartholomew’s not here. He’s gone.”

“Gone?” she echoed. “He can’t have gone yet. He—when did he leave?”

“A quarter of an hour ago. He took one of the watch who was injured to hospital.”

And I heard him carrying the man down, Polly thought sickly. He was just on the other side of the wall.

“Then let me speak to Mr. Humphreys,” she said.

She could at least give him a message to give John Bartholomew when he returned. If he returned. Eileen had said he’d left immediately after he’d been injured.

She’d had it wrong—he wasn’t the one injured—but she might have got the part about his leaving then right. He might have gone to hospital and then not been able to get back to St. Paul’s because of the fires.

“Humphreys went with them.”

“To which hospital?”

“I don’t know.”

“St. Bart’s, I think,” Nickleby said.

“Where is that?” Polly asked.

“Over there,” the first firewatcher said, and pointed over the northern edge of the roof at a sea of smoke and flame. “But you’ve no business going out there. You need to be in a shelter.”

An anti-aircraft battery just below them started up. “Nickleby, take her down to the Crypt,” he shouted over it, “and then get back up here!” He looked up at the smoky sky, listening to the planes, now nearly overhead. “We’re due for another round.”

Polly let Nickleby lead her over to a doorway at the base of the dome, then wrenched free of him and ran down the spiraling stone steps to the Whispering Gallery

—oh, God, those stairs do go all the way up! If I’d only come that way!—and the telephone post of the watch just below it.