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.
She set the bucket down and ran back to the staircase and up the twisting steps, round and round, to the gallery above.
It was even more full of smoke and ash and cinders. And it will get worse as you go up, Polly thought, ducking her head to protect it from the embers as she ran along the gallery, trying doors, searching for a stairway which would take her farther up. A library. A closet, filled with choir robes.
The stairway must be in the transept, she thought, and hurried toward the dome.
It was in the transept, just past the corner of the gallery. It led up to a dark and stiflingly hot corridor roofed with low wooden beams that she had to duck under and huge bumps in the floor she had to edge around or crawl over. The tops of the arches’ vaults?
But she must be going the right way, because coils of hose and tubs of sand and water stood every few yards against the walls and, in one case, in the middle of the corridor. She splashed into it as she tried to step over a hump, and it was only then that she realized she was still in her stocking feet and her shoes were still in her pockets. She sat down next to the tub, put her shoes on and went on, looking for a stairway leading farther up.
She finally found one. It led up to a maze of even lower-roofed, narrower, and smokier passages that had to be just beneath the roofs. She could hear planes and anti-aircraft guns through the ceiling.
And voices, coming from farther along the passage and above her. “Easy, easy,” she heard one voice say, and then a second voice from a bit below the first, saying,
“Watch the turning.”
They’re coming down a flight of stairs, Polly thought. And they were no more than a few feet away, which meant this passage had to connect to the stairs. She scuttled along the passage, trying not to crack her head against ceiling beams she could only half see in the dimness, straining to spot the doorway to the stairs.
“No, no, you’ll—” the first voice said.
“Come back this way.”
And the other said, “Wait, I haven’t got a good grip.”
They must be carrying something between them. They were nearly even with her. She needed to hurry or she’d miss them. She rushed toward their voices.
And straight into a wall. The stairway lay on the other side of it—she could hear the two men only inches from her—but there was no door, no connecting link. The passage she was in dead-ended. And in the meantime, the men had already passed below her with their burden, their voices still repeating, “Easy” and “Careful,” as they got farther away. And now she had the entire maze to crawl back along, hoping she could remember the way she’d come and find a way out.
She was so focused on retracing her steps that she nearly missed the door. It stood behind an angled beam and was so narrow that she had to squeeze through it and up the shallow stone steps, not certain she wouldn’t get stuck as she did. The stairs ended in a trapdoor, which she had to push up mightily on with both hands to budge. It fell back, opening on the suddenly deafening roar of planes and a rush of heat and wind that blew her hat off. She grabbed for it, but the hat was already gone, caught in an updraft.
But it didn’t matter. She was through it and finally, finally, out on the roof.
On one of the roofs, she amended, pushing her blowing hair out of her eyes and looking at the long, flat roof and the stone wall and steep slant above her.
In spite of the distance she’d climbed, this was only one of the lower aisle roofs which ran the length of the nave. The pitched central roof and the dome were still a full story above her, and she had no way to get to them.
I’ll need to go all the way back down and find another way up, she thought despairingly.
But if an incendiary fell down here, they had to have a way to get to it quickly. There must be something here to make that possible—ropes or a ladder or something.
A ladder. It stood against the wall, hidden by the shadows of the transept roofs above it. She began to climb it.
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.