Mr. Stokes glanced sharply behind them and slammed the door to the shelter shut. Grace looked in the same direction, searching the darkness for something, anything, with which to gauge the location of nearby planes.
Spears of light stabbed up through the night sky as the anti-aircraft guns sought out their targets, the beam rolling over the dense underbellies of clouds. When Grace had seen the planes in the park, they had been flecks in the distance. Now, they looked much larger. Closer. Like an enormous black bird pinned in the center of the shaft of light.
A German plane.
Not above them, but near enough to make the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
Without a moment’s hesitation, an anti-aircraft gun boomed into action, its baritone shots rumbling in Grace’s bones.
A dark, oblong object slipped from the bottom of the plane and sailed downward. A bomb.
She and Mr. Stokes stood transfixed as it glided toward its target, a whistle of air building around it as it went, followed by a fraction of a second of silence, so quick one could scarce blink. Then a flash of light. A soul-shuddering boom that rattled the ground where they stood. A cloud of smoke belched upward, flickering with flames.
And just like that, someone’s house might be lost. A family might have been killed.
The reality of it happening in Grace’s borough, to people she might know, was like a dagger in her chest. But she couldn’t stand in awe of something so terrible. Not when she had a job to do.
It was difficult to tell from where they stood if the bomb hit within their sector. Adrenaline fired through her body. She charged through the empty street, lit by the nearby glow of a fire as well as the rekindled flames of the East End, which had clearly been struck again.
As she twisted her way through the blocks they were charged with monitoring, the sounds of war grew louder. Only this time, the rattle of the flying planes was muted by the whistling of falling bombs and the shuddering booms of their impact. All this combined with the constantly firing anti-aircraft guns as well as the RAF overhead in aerial battle with Germany. When a lull presented itself, the ringing bells of an AFS vehicle could be heard on its way to one of the many fires raging throughout London.
Grace’s breath rasped in her lungs as she ran, her legs moving with such force, they felt as though they might separate from her body and go on without her. Her feet crunched over the street where millions of shards of glass littered the road, sparkling like rubies in the glowing red light of London’s inferno. Every window of the houses on the left side of the street had been blown out, their shredded curtains hanging out like ragged black hair and their doors all knocked from their hinges.
The scrim tape, so carefully applied in each of those homes, had clearly done nothing.
“Miss Bennett, slow down.” Mr. Stokes puffed at her side. “Do remember my heart.”
But Grace did not slow. People who might be dying wouldn’t give a fig about his heart, she thought. She rounded the corner and skidded to a halt.
There in front of her was a massive gap in the neat row of townhouses, backlit by the flames. In its place was a smoldering pile of rubble where someone’s house had been.
Their sector had been bombed, and now Grace’s job as an ARP warden truly began.
THIRTEEN
Grace drew to a stop before the bombed-out house on Clerkenwell Road, the muscles in her legs jumping from her exertion. The address was no longer visible in the rubble that had once been a home, but she could make out the two on either side well enough to identify the missing house number. For that number was tied to names in her mind, repeated by Mr. Stokes three times a week at several intervals on every watch.
Mr. and Mrs. Hews, an elderly couple, had lived in that house since they wed nearly fifty years prior. Mr. Stokes often mentioned Mrs. Hews’s fondness for chocolate and how she’d always carried one just for him when he’d been a boy.
Mr. Stokes’s footsteps slowed as he appeared beside Grace. “Mrs. Hews,” he whispered, his expression stark as he observed the ruins.
“They were in the shelter.” Grace recalled the names from the list she’d assembled as people entered the door. “Mr. Stokes, they’re safe.”
“Good.” He nodded. “Good. That’s good.”
They set to work, dousing the small flames that flickered in the rubble with their stirrup pumps and continued their watch on the rest of the sector. More bombs fell as the night went on, though no more were in their area of patrol. The better part of their night was spent sweeping up the fallen glass on the surrounding streets where all the windows had been blown out, and at one point chasing away looters from the Hewses’ property.