She’d only just started Middlemarch the night before and was several chapters in, her mind locked on Dorothea and the young woman’s plight with her new, much older husband. The siren overhead cut off and the shuffle and muttered conversation of dozens of people inside the tube echoed against the rounded walls. Wind billowed in from the gaping tunnels on either side of the platform, issuing a low, haunting note and tickling Grace’s hair across her cheek.
She blocked all sound out, propped her open book on her knees and began to read. Outside came the now familiar sounds of war, the booming ack-ack guns firing at enemy aircraft as the RAF dove and shot at the Germans in an effort to fend them off. Amid it all, and far less often than at night, came the distant thud of falling bombs.
“What are you reading, miss?” a woman asked from beside her.
Grace looked up to find the young mother she’d comforted weeks before. “Middlemarch by George Eliot.”
Guns pounded overhead. The woman glanced up anxiously. “What’s it about?”
“A woman named Dorothea,” Grace replied. “She has a handsome suitor intent on marrying her, but he’s not the man who draws her eye.”
“Why is that?”
“She quite prefers an older man, a reverend.”
The young mother gave a nervous chuckle. “Does she?”
“She does.” Grace pinched her finger between the pages of the book to ensure she wouldn’t lose her spot and sat up a little straighter. “She even marries him.”
“What was so appealing about him?” a middle-aged woman in a blue housedress asked.
A low whistle sounded outside, followed by an explosion that made the ground vibrate and the lights flicker. Mr. Evans nodded encouragingly at Grace, a small smile playing on his lips.
“She’s pious,” Grace answered. “And he is a scholar in addition to being a reverend, with intellectual pursuits she finds fascinating.”
“What about the handsome man?” a voice asked.
Grace grinned. “He pursues her sister.”
Someone laughed. “Brilliant!”
“Does it work out then?” a burly man in a yellow pullover asked. He hardly looked the type to care with his tousled dark hair and rumpled clothes more likely suited for a pub.
“With the sister and the handsome suitor?” Grace asked. “Or Dorothea and the reverend?”
The man shrugged. “Both, I suppose.”
The crack of the anti-aircraft guns rang out overhead as a plane swooped low enough for the hum of its engine to echo through the cavernous tube station.
“I don’t know.” Grace glanced at the book, still pinched at her location. “I haven’t read that far yet.”
“Well,” the housewife said. “Go on.”
Grace hesitated. “You want me…to read it?” Everyone on the platform of Farringdon Station watched her expectantly. “Out loud?”
The lot of them all nodded, and quite a few smiled.
Suddenly, she was the painfully shy girl of her youth again in scuffed shoes that pinched at her toes, standing before the class with a bit of chalk in her hand and every set of eyes on her. Her stomach coiled itself into a knot.
“Please,” the young mother said. Another barrage of gunfire came, and she cowered down into herself.
Mr. Evans’s expressive brows crept upward in silent question.
Despite every brutally shy bit of Grace’s makeup screaming at her to refuse, she opened the book, licked her suddenly dry lips and began to read. Her tongue tripped over the first couple of sentences, and she was awkwardly aware of how many people were witnessing her missteps. And when a bomb exploded somewhere far off, its thunder distracted her so thoroughly, she forgot what line she’d been on.
But as she continued to read, the crowd around her faded away and her mind focused only on the story. Her world curled around Dorothea’s, experiencing that miserable honeymoon in Rome with a man who hoarded his scholarly aspirations to himself. As the pages turned, they met Fred, the wastrel who had his sights set on marrying a woman in his uncle’s care while Dorothea’s previous beau set his intent toward her younger sister.
When the anti-aircraft guns fired, Grace raised her voice to be heard. When the lights winked in and out, she continued on as best she could, recalling from her peripheral vision what words were to come next. And when a new character spoke, she invented a voice for each and every one of them.
A howling screech came overhead, followed by a boom that plunged the tube station into darkness.