“We need to leave.” Mr. Stokes’s face glistened with sweat, and his eyes darted over the swelling fires. “They’ve no water to spare. There’s nothing we can do here.”
She took Tabby with them as there was nowhere to leave him, depositing him at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which remained blessedly free of flames thus far. One of the parishioners who sought refuge there offered to mind the cat for Grace, enfolding the small frightened feline into her arms.
After that, Grace and Mr. Stokes returned to the blazing streets. The planes were overhead still, not visible in the haze of smoke, but audible with their droning engines and the repeated dropping of bombs and the maddening plop, plop, plop of incendiaries.
A firefighter stood in front of a burning building, the hose in his hand limp and empty. “They’ve bombed the mains,” he said as they approached to help.
“What of the water relays from the Thames?” Mr. Stokes asked.
The water relays were there as a safety measure in the event the bombings cut the water mains that fed the hydrants. The Thames could then be tapped as a water source.
The man didn’t turn from where he watched the fire devour the building, his gaze bright with helplessness. “The tide is too low.”
Grace’s skin prickled with the intense heat. “You mean…？”
The man lowered his head in defeat. “There’s no water. We have no choice but to let these fires burn themselves out.”
And burn themselves out they did. While Grace and Mr. Stokes went on to try to help any people who might have survived, the firemen could only watch as the flames consumed building after building with insatiable greed, jumping from one to another the way it’d done nearly three hundred years prior during the Great Fire of London. The inferno had rendered central London to char and ash then and appeared to be doing so again.
She shuddered to recall the scenes she’d read in Old St. Paul’s by William Harrison Ainsworth when the great fire devoured London. Except she couldn’t stop it as the main character had.
Grace and Mr. Stokes continued to rescue who they could as the longest night of her life pressed onward. Through it all, she drew from a stream of desperate energy she didn’t know she could possess when so thoroughly fatigued.
After what felt like a lifetime, the morning came, bringing with it an end to the hours of bombing and perpetual dropping of incendiaries. Smoke still hovered in a thick blanket over the ruined buildings that crackled with fires that could not be extinguished.
Exhausted and defeated by so much destruction, Grace made her way toward St. Paul’s in the hopes of collecting Tabby. Dread gripped her in its icy grasp as she strode toward the cathedral through smoke too thick to discern if the old church still stood.
She held her breath, hoping it too hadn’t fallen prey to the attack as the rest of Paternoster Square had.
Suddenly a gust of wind blew, its chill startling against the heat of smoldering brickwork and flames. The plumes shifted and rolled as they cleared away to reveal a patch in the sky and the miraculously unmarred dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
During the first Great Fire, the cathedral continued to stand for three days before finally falling. It had been rebuilt and still stood now. But it was so much more than simply a building. It was a place of worship, of succor for lost souls.
It was a symbol that in the middle of hell, good had still prevailed.
It was a mark of the British spirit, that even in the face of such annihilation and loss, they too had kept standing.
“London can take it,” Mr. Stokes said in a gravelly voice from beside Grace. The ethereal sight had clearly moved him with the same flood of patriotism as he echoed the slogan the government had encouraged since the start of the Blitz.
Even more astonishing, Tabby had remained put, now wrapped in a thin blanket and contentedly sleeping at the end of a pew. Grace lifted the pale blue bundle with her soot-blackened hands, and Tabby blinked awake with his amber eyes.
No sooner had she lifted the small cat against her than he nestled close, clinging with gentle claws. Cat properly in hand, Grace allowed Mr. Stokes to walk her back to the townhouse on Britton Street, too tired to argue that he needed to be home in bed as much as she. Regardless of their exhaustion, and though it was never discussed, they took the longer path to curl around the front of Primrose Hill Books, where it still sat as snug and safe as it had ever been.
She appreciated that the shop remained unharmed, especially when so many had experienced such loss.
Mr. Evans was no doubt back in his flat above the shop after the all clear had sounded early that morning.