“Here’s another for your little band,” the chorister said to them. He explained to Polly, “These ladies were evacuated from a shelter in Watling Street.”

“It was on fire,” the boy explained, sounding disappointed that they’d been forced to leave.

“You’ll be safe here,” the chorister said to all of them, and walked rapidly back to the watch’s headquarters. But not back upstairs, and it didn’t look like he was going to go upstairs. He was messing about with the kettle.

Polly looked about for a stairway at this end of the Crypt, but she couldn’t see one. What now? Should she wait here on the off chance one of the fire watch would come down here, and try to persuade him to take a message to John Bartholomew?

From the sound of things, that wasn’t likely to happen. More and more incendiaries were spattering overhead, and the roar of the planes was growing louder even down here. “Will St. Paul’s burn down?” the boy asked his mother.

“It can’t,” the woman said. “It’s built of stone.”

But that wasn’t true. The cathedral had wooden inner roofs, wooden supports, wooden beams, wooden choir stalls, wooden screens, wooden chairs. And hard-to-reach spaces between the roofs which seemed to have been designed just for incendiaries to melt through and lodge in. Which was what the fire watch were working frantically to keep from happening. And would be working frantically on all night. The chorister was right. They wouldn’t be down before morning.

She couldn’t wait that long. But to get to the roofs, she’d have to get past the chorister. And away from the shelterers, which would be difficult. When the boy wandered a short way down the Crypt, the women made him come sit down, saying, “The gentleman in charge told us to keep to this end.”

“I only wanted to look at the tombs,” the boy said, which gave Polly an idea.

“Isn’t the artist who painted The Light of the World buried down here?” she asked no one in particular, and walked over to read the memorial tablets on the north wall, working her way slowly along them and waiting for her chance.

The chorister looked at his watch, took the kettle off the gas ring, and disappeared into one of the bays. Polly waited for the next batch of incendiaries and when the shelterers automatically looked up at the ceiling, darted into the next bay and along the Crypt, keeping next to the wall and looking for another way up to the main floor. Or to the upper levels.

Two of the bays had mounds of sandbags covering something—the organ pipes? John Donne in his shroud?—and the next had a grille across it with a padlocked and locked gate, but in the one after that there were several shovels and coils of rope and a large tub of water. And a stairway.

It was the twin of the one she’d come down, which meant it would only go up to the main floor, but it would get her up out of the Crypt and away from the chorister. She ran quickly up the not-nearly-as-dark steps and out into the north transept.