“Tell them yes,” Dr. Cross said.

“But what about the patient in the back?”

“He’s stable for the moment,” the doctor said, and they took off for Wood Street through streets filled with reddened smoke and lined with orange flames, maneuvering around spills of bricks and sparkling, sputtering incendiaries.

“HE,” Dr. Cross said as Eileen edged past a huge crater.

Alf nodded. “Five-hundred-pounder.”

I thought Mike said they didn’t drop any HEs, Eileen thought. And he said the raids were over by midnight.

But even though the all clear had gone while they were on the way back from Moorgate, she could still hear the low growl of the planes, and so could Binnie. “ ’Ow come they done the all clear when them bombers is still comin’?” Binnie asked.

“It ain’t bombers makin’ that sound, you noddlehead,” Alf said. “It’s the fires. Ain’t it?” he asked Dr. Cross.

“Yes,” Dr. Cross said absently, wiping the windscreen with his hand to clear it, but it wasn’t the windscreen. It was the smoke, which seemed to be growing thicker by the moment as the number of fires increased.

When it began to rain a few minutes later, Eileen thought, Good, that should help put out the fires, but all it did was send up smothering clouds which came down over the streets like a blackout curtain.

Even Alf couldn’t find his way in it. He got them lost twice, and even when he was able to tell which way to go, more often than not the route was blocked with debris or with fire pumpers and miles of snaking hose.

They detoured around fallen masonry and a broken gas main shooting a jet of flame across the road. It was impossible to avoid all the broken glass—it was everywhere, testament to the HEs Polly had said the Luftwaffe hadn’t dropped.

Eileen drove cautiously over it, praying she wouldn’t get a puncture and strand them in the midst of the flames. She backed, turned, bore left in response to Alf’s directions and then right, trying to get to the incident and the injured warden and then trying to find a way back to St. Bart’s in an endless nightmarish round of darkness and flame and smoke.

Occasionally, a gust of wind would blow the smoke aside, and she’d catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s dome, floating above the smoke. It was never any closer, always just out of reach. Even if she could somehow have got free of Dr. Cross and the patients in the back, she couldn’t have got to it. When they tried to go to Creed Lane, a soot-blackened warden had stopped them and said, “You can’t get through this way. You’ll have to go round by Bishopsgate to Clerkenwell.”

“Bishopsgate?” Alf said. “That’s miles. Can’t we take Newgate?”

The warden shook his head. “The whole of Ludgate Hill’s on fire.”

“Even St. Paul’s?” Dr. Cross asked anxiously.

“Not yet, but it won’t be long now, I’m afraid.”

“What about the fire brigades? Can’t they do anything?”