“Darling, it’s got to be done. It’s the only chance to stop the thing from spreading all the way up the damned hill!”

At that instant, just over the duke’s last few words—the damned hill—a low boom shook the ground. I realized I’d heard it before, the last time I went outside, except I hadn’t paid attention, I’d assumed it was part of the general noise of the fire’s destruction. Now I listened. There was a loud crack, and the sound of crumbling, breaking.

An expression of shock transformed the duchess’s face. I don’t think she had considered this, that the fire might reach all the way to Government House, to her own home, where the carloads of Red Cross supplies were right now being unloaded into the ballroom. She turned back to the cathedral roof and put her hand to her brow, as if shielding her eyes from a terrible sun. I looked too, and saw a curious thing: the large metal cross at the very front of the cathedral, atop the peak, silhouetted against the glow of flames, in such a way that the fire seemed to come from within the cross itself.

“Oh, it’s going to be all right,” someone said. I turned to my left and saw Miss Drewes, staring at the cross as I had. Her face glowed in the light. I would almost have said she looked beatific, except that glow was only a reflection, wasn’t it? A reflection of the fire itself.

I grabbed her elbow. “Not if you don’t beat it up the hill this second. Go. Get in the car.”

She got in the Morris, and the duchess in the station wagon. The duke kissed his wife through the open window and waved the chauffeur away. When he turned and saw me, he started.

“Why, aren’t you going too, Mrs. Randolph?”

I shook my head and opened my mouth to ask what I could do, where I could go, when a noise came from behind me, like an animal roaring. I spun around and saw flames shooting from the doorway of the Red Cross building, where I had spent so many hours, chatted with so many matrons, elicited so many morsels, banal and fascinating.