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.