He shook his head, holding his hand over the receiver. “Most likely place she’d be is in one of the shelters.”

A shelter. Of course. The logical place to be during an air raid. She’d have had more sense than to stay out in this. “Where’s the nearest shelter?”

“Down Little Park Street,” he said, cradling the phone. “Go back along Bayley and turn left.”

I nodded my thanks and took off again. The fires were getting closer. The whole sky was a smoky orange, and there were yellow flames shooting up in front of Trinity Church. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, which was getting brighter by the moment. It was getting colder, too, which seemed impossible. I blew on my icy hands as I ran.

I couldn’t find the shelter. A house had taken a direct hit in the middle of the block, a mound of smoking rubble, and next to it, a greengrocer’s shop was on fire. Everything else in the street was silent and dark.

“Verity!” I shouted, afraid I’d hear an answer from the rubble, and started back up the street, looking closely for a shelter sign on one of the buildings. I found it, lying in the middle of the road. I looked around helplessly, trying to determine which direction the blast might have blown it from. “Hello!” I shouted down stairway after stairway. “Is anyone there?”

I finally found it at the near end of the street, practically next to the cathedral, in a half-basement that offered no protection from anything, not even the cold.

It was a small, grubby room without any furniture. Possibly two dozen people, some of them in bathrobes, were sitting on the dirt floor against the sandbag-lined walls. A hurricane lamp hung at one end from a beam, swaying wildly every time a bomb landed, and under it a small boy in earmuffs and pajamas was playing a game of cards with his mother.

I scanned the dimness, looking for Verity, even though she obviously wasn’t there. Where was she?

“Has anyone seen a girl in a white nightgown?” I said. “She has red hair.”

They sat there as if they hadn’t heard me, looking numbly ahead.

“Have you any sixes?” the little boy said.

“Yes,” his mother said, handing him a playing card.

The bells of the cathedral began to chime, ringing out over the steady roar of the ack-ack guns and the whoosh and crump of the high explosives. Nine o’clock.

Everyone looked up at the sound. “That’s the cathedral’s bells,” the little boy said, craning his neck at the ceiling. “Have you any queens?”

“No,” his mother said, looking at her hand and then at the ceiling again. “Go fish. That’s how you know our cathedral’s all right, if you can hear the bells.”

I had to get out of here. I plunged out the door and up the steps to the street. The bells rang out brightly, chiming the hours. They would do that all night, tolling the hours, reassuring the people of Coventry, while the planes droned overhead and the cathedral burned to the ground.

The knot of people had moved across the street from the south door for a better view of the flames shooting up from the cathedral roof. The two youths were still at their lamp-post. I ran up to them.

“It’s no good,” the tall one was saying. “They’ll never get it out now.”

“I’m looking for a young woman, a girl—” I said.

“Ain’t we all?” the short one said, and they both laughed.

“She has red hair,” I persisted. “She’s wearing a white nightgown.”

This, of course, got a huge laugh.

“I think she’s in one of the shelters round here, but I don’t know where they are.”

“There’s one down Little Park,” the tall one said.

“I’ve already been to that one,” I said. “She’s not there.”

They both looked thoughtful. “There’s one up Gosford Street way, but you’ll never get there,” the short one said. “Land mine went off. Blocked the road.”

“She might be in the crypt,” the tall one said, and, at my expression, said, “The cathedral crypt. There’s a shelter down there.”

The crypt. Of course. Several dozen people had taken shelter down there the night of the raid. They’d stayed down there till eleven while the cathedral burned over their heads, and then been led out up the outside steps.

I tore past the gawkers to the south door and up the steps. “You can’t go in there!” the woman in the kerchief shouted.

“Rescue squad,” I shouted back and ran inside.

The west end of the church was still dark, but there was more than enough light in the sanctuary and the chancel. The vestries were ablaze, and the Girdlers’ Chapel and, above, the clerestories were pouring out bronze-colored smoke. In the Cappers’ Chapel, flames were licking at the oil painting of Christ with the lost lamb in his arms. Burning pages from the order of service were floating above the nave, drifting and dropping ash.

I tried to remember the layout from Lady Schrapnell’s blueprints. The crypt lay under the St. Lawrence Chapel in the north aisle, just to the west of the Drapers’ Chapel.

I started up the nave, ducking the fiery orders of service and trying to remember where the steps were. To the left of the lectern.

Far forward, in the choir, I caught a glimpse of something moving.

“Verity!” I shouted and ran up the nave.

The figure flitted through the choir toward the sanctuary. I caught its flash of white among the choir stalls.

Incendiaries clattered on the roof, and I glanced up and then back at the choir. The figure, if it had been a figure, had disappeared. Above the entrance to the Drapers’ Chapel, an order of service, caught in the updraft, danced and dipped.

“Ned!”

I whirled around. Verity’s faint voice seemed to come from behind me and far away, but was that a trick of the superheated air in the church? I ran along the choir. There was no one there or in the sanctuary. The order of service twirled in the draft from the Drapers’ Chapel and then caught fire and sank, burning, onto the altar.

“Ned!” Verity shouted, and this time there was no mistaking it. She was outside the church. Outside the south door.

I tore out and down the steps, shouting her name, past the roof-watchers and the lamp-post-loungers. “Verity!”

I saw her almost immediately. She was halfway down Little Park Street, talking earnestly to the stout ARP warden, the skirt of her torn long white dress trailing behind her.

“Verity!” I called, but the din was too great.

“No, you don’t understand,” she was screaming at the warden. “I don’t want a public shelter. I’m looking for a young man with a mustache—”

“Miss, my orders is to clear this area of all civilians,” the warden said.

“Verity!” I shouted, practically in her ear. I grabbed her arm.

She turned. “Ned!” she said, and flung herself into my arms. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Ditto,” I said.

“You’ve got no business being out here,” the warden said sternly. There was a whistle, and a long drawn-out scream, during which I couldn’t hear what he said. “This area is for official services only. Civilians aren’t supposed to be—” There was a sudden deafening bang and the warden disappeared in a shower of dust and bricks.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Warden! Warden!”

“Oh, no!” Verity said, waving her hands as if trying to push the billowing dust aside. “Where is he?”

“Under here,” I said, digging frantically through the bricks.

“I can’t find him,” Verity said, tossing bricks aside. “No, wait, here’s his hand! And his arm!”

The warden shook her arm off violently and stood up, brushing dust off the front of his coveralls.

“Are you all right?” we both said in unison.

“Of course I’m all right,” he said, coughing, “no thanks to you! Civilians! Don’t know what you’re doing. Could have killed someone, throwing bricks about like that. Interfering with the official duties of the ARP is an infraction punishable by—”

Planes began to drone overhead again. I looked up. The sky lit up with sharp flashes, and there was another, closer scream of a whistle.