“We’d better get out of this,” I said. “Down here!” and pushed Verity ahead of me down a basement stairway and into the narrow shelter of a doorway.

“Are you all right?” I shouted, looking at her. Her hair had come down on one side, and her torn dress was streaked with soot. So was her face, and her left hand had a smear of blood on it. “Are you hurt?” I said, lifting it.

“No,” she said. “I hit it on one of the arches in the church. It was dark, and I couldn’t s-see where I was going.” She was shivering. “How can it be so c-cold when the whole c-c-city’s on fire?”

“Here,” I said. “Put this on.” I took off the raincoat and wrapped it round her shoulders. “Courtesy of T.J.”

“Thanks,” she said shakily.

There was another crash, and dirt rained down on us. I pulled her farther back into the doorway and put my arms around her. “We’ll wait till this lets up a bit, and then go back to the cathedral and get out of this and back to a warmer climate,” I said lightly, trying to make her smile. “We’ve got a diary to steal and a husband to find for Tossie. You don’t suppose there’s somebody around here who’d be willing to exchange all this,” I waved my arm at the firelit sky, “for baby talk and Princess Arjumand? No, I suppose not.”

The effect wasn’t quite what I wanted. “Oh, Ned,” Verity said, and burst into tears.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be making jokes in the middle of a raid. I—”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. Oh, Ned, we can’t go back to Muchings End. We’re stuck here.” She buried her face against my chest.

“Like Carruthers, you mean? They got him out. They’ll get us out, too.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, looking tearfully up at me. “We can’t get to the drop. The fire—”

“What do you mean?” I said. “The tower didn’t burn. It and the spire were the only things that didn’t. And I know that dragon from the Flower Committee’s guarding the west door, but we can get there from the south—”

“The tower?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t come through in the tower?”

“No. In the sanctuary. I stayed there for nearly an hour, hoping it would open again, and then the fires started, and I was afraid the fire watch would catch me, so I went outside and looked for you—”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I knew you’d come as soon as you found out where I was,” she said matter-of-factly.

“But—” I said, and decided not to tell her we’d tried to get here for two weeks and hadn’t been able to even get close.

“—and when I got back to the church, the sanctuary was on fire. And the net won’t open onto a fire.”

“You’re right,” I said, “but we don’t need it to. I came through in the tower, which only got a bit scorched. But we need to be able to get through the nave to the tower, so we’d better go.”

“Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the raincoat on over her arms and then took the tie belt off and used it to hitch her ripped, trailing skirt up to knee-length. “Will I pass for 1940 now?” she said, buttoning the coat.

“You look wonderful,” I said.

We went up the stairs and back toward the cathedral. The east end of the roof was blazing. And the fire brigade had finally arrived. A fire engine was parked on the corner, and we had to step over a tangle of hoses and orange-lit puddles to get to the south door.

“Where are the firemen?” Verity asked as we reached the knot of people by the south door.

“There’s no water,” a ten-year-old boy in a thin sweater said. “Jerries got the water mains.”

“They’ve gone round to Priory Row to find another hydrant.”

“No water,” Verity murmured.

We looked up at the cathedral. A good part of the roof was blazing now, shooting up in sparks at the near end near the apse, and there were flames in the blown-out windows.

“Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral,” a man behind us said.

The boy tugged at my arm. “She’s goin, ain’t she?”

She was going. By ten-thirty, when they finally found a working hydrant, the roof would be completely ablaze. The firemen would attempt to play a hose on the sanctuary and the Lady Chapel, but the water would give out almost immediately, and after that it would just be a matter of time as the roof blazed and the steel rods J.O. Scott had put in to prevent strain on the arches, began to buckle and melt in the heat, bringing the fifteenth-century arches and the roof down on the altar and the carved misereres and Handel’s organ and the wooden cross with the child kneeling at its foot.

Our beautiful, beautiful cathedral. I had always put it in the same class as the bishop’s bird stump — an irritating antiquity — and there were certainly more beautiful cathedrals. But standing here now, watching it burn, I understood what it had meant to Provost Howard to build the new cathedral, modernist — ugly as it was. What it had meant to Lizzie Bittner not to see it sold for scrap. And I understood why Lady Schrapnell had been willing to fight the Church of England and the history faculty and the Coventry City Council and the rest of the world to build it back up again.

I looked down at Verity. Tears were running silently down her face. I put my arm around her. “Isn’t there something we can do?” she said hopelessly.

“We’ll build it back up again. Good as new.”

But in the meantime we had to get back inside and into the tower. But how?

This crowd would never let us walk into a burning church, no matter what pretext I thought up, and the west door was being guarded by a dragon. And the longer we waited, the more dangerous it would be to get across the nave to the tower door.

There was a sound of clanging over the din of the ack-acks. “Another fire brigade!” someone shouted, and in spite of the fact that there was no water, everyone, even the two lamp-post-loungers, ran off toward the east end of the church.

“This is our chance,” I said. “We can’t wait any longer. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Wait,” I said, and tore two long strips from the already-ripped hem of her dress.

I stooped and dipped them in the puddle left by one of the hoses. The water was ice-cold. I wrung them out. “Tie this over your mouth and nose,” I said, handing her one. “When we get inside, I want you to head straight for the back of the nave and then go along the wall. If we get separated, the tower door’s just inside the west door and to your left.”

“Separated?” she said, tying on the mask.

“Wind this round your right hand,” I ordered. “The door handles may be hot. The drop’s fifty-eight steps up, not counting the floor of the tower.”

I wrapped my hand in the remaining strip. “Whatever happens, keep going. Ready?”

She nodded, her greenish-brown eyes wide above the mask.

“Get behind me,” I said. I cautiously opened the right side of the door a crack. No flame roared out, only a billow of bronze-colored smoke. I reared back from it and then looked inside.

Things weren’t as bad as I’d been afraid they might be. The east end of the church was obscured by smoke and flames, but the smoke was still thin enough at this end to be able to see through, and it looked like this part of the roof was still holding. The windows, except for one in the Smiths’ Chapel, had been blown out, and the floor was covered with shards of red and blue glass.

“Watch out for the glass.” I pushed Verity ahead of me. “Take a deep breath and go! I’m right behind you,” I said and opened the door all the way.

She took off running, with me right behind her, flinching away from the heat. She reached the door and yanked it open.

“The door to the tower’s to your left!” I shouted, though she couldn’t possibly have heard me above the furious roar of the fire.

She stopped, holding the door open.

“Go up!” I shouted. “Don’t wait for me!” and started to sprint the last few yards. “Go up!”