The Last Bookshop in London Page 22

  In the distance, toward the mouth of the river, came another familiar drone. Another swish. And the raining of more incendiary bombs upon London.

  The firemen battling for control of their own station would be of little help. There was nothing for it, but to fight.

  No matter how long that battle may be.

  Grace and Mr. Stokes managed to put out the fires in their sector while the blaze near the river grew brighter.

  They’d passed Primrose Hill Books several times to ensure it remained secure, confirming it had indeed. Mr. Evans had taken to keeping Mrs. Weatherford company in Farringdon Station. At least Grace could be at ease knowing they were both safe.

  While the sky glowed with orange and red intensity, the bookshop remained quietly tucked in the shadows of the blackout. It was on one such check-up that they came upon a fireman, his face streaked with soot and glossy with sweat.

  “If your sector is clear, we need help.” His gait increased to a run as he pointed in the distance. “Paternoster Square. Bring whatever you can.”

  EIGHTEEN

  A chill prickled down Grace’s spine despite the heat caused by her exertions. What of the booksellers’ district on Paternoster Row, which connected to the square? What of Simpkin Marshalls who so readily provided all the books to the bookshop? What of the printers and publishers and all the many stores?

  Grace and Mr. Stokes wasted no time. Armed with their stirrup pump and an empty bucket, they followed the fireman, running several blocks. The blaze became more visible with each step, glowing as if it were one solid inferno with firefighters on all sides, spraying the flames from their taxi-drawn wagons.

  The thundering report of the ack-ack guns firing at the Germans was louder too, along with the whistling of dropping bombs and the inevitable explosions that followed.

  The closer Grace and Mr. Stokes drew to Paternoster Square, the hotter the air became, until it was like trying to breathe in an oven.

  “Grace, we need to stop,” Mr. Stokes panted at her side, bending over to catch his breath.

  He said something else, but a bomb whistled nearby, went silent for a breath of a moment, then detonated with a deafening explosion that set the ground underfoot rumbling.

  “We can’t stop now.” She picked up her pace, running at full tilt, rounding the corner of Paternoster Row and stopping.

  Where holy men once blessed the streets, hell had descended.

  Choking plumes belched up from the flames and singed pages scattered through the debris-ridden street like the feathers from wings that had been ripped apart.

  The street glowed red with the consuming conflagration, yet several buildings remained untouched, most likely those whose owners employed fire watchers on their roofs. Though they were few and far between.

  The stores full of dry books were like tinder waiting for a match. Most had fire crawling across their slate roofs, dancing wickedly over their costly wood interiors and stretching out from their shattered windows, the exterior paintwork blackening with soot.

  Simpkin Marshalls, who often touted their stock of millions of books, burned like a funeral pyre.

  The building to Grace’s right blazed brighter as though it were igniting from within. Inside, shelves of books were being licked apart by flames as they raced with greedy delight over rows and rows of neatly organized spines.

  The building seemed to pulse, as if it were a breathing beast, set on devouring everything in its path.

  Someone called her name and the beast of a building roared, powerful and terrifying.

  She couldn’t move. Couldn’t tear her gaze from the horrific scene before her. So many books. Millions. Gone.

  Something solid collided with her, knocking her to the ground. She landed hard as a blast of blistering heat rushed at her. Bits of sand and dust stung her cheeks and the backs of her hands.

  Dazed and momentarily bewildered, she blinked up to find Mr. Stokes covering her with his body. The heaving building was now rubble, its tumbled bricks glowing red.

  “Are you hurt?” Mr. Stokes shouted over the cacophony of war.

  Grace shook her head. “We need to find water.”

  He looked around sadly. “We need to find survivors.”

  He was right, of course. The fire was too great to contain. All around them firemen were emptying their tanks into the blaze to no effect.

  Pritchard & Potts was only several shops away from Grace, one of the few that was absent flames, though a chunk appeared to be missing where a blast had caught its right side and demolished the shop beside it.

  Fortunately, Paternoster Square wouldn’t have many people in the buildings, with most having gone to the country, intent on returning in the new year. But some had nowhere to go.

  Like Mr. Pritchard.

  He would be in his flat above Pritchard & Potts without a doubt. Especially when he had so often decried public shelters, complaining about those who littered the floors of the tube stations and bricked-up buildings.

  Grace rushed over to the shop and found the door missing, blown off by the bomb that had struck it. Inside, the bookstore was dark, lit only by the glowing flames coming in through the shattered windows. Books had been thrown from their shelves and littered the floor, splayed and broken like fallen birds.

  A whistle sounded outside, followed by a crash that made the entire structure tremble. Plaster sprinkled down from the ceiling, and several more books tumbled from their shelves.

  “Mr. Pritchard,” she called out.

  He did not reply.

  This was no time for decorum. She found the door leading to his flat and didn’t bother to knock as she rushed up the stairs. Even as she did so, the building seemed to sway slightly, unsteady on its foundation.

  By the flickering orange light from outside, she searched the flat, its state in as much disrepair as the shop below. Her breath caught as she noticed what appeared to be a skinny leg jutting from beneath a tipped curio cabinet.

  “Mr. Pritchard,” she said again.

  When she received no response, she knelt by the cabinet, confirming it was indeed the old man beneath. She shoved at the furniture to no avail. A bomb crashed somewhere nearby, and the building shuddered as if it wished to crumble in on itself.

  It very well might.

  But the cabinet did not matter, not after she tried to find a pulse in the limp, slender wrist. There would be no saving Mr. Pritchard.

  He was already dead.

  Another bomb crashed, this one with such force, Grace’s balance faltered. That’s when she heard it, a pathetic mewling cry.

  She rushed to the sound, straining, and looked beneath the sofa to find a very frightened Tabby. She scooped him up with such haste, he did not bother trying to fight her. Instead, he clung to her as she raced from the building.

  Outside, Mr. Stokes was standing in the middle of the street while fires raged on either side of him. Men with the AFS pointed their hoses into the flames, their uniforms soaked with runoff from the brass nozzles, but still they didn’t move from their position.

  Mr. Stokes glanced at Tabby and said nothing. “Any other survivors?”

  The image of Mr. Pritchard pressed lifelessly beneath the cabinet flashed in her mind. She hugged Tabby a little tighter and shook her head.

  Wind swept through the narrow alley, fanning the flames into wild excitement and sending flecks of sparks shooting every which way. The heat around them expanded, pressing in on Grace until she felt as though the marrow of her bones was melting like wax.

  When she was a girl, she’d thought the glowing embers in the fireplace beautiful, like fire fairies. There was nothing beautiful or magical now. The flames were cruel in their greed and merciless in their destruction.

  “We need to leave.” Mr. Stokes’s face glistened with sweat, and his eyes darted over the swelling f
ires. “They’ve no water to spare. There’s nothing we can do here.”

  She took Tabby with them as there was nowhere to leave him, depositing him at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which remained blessedly free of flames thus far. One of the parishioners who sought refuge there offered to mind the cat for Grace, enfolding the small frightened feline into her arms.

  After that, Grace and Mr. Stokes returned to the blazing streets. The planes were overhead still, not visible in the haze of smoke, but audible with their droning engines and the repeated dropping of bombs and the maddening plop, plop, plop of incendiaries.

  A firefighter stood in front of a burning building, the hose in his hand limp and empty. “They’ve bombed the mains,” he said as they approached to help.

  “What of the water relays from the Thames?” Mr. Stokes asked.

  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.

  “London can take it,” Mr. Stokes said in a gravelly voice from beside Grace. The ethereal sight had clearly moved him with the same flood of patriotism as he echoed the slogan the government had encouraged since the start of the Blitz.

  Even more astonishing, Tabby had remained put, now wrapped in a thin blanket and contentedly sleeping at the end of a pew. Grace lifted the pale blue bundle with her soot-blackened hands, and Tabby blinked awake with his amber eyes.

  No sooner had she lifted the small cat against her than he nestled close, clinging with gentle claws. Cat properly in hand, Grace allowed Mr. Stokes to walk her back to the townhouse on Britton Street, too tired to argue that he needed to be home in bed as much as she. Regardless of their exhaustion, and though it was never discussed, they took the longer path to curl around the front of Primrose Hill Books, where it still sat as snug and safe as it had ever been.

  She appreciated that the shop remained unharmed, especially when so many had experienced such loss.

  Mr. Evans was no doubt back in his flat above the shop after the all clear had sounded early that morning.

  Not all homes or people were as lucky. In their sector in Islington, many homes had roof damage from the incendiaries, and a number of properties had been bombed. However, the destruction was nowhere near the devastation of Paternoster Row.

  Now, away from such a blazing inferno, the air was colder and a shiver ran down Grace’s back.

  Mr. Stokes simply nodded at her when they arrived at her townhouse before he turned to stagger slowly in the direction of his own home on Clerkenwell Street. Mrs. Weatherford pulled the door open before Grace had finished climbing the stairs.

  “Grace.” Mrs. Weatherford put her hand to her neck as if she was struggling to breathe. “Oh, thank God you’re safe, my girl. Come in, come in.”

  Grace was too tired to do much more than trudge up the remaining steps and into the townhouse. Her throat burned from hours of breathing in the hot air, and her chest felt as though it was clogged with soot.

  “I heard it was awful.” Mrs. Weatherford closed the door and fluttered anxiously around Grace. “Was it? No, don’t answer that. I can see it on you that it was. My poor dear. Thank God you’re safe, you’re home. Do you want a spot of tea? Some food? Can I get you anything at all?” She paused in her worried onslaught and looked at the bundle Grace carried.

  The weather was so cold outside that the heavy fog seemed laced with shards of ice. Once they were away from the inferno of London’s center, Grace had covered Tabby with the blanket to ensure he’d remain warm. Now, she peeled the thin layer of cloth back, revealing a sleepy-eyed cat who had experienced just as terrible a night as them all.

  Mrs. Weatherford put her fingers over her lips. “That isn’t...is that...?”

  “Tabby,” Grace croaked through her raw throat.

  Mrs. Weatherford touched a hand to Grace’s cheek in silent emotion, then let it come to rest on Tabby’s head. “You were the last—” Her voice caught. “You were the last wounded creature Colin saved.” Suddenly remembering herself, she looked up sharply at Grace. “Mr. Pritchard.”

  Grace shook her head. She’d made sure the rescue crews knew his location so that his remains would be seen to properly. “I hoped you would keep Tabby,” Grace said hoarsely. “He’s very frightened, I believe, and could use someone to love.”

  Mrs. Weatherford gave a shuddering exhale. “I feel very much the same, little Tabby.” She lifted the cat from Grace’s arms, bundle of cloth and all.

  Grace bathed after that, leaving smears of black soot in the small bathroom, but too exhausted to care. She’d meant to clean it when she woke, but found it already done later, practically gleaming with the telltale scent of a good carbolic cleanse.

  Downstairs, she found Mrs. Weatherford, who waved off her thanks while cooing over Tabby. For the cat’s part, he appeared to be just as besotted with Mrs. Weatherford as he stretched up to rub his face against hers. Much to her delight.

  After the quick meal of vegetable and rabbit stew, Grace left the townhouse to make her way to the bookshop. After all, life went on and she still had a job to do.

  There was a bite in the damp air that made her suck in her breath as soon as it hit her. The odor of burning hung acrid on the wind and recalled everything from the night before.

  “It’s you,” a curt voice came from the other stoop next door.

  Grace blinked against the cold to find
Mrs. Nesbitt standing stiffly at the railing of her townhouse. Soot was smeared over her otherwise neat macintosh and her eyes were red-rimmed.

  She elevated her head to tilt her glare over her sharp nose. “I’ve just been to my shop. Or what’s left of it.”

  Such a sight surely must have been devastating. Grace turned fully to Mrs. Nesbitt, genuine in her empathy. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You should be,” the other woman hissed.

  Grace ought to be used to Mrs. Nesbitt’s stinging rebukes, but those barbs never failed to strike their mark. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You were out there last night.” Mrs. Nesbitt pinched at her gloves, angrily removing them, one finger at a time. “You could have done more. Were it not for the stock I keep here at the townhouse, I would have nothing left. Nothing.” She jerked the gloves from her hands and slapped them into one bare palm. “There is no excuse for so many businesses to have burned like that. None.”

  It was on the tip of Grace’s tongue to defend her actions and those of the many volunteers who had fought last night. There had been too many incendiaries dropped. The mains had been hit, and the Thames had its lowest tide of the year at that exact time. But she owed no justification to this woman. Not when she and everyone else had given it their all.

  Anger singed away the chill in the air.

  The report on the wireless that morning had stated over a dozen firefighters had been killed, and over two hundred were injured. Brave men whose families would never welcome them home again, tell them they loved them again.

  “How fortunate for you that several people lost their lives fighting the fires last night,” Grace said in a hard tone. “There are now openings for you to fill, as the rest of us are clearly so inept.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt’s cheeks went red. “You impudent—”

  But Grace was already jogging down the remainder of the stairs, not bothering to listen anymore. Not when it was too tempting to march up to the other woman and slap her bony face.