All Clear (43 page)

But how did that help? The moment she let up on the towel, the wound would begin spurting again, and they couldn’t stay here indefinitely. The lieutenant’s only hope lay in their getting him to hospital, and soon. “Binnie? Do you think you could drive?” Eileen asked.

“A’ course,” Binnie said, and scrambled over the seats and into the driver’s seat.

“Do you remember where first gear is?”

In answer, Binnie stepped on the clutch, put the car in gear, and shot down the street at breakneck speed.

She’s going to get us all killed
, Eileen thought, but she didn’t tell her to slow down. Speed was their only hope, both for the officer and the driver, who looked as though she was already dead. Even bending over her, Eileen couldn’t hear her breathing.

“Go right,” Alf said. “Now down there. Now bear left.” Binnie was apparently going the way he told her because he didn’t call her a noddlehead.

She hoped to goodness he knew where he was going and wasn’t only making it up as he went along. But he only hesitated once, to say, “It’s the next one, I think, or the one after. No, go back, it was the first one.” Binnie threw the car into reverse, backed up, and turned into the street he’d indicated.

Eileen didn’t have time to ask if they were getting close. She had her hands full with the lieutenant, who was coming back to consciousness and attempting to pull away from her, and it was all she could do to keep the pad in place.

“Now bear right down that lane,” Alf said, “all the way to the end.”

There was a brief silence, and then Binnie said accusingly, “You told me wrong. There ain’t no way out, just buildin’s.”

“I know,” Alf said. “We’re ’ere.”

Eileen bent forward to look out the front window. They were. The stone buildings of St. Bart’s towered beautifully ahead of them.

“Which door do we go in?” Binnie asked Alf.

“I dunno,” Alf said. “Eileen, where do we go?”

“Binnie, come back here and take over,” Eileen said. Binnie scrambled over the seat and took Eileen’s place, and Eileen squeezed past her into the driver’s seat, but in the darkness she couldn’t tell which door she should pull the ambulance up to either. There were a dozen doors, none of them marked and none of them lit.

“I’ll go see,” Alf said, and was out of the ambulance and out of sight before she could stop him.

Hurry
, Eileen thought, her hands gripping the steering wheel, ready to move the car the instant he returned.

“Why don’t he come?” Binnie asked, sounding panicked. “The blood’s comin’ through again.”

There was no sign of Alf. Eileen honked the horn, but no one came.

“I think the driver lady’s stopped breathin’,” Binnie said.

They’re both going to die right here outside St. Bart’s
, Eileen thought desperately.

She put on the emergency brake, said, “I’m going to go find it,” and flung herself out of the ambulance and across the drive to the nearest door.

It was locked. She banged on it for what seemed like an eternity and then ran to the next one, and the next. The last one opened onto a narrow, dimly lit corridor, and at one side a counter and sign:
Dispensary
.

Eileen ran up to the counter, praying there was someone behind it.

There was—a plump, sweet-faced woman in a gray dress with white cuffs and collar and a cameo at her throat. She looked out of place, as if she should be presiding over a tea party.

She won’t be of any help at all
, Eileen thought, but there was no one else.

“I have two patients outside, and I can’t find where to go, the doors are all locked, and the ambulance driver’s unconscious and the other one’s bleeding badly,” she said, thinking,
I’m babbling, she’ll never be able to understand
, but amazingly, the woman did.

“Where’s the ambulance?” she said, snatching up a telephone. “Outside this door?”

“Yes, I mean, no. It’s—I kept trying doors and they were all locked. I—”

“Bring the ambulance round to this door,” the woman ordered, and said into the telephone, “I have an emergency here in the dispensary. I
need a stretcher crew immediately, and tell them we’ll need a transfusion.”

“Thank you,” Eileen breathed, and ran back out to the ambulance, scrambled in, said to Binnie, “I’ve found help,” and started the ambulance. By the time she’d backed it up to the dispensary door, a group of attendants was already there, opening the back doors, loading the driver and the officer efficiently onto wheeled carts, and draping them with white sheets.

“He’s bleedin’,” Binnie said, scrambling out of the ambulance after them. “You got to apply direct pressure.”

The attendant nodded. “Go with her and make your report,” he said to Eileen, pointing to the nurse standing next to the stretchers.

“I’m not—” Eileen began.

The nurse herded her and Binnie through the door. “Where are you injured?” she asked as soon as they were inside.

“She
ain’t
,” Binnie said. “It’s them what’s ’urt.” She pointed at the stretchers they were bringing in.

“Come with me,” the nurse said, and led them down the corridor after the carts, which the attendants were pushing at breakneck speed.

The nurse was walking almost as quickly. “I’m not the ambulance driver,” Eileen said, trying to keep up with her. “The injured woman is. They recruited me because I could drive—”

The nurse wasn’t listening. She’d raised her head and was listening to a drone of planes which was growing louder and louder.

Oh, no
, Eileen thought,
was St. Bart’s hit on the twenty-ninth
?

They turned down another corridor, and then another, at the end of which the carts disappeared through a pair of double doors. “Wait here,” the nurse said, and went through them, too.

“You ain’t gonna have to file a report, are you?” Binnie asked.

“A report?”

“Yeah, about us takin’ the ambulance. We won’t ’ave to tell ’em our names, will we?”

“Where’d you two go?” Alf asked, appearing out of nowhere.

“Where’d
we
go?” Binnie said indignantly. “You were the one what disappeared.”

“I never. I went to find where to go, like you
told
me—”

“Shh,” Eileen said. “This is a hospital.”

Alf looked around. “What are you standin’ ’ere for? I thought you said you ’ad to go to St. Paul’s.”

“I do, but the nurse—”

“Then we better go before she comes back. The ambulance is this way,” Alf said.

“We can’t drive the ambulance to St. Paul’s,” Eileen said. “The hospital needs it.”

“But if they ain’t got nobody to drive it, it ain’t no good to ’em. We might as well take it,” Alf said, ever practical.

“And if we don’t, ’ow’ll you get there?” Binnie asked. “It’s
miles
, and the trains’ve stopped running.”

“They have? What time is it?” Eileen asked, glancing at her watch.

It was nearly eleven. Mike would have long since come back to Blackfriars looking for her. He’d have no idea where she’d gone. She had to get back there.

But how? The planes were growing steadily louder, and fires were already blocking nearly every street that led back to Blackfriars. And they’d have spread during the time they’d been here. Soon no one would be able to get anywhere near it or St. Paul’s. The entire City would be ablaze, and there’d be no way to get to Mike or Polly. Or to Mr. Bartholomew, whom they’d surely found by now. They’d each promised they wouldn’t go without the others, but what if the drop was only open for a short time? What if they hadn’t any choice but to go without her?

“Where did you say the ambulance was?” she asked.

“This way.” Alf plunged down a corridor.

“Wait,” Eileen said. “How do you know it’s still there? Someone else may have taken it out.”

Alf reached in his pocket and held the key up. “I took it out when I was lookin’ for you. So nobody could pinch it.”

“Alf!”

“There’s lots of thieves about during raids,” he said innocently.

“We better go before that nurse comes back and asks us our names,” Binnie said.

“This way,” Alf said, “quick,” and led them back through a maze of corridors to the one that led to the dispensary.

Binnie balked. “I don’t think we should go this way. What if that lady’s there?”

“What if she is?” Alf said. “We ain’t
doin’
nothin’, only walkin’ past. This way’s the nearest.”

“All right,” Binnie agreed reluctantly, dropping her voice to a whisper, “but tiptoe.”

“Tiptoeing will look suspicious,” Eileen whispered back. “Just walk past normally. She won’t even notice us.”

Binnie didn’t look convinced. “She looked like she was the sort who don’t miss a trick.”

Alf nodded. “Like the ticket guard at Bank Station.”

“That’s your guilty conscience speaking,” Eileen said. “She was no such thing.” She started confidently down the corridor.

The door to the dispensary stood half open. Inside, the woman who’d helped her was counting out white tablets with a metal stick, her head bent over the tray.
Don’t look up
, Eileen willed as they passed.

She didn’t. Eileen opened the door, and they scooted through it. She’d counted on the darkness hiding them once they were outside, but the drive was nearly as bright as the corridor had been. The cloudy sky above them was orange-pink, and the hospital buildings cast odd, wrong-angled, blood-red shadows across the ambulance parked there.

Eileen made Alf and Binnie climb in back. “Get down so they can’t see you till we’re away from the hospital,” she said, putting the key in the ignition and hoping she could start it. It had been running when the rescue worker had handed it over to her.

She pulled on the choke and let the clutch out, praying for the engine to catch.

It did, and then promptly died. “Come on,” Alf said from the backseat. “ ’Urry.”

Eileen tried again, pulling the choke out slowly and easing up steadily on the clutch as the vicar had taught her. This time it didn’t quite die, and she glanced in the rear-vision mirror and began to back away from the door.

A fist pounded on the passenger-side window.

Eileen nearly jumped out of her skin and killed the engine.

A man in a white coat was standing there knocking. “We’re for it now,” Alf said.

“Step on it!” Binnie ordered, leaning over the seat. “Go!”

“I can’t!” Eileen said, trying desperately to start the engine.

It wouldn’t catch. The man, in his sixties, opened the door and leaned in. “Are you the young woman who brought in the ambulance driver?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said, getting in. He was carrying a black leather bag. “Mrs. Mallowan told me you were out here. Thank goodness you hadn’t left. I’m Dr. Cross. I need you to take me to Moorgate.”

Both children had ducked down out of sight. “Moorgate?” Eileen said.

He nodded. “There’s a young woman at the tube station there. She’s too badly injured to be moved.” He shut the ambulance door. “We’ll have to treat her at the scene.”

“But I can’t—I’m not a real ambulance driver—”

“Mrs. Mallowan told me you’d been recruited to bring the injured driver and the lieutenant in.”

“She can’t take you,” Alf said, popping up from the back.

“Good Lord, a stowaway,” Dr. Cross said, and as Binnie appeared beside him, “Two stowaways.”

“We’re ’er assistants,” Binnie said. “She can’t take you to Moorgate. She’s got to go to St. Paul’s.”

“To pick up a patient?”

“Yeah,” Alf said.

“One of the fire watch was injured,” Eileen said.

“They’ll have to send another ambulance.”

He reached across and honked the horn. An attendant appeared in the doorway. “As soon as Dawkins gets back,” the doctor called to him, “send her to St. Paul’s!”

He turned to Eileen. “All right, let’s go.”

“We ain’t sure it’ll start,” Alf said.

“It wouldn’t before,” Binnie added.

And if I can’t start it, Dr. Cross will have to find some other transport
, Eileen thought, and yanked roughly on the choke the way she had on her first driving lesson.

The ambulance started up immediately. She put it in gear and let out the clutch with a motor-killing jerk that didn’t do anything either. The motor was practically purring.

“Turn left onto the street,” the doctor directed, “and then left on Smithfield.”

Eileen began to back out of the courtyard. An ambulance was pulling in. Why couldn’t it have been here five minutes sooner?

She slowed, trying to think of something she could say to persuade him to take the other ambulance.

Two men in helmets and overalls were clambering out of the back. They pulled out a man on a stretcher. Attendants converged on them.

“Hurry,” the doctor said to Eileen. “We haven’t much time.”

“MR. DUNWORTHY,” POLLY BREATHED. SHE GRABBED FOR THE
lamppost at the end of the steps of St. Paul’s, legs suddenly wobbly. Eileen had said he would come, and he had. And this was why she hadn’t been able to get a message to John Bartholomew, because she didn’t need to. Mr. Dunworthy had found
them
before they found him. It was only a spike in slippage, after all, and not some horrible catastrophe that had killed everyone in Oxford, and not their having changed the outcome of the war.

And not Mr. Dunworthy—and Colin—having lied to them.

Colin.
If Mr. Dunworthy’
s
here, Colin may be, too
, she thought, her heart lifting, and glanced at the people on either side of Mr. Dunworthy, but she couldn’t see him. Mr. Dunworthy was flanked by two elderly women who were staring raptly up at the dome.

“Mr. Dunworthy!” Polly called to him, shouting over the roar of the planes and anti-aircraft guns.

He turned, looking vaguely about to see where the voice was coming from.