This must be the reason he came back today. She hopes she hasn’t made him late. She hurries up the steps behind him.
The grand domed cathedral is a fixture in the London skyline, the tallest building in the city. Beatrix hasn’t been back since the day she sat on its steps and wept for the London that burned. It was the day she realized she was the only one left in the city who had walked the old streets, set foot in the old cathedral, knew the old London at all. “I’ve never been inside the new St. Paul’s.”
Oliver smiles. “Only you could call a centuries-old cathedral new.”
It is not the same. Still grand and beautiful, maybe even more so than her St. Paul’s, with its missing spire and an aisle long enough to hold the world. But it is not her St. Paul’s, even though it has the same name, even though it stands on the same hallowed ground. It feels strange instead of familiar, leaves her hollow with longing. A homesickness for a place that was never home.
It’s far too sentimental for a heap of stone and colored glass. She tries to shake the feeling and follows Oliver past the gilt archways to a spiral staircase, swirling overhead in graceful curves.
Beatrix loses track of how many steps it takes to reach the dome. She follows Oliver through a low door to a narrow walkway that runs around the edge. Weak light filters through the windows above her, casting the space in a muted, tired quiet.
A ledge that serves as a bench rings the outside of the walkway, and a decorative wrought-iron railing circles the inside. She leans against the tall rail, peers down to the mosaic tile floor far below. From this vantage point, she can see how magnificent it all is—how breathtakingly beautiful—and she is in awe that this rose from the ashes of her St. Paul’s.
Oliver puts her bag on the floor. “Wait here. I’ll only be a minute.”
She sits on the bench. There are a few others speaking in hushed voices and several people standing at the rail. Beatrix wonders which one Oliver is here to meet, wonders what they have done or what they will do to warrant a page in his journal.
She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Now that she has stopped moving, she is exhausted, and a throbbing has started at her temples.
“Talk to me, Bea.” Oliver’s voice is a whisper in her ear. She opens her eyes, but the bench next to her is empty. She must be imagining things. Oliver is sitting all the way across the dome. He turns his head toward the wall, and then his voice is in her ear. “Say something.”
She turns her head like Oliver. Her cheek brushes against the cool stone. “How are you doing this?”
“I’m not doing anything. It’s an unintentional acoustic phenomenon of the architecture.”
Beatrix raises an eyebrow. “Which means?”
“The dome is perfectly curved, so sound waves can travel along the wall. It’s called a ‘whispering gallery.’ Theo was obsessed with them when we were kids. There’s one in New York City, too. Or there will be, in about ninety years.”
“You’re not here to talk to someone important, are you?”
“Sure I am,” Oliver says. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
Beatrix rolls her eyes, even though she’s sure Oliver can’t see it from this distance.
“Tell me something,” he says.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Beatrix laughs. “How much time do you have?”
“I’m a time traveler.” She can hear the smile in his voice, even through the whispering wall.
Sitting in the St. Paul’s that is now old but new to her, Beatrix thinks of her St. Paul’s, the one Oliver has never known. She wishes she had shared that part of her life with him on the day they met in London. But he was nobody to her then, and she couldn’t have known what the future would hold for her or the cathedral. Or for them.
Oliver sits quietly, his head tipped against the wall. She knows hewill listen to her words. That he will remember them. She hopes the cathedral walls do, too.
“St. Paul’s was the first place I came to, when I arrived in London,” she whispers.
It took her almost a fortnight to reach the city from Lancaut. Hunger gnawed at her insides, a feeling that would become as familiar to her as the city’s crooked streets. It was a comfort to her that night. It meant she was alive.
“I slept there, my first night.”
Beatrix can still remember the terror coursing through her veins as she pushed open the church’s massive door, the heavy silence pressing against her as she stepped over the threshold.
“There was this window of colored glass at the end of the aisle. It was a massive thing. Not like the ones that are here now,” she says. “It was shaped like a flower.” She can still see it when she closes her eyes. “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I never even imagined something like that could exist.”
