“Wait!” Robert calls after her.
But Beatrix is already running.
She sprints for the cemetery, her loose hair streaming behind her, her bare feet pounding against the frozen ground. The zeppelin flies high overhead, an ominous dark shape blocking out the stars. Engines roar in her ears as she darts around the corner and the minster comes into view. She can barely make out the shadowy outline of the hollow tree.
She runs toward it, her lungs burning. “Elsie!”
The girl’s head pops up from behind a gravestone. “Beatrix!”
A wave of relief threatens to bring Beatrix to her knees as Elsie runs to her. She gathers the girl into her arms and races with her toward the church. They have to get inside.
Beatrix tries to force the door open with her shoulder, throws all her weight into it, but it won’t budge. She pounds her fists against the smooth wood. “Hello? Let us in!”
A square of warm light opens in the silvery skin of the zeppelin. A moment later, dark shapes tumble from it. Bright flashes illuminate the night and the ground shudders. Elsie screams.
“It’s all right,” Beatrix whispers as the girl buries her face in her hair. “We’re all right.”
She repeats those words over and over, clutches the trembling girl to her as they cower together in the minster’s doorway, the night lighting up around them, the ground shaking beneath them. She doesn’t move from the church until the zeppelin has disappeared into the night, the last drone of its engines fading into suffocating silence, as if all of Great Yarmouth is holding its breath.
Is it safe? Is it over?Beatrix has the sinking feeling that this is only the beginning.
Elsie refuses to let her go, so Beatrix carries her to the row house. The streets she limps through are not the same ones she ran through less than an hour ago. The scent of the sea has been erased, overwhelmed by smoke and dust and the stink of fear. Broken glass and masonry litter the streets, and the people of Great Yarmouth wander through them in a daze, some injured, most in shock. She passes a home with no front left, only a gaping hole where walls and windows used to be. “A woman’s been killed,” someone murmurs to their neighbor.
If it weren’t for the child in her arms, Beatrix would stop moving altogether, the adrenaline gone, the exhaustion overwhelming, the sorrow threatening to sink her. Because the war has come to her doorstep. Because people have died, and it could have been Elsie. The thought alone makes her knees tremble.
She keeps going, her feet numb, her arms aching, placing one foot in front of the other all the way to the row house. The door flies open, and Mary rushes out. Tears stream down her face as she takes Elsie from Beatrix’s arms.
“I think she’s fallen asleep,” Beatrix says, gently brushing the girl’s hair away from her dirty face.
“Thank you,” Mary chokes out as she hugs Beatrix tightly with her free arm. She carries Elsie inside.
Beatrix shivers. She wants nothing more than to wrap herself in a blanket by the fire, to sink into oblivious sleep and forget about zeppelins and bombs and war.
Robert stands in the doorway of the row house, glaring at her. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Beatrix hadn’t thought. She just ran. Ran, because she would never forgive herself if Elsie got hurt. Ran, because the terror and the truth had hit her like a dagger to the heart, tearing her open: She loves that girl.
Beatrix bursts into tears. It’s all wrong. The war isn’t supposed to be here. She isn’t supposed to be here. And she isn’t supposed to love that child. She isn’t supposed to love anyone. She can’t. Her vision swims and the ground tilts beneath her, her entire world tipping off its axis.
Robert catches her by the elbow. “I’ve got you.”
Her legs give out, as if his words have given her permission to sink into the darkness and forget.
Beatrix wakes in a single bed, tucked under an old patchwork quilt, bright winter sun streaming through the window.
“Sorry.” Robert puts a plate of cold supper on his desk in the corner. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She is in Robert’s room. In Robert’s bed.
“How are you feeling?”
The last thing Beatrix remembers is sobbing in the street. She sits up in the bed and looks over at Robert, her eyes wide. “Did you carry me all the way up here?”
Robert smirks at her. “Yes, all the way, up an entire twelve steps.”
“But your leg—”
“Is fine,” Robert insists.
