offering a home to all those who wanted to come with him. Anyone who wanted to return to the communities they were snatched from could come back with them too, he promised to arrange safe transport home.
A bunch of the comfort women elected to come with them, but a group of nine children refused to come along, insisting that they could look after themselves, distrustful of all adults even still. He let them go.
The fire spread more slowly than expected, but the entire Parliament complex was ablaze by the time they loaded the remaining children back into the lorries and set off for St Mark's through the snow.
As they reached the edge of the city two of them parted company with the main convoy. Jack led a small team to Heathrow where they spent three busy days siphoning off aircraft fuel, laying charges, planning the biggest explosion since Salisbury. When they pulled out of the airport, they left a huge conflagration behind them. All the planes burned, the runways a mass of unuseable craters. Nobody would be flying children to the US from there ever again, and neither could the American Church land and start again. In the week that followed, they took care of Gatwick and Luton before returning to St Mark's.
Wilkes and Ferguson, who had taken off back to Nottingham once the battle of Westminster was over, had promised the Rangers would take similar steps at Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds airports. Obviously there were still local and military airfields the church could use, but they agreed this sent a strong message and was worth the effort.
Jane took no part in any of this. She sat silent, comatose, her eyes fixed on some distant point. She let herself be led into one of the lorries, compliant, like a puppet or a doll.
When they got back to the school she took to her bed and stayed there. She would eat when she was fed, sleep when the candle was blown out, wake when they opened her curtains.
But that was all.
It was as if she wasn't even in there anymore.
Epilogue
Caroline opened her good eye and winced. It was hard to divorce the pounding in her head from the pounding on the door of her small room. The walls glowed orange, lit by the dying embers of the fire that kept ice from forming on the inside of the windows on these long, cold nights.
Even through her hangover, Caroline knew instantly what was occurring.
Someone was having a baby.
'Okay,' she shouted wearily. 'I'm coming.' The hammering stopped and she heard footsteps scurry off down the corridor outside.
She rubbed her head and reached for the glass of water that she always kept on her bedside cabinet. She gulped it all down, wishing there were still such things as aspirin or Nurofen.
'What's going on?' murmured Jack, rolling over and nuzzling into her neck.
'The baby's coming,' she whispered. 'You go back to sleep.'
He mumbled something and rolled back again, pulling the blankets tight to his neck. Within moments he was snoring softly.
Caroline reached across and stroked his hair tenderly before bracing herself and swinging her legs out of the warm cocoon of the bed into the freezing night air. The rug protected her feet from the worst of the cold as she pulled her jeans and sweater on. Her breath misted the air in front of her face as she added central heating to the list of things she would wish for if she ever found a lamp with a genie in it.
She sat back on the edge of the bed, pulled on her slippers, then hurried to the door and emerged into the first floor landing of Fairlawne, the new home of St Mark's.
The school she had returned to six months previously was very different to the one she had left two years before that.
It wasn't just that they were in a different building now; the sudden influx of new children had shifted the balance of the place. The easy cameraderie she remembered from their time at Groombridge was gone. There were new cliques and new gangs, new classes, new troublemakers and new favourites.
New names on the memorial wall, too.
With so many of the adults dead, they had too few staff to deal with the new intake. Although a bunch of the women who had been kept prisoner in Westminster turned out to be naturals, they couldn't replace what the school had lost. Green seemed to be in twenty places at once — breaking up fights, teaching classes, organising the repatriation of rescued kids, tending to the wounded and damaged. He was magnificent, holding the school together almost single-handed.
It felt as if the whole school were in a kind of shock, perhaps from the children's realisation of their own savagery during the battle of Parliament, or perhaps from the loss of so many friends and teachers.
Caroline felt it too. St Mark's was holding its breath, unable to relax, waiting for something to happen.
The winter had been unbelievably long, harsh and fractious. The fireplaces burnt twenty-four hours a day and the snow seemed never ending. They'd had little contact with the other communities they'd befriended. Travel was arduous in those conditions, so they became isolated. The whole school suffered from cabin fever. Tempers were short and food was scarce. There were so many new mouths to feed that the supplies they had laid in were inadequate, so they ended up slaughtering more of their livestock than they could afford. Caroline knew that by the time spring arrived they would have depleted all their meagre resources. They would have to work hard all summer — and pray God it was a good harvest — to lay in enough to see them through another winter.
The rumour had spread that the world was entering a nuclear winter caused by some distant cataclysm; another Chernobyl or a nuclear skirmish. But even as the winter entered its sixth bitter month Caroline was sure spring would come again; the snow would melt, the blossom would appear, the flowers would bloom. They had to.
On one of the very few times the school had been visited by traders from Hildenborough they heard that the Abbot had made his final broadcast, murdered on air by a Brit. The Church had been defeated at home and abroad. They were safe again.
Even in the cold darkness, some children were congregating on the landing as Caroline hurried to the birthing room, woken by the screams, emerging to see what was going on. She ushered them back to their beds.
She paused of the threshold of the room, disturbed by the noises coming from within.
Ever since she'd arrived here, Caroline had spent at least an hour a day in this room, sitting beside the bed, reading out loud. Mostly Jane Austen, keeping it light. Sometimes, less often, she had just sat and talked. Once she had confessed to the murder of John Keegan and broken down in tears. As she'd cried into the eiderdown she'd felt a hand on her hair, stroking it softly. It was the only sign of understanding she'd had in all that time.
Matron hadn't spoken a word since that day in Westminster.
Now Caroline stood outside Matron's room and heard her screaming her way through labour. It felt odd to hear any noise coming from that mouth.
She stepped inside. Matron was sitting up in the bed, legs splayed, face red, breathing hard. She reached out her hand when she saw Caroline enter, so she stepped forward and held out her hand in turn. Matron grasped it tight and pulled the girl to her side. They stayed like that, hands locked firm, as Mrs Atkins oversaw the birth.
All the noises that Matron vocalised were primal. They were roars and cries and groans and screams. Not one word passed her lips — no fucks or shits or Jesus holy motherfucking Christs.
It was an animal birth.
The baby was born as the first light of dawn crept in the window.
Caroline held the child as Mrs Atkins cut the cord. She gasped in wonder at the tiny, blue screaming thing in her hands. So light and so angry at being removed from the nice warm place that was all it had ever known.
She laid the newborn on Matron's naked chest and pulled the sheets up to protect it from the cold. It fell silent immediately, eyes open, comforted by the warmth of its mother's skin and sound of her heartbeat.
'It's a boy,' said Caroline.
Matron looked up at Caroline and smiled through her tears.
'I know,' she said. 'His name's Lee.'
Later, Caroline walked out of the room into the half-lit hallway and told the lingering children the good news
