floor like black leaves.
There was still a puddle of water from where she had doused the burning postcards, and next to it lay the half-burnt print of The Light of the World. Polly bent to pick it up. The left-hand side of the picture where the door was supposed to be was blackened and curled, and when Polly touched it, that half crumbled into flakes and fell away, so that Christ’s hand was raised to knock on nothingness.
Polly looked at the print a long moment, then laid it gently on the desk and went outside and sat down on the broad step next to Eileen and the children, and in a moment Mike came back outside and sat down between them. “Bartholomew didn’t say anything to anybody,” he said. “He just left. I am so sorry, Polly.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You tried your—”
“I beg your pardon,” the man whom she’d seen speak to Mike before as he got out of the taxi said. He was standing at the foot of the steps, looking beseechingly up at Mike. “Should I go home, do you think? Or should I wait here?”
“The place he worked was destroyed last night,” Mike explained to them.
“What do I do now?” the man said.
I have no idea, Polly thought.
“Stay here,” Mike said decisively. “The owners of the business are bound to show up sooner or later.”
But what if they don’t come till it’s too late? Polly thought.
“Thank you,” the man said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
They watched him go back down the steps and across the puddle-filled courtyard. “Helpful,” Mike said bitterly. “It’s my fault we didn’t find Bartholomew, you know. If I’d asked you about him and about St. Paul’s nearly burning down instead of assuming he’d been here at the end of the Blitz. Or seen that damned wall coming down—”
“What wall?” Eileen asked.
He told them how he’d been knocked unconscious and woken up in St. Bart’s.
“You were there?” Eileen said incredulously. “At St. Bart’s?”
We were all at St. Bart’s last night, Polly thought.
The injured firewatcher might have been in the bed next to the unconscious Mike. Mike might have been only inches away from Mr. Bartholomew, as she had been The injured firewatcher might have been in the bed next to the unconscious Mike. Mike might have been only inches away from Mr. Bartholomew, as she had been up in the rafters of St. Paul’s, separated from him by only a wall. They had been so close.
But everything had conspired against them, from Theodore’s refusal to leave the pantomime to the blocked streets which had kept them from getting here before he left this morning. It was as if the entire space-time continuum had been engaged in an elaborate plot to keep them from reaching John Bartholomew. Just as it had kept her and Eileen from finding each other last autumn. “How all occasions do inform against us,” she thought.
“It isn’t your fault, it’s mine,” Eileen was saying. “If I’d listened to Mr. Bartholomew’s lecture, I’d have known he was still here, and we could have found him weeks ago. And now it’s too late—”
“ ’Ow come you can’t go to Wales an’ get ’im?” Alf asked.
“ ’Cause they don’t know where ’e is in Wales,” Binnie said. “And you ’eard ’im.” She pointed at Mike. “ ‘E ain’t really goin’ there. ’E only said ’e was,” and Polly was glad she’d stopped Mike from saying any more than he already had. They’d obviously been listening to every word the three of them had said. And she was almost certain they were the two delinquents she’d seen stealing the picnic basket that night in Holborn, though she hadn’t said anything to Eileen.
“Well, if ’e ain’t in Wales, then where’s ’e gone?” Alf was asking Eileen.
“We don’t know,” Polly said. “He didn’t tell us.”
“I bet I could find ’im.”
“How?” Binnie said. “You don’t even know what ’e looks like, you dunderpate.”
“I ain’t a dunderpate. Take it back,” Alf said, and dove at Binnie. She darted away down the steps and across the forecourt, Alf in hot pursuit.
Eileen was still blaming herself. “I should simply have told the incident officer I couldn’t take the ambulance to St. Bart’s.”
And I shouldn’t have rushed off to St. Bart’s without finding out the injured firewatcher’s name and who’d gone with him to hospital, Polly thought. If she hadn’t, she’d have found out what Mr. Humphreys had told her a few minutes ago, that he’d helped Bartholomew put the injured man in the ambulance and then gone back up to the roofs. She could’ve told Mr. Humphreys to tell Mr. Bartholomew not to leave till they got there.
“It’s no one’s fault,” she said.
They couldn’t have found him no matter what they did because it had all happened already, and when he got back to Oxford, he hadn’t been bearing a message from them. It had been a hopeless enterprise from the beginning. It had all been hopeless—the attempts to contact Mike’s retrieval team and the search for Gerald.
The door behind them opened, and Mr. Humphreys came out bearing a tray with a teapot and cups on it. “Your friend Mr. Davis said you were still out here,” he said to Polly, handing her and the others cups and saucers. “And I thought you might like some tea. It’s such a cold morning.”
He poured out their tea, then went down the steps and over to the man who’d asked Mike what he should do and then over to Alf and Binnie, who were playing in the still-smoldering wreckage.
He gave them biscuits and then came back. “I’m so sorry you missed your friend, Miss Sebastian,” he said. “I’ll ask Dean Matthews if he had an address where Mr.
Bartholomew might be reached. Do you need assistance in getting home?”
