newspapers.
“But we already did that,” Eileen said, “and no one answered.”
“These aren’t messages to the retrieval team,” Mike said. “They’re messages to Oxford.”
“But how can we send messages to the future unless we find another historian?” Eileen asked. “We don’t know where Mr. Bartholomew’s drop is.”
“We send them the same way we sent the messages to the retrieval team. Remember those messages you told us about, Polly, that British Intelligence put in the newspapers to fool Hitler into thinking the invasion was coming at Calais instead of Normandy?”
“The wedding announcements and letters to the editor?”
“Yes. And there’s the Verlaine message and the other coded messages they sent out over the BBC to the French Resistance.”
“But those messages weren’t to the future,” Polly said.
“No, but they made it to the future. After World War II, historians went through all the newspapers and all the radio recordings and telegrams of the time, looking for clues to what had happened, and they found the Fortitude South and BBC messages.”
“But they were looking through the 1944 newspapers,” Polly said. “Why would they look for messages in 1941 newspapers?”
“Because we’re in 1941. They’ll be trying to find out where we are,” he said, “and we’re going to tell them.”
It won’t work, Polly thought. If they were looking for messages, they’d already have found the ones the three of us sent to the retrieval team, and they’d have been in Trafalgar Square or at the Peter Pan statue.
And if they weren’t looking, if Mike was counting on some random historian stumbling across their messages, that historian wouldn’t understand it. Unless it read,
“Mr. Dunworthy: Trapped in 1941. Need transport home. Polly, Mike, and Eileen,” there was no guarantee the historian would even recognize it as a message.
And that was if the message managed to survive till 2060. Fleet Street would be bombed several times before the end of the war, and countless more records had been destroyed by the pinpoint bomb which had destroyed St. Paul’s and during the Pandemic. A message in the personal column of the Evening Express had as much chance of reaching Mr. Dunworthy as a message in a bottle, and Mike surely knew that. Polly wondered if he was simply having them do this to keep her and Eileen from realizing there was nothing they could do.
But no matter what the reason, he no longer had the driven, desperate look he’d had when Polly’d told him. And if Mike was waiting in St. Paul’s—“Meet me in the south aisle by The Light of the World”—or at Hyde Park Corner, he wasn’t off in Backbury or Saltram-on-Sea getting shot. So Polly diligently wrote, “R.T. Sorry I couldn’t come last Saturday. Leave canceled. Meet me in Paddington Station, Track 6, at two, M.D.” and “Gold ring, lost in Oxford Street, inscribed ‘Time knoweth no bounds.’ Reward. Contact M. Davies, 9 Beresford Court, Kensington.”
On Friday Mike asked her again whether she was sure he hadn’t been in Trafalgar Square with Eileen. “Did you look at the people standing around her?”
“Yes,” she said. “There was a teenaged girl in a white dress and a sailor …” She frowned, trying to remember. “And two elderly ladies. Why?”
“Because even if you and I had both been killed, she still wouldn’t have been there alone. She’d have been there with the shopgirls from Townsend Brothers or something, and the fact that she wasn’t proves she was there on another assignment.”
No, it didn’t, but if he believed that, he was less likely to do something rash.
“The elderly ladies weren’t Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard, were they?” he asked. “Or Miss Snelgrove?”
“No,” Polly said and didn’t mention that she had scarcely glanced at them, or that at that point she hadn’t met them yet.
On Saturday the eleventh, Townsend Brothers had to be evacuated again due to a gas leak in Duke Street, and Mr. Witherill sent half the staff—including Polly—
home. Eileen wasn’t there, and before she could go to see if Mike was at Mrs. Leary’s, Miss Laburnum waylaid her to look through plays for dramatic readings the troupe could do.
“Scenes with only a few parts,” she instructed Polly, “so it won’t matter if not all the troupe is there.”
“Scenes with only a few parts,” she instructed Polly, “so it won’t matter if not all the troupe is there.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been gone the last few nights,” Polly said. “I promise I’ll come this evening.”
“Oh, I wasn’t referring to you,” Miss Laburnum said. “I meant Mr. Simms. He’s volunteered to be a firespotter, and Lila and Viv scarcely ever come. They’re always off to service club dances.”
“They’re not going to one tonight, are they?” Polly asked anxiously. The big raids which had hit Bank and Liverpool Street stations were tonight.
“I do hope not,” Miss Laburnum said. “We’re reading a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we’ll need them for Mustardseed and Peaseblossom.”
Neither Mike nor Eileen was back when the sirens went, or at Notting Hill Gate when Polly got there. Before they’d left the night before, she’d reminded them to take shelter the moment they heard the sirens and not to board any train that would go through Bank or Liverpool Street Station, which meant they might be some time getting here.
She left a note for them in the staircase and went out to the platform. Lila and Viv, thankfully, were there, and so was everyone else except Mr. Simms, who was on duty, and Mrs. Rickett, whom Mr. Dorming reported was convinced the weather was too bad for raids. “She may be right,” he said. “It looks as though it might snow.”
