Exactly how many crimes they’ve committed? Polly said silently, looking up at the people coming down the escalator. Miss Laburnum should have got to Mrs.

Leary’s by now and told Mike. If he was there.

“I’ve been thinking about how Alf and Binnie ran away the other morning when I said I’d take them home,” Eileen said. “And how the day I borrowed the map from them, they wouldn’t let me in.”

More and more people were coming down the escalator, shelterers with their bedrolls under their arms, making the trek back to the East End, and factory workers on the early shift, but there was still no sign of Mike.

“And Alf and Binnie are so dirty and ragged. I mean, I know their mother doesn’t take proper care of them, but Binnie’s wearing the same dress she had at the manor, and it was too short for her even then. And—”

Miss Laburnum was coming down the escalator toward them. “It’s all right,” Polly called up to her. “I found her. You were right. She spent the night—”

And saw the ARP warden on the step above her. And the look on Miss Laburnum’s face. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?” But she already knew.

No, she thought. No.

“Are you Miss Sebastian?” the ARP warden said, and she must have nodded because the warden said, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m afraid your friend Mr. Davis was killed last night.”

Viola: What country, friends, is this?

Captain: This is Illyria, lady.

Viola: And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

TWELFTH NIGHT

London—Winter 1941

MIKE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD BEEN KILLED IN THE raid. Mr. Simms had, too. He’d been filling in for a warden who had the flu when the ARP post was hit. Nelson had been with him, and the dog’s whimpering had led the rescue crew to his master, but it was too late. Mr. Simms had already bled to death.

Nelson was unhurt, except for a lacerated paw, but Mr. Simms had no family, and there was concern among the troupe over what would become of him. But the next week Mr. Dorming brought Nelson to Notting Hill Gate and announced that he had paid a guinea for him.

“Mr. Dorming doesn’t even like dogs,” Polly said when Miss Laburnum told her. “And I thought Mrs. Rickett didn’t allow her boarders to keep pets.”

“I told you, my dear. Mr. Dorming’s moved out. He’s taken Mr. Simms’s old rooms.”

Polly didn’t remember Miss Laburnum having told her that. She didn’t even remember having been told that Mr. Simms had been killed, though she must have been because she recalled wondering if he had been in Houndsditch, too. She remembered scarcely anything of those first few days. It was all she could manage to absorb the fact that Mike was dead and to do all the things that had to be done.

She had always wondered how the contemps had found the courage to go on after their husbands, parents, children, and friends had been pulled lifeless from the rubble. But it wasn’t courage. It was that there were so many things that had to be taken care of that by the time one had done all of them, it was too late to give way.

She had to go with the warden to the ARP post to identify Mike’s effects and sign for them, had to talk to the incident officer, had to telephone Townsend Brothers to tell them she and Eileen wouldn’t be in to work, and to remove Mike’s belongings from his room so new tenants could move in. “I do hate to worry you so soon,”

Mrs. Leary said, “but it’s a couple who were bombed out last night and have nowhere to go.”

“It’s quite all right,” Polly said. And because she didn’t want Mrs. Leary going through his things and finding a list of upcoming raids and thinking he had been a spy, she went straight over.

But there was nothing incriminating in his room, only his clothes and his suitcase, his towel and shaving things, and a paperback biography of Shackleton.

She packed them up, took them back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and went to the Daily Express to tell his editor, all the while protected by a barrier of numbness through which the pain would presently begin to work its way.

But there was no time to worry about that. She had to respond to Mike’s editor’s questions and to the condolences of the troupe and Sir Godfrey’s anxious concern, had to put the flowers Doreen had brought “from everyone on third” in water. And, worst of all, had to deal with Eileen, who refused to believe Mike was dead.

“It’s all a mistake. It was someone else,” she insisted, even though the warden had shown them Mike’s identity card and ration book and the reporter’s notebook he’d carried. And the pumpkin-colored scarf Miss Hibbard had knitted and Polly had lent him at St. Bart’s that morning after they’d tried to find John Bartholomew.

The edges of his papers were charred, and all of the things were sodden. “The fire hoses,” the warden explained apologetically.

“Those could have been stolen from him,” Eileen said. “Alf and Binnie stole that sort of thing from people all the time. I won’t believe it till I’ve seen the body.”

But there wasn’t a body, as the warden gingerly explained. “It was a thousand-pounder, and then incendiaries, you see.”

Polly saw. There would only have been fragments too small for the rescue squad to have collected. She thought of Paige Fairchild telling her at one of her first V-1

incidents, “Don’t bother with anything smaller than a hand.”

“It can’t have been Mike,” Eileen insisted. “What would he have been doing out in the middle of a raid? We all promised we’d go to a shelter the moment the sirens went.”

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