“Perhaps it was too far away and he hadn’t enough time—”
“No,” Eileen said. “I asked the warden. She said Houndsditch wasn’t hit till eleven. And what would he have been doing in Houndsditch? He never mentioned it to you, did he?”
“No. But remember Marjorie? She didn’t tell anyone she was going to meet an airman either. There was no reason anyone knew of for her to have been in Jermyn Street.”
“And Marjorie wasn’t dead. Mike isn’t either.”
“Eileen—”
“He might have been injured and wandered away, or got hit on the head and can’t remember who he is,” Eileen argued and insisted on checking the hospitals—
even though the authorities had already done that—and waiting at the foot of the escalator in Oxford Circus Station where they’d agreed to meet if something went wrong.
“You can’t go on doing this,” Polly said after the third night. “You must get some sleep.”
Eileen shook her head. “I might miss him,” she said, and when he still hadn’t come by the fourth night, she said, “Perhaps he found the retrieval team, and they pulled him out. And he wanted to come fetch us, but there wasn’t time—”
Polly shook her head, remembering how adamant he’d been about them splitting up when he realized Mr. Bartholomew was at St. Paul’s. “He’d never have gone through without us.”
“Perhaps he hadn’t any choice. Like Shackleton. He had to leave us behind to go fetch help. Perhaps the drop was in Houndsditch, and if they didn’t go through immediately, it would have been destroyed, so he went and now he’s working with Badri and Linna to find another drop site for us.
“And don’t say, ‘This is time travel,’ like that,” Eileen said, even though Polly hadn’t said anything. “There are scores of reasons why they might not have been able to come through yet. Slippage and divergence points and …”
But the most likely is that that isn’t what happened at all, Polly thought. Mike didn’t go through, and there was no drop in Houndsditch. Only an HE, followed by incendiaries.
“He can’t be dead,” Eileen said. “He promised he’d get us out.”
“He can’t be dead,” Eileen said. “He promised he’d get us out.”
Yes, and Colin promised he’d come rescue me if I got into trouble, Polly thought. Sometimes promises can’t be kept.
“Perhaps he got a new lead on the retrieval team and went off to find them,” Eileen said. “He went to Manchester without telling us.”
Which didn’t account for his half-burnt papers being in Houndsditch, or his things being at Mrs. Leary’s. If he had gone off, he would have taken his razor and shaving soap with him.
Polly had hoped there would be some clue among his belongings as to what he had been doing in Houndsditch, though she was almost afraid to find out. What if he’d caught sight of Eileen going to find Alf and Binnie and followed her? Houndsditch wasn’t that far from Bank Station. Or what if he’d been on some dangerous mission to get the three of them out? He’d looked so desperate and distracted after she told him about Eileen’s coat. What if, in his desperation, he’d seen someone he thought might be the retrieval team and followed them to Houndsditch? To his death.
I shouldn’t have told him, she thought. I should have lied about the coat. If he had died attempting to save them, to get her out before her deadline, she didn’t think she could bear it.
But if they knew what he’d been doing in Houndsditch, Eileen might come to her senses, so the next night Polly stayed behind at Mrs. Rickett’s and dried out Mike’s still-wet notebook in the oven and then went carefully through its crinkled leaves.
The ink on some of the pages had run or washed away. Like the code in the bigram books, she thought, peering at the blurred words, attempting to decipher them.
There were notes for a newspaper story on an all-female AA-gun squadron, the list of names she’d given him before he went to Bletchley Park—“Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Dilly Knox”—and what looked like a list of ideas for possible newspaper stories: “Wartime Weddings,” “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?”
“Winter and War: Ten Survival Strategies.”
Survival strategies, Polly thought, and felt the pain begin to seep through, like blood through a shirt.
Several pages had been torn out of the notebook. The list of upcoming raids, Polly thought.
The remaining pages were notes for an article called “Doing Our Bit: Heroes on the Home Front,” and a list of names, addresses, and times. “Canteen worker, Mrs.
Edna Bell, 6 Cuttlebone Street, Southwark, Jan. 10, 10 P.M.,” and below that, “Firespotter,” and a name that might have been “Mr. Woodruff” or “Mr. Walton” and
“Jan. 11, 11 P.M., 9 Houndsditch, corner of H and Stoney Lane.”
He hadn’t been following Eileen or looking for the retrieval team. He had gone to Houndsditch to interview a firespotter for a story he was writing on home-front heroes for the Daily Express. It wasn’t her fault. He hadn’t been killed attempting to save them.
She had thought that knowledge would be a comfort, but it wasn’t, and she realized that she had been hoping as much as Eileen that there was some mistake, some other explanation. That he wasn’t truly dead. But he was.
And if he was dead, then no one was coming to rescue them. She might have been able to convince herself that Mr. Dunworthy would have allowed Mike to be left here with an injured foot and her here with a deadline, but there was no way he would have allowed one of them to be killed if he could help it.
Which meant he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t get them out. And it scarcely mattered if the reason was slippage
