coincidence! I knew I was right in thinking you should meet.” He beamed at both of them. “But I had no idea you were acquainted. How do you know Miss Sebastian, Mr. Hobbe?”
“He taught me at school,” Polly said so Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t have to answer.
“I told Miss Sebastian I thought you were a schoolmaster,” Mr. Humphreys said happily. “You knew so much about St. Pau—”
“And you were right, Mr. Humphreys,” she said. “Thank you so much for bringing us together and giving us this chance to visit,” she added, hoping he’d take the hint, but he took no notice.
“What was your subject, Mr. Hobbe?” he asked.
“History,” Polly said.
“I knew it! I told you he knew all about history, didn’t I, Miss Sebastian?” Mr. Dunworthy winced. “And I was right, you are an historian.”
She had to stop this, had to get Mr. Dunworthy away somehow. “Mr. Humphreys, I’m afraid we’re tiring Mr. Hobbe.”
She took Mr. Dunworthy’s arm. “You’ve only just got out of hospital. Perhaps—”
She had intended to say, “I should take him home,” but Mr. Humphreys was too quick for her. “Oh, of course, how thoughtless of me. Let me fetch you a chair.”
He bustled off toward the nave.
The instant he was out of earshot, Polly said, “Mr. Dunworthy, it’s Colin, isn’t it? He came through with you, didn’t he?”
“Colin? No, I wouldn’t let him come.”
Polly’s knees nearly buckled from the force of the relief she felt, and she had to put a hand out to the pillar to steady herself.
“I wanted to get you out as quickly as possible,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I was afraid the slippage might spike, and you’d be trapped here past your deadline.”
“But then why didn’t you come in September?”
“I did, but the slippage sent me through to December.”
Three months’ slippage. That meant the reason their drops hadn’t opened could have been because of slippage after all, and the entire first few months of the Blitz had been a divergence point. And now that the twenty-ninth was over …
But if it was merely slippage, Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t look so utterly devoid of hope. Unless the bomb blast had destroyed his drop.
“Where’s your drop?” she asked, and then remembered what Mr. Humphreys had said about him frequenting the north transept. “It’s here, isn’t it? In St. Paul’s? Is that why you’ve been coming here every day? You’ve been waiting for it to open?”
He shook his head. “It isn’t going to open.”
“What do you mean?”
A horrible thought struck her. He’d been to the Blitz before. What if it had been in February? “Mr. Dunworthy,” she said urgently, “when were you here before?”
“Here we are,” Mr. Humphreys said, arriving with a wooden folding chair. He opened it out with a snap and set it in front of the painting. “Come, sit down.” He took Mr. Dunworthy’s arm.
Mr. Dunworthy sank down heavily onto the chair, and Polly saw with dread how painfully he moved, how frail he was. She’d assumed she’d be killed just before her deadline by a bomb or shrapnel, but there were other ways of eliminating someone who might create a paradox—complications following an injury, or pneumonia.
“I should have thought of this before,” Mr. Humphreys was saying. “There should always be chairs in this bay, so that visitors can sit and contemplate The Light of the World.” He smiled happily up at it. “It’s a painting which cannot be understood in a few moments of looking. It requires time.”
“Time,” Mr. Dunworthy said bitterly.
Oh, God, Polly thought. He does have a deadline.
“Did you tell Mr. Hobbe you were a fellow admirer of The Light of the World, Miss Sebastian?” Mr. Humphreys asked brightly. “That was why I wished the two of you to meet, Mr. Hobbe. I knew I was right to insist on its being here in St. Paul’s, even though only as a copy. ‘It belongs here,’ I told Dean Matthews. ‘Who knows what good may come from some visitor’s seeing it?’ And now look, it’s brought the two of you together. God truly does work in mysterious—”
Mr. Humphreys stopped at a sound of voices and looked out across the nave. The three sailors who’d been in the north transept were looking at the bricked-up Wellington Monument.
“Oh, good, they didn’t leave after all,” Mr. Humphreys said. “If I may take leave of you for a moment, I need to speak with them. I did not finish telling them the story of Captain Faulknor.”
He hurried off. Polly knelt in front of Mr. Dunworthy. “When were you here in the Blitz before?”
“When I was seventeen,” he said. “And again when I was—”
“No, no, the dates. What dates were you here doing observations?”
“In May and in October and November.”
“And that’s all?”
“No,” he said, and she could tell from his face that this was it, the bad news.
Oh, God, she thought.
