“No. After I’ve told you, you won’t want—”
“Of course we’ll want you,” she said, truly alarmed now. “You’re talking nonsense. You can tell me on the way.”
“No. Now.” He began to cough.
“All right,” she said hastily, “but we can’t do it standing out here in this freezing rain. We need to find somewhere warm. The place you’ve been staying, is it near here?”
He didn’t answer.
He doesn’t want me to know where he lives, she thought. He doesn’t want me to be able to find him. Which meant at the first opportunity he intended to attempt to get away from her again. She had to get him somewhere warm before he had the chance.
But everything along Paternoster Row had burnt down the night of the twenty-ninth. She’d seen a pub off Newgate on her way home from St. Paul’s that first Sunday. She’d have to hope it was still there.
It was, and thank goodness the fires, the blackout, and the weather had almost completely destroyed business. The place was all but empty. Polly sat Mr.
Dunworthy, who was now shivering uncontrollably, down on the wooden settle in front of the fire, put her own coat around his shoulders, and went to the counter.
“My friend has had a bad shock,” she told the middle-aged, ginger-haired barmaid. “I daren’t leave him alone. Could you bring us a pot of tea?”
“ ’A course, dearie,” the barmaid said. “Bombed out, was he?”
“Yes,” Polly said, and hurried over to the fire. Mr. Dunworthy had stood up, folded her coat over the back of the settle, and was going toward the door.
She headed him off, said, “Our tea’s coming,” steered him back to the settle, and draped her coat over his knees. “It’ll be here in a moment.”
The barmaid came out of the kitchen bearing a teapot, teaspoons, a pair of saucers, two chipped teacups dangling from her crooked fingers, and a glass full of a brown liquid. “I was bombed out meself in November,” she said to Mr. Dunworthy. “Dreadful. Fair knocks the stuffin’ out of you, don’t it? This will do you up right.”
She set the glass in front of Mr. Dunworthy. “A spot of brandy,” she explained to Polly. “Nothin’ like it to bring the fight back into you.”
“Thank you,” Polly said. She poured Mr. Dunworthy out half a cup of tea, filled it the rest of the way with brandy, and handed it to him. “There. Have some tea, and then you can tell me whatever it is. Drink it down,” she ordered.
He did, and she poured him a second, but he didn’t drink it, in spite of her urging. He sat staring blindly at the fire, his hands wrapped around the teacup, not as if he was warming them on it but as if he was clinging to the cup for dear life.
I need to get him home and into bed, Polly thought. And telephone to the doctor.
“Mr. Dunworthy,” she said, “whatever it is you have to tell me, it can wait. Merope will have made supper, and you’ll feel better after you’ve had a hot meal.”
No response.
“You can stay with us tonight, and tomorrow we can go collect your things, and then when you’re feeling better, we can decide which drop—”
“The drops won’t open.”
“But if the problem’s the slippage—”
“The slippage was an indicator.”
“We’re trapped here for good, is that what you’re afraid to tell me?” she said.
“Yes.”
“What about Michael’s roommate, Charles? Did he go to Singapore, or did you realize we couldn’t get out before—?”
“No.”
No. Which meant Charles would still be there when the Japanese invaded. He would be rounded up with the rest of the British colonials and herded off to a jungle prison camp to die of malaria or malnutrition. Or worse.
“What about the other historians with deadlines?” she asked.
“You’re the only one. I’d pulled out all the others. I didn’t realize you’d done the 1944 segment of your assignment first. That’s why you weren’t pulled out when the others were.”
“And there’s no way we’ll get out before our deadlines?”
“And there’s no way we’ll get out before our deadlines?”
“No,” he said. But there was no relief in his voice at having told her. Which meant there was worse to come. And if it wasn’t Colin, there was only one thing it could be.
“The reason we’re trapped,” she said, “it’s because we altered events, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
So Mike had been right.
“How did you find out?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.
“Mike—Michael—saved a soldier’s life at Dunkirk, and the soldier went back across and brought home more
