everyone who’d helped them and been kind to them—Marjorie and Eileen’s vicar and Daphne and Miss Laburnum and Sir Godfrey. Everyone they cared about.
“So that’s that?” she said finally.
“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and she could only nod, her eyes full of tears for him, for them. And for all the people they had killed.
Would kill. She must have made some sort of sound because Mr. Dunworthy reached out a hand to her and said, beseechingly, “Polly—”
She stood up and took the glass from him. “Try to rest,” she said, and switched off the lamp. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”
She took the glass out to the dark kitchen and set it on the table, closed Binnie’s fairy-tale book, and then went down to the cellar and sat at the bottom of the stairs, staring into darkness.
She had thought she’d given up hoping that they’d somehow be rescued even before Mike died, even before they’d failed to get a message to John Bartholomew, but she realized now that some part of her had gone on hoping. Gone on believing that there was some other, magical explanation which, as Eileen said, accounted for everything. Which fit all the facts and was right there in front of you all the time, only you couldn’t see it. But this wasn’t an Agatha Christie murder mystery, with a tidy solution and a happy ending. There was no happy ending. And she was the murderer.
They were all murderers. Mr. Dunworthy had killed a Wren, and Mike had killed Commander Harold and Jonathan, Eileen had been responsible for the vicar’s joining up, and she had been responsible for Marjorie’s enlisting in the Royal Army Nursing Service.
Were they next? Or would it be Private Hardy or Alf and Binnie or Sir Godfrey? Or Mrs. Sentry, or the FANYs at Woolwich and Croydon whom Polly had wangled supplies from, or the little boy who’d shhed her at the pantomime? Or the strangers who had the misfortune of being next to them in Townsend Brothers or the tube station or Trafalgar Square when the continuum—flailing, sparking, melting down like an incendiary and burning through space and time—killed her or Mr.
Dunworthy or Eileen?
She thought suddenly of Ethel in the book department at Townsend Brothers who had been killed by shrapnel. Had Polly killed her by talking to her about ABCs and planespotting?
She sat there in the cellar all night, till Alf opened the door and shouted, “Polly’s down ’ere!”
She went upstairs. Eileen was cooking breakfast, and Binnie was setting the table. “What was you doin’ down there?” Alf asked. “I didn’t hear no raid.”
“I was thinking,” Polly said.
“Thinkin’!” he hooted.
“Hush,” Eileen said, and to Polly, “You mustn’t worry. Mr. Hobbe’s going to be all right. His fever’s down.”
She sent the children to their room to get dressed. “You didn’t get taken on as an air-raid warden, did you? Or with a rescue crew? Things were so muddled last night, I forgot to ask.”
Muddled.
“No,” she said.
“Are you going to try again today?” Eileen asked.
You don’t understand, Polly thought. I’m the last person anyone would want on a rescue squad, pulling people out of the rubble, administering first aid.
She thought suddenly of the man in Croydon whose legs she’d tourniqueted. She’d been afraid he’d died, but what if he should have died there in the rubble, and her saving him had only doomed him to a worse, lingering death in hospital? And what if the tying of that tourniquet had been the act that had tipped the balance and brought about all their downfalls?
No, it couldn’t have been because her drop had still opened, had still let her go back to Oxford and come through again to finish the deed. But it might have helped, might have jostled the china ever closer to the edge.
“I mean, you’ve seen with Mr. Dunworthy how deadly being out on the streets at night is,” Eileen was saying. “Working as a warden is far too dangerous.”
“You’re right, it is. I’m not going to do it.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Eileen said, and flung her arms around Polly. “I’ve been so worried! Now, sit down and have a cup of tea, and I’ll take Mr. Dun—Mr.
Hobbe—his.”
Polly obeyed.
Eileen was gone several minutes. When she came back out, she whispered, “I asked him about the Alhambra, and he said it wasn’t hit, that only two theaters were damaged during the Blitz, and neither one was during a performance.”
I’m going to have to tell her, Polly thought despairingly. But not yet. I can’t bear it. And Alf and Binnie had come back into the kitchen and were arguing over who got to feed the parrot. “Mind the gap, Binnie!” it squawked.
“My name’s not Binnie,” Binnie said. “It’s Vera. Like Vera Lynn.”
Alf, his mouth full, said, “I thought it was Rapunzel.”
“Rapunzel was a noddlehead,” Binnie said. She held out a bit of bread to the parrot. “Say, ‘Mind the gap, Vera.’ ”
We’ll have to send them away, Polly thought. It’s the only way to keep them safe. They’ll have to be evacuated,
