They didn’t hear me, she thought, and cupped her hands around her mouth. “There’s an injured man in here! We need a stretcher and a jack! Hurry!” She went back to shifting the seats and then a piece of the balcony.
Oh, God, it was too heavy to lift. She put both hands against the end and gave a mighty shove, and there he was, a foot below her in a narrow hole, lying on his back across a row of upended seat backs, his legs under a piece of the balcony which she could see at a glance was far too heavy for her to lift.
“ ‘She lives,’ ” he said, smiling up at her. “ ‘If it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.’ ”
Polly bit back tears. “Where are you hurt?” she asked, but she could already see. A red stain covered the top half of his shirt.
She stretched out over the edge of the hole so she could reach down to the wound. He didn’t flinch, but her hand came away wet. She tore open his shirt. The wound was an inch wide and above his heart, but it was bleeding badly, and there was no way to put a tourniquet on it. And no time to go for help. By the time she clambered back over the wreckage to the front of the theater, he’d have bled to death. She needed to stop the bleeding now.
Direct pressure. She replaced the torn shirt over the wound and pressed down with the palm of her hand while she looked about for something better. His coat—No, it was twisted under him so she couldn’t get at it. The upholstery from the seat cushions might work, but she knew from trying to free her foot that it was too tough to tear.
If that woman at the Works Board had let me become a rescue worker, she thought, I’d have had a medical kit and bandages with me.
She hoisted herself to her knees and wrenched off her skirt. “Help! Casualty over here!” she shouted, folding it into a not-nearly-thick-enough compress.
ENSA’s costumes are much too skimpy, she thought, wriggling out of her bolero and bloomers and folding them and the skirt into a thick square. She stretched out flat again, clad only in the bathing suit, laid the pad against the wound, and pressed down as hard as she could with the heel of her hand.
Sir Godfrey grimaced. “Did you come to tell me you’ve decided to do the pantomime after all?” he asked.
“Shh,” Polly said, “you mustn’t try to talk.”
“Nonsense. How else shall I do my death scene?”
Her heart twisted. “You’re not dying,” she said firmly. “It’s only a flesh wound.”
“You always were a wretched actress, Viola,” he said, shaking his head against the timbers he lay on. “This isn’t quite the farewell I’d imagined. I’d always hoped to die onstage. Halfway through the second act of a Barrie play so I would be spared from doing Act Three.”
He could always make her laugh, even here in the rubble, with him bleeding to death and no sign of a rescue squad.
What’s taking them so long? she thought. They’re as bad as the retrieval team.
Blood was soaking through the compress. She wasn’t applying enough pressure. She inched forward, trying to get into a better position, and pushed down as hard as she could on it.
“Which speech will you have?” Sir Godfrey asked. “Hamlet? ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.’ ”
No, it isn’t a divinity. I caused this. But he’s not going to die if I can help it, she thought, pressing down with all the force she could muster. The continuum was going to have to correct itself some other way.
She raised her head and shouted for help again, trying to remember everything Sir Godfrey had taught her about projecting to the very back of the stalls. “In here!
Help!” And as if in answer there was the sound of planes in the distance.
“They’re coming round again,” Sir Godfrey said, looking up at the ceiling. “You must get to a shelter—”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“You must, Viola. Your young man would never forgive me if I got you killed.”
My young man. “I lied to you back there at the theater,” she said. “There’s no young man.”
“Of course there is. He’s why I never had the ghost of a chance with you,” he said, and after a minute he asked, “Was he killed?”
“I think he must have been, or he’d be here by now.”
“He may yet come,” Sir Godfrey said gently. “Which is why you must go, Miranda. ‘Fly, Fleance, fly.’ ”
She shook her head. “ ‘If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ ”
“Shakespeare!” he said contemptuously. “I have always loathed actors who quote the Bard. ‘Go, get you gone, foul varlet.’ I will not have your death on my hands.”
“You have it the wrong way round,” she said bitterly. “This is my fault. I did this to you.”
“You have it the wrong way round,” she said bitterly. “This is my fault. I did this to you.”
“I fail to see how, unless you abandoned your air-raid duties with ENSA and enlisted in the Luftwaffe within the last hour. I fear the guilt is mine. I shouldn’t have come to ask you to be in the pantomime,” he said, and then murmured, as if to himself, “I should have told Greenberg yes. I should have gone to Bristol.”
He closed his eyes in pain. “ ‘We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.’ ”
“No, we’re not, “she said. “None of us meant to do any harm.”
But Sir Godfrey wasn’t listening to her. “What’s that?” he asked, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a sound. “I thought I heard something.”
