“It’s beautiful,” Colin breathed. “When I came here in the seventies, it was totally hidden by concrete buildings and car parks.”
“The seventies?”
“1976, actually,” he said. “The year they declassified the Fortitude South papers. I’d been here earlier—I mean, later—earlier and later—in the eighties. We couldn’t get anything before 1960 to open or anything after 1995, when we could have gone online, so I had to do it the hard way. I came here to search the newspaper archives and the war records for clues to what might have happened.”
Colin, who had wanted to go to the Crusades, spending—how long—in reading rooms and libraries and dusty newspaper morgues?
“And you found the engagement announcement,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“Yes. I also found your death notice. And Polly’s.”
“Mine?” Polly said. “But I checked the Times and the Herald. It wasn’t—”
“It was in the Daily Express. It said you’d been killed at St. George’s, Kensington.”
How must Colin have felt, reading that, all alone and eighty years from home? And how many years had he sat there in archives, hunched over volumes of yellowing newspapers, over a microfilm reader?
“But you didn’t stop looking,” Polly said.
“No. I refused to believe it.”
Like Eileen, Polly thought.
“I had a bit more trouble hanging on to the belief that you were alive after Michael Davies told me you and Eileen were at Mrs. Rickett’s, and it turned out it had been bombed.” He smiled at her.
“But you didn’t stop looking.”
“No, and you weren’t dead. And neither was Mr. Dunworthy. At least for the moment. But the sooner I get you both back to Oxford, the better I’ll feel. Let’s go,”
he said, and hurried them toward St. Paul’s.
Halfway there Mr. Dunworthy stopped and stood there on the pavement, his head down.
Oh, no, Polly thought. Not now, not this close. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“I ran into her here,” Mr. Dunworthy said, pointing down at the pavement. “The Wren.”
“Lieutenant Wendy Armitage,” Colin said. “Currently working at Bletchley Park. One of Dilly’s girls. She helped crack Ultra’s naval code. Come along. It’s nearly midnight.”
They hurried on up the hill. “We need to go in the north door,” Colin said, and started across the courtyard.
Mr. Dunworthy pulled him back. “The watch’ll see you. They’re still up on the roofs. This way,” he whispered, and led the way around the perimeter of the Mr. Dunworthy pulled him back. “The watch’ll see you. They’re still up on the roofs. This way,” he whispered, and led the way around the perimeter of the courtyard, keeping to the shadows, till they were even with the porch.
“We still have to cross that open space,” Colin whispered, pointing to the thirty feet between them and the steps.
“We wait for the next bomber,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “They’ll look up at the sky, and we can make a dash for it. Here comes a bomber.” And he was right, Colin and Polly both instinctively looked up at the drone of its engines.
“Now,” Mr. Dunworthy said, his voice scarcely audible above the Dornier’s roar, and started off across the open space.
Colin grabbed Polly’s hand, and they shot across it after him and up the steps, past the star-shaped burn mark where the incendiary had been, past the place where she and Mike and Eileen had sat on the morning of the thirtieth, up to the porch she had darted across that first day when the rescue squad was defusing the UXB, and under the porch’s concealing shadows to the north door. He pulled the heavy handle.
It wouldn’t open. “It’s locked,” Colin said. “What about the Great West Door?”
“It’s only open on important occasions,” Mr. Dunworthy said, as if this wasn’t the most important occasion of his life.
“The side door to the Crypt should be unlocked,” Colin said, and started back toward the steps.
“No, wait,” Polly said. “Some of the fire watch may be down there. We need to try the south door first.” She ran lightly along the porch and yanked on the handle.
It wouldn’t open either. But it was only stuck, as it had been on the night of the twenty-ninth. When Colin gripped the handle, too, the door opened easily. “Mr.
Dunworthy,” he whispered, beckoning, and pushed him and then Polly through into the dark vestibule.
The cathedral, in spite of the spring weather and the nearby fires, was as cold as winter and very dark.
“Hear anything?” Colin whispered, pulling the door silently shut behind them.
“No,” Polly whispered back. Only the audible hush St. Paul’s always had. The sound of space and time. “I know the way,” she said softly, and led them up the south aisle. There was enough light from the fire-lit clouds and the searchlights to navigate by, but only just.
The long walk, and that last sprint across to the porch, had taken its toll on Mr. Dunworthy. He was badly winded and leaned heavily on Colin’s arm. Polly led them past the spiral staircase she’d fled up the night of the twenty-ninth, past the chapel where they’d held Mike’s funeral. Only he hadn’t really been dead.
