Blackout

London-22 September 1940

“POLLY! OVER HERE!” LILA CALLED AGAIN FROM ACROSS the tube station, and Viv echoed, “Here.”

It couldn’t be them-no one could have survived in that flattened tangle of rubble-but there they were, elbowing their way toward her carrying mugs of tea and sandwiches. “Where-how-?” Polly stammered. “I thought you were dead.”

“You thought we were dead?” Lila said. “We thought you were dead! Viv, go tell them we’ve found her,” she ordered, and Viv handed Polly the sandwich and tea she was holding and took off back through the crowd.

“You said ‘they.’ Does that mean-?”

But Lila wasn’t listening. “What happened to you?” she demanded. “We were convinced you’d gone to St. George’s. Where have you been all this time? It’s been three days!”

Polly heard Viv say, “We came up to the canteen to buy a sandwich, and there she was,” and looked over at the escalator. Viv was leaning over it, chattering to someone coming up. “We couldn’t believe our eyes!” and it was the rector she was talking to.

Polly started through the crowd toward them, but the little girls-Bess and Irene and, oh, thank goodness, Trot-were already pelting toward her. Irene ran full tilt into her, and Trot hugged her legs. “You aren’t killed!” she said happily.

“I knew she wasn’t,” Bess said.

The rector came up. “Praise God you’re safe.”

Irene was tugging on her arm. “Come along,” she said. “We must show you to Mother.”

“Trot, let go,” Bess said, taking hold of her other arm. “You’ll bowl her over.” And the three of them dragged her down the escalator, Trot clinging to her skirt, and out to the northbound District Line platform, shouting, “Mother, look what we’ve found!”

And there at the end of the platform were Mrs. Brightford and Miss Laburnum and Mr. Dorming-all of them rising from where they’d been sitting to gather around her, exclaiming and smiling and talking at once in a happy jumble: “Where have you been? … gave us such a fright… so worried… Sir Godfrey refused to leave… and when you didn’t come back to Mrs. Rickett’s…”

Trot was tugging on her mother’s skirt. “She isn’t killed, Mummy.”

“No, she isn’t,” Mrs. Brightford said, beaming. “And we’re very, very glad.”

“I told you you were all worried for nothing,” Mrs. Rickett said to the rector. “Didn’t I say she’d turn up?”

“But you… I don’t understand… the man at the church-” Polly stammered. “I saw the wreckage-” And yet here came Miss Hibbard, carrying her knitting, tears streaming down her face, and, trotting toward Polly on a leash, was Nelson. “But pets aren’t allowed in public shelters,” Polly said, thinking, This must be a dream.

“The London Underground Authority’s given him a special dispensation,” Mr. Simms said, and she couldn’t be dreaming. She could never have imagined something like that.

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you! We feared you’d been killed,” Mrs. Wyvern said, stepping forward to embrace her, and she couldn’t have imagined that either.

They were really here and not buried in the rubble of the church. “You’re not dead. You’re all here,” Polly said, looking around happily at Mrs. Rickett and the rector and Nelson and-

Where was Sir Godfrey? She looked wildly around at the people on the platform. “Sir Godfrey refused to leave,” they’d said, and the old man at St. George’s had shaken his head and murmured, “Such a pity. So many killed.”

“Where’s Sir Godfrey?” Polly demanded. She darted back along the platform, pushing her way past passengers, looking for him, stepping over shelterers, thinking, Oh, God, that rescue shaft was for him-

And saw him coming through the archway from the tunnel, his Times tucked under his arm.

Thank God, he’s all right, Polly thought, but he wasn’t. He looked beaten, battered-as if St. George’s had crashed down on him-and years older than that night they’d done The Tempest. His face was lined and ashen.

Trot shot past her through the milling passengers, shouting, “Sir Godfrey! Sir Godfrey!” He looked down at Trot and then up. And saw Polly. “She’s not dead!” Trot said happily.

“No,” he said, his voice cracking, and took a step toward Polly.

“Sir Godfrey,” she tried to say, but nothing came out.

“‘I saw her as I thought dead,’” he murmured, “‘and have in vain said many a prayer upon her grave.’” He reached forward to take her hands and then stopped and looked questioningly at her. “‘What rich gift is this?’”

“What?” Polly said blankly and looked down at her hands. She was still holding Viv’s sandwich and tea mug. “I’ve no idea… I must have…” she stammered, and held them helplessly out to him.

He shook his head. “‘I am too far already in your gifts-’”

“Oh, good, you’ve found him, Miss Sebastian,” the rector said, coming up with Miss Laburnum and the others. They crowded around them. Nelson pushed forward, tail wagging.

“Sir Godfrey, isn’t it wonderful?” Miss Hibbard said. “Finding Miss Sebastian safe and well?”

“Indeed,” he said, looking at her solemnly. “‘It is a most high miracle. Though the seas threaten, they are merciful. I have cursed them without cause.’ Welcome, thrice drowned Viola.”

“You should have seen Sir Godfrey!” Lila said. “He was simply beside himself.”

“They had dogs and everything,” Viv said.

“What I want to know is where you’ve been all this time,” Mrs. Rickett demanded sourly.

“Yes, do make her tell us where she’s been, Sir Godfrey,” Miss Laburnum urged.

“But shouldn’t we go back to our own corner first?” Mr. Simms suggested. “Someone’s liable to take our space.”

“We are rather in the way here,” the rector said and led the way back along the crowded platform through the jostling passengers, Bess and Trot holding Polly by the hand.

“It’s not so cozy here as the shelter in St. George’s, I’m afraid,” Miss Laburnum said.

“And it’s rather noisy,” Mrs. Brightford added, “though when the trains stop, it’s a bit better.”

“I like it,” Lila whispered to Polly as they followed the rector. “There’s a canteen and-”

“And lots of nice-looking men,” Viv finished.

They reached the end of the platform. “Now, sit down,” Miss Laburnum said, gesturing to Lila and Viv to make room for Polly, “and tell us all about your adventures.”

Sir Godfrey gently took the mug and sandwich-which she was still unaccountably holding-from her and handed them to Viv. Polly sat down. So did everyone else, moving their camp stools and blankets to form a circle around her. “What happened to you?” Lila asked. “Why didn’t you come back to Mrs. Rickett’s?”

“Tell us everything,” Trot said.

“Aye, Miranda,” Sir Godfrey said. “‘Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found thy father’s court?’”

“She didn’t,” Trot said. “We found her!”

“Hush, darling,” her mother said. “Let her speak.”

“‘Aye, speak, maid,’” Sir Godfrey ordered. “‘Give us particulars of thy preservation, how thou hast met us here who three days since were wrecked upon this shore.’”

She couldn’t tell them she’d spent a night in the drop. Instead, she said the sirens had gone when she was still at work, and she’d had to spend the night in Townsend Brothers’ basement shelter. “And the next morning there wasn’t time to go home before work, and that night it happened again. And when I came home Saturday morning, I saw the church, and they said people had been killed. I thought you were all dead. Who was killed?”

“Three firemen and an ARP warden,” the rector said. “And the entire bomb disposal squad.”

Miss Hibbard shook her head sadly. “Poor brave men.”

“The mine’s parachute had caught on a cornice of the building next to the vicarage,” Mr. Dorming explained. “They were trying to cut it down when it went off.”

“But I still don’t see how you-”

“We’d all been evacuated,” Mr. Simms explained.

“We’d no more than arrived at St. George’s when the ARP warden knocked on the door,” Miss Laburnum said, “and told us we had to leave immediately.”

“Sir Godfrey refused to go without you,” Lila said. “He said you wouldn’t know about the bomb and we must wait till you arrived, but the warden said they’d cordoned off the area.”

“They took us to a makeshift shelter in Argyll Road,” Miss Laburnum said, “and we were no sooner there than it went off. If we’d waited even a few minutes longer-” She shook her head.

“As soon as the raid let up, they sent us here,” Lila said, “and the tube authorities wouldn’t let Nelson in-”

“And Mr. Simms said he couldn’t just leave him outside in the middle of a raid,” Viv put in eagerly.

“Sir Godfrey told the guard he was an official member of our acting troupe,” Mr. Simms said, “so then they had to let him in.” He patted Nelson’s head affectionately.

“We were certain you’d be here,” Mrs. Brightford said.

And she had been, but then she’d gone to Holborn to observe the shelterers.

“Sir Godfrey went to Bayswater and Queensway stations to see if you might have been sent there,” Miss Hibbard said, “but you hadn’t.”

“And then,” Miss Laburnum said, “when you didn’t come back to the boardinghouse the next morning…”

The boardinghouse. She’d told herself the retrieval team hadn’t been able to find her because they’d been killed, that there’d been no one at Mrs. Rickett’s to tell them she lived there. But they weren’t dead. They would have been there to tell the retrieval team. So where were they?

“We feared the worst,” Miss Laburnum said.

So do I, Polly thought, and felt the panic begin to stir again.

“We were afraid there were areas which hadn’t been cordoned off and you hadn’t seen the Danger-Keep Out notices in the dark,” the rector said, “and had come along to the church.”

“And been killed,” Trot said.

“Sir Godfrey insisted the rescue squad search through the wreckage of the entire church,” Lila said.

That rescue shaft I saw wasn’t for them, Polly thought. It wasn’t for Sir Godfrey. They were looking for me.

“They told him it was no use,” Viv said, “that the entire weight of the sanctuary and the roof had collapsed directly onto the shelter, and no one could have survived under there, but Sir Godfrey refused to give up. He was determined to find you, no matter how long it took.”

Like Colin, Polly thought. The problem wasn’t only that the retrieval team hadn’t come, it was that Mr. Dunworthy and Colin hadn’t. They’d have moved heaven and earth to find her. “Mrs. Rickett, did anyone come to the boardinghouse looking for me?” she asked.

“Everyone was looking for you,” Mrs. Rickett said reprovingly. “Sir Godfrey spent all day yesterday and today searching the hospitals for you. You could at least have attempted to notify us that you were unharmed.”

“How could she have notified us?” Lila said. “She thought we were dead.”

Mrs. Rickett glared at her.

“What matters is that you’re alive and safe and we’re all here together,” the rector said in his peacemaking voice. “All’s well that ends well, isn’t that right, Sir Godfrey?”

“Indeed. ‘And if it end so meet, the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ Or to quote our fair Trot, ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’”

“Except for the fact that Hitler was trying to kill them,” Mr. Dorming said dourly.

And except for the fact that the retrieval team hasn’t been to the boarding-house. Where are they? What if something terrible’s happened? But she had thought something terrible had happened to the group, and here they all were, safe and sound.

You were foolish to panic, she told herself. There could be lots of reasons why the retrieval team hasn’t found you yet. Perhaps they’d gone to the boardinghouse before Mrs. Rickett and the others had got back home. Or perhaps the streets around it had been cordoned off, and only residents had been allowed through. Or Badri had had difficulty finding a drop site for the team. It had taken him six weeks to find her one.

But she kept coming back to the fact that this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through, and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning.

Unless they couldn’t get there, she thought, remembering how much difficulty she’d had getting to St. Paul’s that Sunday and to Oxford Street the day after John Lewis, and how the indomitable Miss Snelgrove hadn’t made it into work that same day. If Badri had had difficulty locating a new drop site and, as a result, the retrieval team had had to come through in the East End or Hampstead Heath, or somewhere outside London altogether, they might still be there, unable to get into the city because the trains and buses weren’t running. Or they might have made the mistake of entering a roped-off area or trying to cross a mound of rubble and had been arrested for looting.

Or, more likely, it had taken them two full days of dealing with daytime raids and diversions and damage on the Underground lines to reach Oxford Street, by which time she’d have gone home with Marjorie. And rather than face the trek back, they’d decided to simply wait till Monday. In which case they’d be at Townsend Brothers tomorrow morning.

But they weren’t, even though Polly stayed at her counter through her lunch and tea breaks to make certain she didn’t miss them.

Marjorie was overjoyed that Sir Godfrey and the others hadn’t been killed. “I told you things would work out all right in the end,” she said.

Not quite, Polly thought, hoping the retrieval team would be at the boardinghouse when she got home, but they weren’t there either. “Did anyone come and ask for me today?” she asked Mrs. Rickett.

“If they had, I would obviously have told you,” she said, offended. “Who were you expecting? I hope I needn’t remind you of the rules against having gentlemen in your room.”

The team wasn’t at Notting Hill Gate either, though Polly searched every tunnel and platform.

“Mrs. Wyvern and the rector and I have had the most ingenious idea,” Miss Laburnum said when Polly came back from searching. “We shall have our own theatrical troupe!”

“Here in the shelter,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “We’ll do public dramatic readings. It will be excellent for civilian morale-”

“And not only dramatic readings,” Miss Laburnum interrupted. “We shall put on a play! Sir Godfrey will star, and we shall all be in it.”

“I did amateur theatrics when I was up at Oxford,” the rector said. “I played the Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.”

“What a coincidence!” Mrs. Wyvern said. “I played Cecily in that play at school,” something Polly found impossible to picture.

“We can do Barrie’s The Little Minister,” Miss Laburnum enthused.

Sir Godfrey will love that, Polly thought. And even if they didn’t drive him away by doing Barrie, the theaters would reopen in another fortnight, and he’d be returning to the West End.

“Isn’t putting on a play a wonderful idea?” Miss Laburnum asked her.

“I… are you certain Sir Godfrey will be willing?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Wyvern said. “It’s his chance to aid the war effort.”

“The Little Minister’s such a lovely play,” Miss Laburnum said. “Or we could do Mary Rose. Do you know the play, Miss Sebastian? It’s about a young woman who vanishes and then reappears years later, not a day older, and then vanishes again.”

She must have been an historian, Polly thought.

But Mary Rose’s retrieval team had obviously come and fetched her. Unlike mine. Where are they?

They weren’t waiting for her outside the station the next morning. Or at Mrs. Rickett’s. Or outside Townsend Brothers. Which meant the problem had to be something besides diversions and transportation delays.

Slippage, she thought. There had been four and a half days’ slippage on her drop, which she’d assumed had been because of a divergence point. Could there have been another divergence point the day the drop had been damaged-or on subsequent days-which would have kept their drop from opening? The Battle of Britain was over and the attack on Coventry wasn’t till mid-November. The Luftwaffe had begun dropping the nasty bundles of HEs and incendiaries called Gцring breadbaskets around then, but the retrieval team’s presence couldn’t have affected that. Had Churchill or General Montgomery had a near-deadly encounter? Or the King?

Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard followed the Queen’s activities faithfully. When Polly got to Notting Hill Gate that night, she asked them if the royal family had been in the news lately.

“Oh, my, yes,” Miss Laburnum said, and told her Princess Elizabeth had been on the wireless with an encouraging message for the evacuated children, which wasn’t exactly what Polly was looking for.

“The Queen visited the East End yesterday,” Miss Hibbard said. “The bombed-out families, you know. There was a woman there who was trying to get her little dog out of the rubble. Poor thing, it was too frightened to come out. And do you know what the Queen did? She said, ‘I’ve always been rather good with dogs,’ and she got down on her hands and knees and coaxed it out. Wasn’t that lovely of her?”

Mrs. Wyvern said doubtfully, “It doesn’t seem quite dignified for a queen to-”

“Nonsense, she did just what a queen should have done,” Mr. Simms said. “Isn’t that right, Nelson?” He scratched the dog’s ears. “She was doing her bit for the war effort.”

But the rescue of a dog wasn’t likely to affect the war’s outcome one way or the other. And Buckingham Palace wouldn’t be bombed again till March.

Polly borrowed Sir Godfrey’s Times and read the headlines and then went to Holborn and looked through the library’s supply of the previous week’s Heralds and Evening Standards, looking for other events it might have been necessary to keep historians away from.

The National Gallery had been hit, but an historian couldn’t affect where bombs fell. An incendiary bomb had started a small fire in the House of Lords that a few minutes’ delay could have turned into a major blaze. An historian could have affected that, but the retrieval team would have had no reason to be there or at St. Thomas’s Hospital, which was hit the same night. A land mine had landed on Whitehall’s Hungerford Bridge. If it had gone off, it would have killed everyone in the War Office, including Churchill. That was a possibility, though that divergence point would only have lasted for the time it took to remove the bomb. Polly couldn’t find anything which would keep the net from opening for the five days since her drop had been damaged.

Though the event wouldn’t have to be the sort of thing that made the papers. In London now, a few minutes’ delay in getting to a shelter or in boarding a train could make a life-or-death difference. And it could be the sort of action that set a domino-like chain of events in motion that would take several days or weeks to play out. And in the meantime, there was nothing she could do but wait.

Or find some other historian who was here-and not in the Blitz-and use his drop. Who might be here now? Merope had said Gerald Phipps was doing something in World War II, but she hadn’t said what or when. Michael Davies was doing Dunkirk. He might be here. But Dunkirk had been over for nearly four months. He was probably in Pearl Harbor by now, or at the Battle of the Bulge, neither of which did her any good. He’d mentioned his roommate, but he’d been doing Singapore, also of no help. Polly frowned, trying to remember if he and Merope had mentioned anyone else who-

Merope. Might she still be in Backbury? When Polly’d seen her in Oxford, she’d said she still had months left on her assignment, but that might mean anything. She tried to remember if Merope had said anything else about how long her assignment was. Most of the children had been evacuated in September and October 1939. If Merope had been on a yearlong assignment, there was a chance she might still be there.

I need to write her immediately, Polly thought. But what was her name? Eileen Something. An Irish name. O’Reilly or O’Malley. Or Rafferty. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember the name of the manor either. Had Merope even mentioned it?

There would scarcely be more than one manor near Backbury. But what if there were? And even if there was only one, she couldn’t send a letter addressed only to “Eileen the Irish Maid at the Manor near Backbury.”

I’ll have to go up to Backbury and find her, she thought. She’d need to go up there to use her drop at any rate, and going would be quicker than writing and then waiting for a letter back.

But what if she’s not there? Polly thought. I’ll have given up my job-and the best chance the retrieval team has of locating me-for naught. And what if it is a divergence point that’s standing in their way, and they come the moment I’m gone? She’d better stay here.

But every day that went by increased the chance of Merope’s going back to Oxford and Polly’s missing her. And she needn’t quit her job to go find her-she could show Miss Snelgrove Props’s letter saying that her mother was gravely ill and that she needed to come at once. Miss Snelgrove could scarcely refuse to let her go in that sort of situation, and she’d been extremely understanding the day the shelter had been destroyed. And as far as the retrieval team went, Polly could tell Marjorie to tell anyone who came in asking for her that she worked there and when she’d be back.

And making the journey to Backbury would be better than sitting here fretting over what would happen if the retrieval team didn’t come by her deadline. But, given her recent run of luck, they’d arrive as soon as she left. Especially if the divergence point they were being kept from interfering with was the big attack on Fleet Street, which would happen Wednesday night.

I’ll give it till Thursday, she thought. Surely they’ll be here by then. But they weren’t.