“Yes, but that was two years ago … Oh,” she said, seeing what he was getting at. It didn’t matter when historians had done it in their past. This was time travel.
Here in 1940, they would do it two weeks from now.
“But there’s no way we could get to Ned and Verity. We don’t know where they were except that they were in the middle of Coventry, in the heart of the fire. And it’s much too dangerous—”
“Not any more dangerous than Dunkirk,” Mike said. “And we know one place they were—in the cathedral.”
“As it was burning down,” Polly said. “You can’t be thinking of trying to go there. The area around the cathedral was nearly a firestorm.”
“It might also be our fastest way out. We wouldn’t necessarily have to find Ned and Verity. The drop was inside the cathedral, wasn’t it? All we have to do is find it.”
“Mike, we can’t go through their drop.”
“Why not? We know it was working.”
“But we can’t use it because it was two years ago. We can’t go through to a time we’re already in. Their drop opens on Oxford two years ago, and two years ago—”
“We were all in Oxford,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. But we can send a message through them.”
“A message?”
“Yes. We find Verity and Ned before they go back and have them tell the lab where we are and that our drops won’t open and to reset the drop so it opens in our time. There’s no reason we can’t do that, is there?”
“Yes, there is. Because we didn’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. If we’d found them and told them what had happened, Oxford would have known what was going to happen when it sent us through. We’d have known what was going to happen.”
He considered that. “Maybe they couldn’t tell us because it would create a paradox. If we knew we were going to be trapped, we wouldn’t come, and we had to come because we had come.”
“But Mr. Dunworthy wouldn’t have let us come. You know how over-protective he is. He’d never have let you come knowing they couldn’t get you out after you were injured.” And he wouldn’t have let me come knowing I had a deadline.
But she couldn’t say that. “This is a man who was worried I might get my foot caught in a barrage-balloon rope,” she said instead. “He’d never have let us get trapped in the Blitz. Or let you go to Coventry to get us out. The entire city burned. It would be suicide for you to go there. You’re here to observe heroes, not die trying to be one.”
“Then we need to come up with somebody besides Ned and Verity. Who else was here? Didn’t Dunworthy go to the Blitz at some point?”
“He went several times, but—”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I know he observed the big raids on May tenth and eleventh, because he talked about watching the fire in the House of Commons, and that happened on the tenth.”
“And you said before that the ninth and tenth were the worst raids of the Blitz?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Nothing. We need something sooner. When else was he here?”
“I don’t know. I remember him telling a story about attempting to get to his drop, and the gates at Charing Cross Railway Station being shut and him not being able to get in.”
“But you don’t know the date?”
“No.”
“But if he told you he was trying to get to his drop, that means it must have been somewhere in Charing Cross.”
“No, it doesn’t. He might have been taking the train to his drop. He could have been going anywhere.”
“But it’s a place to start, and we can’t afford to leave any stone unturned. I want you to go check it while I’m at Beachy Head. Unless one of these names I got at Biggin Hill turns out to be Phipps’s airfield. Speaking of which, what’s keeping Eileen?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “I need to read them to her. I managed to wangle a ride to Beachy Head, and the guy’s leaving at two, but I don’t want to waste my time there if Gerald’s at one of these other airfields.”
Eileen hurried in just as Mike was paying the bill, saying, “Sorry, I was applying at Mary Marsh, and they kept me waiting.”
Mike read her the list. She shook her head decisively at each of the names.
“Okay, then, it’s Beachy Head,” he said. He hurried off to catch his ride. “I’ll be back before the fourteenth.”
So you can go to Coventry, Polly thought.
She had to keep him from doing that. Which meant she had to find Gerald’s airfield.
Over the next few days, she spent her lunch breaks going to Victoria and St. Pancras Stations to copy down two-word names beginning with B and P from the departure boards and her evenings incurring Sir Godfrey’s wrath by trying to get additional airfield names from Lila and Viv, but they were almost no help at all.
“We nearly always go to the dances at Hendon,” Lila said.
“There’s one on Saturday,” Viv told her. “You and your cousin could come with us.”
She nearly accepted. They could ask the airmen they danced with where else they’d been stationed. But she was afraid if they weren’t there when Mike came back, he’d decide to go to Coventry, which would be not only dangerous but pointless.
Because if Mike had found Ned and Verity and given them the message, that would mean Mr. Dunworthy had known for years that all this was going to happen and not only allowed it to but arranged it. Arranged for Mike to go to Dunkirk, for Eileen to go to a manor where the evacuees had the measles, had manipulated and lied to all of them from the moment they entered Oxford.
It’s impossible, she told herself.
But even as she thought it, she was remembering. He made me bring extra money, he made me learn the raids through December thirty-first. He insisted I work in a department store that was never hit during the entire Blitz. And if they had managed to get a message through, then he’d have known they were pulled out in time and that they weren’t in any actual danger.
But if Mr. Dunworthy had lied, then why hadn’t he sent Mike to Dunkirk in the first place instead of scheduling him to do Pearl Harbor and letting him get his Land-A implant? And why had Linna and Badri been questioning everyone about increased slippage if they already knew about it?
Mike still wasn’t back by the twelfth, and they’d had no word from him. It hadn’t taken him this long when he went to Biggin Hill.
What if he went to Coventry without telling us? Polly thought, looking over at the lifts from her stocking counter, hoping one would open and Mike would emerge.
One of them finally did, but it wasn’t Mike. It was Eileen. “I came for two reasons,” she said. “I’m determined to have the name of Gerald’s airfield for Mike when he gets back from Beachy Head, so I came to tell you I’m going to go scour the secondhand bookshops for an old ABC or a book about the RAF or something with airfield names, and I wanted to make certain there weren’t any raids in Charing Cross Road today.”
“There aren’t any daytime raids anywhere in London today,” Polly reassured her.
“Oh, good. I’m sorry I’m such an infant about them—”
“It’s not being an infant to be frightened of someone who’s trying to kill you,” Polly said. “You said you had two reasons for coming?”
“Yes. I wanted to tell you I found out why Lady Caroline didn’t write. I got another letter from Mrs. Bascombe. Lady Caroline’s husband was killed.”
“Oh, dear. Had you met him?”
“No, Lord Denewell worked in London at the War Office, and the house he was staying in was bombed—”
“Lord Denewell? You worked for Lady Denewell?”