Colin shook his head. “Even we couldn’t save him. He was too badly injured. But the tourniquets you tied kept him alive long enough to tell us that you’d still been alive when he left in January of 1941 and that Eileen was with you.”
So Colin had gone to find Eileen after the war, and she’d told him where they were. Mike had got them out, just as he’d promised he would. But at what a cost!
“I should have known it was him,” she said.
Colin shook his head. “He was doing his best to keep you from finding out. His one thought was rescuing you. And if you hadn’t gone, I couldn’t have got him out of there and back to Oxford.”
You were the person in the ambulance from Brixton, Polly thought, looking at Colin. There was nothing of the impetuous, impossible boy she’d known in the man standing in front of her now, and nothing of the careless, charming Stephen Lang.
Colin sacrificed himself, too, she thought despairingly. How much of his youth, how many years, had he given up to come and find her, to fetch her home? I am so sorry. So sorry.
“Michael insisted on telling me everything he knew about where you were before he’d let me take him through to Oxford,” Colin said. “He was afraid once he got to hospital, he wouldn’t have the chance. He would have been so glad to know he got you out.” He smiled at her. “And if I’m going to do that, we’d better go.”
She nodded wearily. Colin helped Mr. Dunworthy get slowly to his feet, and they set off again, following the rose-colored river, guided by the drone of planes and the crump of bombs and the deadly, starry sparkle of incendiaries, till they came at last to Ludgate Hill. And there above them at the end of the street stood St. Paul’s, silver against the dark sky, the ruins all around it hidden by the darkness or transformed to enchanted gardens.
“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.
No, that was wrong. He’d died that night in Croydon, before she ever came to the Blitz.
Up the aisle, past the blown-out windows to the bay where she’d found Mr. Dunworthy. She looked toward the niche where The Light of the World hung, as if she expected the golden-orange lantern to be glowing in the darkness, but it was too dark to see it, or the painting.
No, there it was. She could just make out the white robe, insubstantial as a ghost, and the pale gold of the flame within the lantern. And then, as if the flame was growing brighter, lighting the air around it, she began to be able to see the door and Christ’s crown of thorns, and finally his face.
He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door—to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?—would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn’t possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too—in a place he didn’t belong, serving in a war in which he hadn’t enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?