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.