Jesus, that meant there’d been locational slippage, and he’d have to take the bus, which meant he had to find out immediately when it went and where it stopped. “Hello?” he called loudly up the stairs and into the pub room. “Anyone here?”
No response, and no sound of any movement overhead. He listened for another minute, then went into the semi-dark pub room to look for a bus schedule or the local newspaper. There wasn’t one on the bar and the only thing on the wall behind the bar was another movie schedule, this one for Lost Horizon, which had come out in 1936 and was playing from June fifteenth through the thirtieth. Christ, has there been temporal slippage, too? he thought, going around behind the bar to see if there was a newspaper there. He had to find out the date.
There was a newspaper in the wastebasket, or a part of one. Half the sheet-the half with the name of the paper and the date, naturally-had been torn off, and the remaining half had been used to mop up something. He unwadded it carefully on the bar, trying not to tear the damp paper, but it was too dark in here to read the wet, gray pages.
He picked it up by the edges and carried it back out to the hall to read. “Devastating Power of the German Blitzkrieg,” the headline said. Good. At least he wasn’t in 1936. The main story’s headline was missing, but there was a map of France with assorted arrows showing the German advance, which meant it wasn’t the end of June either. By then, the fighting had been over for three weeks and Paris was already occupied.
“Germans Push Across Meuse.” They’d done that on May seventeenth. “Emergency War Powers Act Passed.” That had happened on the twenty-second, and this had to be yesterday’s newspaper, which would make this the twenty-third, which would mean the slippage had sent him through a day early, but that was great. It gave him an extra day to get to Dover, and he might need it. He read farther down. “National Service of Intercession to Be Held at Westminster Abbey.”
Oh, no. That prayer service had been held on Sunday, May twenty-sixth, and if this was yesterday’s paper, then it was Monday the twenty-seventh. “Damn it,” he muttered. “I’ve already missed the first day of the evacuation!”
“The pub doesn’t open till noon,” a female voice said from above him.
He whirled, and his sudden jerk tore the wet newspaper in half. A pretty young woman with her hair in a pompadour and a very red mouth stood halfway down the stairs, looking curiously at the torn newsprint in his hands. And how the hell was he going to explain what he was doing with it? Or what he’d said about the evacuation. How much had she heard?
“Was it a room you were wanting?” she asked, coming down the rest of the stairs.
“No, I was just looking for the bus schedule,” he said. “Can you tell me when the bus to Dover is due?”
“You’re a Yank,” she said delightedly. “Are you a flyer?” She looked past him out the door, as if expecting to see an aeroplane in the middle of the street. “Did you have to bail out?”
“No,” he said. “I’m a reporter.”
“A reporter?” she said, just as eagerly, and he realized she was much younger than he’d thought-seventeen or eighteen at the most. The pompadour and the lipstick had fooled him into thinking she was older.
“Yes, for the Omaha Observer,” he said. “I’m a war correspondent. I need to get to Dover. Can you tell me what time the bus comes?” and when she hesitated, “There is a bus to Dover from here, isn’t there?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid you’ve only just missed it. It came yesterday, and it won’t come again till Friday.”
“It only comes on Sundays and Fridays?”
“No. I told you, it came yesterday. On Tuesday.”
An’ if thou seest my boy, bid him make haste and meet me.
Oxford-April 2060
POLLY HURRIED OUT BALLIOL’S GATE, UP THE BROAD, AND down Catte Street, hoping Mr. Dunworthy hadn’t glanced out his windows and seen her standing in the quad talking to Michael and Merope. I should have told them not to say anything about my being back, she thought, but she’d have had to explain why, and she’d been afraid he might emerge from his office at any moment.
Thank goodness she hadn’t gone blithely in and made her report. He already thought her project was too dangerous. He’d been protective of his historians since she was a first-year student, but he’d been absolutely hysterical about this project. He’d insisted on her drop site for the Blitz being within walking distance of Oxford Street, even though it would have been much easier to find a site in Wormwood Scrubs or on Hampstead Heath and take the tube in. It also had to be within a half-mile of both a tube station and whatever room she let. “I want you to be able to reach your drop site quickly if you’re injured,” he’d said.
“They did have hospitals in the 1940s, you know,” she’d said. “And if I’m injured, how exactly will I walk half a mile?”
“Don’t make jokes,” he’d snapped. “It’s possible to die on assignment, and the Blitz is an exceptionally dangerous place,” and launched into a twenty-minute lecture on the perils of blast from high-explosive bombs, shrapnel, and sparks from incendiaries. “A woman in Canning Town got her foot entangled in the cord of a barrage balloon and was dragged into the Thames.”
“I am not going to be dragged into the Thames by a barrage balloon.”
“You could be struck by a bus which couldn’t see you in the blackout, or murdered by a mugger.”
“I scarcely think-”
“Criminals thrived in the Blitz. The blackout provided them with cover of darkness, and the police were too busy digging bodies out of the rubble to investigate. The death of a victim found dead in an alley was simply put down to blast. I don’t want to read your name in the death notices in the Times. A half-mile radius. That’s final.”
And that hadn’t been the only restriction. She was forbidden to let a room in any house hit by a bomb before the end of the year, even though she’d only be there through October, and the drop site had to be one that hadn’t been hit at all, which eliminated three sites that would have worked nicely, but that had been destroyed in the last big raid of the Blitz in May 1941.
It was no wonder the lab still hadn’t found a site. I hope they locate one before Mr. Dunworthy finds out I’m back, she thought. Or someone tells him. She doubted if Mr. Purdy would-he didn’t even seem to realize she’d been gone-and hopefully Michael Davies would be too busy attempting to get his date changed and Merope’d be in too much of a hurry to get her driving permission for them to mention that they’d seen her.
She felt bad about ducking out on her promise to speak to Mr. Dunworthy about Merope going to VE-Day, but it couldn’t be helped. And it wasn’t as if time was an issue. Merope’d said she still had several months left to go on her evacuee assignment. And I’ll only be gone six weeks, Polly thought. I’ll go see him as soon as I’m safely back and persuade him to let her do it.
If it was even necessary. He might already have changed his mind by then. In the meantime, Polly needed to keep out of Mr. Dunworthy’s way, hope the lab came up with a drop site soon, and be ready to go through the moment they did. To that end, she went to Props to get a wristwatch-this one radium-dialed, since the one she’d had last time hadn’t been and had been nearly useless-a ration book and identity card made out in the name of Polly Sebastian, and letters of recommendation to use in applying for work as a shopgirl.
“What about a departure letter?” the tech asked her. “Do you need anything special?”