All Clear

But everything had conspired against them, from Theodore’s refusal to leave the pantomime to the blocked streets which had kept them from getting here before he left this morning. It was as if the entire space-time continuum had been engaged in an elaborate plot to keep them from reaching John Bartholomew. Just as it had kept her and Eileen from finding each other last autumn. “How all occasions do inform against us,” she thought.

“It isn’t your fault, it’s mine,” Eileen was saying. “If I’d listened to Mr. Bartholomew’s lecture, I’d have known he was still here, and we could have found him weeks ago. And now it’s too late—”

“ ’Ow come you can’t go to Wales an’ get ’im?” Alf asked.

“ ’Cause they don’t know where ’e is in Wales,” Binnie said. “And you ’eard ’im.” She pointed at Mike. “ ‘E ain’t really goin’ there. ’E only said ’e was,” and Polly was glad she’d stopped Mike from saying any more than he already had. They’d obviously been listening to every word the three of them had said. And she was almost certain they were the two delinquents she’d seen stealing the picnic basket that night in Holborn, though she hadn’t said anything to Eileen.

“Well, if ’e ain’t in Wales, then where’s ’e gone?” Alf was asking Eileen.

“We don’t know,” Polly said. “He didn’t tell us.”

“I bet I could find ’im.”

“How?” Binnie said. “You don’t even know what ’e looks like, you dunderpate.”

“I ain’t a dunderpate. Take it back,” Alf said, and dove at Binnie. She darted away down the steps and across the forecourt, Alf in hot pursuit.

Eileen was still blaming herself. “I should simply have told the incident officer I couldn’t take the ambulance to St. Bart’s.”

And I shouldn’t have rushed off to St. Bart’s without finding out the injured firewatcher’s name and who’d gone with him to hospital, Polly thought. If she hadn’t, she’d have found out what Mr. Humphreys had told her a few minutes ago, that he’d helped Bartholomew put the injured man in the ambulance and then gone back up to the roofs. She could’ve told Mr. Humphreys to tell Mr. Bartholomew not to leave till they got there.

“It’s no one’s fault,” she said.

They couldn’t have found him no matter what they did because it had all happened already, and when he got back to Oxford, he hadn’t been bearing a message from them. It had been a hopeless enterprise from the beginning. It had all been hopeless—the attempts to contact Mike’s retrieval team and the search for Gerald.

The door behind them opened, and Mr. Humphreys came out bearing a tray with a teapot and cups on it. “Your friend Mr. Davis said you were still out here,” he said to Polly, handing her and the others cups and saucers. “And I thought you might like some tea. It’s such a cold morning.”

He poured out their tea, then went down the steps and over to the man who’d asked Mike what he should do and then over to Alf and Binnie, who were playing in the still-smoldering wreckage.

He gave them biscuits and then came back. “I’m so sorry you missed your friend, Miss Sebastian,” he said. “I’ll ask Dean Matthews if he had an address where Mr.

Bartholomew might be reached. Do you need assistance in getting home?”

Yes, she thought, but you can’t help us.

She shook her head.

“If you need bus fare or—”

“No,” Polly said. “We have transport.”

“Good. Drink your tea,” he ordered. “It will make you feel better.”

Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month’s sugar ration into it.

She drained the cup, feeling suddenly ashamed of herself. She wasn’t the only one who’d had a bad night. Or the only one facing a frightening future. And the outlook wasn’t totally bleak. The fact that they hadn’t found Mr. Bartholomew meant that Mr. Dunworthy hadn’t betrayed them, that Colin hadn’t lied to her.

And her actions, and Mike’s and Eileen’s, didn’t seem to have affected events. Last night had gone just as it was supposed to. St. Paul’s was still standing, and the rest of the City wasn’t. History was still on track.

For the past two months Polly’d been terrified of finding proof they’d altered the course of the war, but now she almost wished historians were able to alter events, to alter this—the Guildhall and the Chapter House and all those beautiful Christopher Wren churches destroyed. And all the horrors that were still to come—Dresden and Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And Jerusalem and the Pandemic and the pinpoint bomb which would obliterate St. Paul’s. To repair the whole bloody mess.

But what could do that? The three of them had attempted all last night to find a single man and deliver a single message, to no avail. What made her think they could repair history, even if they knew how to go about it? And there was no way to know. The continuum was far too complex, too chaotic, to ensure that an attempt to avert a disaster wouldn’t lead to a worse one. And, as horrific as World War II had been, at least the Allies had won. They’d stopped Hitler, which had been an unarguably good thing.