All Clear

Though he wasn’t any longer. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying, pumping Ernest’s hand vigorously. “I’m so glad you’re here. I never thanked you for saving our lives. Without you, we’d be at the bottom of Dunkirk harbor. And you nearly got killed yourself, trying to—” He stopped short and looked down at the water Ernest was standing in. “I mean, your foot and everything. I thought they were going to have to cut it off.”

So did I, he thought.

“We’d never have made it without you,” Jonathan said. “I should have recognized you, but you look so different!”

“I look different? Look at you! You’re all grown up!”

“Having German torpedo boats on your tail ages you rather quickly. But what are you doing here?”

“That’s the same question I’ve been asking your grandfather. I’d heard you didn’t make it back to Dover after your second trip to Dunkirk.”

“We didn’t,” the Commander said. “We were commandeered.”

“They needed us to go to Ostende to take off an intelligence officer they couldn’t afford to let the Germans get hold of,” Jonathan explained. “So they offloaded our passengers onto the Grayhoe, and we went to Belgium instead.”

“And when we got him back to Ramsgate, they asked us if we’d do a few other jobs for Intelligence, like—”

“Grandfather,” Jonathan said warningly. “That’s classified. I’m not certain we’re allowed to—”

“Bah! We can tell him. Can’t we, Kansas?”

“Not Kansas,” he said. “These days it’s Ernest Worthing.”

“What’d I tell you, Jonathan? And I’ll wager he’s got even more secrets than we do, haven’t you, Kansas?”

“Yes,” he said. Most of which I can’t tell even you.

“All right, we told you what we’ve been up to since Dunkirk,” the Commander said. “Now you tell us what you’ve been doing these last four years.”

I’ve been trying to get two of my fellow historians out of this century and back home, he thought. I’ve been writing letters to the editor and personal ads and funeral notices with coded messages in them to people who haven’t been born yet. And I’ve been trying to find Denys Atherton, who is somewhere in the staging area for the invasion, so he can tell Oxford where Polly and Eileen are and pull them out before Polly’s deadline, which passed four months ago.

“I’ve been delivering parcels,” he said, and when the Commander frowned, he smiled and said, “I’m Seaman Higgins. Captain Pickering said as how you were hiring on a crew.”

“I knew it,” the Commander said jubilantly. “I told Jonathan that Tensing’d put you to work.”

“You’re not supposed to call Colonel Tensing that,” Jonathan said. “You’re supposed to call him Algernon.”

“That’s only when there might be German spies about.” The Commander turned to Ernest. “All these made-up names—Captain Doolittle, First Mate Alfred—a lot

“That’s only when there might be German spies about.” The Commander turned to Ernest. “All these made-up names—Captain Doolittle, First Mate Alfred—a lot of nonsense. Wanted me to be Capitaine Myriel,” he said, pronouncing it “Cap-ee-tayne Meeryell.” “And what the hell good will that do? If the jerries catch us, they’ll know in two minutes we’re not Frenchies. Instead of worrying over names, I told ’em, you should be seeing to it we don’t get caught.” He turned to Jonathan. “And Kansas here knows his name’s Tensing. He was in hospital with him. Weren’t you, Kansas?”

“Yes,” he said, trying to make sense of all this. He’d assumed they’d met Tensing in connection with the assignments they’d done for British Intelligence and that they’d mentioned him to Tensing, but if they’d known him while he was in hospital …

“How did you meet him?” he asked.

“He was the officer we had to fetch at Ostende,” the Commander said.

“He was badly injured,” Jonathan said. “He’d been shot in the spine.”

“And you told him about me when you were bringing him back?”

“He wasn’t in any shape to be told anything,” the Commander said. “Unconscious the whole way.”

“We didn’t think he was going to make it,” Jonathan said.

“And then eight months later up he pops, nearly as good as new and looking for you. Said he’d been in hospital with you and somebody’d told him we’d brought you back from Dunkirk. Said he’d seen you in some town near Oxford and then lost you again and did we know where you were and what could we tell him about you. Mainly, could you be trusted?”

“And what did you tell him?”

“We told him we didn’t know where you were,” Jonathan said, “but that he should ask in Saltram-on-Sea.”

He knew the rest of it, how Tensing and Ferguson had gone there and given Daphne the address he’d thought was the retrieval team’s. He’d wondered how they’d traced him to Daphne, but he’d always assumed one of the nurses at the hospital had mentioned she’d come to see him.

“It looks like he found you,” Jonathan said.