Blackout (All Clear, #1)-Connie Willis Page 0,118

entire week of calm out of it. Then she caught him hanging out the sitting room window looking through Lady Caroline’s opera glasses, which he promptly hid behind his back, dropping them in the process. “I was only trying to see if it was a Stuka,” he said as she picked them up. There was an ominous tinkle of glass. “It was your fault. If you hadn’t scared me, I wouldn’t have dropped them.”

Six more days, Eileen thought, hoping the manor wouldn’t be reduced to a pile of rubble by then. But finally Dr. Stuart proclaimed everyone clear, and had Samuels unboard the doors and take down the notices.

Five minutes later, Eileen was on her way to the drop. She didn’t even set out the letter from her ailing mother in Northumbria. Mrs. Bascombe would assume she simply hadn’t been able to take any more, which was close to being true.

It was raining hard, but she didn’t care. I can dry off in Oxford, she thought. Somewhere where there are no children. She walked swiftly to the road and cut into the woods. The trees were in full leaf and daisies and violets bloomed at their feet.

I hope I can find the drop, she thought, momentarily bewildered by the lush greenery, but there was the clearing and the ash tree. It was overgrown, and ivy and woodbine trailed everywhere. Eileen brushed the raindrops off the face of her watch, checked the time, and sat down to wait.

An hour went by and then another. By noon it was clear it wasn’t going to open, but she sat there in the wet till nearly two, thinking, Perhaps they didn’t realize the quarantine was lifted this morning.

At a quarter after two the rain became a torrent, and she was forced to give up. She slogged back to the road and the manor. Binnie was standing in the kitchen door waiting for her. “You’re all wet,” she said helpfully.

“Really?” Eileen said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You look just like a drowned rat Alf caught once,” she said, and then accusingly, “This ain’t your ’alf-day out.”

My half-day out, Eileen thought. That’s why it didn’t open. They’re assuming I won’t come through till Monday.

But the drop didn’t open on Monday either, even though Eileen had waited till the children were all inside having their tea so they couldn’t follow her, and taken a roundabout route just to be certain.

The lab must not know the quarantine’s over, Eileen thought, though the date it had ended would be in the Ministry of Health archives. But the lab might have sent through a retrieval team and they’d seen a notice that hadn’t been taken down yet and concluded the manor was still under quarantine—though when she checked, all the notices had been removed.

And if the team had come to the manor, they’d have seen unmistakable signs that it had been lifted: children playing outside, cots being fumigated on the lawn, the grocer’s boy going in and out of the kitchen. The retrieval team could easily have waylaid him on his way home and asked him about it.

And the evacuees’ parents had all known the moment the quarantine had been lifted. Some of them had sent for their children the very next day, even though the Battle of Britain was in full cry, airfields and oil depots were being bombed, and the wireless was warning of invasion.

So were Alf and Binnie. “’Itler’s sendin’ over parachutists to get ready for it,” Alf eagerly told the vicar, who’d come to take Eileen and Lily Lovell to the station. “They’re ’ere to cut telephone wires and blow up bridges and things. I wager they’re ’idin’ in the woods this very minute,” and even the vicar confided he feared the attack might come very soon.

But none of the invasion talk had any effect on the evacuees’ parents. They were determined to have their children “safely at home”—which presumably was a reference to their having sent them away only to have them catch the measles—and they couldn’t be persuaded to leave them where they were. Eileen worried over what would happen to them in London.

When she wasn’t worrying about where the retrieval team was. Since this was only her first assignment, she didn’t know how long they waited before coming to get someone. Ten days? A fortnight? But this was time travel. Once they realized she was late, they’d have come through immediately.

There must be something wrong. It must be something else, a breakdown or something. Alf

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