survived under there, but Sir Godfrey refused to give up. He was determined to find you, no matter how long it took.”
Like Colin, Polly thought. The problem wasn’t only that the retrieval team hadn’t come, it was that Mr. Dunworthy and Colin hadn’t. They’d have moved heaven and earth to find her. “Mrs. Rickett, did anyone come to the boardinghouse looking for me?” she asked.
“Everyone was looking for you,” Mrs. Rickett said reprovingly. “Sir Godfrey spent all day yesterday and today searching the hospitals for you. You could at least have attempted to notify us that you were unharmed.”
“How could she have notified us?” Lila said. “She thought we were dead.”
Mrs. Rickett glared at her.
“What matters is that you’re alive and safe and we’re all here together,” the rector said in his peacemaking voice. “All’s well that ends well, isn’t that right, Sir Godfrey?”
“Indeed. ‘And if it end so meet, the bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.’ Or to quote our fair Trot, ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’”
“Except for the fact that Hitler was trying to kill them,” Mr. Dorming said dourly.
And except for the fact that the retrieval team hasn’t been to the boardinghouse. Where are they? What if something terrible’s happened? But she had thought something terrible had happened to the group, and here they all were, safe and sound.
You were foolish to panic, she told herself. There could be lots of reasons why the retrieval team hasn’t found you yet. Perhaps they’d gone to the boardinghouse before Mrs. Rickett and the others had got back home. Or perhaps the streets around it had been cordoned off, and only residents had been allowed through. Or Badri had had difficulty finding a drop site for the team. It had taken him six weeks to find her one.
But she kept coming back to the fact that this was time travel. No matter how long it took Oxford to locate another drop or check every department store and Underground station, they could still have returned to Oxford, sent a second team through, and had them waiting for her outside Townsend Brothers that first morning.
Unless they couldn’t get there, she thought, remembering how much difficulty she’d had getting to St. Paul’s that Sunday and to Oxford Street the day after John Lewis, and how the indomitable Miss Snelgrove hadn’t made it into work that same day. If Badri had had difficulty locating a new drop site and, as a result, the retrieval team had had to come through in the East End or Hampstead Heath, or somewhere outside London altogether, they might still be there, unable to get into the city because the trains and buses weren’t running. Or they might have made the mistake of entering a roped-off area or trying to cross a mound of rubble and had been arrested for looting.
Or, more likely, it had taken them two full days of dealing with daytime raids and diversions and damage on the Underground lines to reach Oxford Street, by which time she’d have gone home with Marjorie. And rather than face the trek back, they’d decided to simply wait till Monday. In which case they’d be at Townsend Brothers tomorrow morning.
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