church toward the vestry door, clutching a sheaf of paper, his robe flying out behind him.
“Vicar!” she called, running after him. “Vicar!” Or was he the vicar? Now that she grew closer, he looked awfully young. Perhaps he was the choir director, and those papers were the morning’s anthems. “Sir! Wait!”
She caught up to him just as he was going in. “What is it, miss?” he said, his hand on the half-open vestry door. His eyes swept over her damp hair, her muddy shoes. “What’s happened? Has there been an accident?”
“No,” she said, out of breath from running. “I’ve just been out to the manor. I came in on the bus this morning—”
“Vicar!” A small boy poked his head out of the half-opened door. “Miss Fuller said to tell you they’ve finished the prelude.” He tugged at the vicar’s sleeve.
“Coming, Peter,” he said, and to Polly, “Has something happened at the riflery school?”
“No. I only wanted to ask you a question. I—”
“It’s time for the invocation,” Peter hissed.
“I must go,” the vicar said regretfully, “but I’ll be glad to speak with you as soon as the service is over. Would you care to join us?”
“Vicar, it’s time!” Peter said, and dragged him into the church.
And that’s that, Polly thought and walked out to the station to wait for the train. Unless the stationmaster knows where the evacuees have gone.
But he’d apparently spent the last three hours drinking. “Whaddya want?” he demanded, and it was obvious he didn’t recognize her from this morning.
“I’m waiting for the 11:19 to London.”
“Won’t be here f’r ’ours,” he said, slurring his words. “Bloody troop trains. Always late.”
Good. She could go back to the church, wait for the end of the service, and ask the vicar after all. And if the 11:19 was as late as every other train she’d been on, she could also ask everyone else in the village. She hurried back to the church through the rain and slipped into the back of the sanctuary.
Only the first few rows of pews had people in them—several white-haired ladies in black hats, a handful of balding men, and young mothers with children. They were just finishing singing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Polly tiptoed in and sat down in the last pew.
The vicar looked up from his hymnal and smiled welcomingly at her, and one of the white-haired ladies, who looked like a cross between Miss Hibbard and Mrs. Wyvern, turned around and glared. Miss Fuller, no doubt.
She’s the person I should speak with, Polly thought. The captain had suggested the vicar, but she doubted if he were on intimate terms with the hired help at the manor. But this was a tiny village. Miss Fuller and the other elderly women would know all the comings and goings of everyone. If Polly could get past that disapproving glare.
But even if she couldn’t, the boy Peter was likely to know about the evacuees, or could at least point out the schoolmistress to her. She’d be certain to know. And in the meantime, if it wasn’t exactly warm in the sanctuary, it was at least dry, and hopefully the vicar’s sermon wouldn’t be too long, though she doubted it from the thickness of his sheaf of papers, which he was now arranging on the top of the pulpit.
He finished arranging them and gazed out over the congregation. “The Scriptures say that our true home is not in this world, but the next, and that we are only passing through…”
Truer words, Polly thought.
“Thus it is with this war,” he said. “We find ourselves stranded in an alien land of bombs and battles and blackouts, of Anderson shelters and gas masks and rationing. And that other world we once knew—of peace and lights and church bells chiming out over the land, of loved ones reunited and no tears, no partings—seems not only impossibly distant, but unreal, and we cannot quite imagine ourselves ever getting back there. We mark time here, waiting…”
For church to be over, for the train to arrive, for the retrieval team to come, Polly thought. The vicar’s sermon was cutting a little too close to the bone. Why couldn’t he have preached on begats or something?
“… hoping that this ordeal will pass, but secretly fearing that we shall never see that land of milk and honey—and sugar and butter and bacon—again. That we will be trapped in this dreadful place forever—”
A whistle cut sharply across his words. Peter got onto his knees to look