unable to get to her during the quarantine—and surely they could have managed that—they’d had more than a month after that to pull her out, and there wasn’t the excuse of their not knowing where Merope was, as there was with her and Michael. Oxford had known exactly where to find her.
But it wasn’t just that. Mr. Dunworthy would never have left Merope to cope with an epidemic, and he definitely wouldn’t have left Michael here with an injured foot.
And this was time travel. Even if it had taken them months to locate Michael in hospital, Oxford could have sent a second team to be there when he landed in Dover and take him to the new drop site and back to Oxford.
“But my drop can’t have been damaged by blast,” Merope said. “The manor wasn’t bombed. So what can have happened?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said.
I do, Polly thought sickly. She’d known it from that morning at St. George’s when she’d realized the retrieval team should have been outside Townsend Brothers the day before. That was why her knees had buckled—because she knew what their not being there meant. But she’d kept inventing excuses to keep from facing the truth. Which was that something terrible had happened in Oxford, and the retrieval team wasn’t coming.
Nobody’s coming, she thought.
“But if we can’t use any of our drops,” Merope was saying, “what do we do now?”
Alone
—LONDON TIMES HEADLINE, JUNE 22, 1940
London—25 October 1940
“HOW WILL WE GET HOME IF BOTH POLLY’S AND MY DROPS are broken?” Merope asked, trying to shout over the noise on the platform and at the same time keep the shelterers on the adjacent blankets from hearing.
“We don’t know for sure that they are broken,” Mike said. “You said there were soldiers at the manor. They might have been close enough to your drop to prevent it from opening.”
Merope shook her head. “They didn’t come till a month after the quarantine ended.”
“How far into the woods was your drop?” Michael asked. “Could it be seen from the road? Or could one of your evacuees have followed you? What about yours, Polly? Are you sure yours was damaged, or could an air-raid warden have been somewhere where he could see the shimmer? Or a firespotter?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Polly wanted to scream at him. “Don’t you understand what’s happened?”
I’ve got to get out of here, she thought, and stood up. “I have to go.”
“Go?” Michael and Merope said blankly.
“Yes. I’d promised I’d meet some of the contemps. I must go tell them I can’t come.”
“We’ll come with you,” Michael said.
“No. It’ll be faster if I go alone,” she said and fled into the crowd.
“Polly, wait!” she heard him call, and then say, “No, you stay here, Merope. I’ll go get her,” but she didn’t look back. She plowed through the crowd, around outstretched feet, over blankets and hampers, through the archway and down the tunnel, desperate to get away, to find somewhere where she could be alone, where she could absorb what Michael and Merope had just told her. But there was nowhere here that wasn’t jammed with people. The central hall was even worse than the tunnel had been.
“Polly, wait!” Michael called. She glanced back as she ran. He was gaining on her in spite of his limp, and the hall was packed so tightly she couldn’t push through. Where—?
“You there, stop!” someone shouted, and two children shot past her, darting between people with a station guard in hot pursuit. The crowd parted in their wake, and Polly took advantage of the momentary opening to run after them as they raced toward the escalators. The crowd closed in behind her.
The urchins, who looked suspiciously like the boy and girl who’d stolen that picnic basket in Holborn, racketed down the escalator to the next level and into the southbound tunnel with the guard and Polly a few steps behind.
They rounded a corner. “Stop, you two!” the guard shouted, and two men who’d been standing among a group against the wall joined the chase. Polly stepped quickly into the space the men had left, flattening herself against the wall, breathing hard.
She leaned out past the remaining men to look back the way she’d come, but Michael didn’t appear in the stairway. I’ve lost him, she thought. She was safe for the moment.
Safe, she thought dully. We’re in the Blitz, and we can’t get out. And nobody’s coming to get us. She put her hand to her stomach as if to hold the