She did, and then they recounted their adventures. Polly was horrified to find out that Mike had been living in Fleet Street and that Eileen had been living in Stepney. “Stepney?” she said. “It had one of the highest casualty rates of all of London. No wonder you’re frightened of the bombs.”
“We have to get you out of there immediately,” Mike said.
“She can move in with me,” Polly said. “My room’s a double.”
“Good. And ask your landlady if she has any vacant rooms. It’ll make it a lot easier for us to be found if we’re all at the same address.”
And safer, Polly thought. She didn’t say that. Eileen was looking better now that she’d had something to eat, but as she told them about her attempts to find Polly, it was clear she’d had a bad time these last few weeks, and when Mike said she needed to go fetch her things first thing in the morning, she looked absolutely stricken. “Alone?” she said. “But what if we get separated again?”
“We won’t,” Polly reassured her and wrote out Mrs. Rickett’s address for her and Mike. “I work on the third floor of Townsend Brothers. And if I’m not there—”
“I know,” Eileen said. “I’m to go to the foot of the escalator on the lowest level of Oxford Circus.”
Mike laid out what they were to do. Polly was to make a list for him and Eileen of when and where the raids were for the next week, and Eileen was to write the manor and everyone she’d known there and give them Mrs. Rickett’s address. “So if your retrieval team comes, they’ll know where you are,” Mike said. “And write the postmistress in Backbury. And the stationmaster.”
“I’ve met the stationmaster,” Polly said. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by writing him.”
“Well, the local clergyman then.”
“I wrote the vicar as soon as I arrived in London to tell him I’d delivered the children to their parents,” Eileen said.
The vicar knew Eileen was in London, Polly thought. And if that wretched train had been late like the stationmaster said it always was and she’d been able to stay till after the service, she’d have found Eileen a month ago, and Eileen would never have been in danger of being killed at Padgett’s.
“Write him again,” Mike was saying. “And contact the parents of the other evacuees you delivered.”
“Alf and Binnie?” Eileen said, sounding horrified.
“Yes, and whoever was in charge of the evacuation. We need every contact we can think of. And we need to find a drop—”
He stopped, listening. A door opened somewhere above them and then slammed, and someone rattled down the steps. Whoever it was must be running. The footsteps clanked down toward them at an enormous rate, and Polly could hear giggling.
Those children who were running from the guard, Polly thought. “I do hope the raids won’t last very long tonight,” she said loudly.
The footsteps halted abruptly and then clanked back up the steps. The door opened and slammed again. “They’re gone,” Mike said. “Now where were we?”
“You said we need to find a drop,” Eileen said.
“Right, preferably one that isn’t under the gun, so to speak,” he said cheerfully.
He was sounding and looking much better, too. She must have convinced him that he hadn’t altered events. I wish he’d managed to convince me that nothing’s happened to Oxford, she thought.
“We need to find one of the other historians who’s here besides us,” Mike went on.
“There was someone who was going to the Battle of the Bulge,” Eileen said.
“That was me,” Mike said. “And I’m glad this didn’t happen while I was there. The Ardennes in winter would have been a nasty place to be stuck.”
“Whereas this…” Polly said, spreading her hands to indicate the dim stairwell.
“At least no one’s shooting prisoners here,” he said, “and it’s not snowing.”
“It might as well be,” Eileen said, hugging her arms to herself. “I wish I had my coat. It’s simply freezing in here.”
Mike took off his suit jacket and draped it around her shoulders. “Thank you,” Eileen said. “But won’t you be cold—? Oh, I just thought of something,” she said, sounding dismayed. “How am I going to buy another coat? And pay Theodore’s mother the room and board I owe her? All the money I had was in my handbag. I was supposed to collect my pay packet tomorrow, but if Padgett’s—”
“Was the store totally destroyed?” Mike asked. “Maybe—”
Polly shook her head. “Direct hit. A thousand-pound HE.”