a shelter when the Blitz began, though it didn’t look as makeshift as she’d expected, considering the Blitz had begun only three days ago. Its contents, except for the high-backed bench, had been pushed to the far end, and the ceiling had been braced with heavy lengths of lumber. A stirrup pump, a bucket of water, and an axe stood on one side of the door. On the other was a table holding a gas ring and a kettle, cups and saucers, and spoons.
The shelterers’ arrangements didn’t look makeshift either. The knitter had brought her yarn, a shawl, and her reading glasses with her; the table was covered with an embroidered tea cloth; and the three little girls—whom Polly estimated as being three, four, and five—had not only their board game, but several dolls, a teddy bear, and a large book of fairy tales, which they were clamoring to have their mother read to them. “Read us ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” the eldest one said.
“No,” the littlest one piped up. “The one with the clock.”
The clock? Polly wondered. Which one is that?
And apparently her sisters didn’t know either. “What’s the clock story?” the eldest one asked.
“‘Cinderella,’” the littlest one said as if it were self-evident.
The middle girl took her thumb out of her mouth. “That’s the one with the shoe,” she said, and pointed at Polly.
And Polly supposed she had looked a bit like Cinderella, standing there in one shoe. And, just like Cinderella, she’d failed to ascertain her space-time location, with nearly as disastrous results. Except that no one had been dropping bombs on Cinderella.
And Badri had said there might be two hours of slippage, not twelve. The morning of the tenth must have been a divergence point for there to have been so much slippage. Or perhaps, in spite of its deserted appearance, someone had been in the alley or in a position where they could see the shimmer and kept it from opening. Whichever it was, she’d lost a full day of her already too short assignment.
She looked around at the others. The middle-aged woman sitting next to the knitter was the image of an early twentieth-century spinster, with her laced brown shoes and her graying hair pulled back into a bun and held in place with tortoiseshell combs. They could all have been taken from one of Merope’s murder mysteries—the frail, white-haired old woman, the clergyman, the sour-faced, sharp-tongued woman, the gruff stout man who looked as if he might have been in the military. Colonel Mustard in the air-raid shelter with the service revolver. Perhaps that was why they’d struck her as sinister when she first saw them.
Or perhaps it was their calm self-possession. These were the fabled Londoners, of course, who’d faced the Blitz with legendary courage and humor, who hadn’t even been fazed by the V-1 and V-2 attacks. But they’d had four and a half years of being accustomed to bombing before the rocket attacks. This was only the fourth night of the Blitz, and all the research she’d done had said they’d been terrified all that first week, especially till the anti-aircraft guns had started up on the eleventh, and that they’d only gradually learned to master their fear of the bombs.
But no one was saying, “Where are our guns?” or “Why aren’t we hitting back?” and looking nervously up at the ceiling. They weren’t paying any attention to the thud and crump of the bombs at all. It had apparently only taken the three previous nights for them to completely adapt to the raids. The white-haired woman glanced up, annoyed, at a particularly loud bang, then began counting stitches, and the clergyman returned to discussing next Sunday’s service with a formidable-looking woman with iron-gray hair.
The scrawny, sour-faced woman was still scowling, but Polly had a feeling that was her permanent expression. The aristocratic gentleman was reading the London Times, and the dog had gone to sleep. If not for the occasional muffled explosion overhead and Lila’s talk of dating men in uniform, there’d have been nothing to indicate there was a war on.
And there was nothing to indicate where this was. Since there’d been temporal slippage and the net had sent her through twelve hours later than the target time, it was unlikely there’d been locational slippage as well. There was generally only one or the other. But the bombs were falling too close for this to be Kensington or Marylebone. Polly looked around at the shelter walls for the name or