tail of it was wet from where it had dragged in the water.
The Lady Jane can’t sink in an hour, can it? he wondered, curling up on the bunk. The water sloshed as the boat rocked gently back and forth. That’s all I ask, an hour, and then, if the water level’s still rising, I’ll get up and start the pump. And at some point he must have staggered over, still asleep, and done it because when he woke he could hear it chugging, and could no longer hear the water sloshing.
How long had he slept? He held his arm up to look at his watch, but it was too dark to read it. Whatever time it is, I need to go see if Powney’s back and then go find Jonathan, he thought, and pushed the blanket off. He sat up and stepped down off the bunk.
Into over a foot of freezing water. The pump obviously wasn’t working, even though it was wheezing away. Its chugging filled the hold, so loud it—
“Oh, no!” Mike said and flung himself, splashing, across the hold and up the ladder. That wasn’t the bilge pump. It was the engine. They were moving. He jerked the hatch open.
Onto more darkness. He blinked stupidly at it, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and at the rush of wind and salt spray against his face. “Well, well, what have we here?” Commander Harold’s voice said jovially. “A stowaway?”
Mike could barely make him out in the darkness. He was at the wheel, in his peacoat and yachting cap. “I had a feeling you’d try to get in on this,” he said.
“In on what?” Mike said, hauling himself up onto deck. He looked frantically back toward the stern, but he couldn’t see anything, only darkness. “Where are you going?”
“To bring our boys home.”
“What do you mean? To Dunkirk?” Mike shouted at him over the wind. “I can’t go to Dunkirk!”
“Then you’d better start swimming, Kansas, because we’re already halfway across the Channel.”
“You may go to the ball, Cinderella,” her fairy godmother said, “but you must take care to leave before the clock strikes twelve.” “But what will I wear?” Cinderella asked. “I cannot go in these rags.”
—“CINDERELLA”
Dulwich, Surrey—13 June 1944
IT WAS LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON BY THE TIME SHE reached Dulwich’s First Aid Nursing Yeomanry post. No one answered her knock. Of course not, she thought, annoyed. They’re all out looking for V-1 fragments. She’d planned to arrive on the morning of the eleventh so she’d have time to settle in, meet everyone, and watch them for two full days before the rockets began, but she hadn’t counted on all the delays the invasion would cause.
The D-Day landings in Normandy might have gone off with scarcely a hitch, but on this side of the Channel, chaos reigned. Every train and bus and road had either been crammed to capacity or restricted to invasion forces. It had taken her a day and a half to arrange transport to London with an American WAC delivering documents to Whitehall, and then at the last moment, the WAC had been ordered to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Portsmouth instead, and when they got there, both car and driver had been commandeered by British Intelligence. She’d spent the next three days in the wilds of Hampshire, vainly attempting to get a seat on a train, and finally hitched a ride to Dulwich in a Jeep with some American GIs, but by then the first V-1s had already fallen, and she’d missed her chance to observe the post in “normal” circumstances.
Though perhaps not. The government hadn’t yet admitted that the explosions were the result of unmanned rockets, and wouldn’t till three days from now. And none of the four V-1s that had hit last night had landed in Dulwich, so that if their post hadn’t been one of those sent to the crash sites by the Ministry of Home Security to gather fragments so the government could determine exactly what sort of weapon they were dealing with, they still might not know. But they obviously had been sent out because there continued to be no answer to her knocking. The post was deserted.
It can’t be, she thought. This is an ambulance post. Someone has got to be manning the telephone. She knocked again, more loudly. Still no answer.
She tried the door. It opened, and she went inside. “Hullo? Anyone here?” she called, and when no one answered, went in search of the despatch room.