remove the thermometer, then turned over and closed her eyes.
Eileen couldn’t read her temp in the near-darkness. She tiptoed over to the lamp on the table: forty. If her temperature stayed that high for long, it would kill her.
Even though it was two in the morning, Eileen rang up Dr. Stuart, but he wasn’t there. His housekeeper told her he’d just left for Moodys’ farm to deliver a baby, and, no, they weren’t on the telephone. Which meant she was on her own—and there was absolutely nothing she could do. If her presence had affected events, the net would never have let her come through to Backbury.
But the alterations the net prevented were those which affected the course of history, not whether an evacuee lived through the measles. Binnie couldn’t affect what happened at D-Day or who won the war. And even if she could, Eileen couldn’t just stand here and let her die. She had to at least try to get her temperature down. But how? Rubbing her with alcohol had had no effect at all. Putting her in a tub of cold water? In her weakened state, the shock might kill her. She needed a medicine to bring down the fever, but they hadn’t any drugs like that in 1940—
Yes, they do, she thought. If Lady Caroline didn’t take it with her. She tiptoed out of the sickroom and ran along the corridor to Lady Caroline’s rooms. Please, please don’t let her have taken her aspirin tablets with her.
She hadn’t. The box was on her dressing table, and it was nearly full. Eileen grabbed it up, put it in her pocket, and sped back to the sickroom. Her opening of the door wakened Binnie, and she sat up, flinging her hands out wildly. “Eileen!” she sobbed.
“I’m here,” Eileen said, grabbing her hands. They were burning up. “I’m here. I only went to fetch your medicine. Shh, it’s all right. I’m here.” She took two of the tablets out of the box and reached for Binnie’s water glass. “I’m not going anywhere. Here, take this.” She supported Binnie’s head while she took the tablet. “That’s a good girl. Now lie down.”
Binnie clutched at her. “You can’t go! Who’ll take care of us if you leave?”
“I won’t leave you,” Eileen said, covering Binnie’s hot, dry hands with both of hers.
“Swear,” Binnie cried.
“I swear,” Eileen said.
All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which, or the severity of which, cannot yet be foreseen.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1940
London—17 September 1940
BY TUESDAY NIGHT, POLLY STILL HADN’T FOUND A JOB. There weren’t any openings “at present,” or, as the personnel manager at Waring and Gillow said, “during this uncertainty.”
“Uncertainty” was putting it mildly. But then the contemps had been noted for understatement. Bombed buildings and people blown to bits were “incidents;” impassable wreckage-strewn streets “diversions.” The daytime air raids, which had interrupted her job search twice today, were christened “Hitler’s tea break.”
Only one person, a junior shop assistant at Harvey Nichols, was willing to say it baldly: “They’re not taking anyone new on because they can’t see the point when the store mightn’t be there in the morning. No one’s hiring.”
She was right. Neither Debenham’s nor Yardwick’s would grant her an interview, Dickins and Jones wouldn’t allow her to fill up an application form, and every other store was on Mr. Dunworthy’s forbidden list.
Which is ridiculous, Polly thought as her train reached Notting Hill Gate. They’d all been hit at night, and only one—Padgett’s—had had casualties, and it hadn’t been hit till October twenty-fifth, three days after she was due to go back.
But Mr. Dunworthy would already be furious that she hadn’t checked in yet. She’d best not do anything to upset him further, which meant she needed to be hired on at either Townsend Brothers or Peter Robinson. And hired on soon. If she didn’t check in tomorrow, Mr. Dunworthy was likely to decide something had happened to her and send a retrieval team to pull her out.
She bought the Express and the Daily Herald from the news vendor at the top of the station stairs and hurried back to Mrs. Rickett’s, hoping tonight’s supper would be better than last night’s tinned beef hash, a watery mush of potatoes and cabbage with a few flecks of stringy red.
It wasn’t. Tonight the flecks were gray and rubbery—halibut, according to Mrs.