“I still don’t know what this has to do with—”

“Don’t you see?” he said, squeezing her hands. “That was where I got the notion of throwing the V-1s off course. You’re the one who gave me the idea. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have been blown up by now, trying to shoot them down.”

We are hanging on by our eyelids.

—GENERAL ALAN BROOKE

London—November 1940

AFTER POLLY FOUND OUT THAT THE REIGN OF TERROR had been over four years after the storming of the Bastille, she attempted to convince herself that there couldn’t possibly be that much slippage. The most on record for a non-divergence point had been three months and eight days. Someone had had six months’ slippage, and Mr. Dunworthy had overreacted and canceled everyone’s drops, that was all. And the fact that he hadn’t canceled hers proved it.

But the fear still nagged at her, so much so that she redoubled her efforts to find a way out. She put a new set of ads in the papers and went to Charing Cross to see if there was any spot in the sprawling station where Mr. Dunworthy could have come through on his earlier journeys. There wasn’t. Even the emergency staircase was filled with amorous couples. His drop had to have been somewhere else.

There was no sign of a younger Mr. Dunworthy either, though she wasn’t certain she’d recognize him if she saw him. The first few times he’d gone to the past, he’d been scarcely older than Colin. She tried to imagine him Colin’s age—lanky, eager, taking the escalator steps two at a time—but she couldn’t manage it, any more than she could imagine Mr. Dunworthy sending them knowingly into danger. Or not coming to get them if he could.

She wondered suddenly if it was not just an increase in slippage that was keeping him from pulling them out, but the fact that he was already here on a previous assignment and couldn’t come through till after his younger self had returned to Oxford. Which would be when?

Mike didn’t phone again on Tuesday or Wednesday, or write, which Eileen was convinced was a good sign. “It means he’s found Gerald, and they’re on their way to check his drop,” she said. “You mustn’t worry so. Just when things are in a complete mess, and you can’t see how they can possibly work out, that’s when help arrives.”

Not always, Polly thought, remembering the thousands of soldiers who hadn’t made it off Dunkirk’s beaches, or the victims who’d died in the rubble before the rescue teams reached them.

“When I took Theodore to the station on the train,” Eileen was saying, “he grabbed hold of my neck and wouldn’t let go, and the train was leaving. And just as I was about to despair, who should show up but Mr. Goode, the vicar, to rescue me.” She smiled at the memory. “And we’ll be rescued, too. You’ll see. I’m certain we’ll hear from Mike tomorrow. Or from the retrieval team.”