Which meant he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t get them out. And it scarcely mattered if the reason was slippage or their having altered events or some catastrophe in Oxford. Mike was dead. “Mike Davis, 26, died suddenly. Of enemy action.”

She took Mike’s things back to Mrs. Rickett’s, and put them in a drawer of the bureau, then took out the half-charred print of The Light of the World she had retrieved from the floor of St. Paul’s, unfolded it, and sat there on the bed, looking at it—at Christ’s hand, still raised to knock on the door though the door had burned away to nothing, and at his face. It held no expression at all.

“Would you care for me to make arrangements for a memorial service for your friend, Miss Sebastian?” the rector asked her on Friday. “I should be glad to officiate. I’ve arranged with the rector of St. Bidulphus’s to have Mr. Simms’s funeral there, and I could speak to him about a service for Mr. Davis.”

But Eileen wouldn’t hear of it. “He isn’t dead,” she insisted, and when Polly showed her the entry in his notebook, she said, “That doesn’t say the eleventh. It says the seventeenth. Or the seventh. Look how the water’s blurred the numbers. And even if it does say the eleventh, it doesn’t mean he kept the appointment.”

On Tuesday, Polly went to Mr. Simms’s funeral. She had attempted to persuade Eileen to go, too, but she’d refused to leave her post at the foot of the escalator. “I might miss Mike,” she said, looking hopefully up at the people descending.

The entire troupe was at St. Bidulphus’s, including Nelson. Miss Laburnum and Miss Hibbard both wore black-veiled hats and carried black-edged handkerchiefs.

Sir Godfrey recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech: “ ‘They shall not speak of this, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.’ ”

And the rector, giving the eulogy, said, “Mr. Simms was no less a soldier than the men in Henry the Fifth’s army, and no less a hero.”

So was Mike, Polly thought, and it didn’t matter what he had been doing when he died any more than it mattered whether an RAF pilot was killed in a dogfight or while he was on leave. Mike had still died trying to get them out. He had devoted every moment since he’d found them to doing that. And it didn’t matter that he’d failed either. History was full of failed attempts—Thermopylae, Scott’s trek back from the South Pole, the siege of Khartoum. He was still a hero.

After the funeral, the rector asked Polly again about scheduling a service. “I could speak to the Reverend Mr. Unwin now, or perhaps you’d like to have it in some other church.”

Yes, Polly thought, St. Paul’s. It’s where all the heroes are: Wellington and Lord Nelson and Captain Faulknor. Mike should be there as well, though she knew they’d never allow it.