“It’s not blood,” she told them. “Was he all right?” But they were already shutting the doors, the ambulance was already moving, and then they were at the hospital and she was being unloaded, carried in, deposited in a bed.

“Concussion, shock, bleeding,” Camberley told the nurse.

“It’s printer’s ink,” Mary said, but when she held out her hands to show them, they were covered in red, not black. Paige’s arm must have bled more than she thought.

“Has Lieutenant Fairchild been brought in yet?” she asked the nurse. “Lieutenant Paige Fairchild?”

“I’ll ask,” she said, and went across the ward to another nurse.

“Internal bleeding,” she heard the other nurse whisper and shake her head.

She’s dead, Mary thought. And it’s my fault. If I hadn’t pushed Talbot down, I’d never have met Stephen, he’d never have come to the post.

But that couldn’t be right. Historians couldn’t alter events. But I must have, she thought, unable to work it out because her head hurt too badly. Because Paige is dead.

But just after dawn Fairchild was brought in and put in the bed next to her, pale and unconscious, and in the morning Camberley, covered in dirt and brick dust, sneaked in to see how Mary was doing and to tell her Fairchild had been in surgery most of the night for a ruptured spleen, but that the doctors had assured her she’d recover completely.

“Thank goodness,” Mary said, looking over at Fairchild, who lay with her eyes closed and her hands folded across her breast, like Sleeping Beauty. She had a bandage on her arm.

“I feel so guilty,” Camberley said, “knowing I should be the one who was in that ambulance instead of Fairchild. It’s my fault—”

No, it isn’t, Mary thought. It’s mine.

“It was so lucky you were on the far side of the incident when the V-2 hit,” she said.

I was tying off the man’s leg, she thought. “Did he make it?” she asked, and when Camberley looked blankly at her, she said, “The man we were working on. With the severed foot.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t bring him in. I’ll ask the nurse.” But the nurse said the only other patients who’d been admitted the night before were a woman and her two little boys.

“He may have been taken to some other hospital,” Camberley said, and promised to ring up Croydon and ask.

But she didn’t return, and when Talbot came during visiting hours with flowers and grapes, she said, “Camberley said to tell you the man you asked about wasn’t taken to St. Francis’s, and that Croydon said the only person they transported was Fairchild. But Camberley said he must be somewhere because she checked with the mortuary van, which was there, and the only person they’d transported had died instantly.”

The man we found who’d been cut in half, Mary thought. “Tell her to ring up Brixton and ask them if they transported him,” she said. “They had an ambulance there.”