She should have known she couldn’t have affected events, even if it had seemed for a time that that was what she was doing. She should have known it would all come right in the end.

“And he simply barged in,” a woman’s voice said behind her. A nurse, coming round the corner of the corridor. And if they saw her, they’d take her back in to bed, to Paige and Stephen.

She dove for the telephone box, reaching to pull its door shut, but she needn’t have bothered. The nurse, flanked by the matron and the orderly, marched past without noticing her and pushed open the ward’s double doors.

“You mustn’t worry, darling,” she heard Stephen say. “I’ll see to it that no other rocket ever gets near you, if I have to shoot every last one of them down myself.”

“Officer Lang,” the matron said sternly. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“In a minute,” he said. “Paige, when I heard what had happened, all I could think of was what an idiot I’d been for not realizing how much you mean to me. You know that bit in the Bible about the scales falling from one’s eyes? Well, that was exactly it.”

The doors swung shut, cutting off the rest of what he was saying. Mary pulled the door of the telephone box shut and sat down to wait for Stephen to be escorted out so she could go back to the ward and her bed. Even if historians couldn’t affect events, she wasn’t going to run the risk of coming between them again and somehow mucking things up. Not when things had worked out so well for everyone.

The FANYs would all be delighted, and the Major would change the schedule back to the way it had been. Reed and Grenville would stop being angry with her, the discussion would go back to who had to wear the Yellow Peril and how to get Donald to propose to Maitland, and she could go back to doing what she’d come here to do: observe an ambulance post during the V-1 and V-2 attacks.

And there was no reason at all for her to feel so … bereft. It was ridiculous. She should be overjoyed. It must be some sort of delayed reaction to shock, like Paige’s being so upset over the ambulance. There was certainly no reason to cry. He was a lovely boy, and that crooked smile of his was admittedly devastating, but it could never have worked out. He had died before she was born.

“But not in the war,” she murmured, and then, thinking of the nine months and the thousands of V-1s and V-2s still to come, “I hope.”

Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,
26 May 1940

London—Winter 1941

THE VICAR ONLY HAD A FORTY-EIGHT-HOUR LEAVE, SO THEY held Mike’s memorial service the next afternoon. The troupe attended, and Mrs. Willett. She didn’t bring Theodore, who had a cold. He was staying with her neighbor.