And after two more drinks:

“Dear Polly, I lied to you when I came back from Manchester. The person who came to Saltram-on-Sea asking about me wasn’t Fordham. It was Tensing. He’d been tracking me down since Bletchley Park, but you were wrong. He didn’t want to hire me for Ultra. He wanted to recruit me for a Special Means unit, and I thought it would mean I’d be able to get to Denys Atherton, but as it turned out …”

But he couldn’t write Polly because her deadline had passed, and she was already dead. She’d been dead since December.

He’d got drunk that night, too, and tried to call her in Dulwich to warn her, and then remembered she wasn’t there until after D-Day and hung up. And when Cess had asked him what he was doing, he’d said, “She’s not here yet. She’s dead.”

And if he had any more toddies tonight, he might blurt out the whole story to the barman, or worse, write it all down, and there was no point. A letter wouldn’t reach Polly in Dulwich because it hadn’t reached her. And if Eileen was here to send it to, then his plan hadn’t worked—he hadn’t found Atherton or got a message through, and Polly had died—and if that was the case, then Eileen was better off not knowing that he was alive, that he’d gone off and left them for nothing. It wasn’t like Jonathan, whose mother would at least have the comfort that he and his great-grandfather had died heroes.

He stood up unsteadily, set down his mug, which was much cleaner than the one the Commander had given him, and prepared to stagger off to bed, but before he made it to the stairs, a pig farmer came in, shaking water everywhere, announced it was “a fit night out for nowt”—a sentiment Ernest agreed with wholeheartedly—and demanded a pint.

“And make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got to take a load of shoats all t’way down to Hawkhurst.”

Ernest promptly begged a ride, crawled into his truck, and was rewarded by the farmer’s asking where he thought the invasion would be and then, without waiting for an answer, saying, “Mark my words, it’s going to be Calais,” and regaling him for the remainder of the trip with how he’d come to that conclusion.

Ernest didn’t have to say a word, which was just as well because the minute he got back to Cardew Castle, Chasuble said, “Oh, excellent, you’re here—good Lord, what’s that smell?”

“Pigs.”

“I thought you were going to sea. Well, never mind. You need to shave and bathe, particularly bathe, and get into this.” He tossed a dinner jacket and Bracknell’s too-small shoes at him, told him he had ten minutes, and hauled him and Cess off to another reception, this one for General Montgomery.

“Only it won’t be Monty,” he said after they were in the staff car.

“What do you mean, it won’t be Monty?” Ernest asked, attempting to tie his tie in the rear-vision mirror.