He knocked on the open door. “Visitor to see you, Adelaide,” he said. “Gentleman.”

“What happened to no men allowed backstage?” Cora demanded.

Mutchins shrugged. “Talk to Tabbitt. He said to come ask was you decent and if you was, to send him up,” he said, addressing Polly. “Are you?”

“Yes.” She abandoned her effort to fasten the stiff strap on her gilt shoe and pulled on a wrapper. “Who is it?”

“Never saw him before. Some old gent.” He turned to the other girls. “Tabbitt said to tell the lot of you to clear out—”

“Clear out?” Cora said. “Well, I like that! And where are we supposed to go?”

“He didn’t say. Just that you was to leave and give Adelaide here some privacy.”

Oh, God, Polly thought. Something’s happened, and Mr. Dunworthy’s here to tell me—

But it was Sir Godfrey. “Ah, Viola,” he said, coming into the dressing room. “ ‘Thus she sleeping here is found, on the dank and dirty ground.’ ”

You weren’t supposed to find me, she thought frightenedly.

“Sir Godfrey, what are you doing here?” she said, and from down the corridor heard excited whispers:

“Sir Godfrey Kingsman?”

“Yes!”

“Not the Sir Godfrey! The actor?”

And the last thing she needed was for the cast to gather around him and insist he stay and see the show. She led him quickly into the dressing room, shut the door, and set a chair against it.

“Let me take your hat and coat,” she said, hanging them on the screen. “Sit down. What are you doing here?”

“I came to find you,” he said, “a task that has proved somewhat daunting. Your previous employers at Townsend Brothers were under the impression you’d left London, and no one in the troupe has had any news of you for weeks. And to make it yet more difficult, you are performing under a stage name which is, alas, not Viola nor Lady Mary. Luckily, your photograph is displayed outside.”

I knew I should have made Mr. Tabbitt take my picture with my bloomers showing instead of my face.

“Miss Laburnum said she’d heard you had become an ARP warden,” Sir Godfrey was saying, “so I went to any number of ARP posts and St. John’s units and incidents—”

Incidents?

“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” Polly said, looking at him in dismay. Even her disappearing had put him in danger.

“But I had need of you, and it was a chance to play the Great Detective again—a role I had not acted in years. My search led me to the Works Board and a Mrs. Sentry, who, alas, had been killed by an oil bomb the week before I arrived, and your file there did not indicate the theater to which you were assigned. But as I said, I was able to track you here through your photograph and to confirm that it was you during the performance last night. An impressive theatrical endeavor.”

“I know it’s not Shakespeare.”