No, it isn’t a divinity. I caused this. But he’s not going to die if I can help it, she thought, pressing down with all the force she could muster. The continuum was going to have to correct itself some other way.

She raised her head and shouted for help again, trying to remember everything Sir Godfrey had taught her about projecting to the very back of the stalls. “In here! Help!” And as if in answer there was the sound of planes in the distance.

“They’re coming round again,” Sir Godfrey said, looking up at the ceiling. “You must get to a shelter—”

“I’m not leaving without you.”

“You must, Viola. Your young man would never forgive me if I got you killed.”

My young man. “I lied to you back there at the theater,” she said. “There’s no young man.”

“Of course there is. He’s why I never had the ghost of a chance with you,” he said, and after a minute he asked, “Was he killed?”

“I think he must have been, or he’d be here by now.”

“He may yet come,” Sir Godfrey said gently. “Which is why you must go, Miranda. ‘Fly, Fleance, fly.’ ”

She shook her head. “ ‘If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ ”

“Shakespeare!” he said contemptuously. “I have always loathed actors who quote the Bard. ‘Go, get you gone, foul varlet.’ I will not have your death on my hands.”

“You have it the wrong way round,” she said bitterly. “This is my fault. I did this to you.”

“I fail to see how, unless you abandoned your air-raid duties with ENSA and enlisted in the Luftwaffe within the last hour. I fear the guilt is mine. I shouldn’t have come to ask you to be in the pantomime,” he said, and then murmured, as if to himself, “I should have told Greenberg yes. I should have gone to Bristol.”

He closed his eyes in pain. “ ‘We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.’ ”

“No, we’re not,” she said. “None of us meant to do any harm.”

But Sir Godfrey wasn’t listening to her. “What’s that?” he asked, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a sound. “I thought I heard something.”

“The planes seem to be moving away,” she said, but he shook his head, still with that attentive look. She raised her head, straining to catch the clang of ambulance bells, of voices.

The raiders’ drone faded away, but she still couldn’t hear anything except a creak as a piece of the wreckage gave way. And the faint hiss of escaping gas.

And why had she ever thought she stood a chance against the entire space-time continuum? Why had she ever believed she could save Sir Godfrey’s life, could stop history in its blind attempt to correct itself?

I am so sorry, Sir Godfrey, she thought. I am so sorry, Colin, and she must be crying. Hot drops were splashing onto the back of her hand, onto the compress, onto Sir Godfrey’s already soaked chest.