“Barrie’s? It was Twelfth Night. A knock on the door and there you were … shipwrecked … the letter …” His voice died away.

“What letter?” she said, even though there was no letter, he was making no sense, but she had to keep him talking. “Who was the letter from, Sir Godfrey?”

“An old friend … we’d played together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when we were young …”

“Do Oberon’s speech,” she urged him. “ ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows,’ ” but he went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

“He wrote … to offer me the lead in a touring company,” he said after a minute, his voice drowsy and slow again, “… Bath … Bristol … but then you came …”

“And you didn’t go.”

“And leave fair Viola?” he murmured, and then, barely audible, “… you knew all your lines …”

She realized now that, even now—digging him out, trying to stop the blood—she had still harbored a secret hope that this was not part of the continuum’s attempts to correct the damage they’d done, that it was, as he’d said, the Luftwaffe’s fault and not hers. But he was supposed to have gone with the touring company, he was supposed to have left London. He’d stayed because of her.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

The stench of gas was growing stronger. She should see if she could find something else to stuff into the gap, a playbill or a newspaper. There were some in the lending library at Holborn. No, that was too far.

“… killed …,” Sir Godfrey said from a long way away. Her seat must be at the very back of the stalls, but that couldn’t be right, because he was saying, “Viola! Awake, fair maid! I hear our rescuers at hand.”

“ ‘It is the nightingale,’ ” she murmured. “ ‘We shall sing like two birds i’ the cage—’ ”

“No,” Sir Godfrey said furiously. “It is the lark. The rescue team is coming—”

“They didn’t come in time,” she said, and laid her head on the rubble and composed herself to sleep, though her hand still pressed down firmly on the compress. “Not in time.”

When I look back over the wartime years I cannot help feeling that time is an inadequate and ever capricious measure of their duration.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL, 9 NOVEMBER 1944

Imperial War Museum, London—7 May 1995

“WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING HERE, CONNOR?” THE woman said. He couldn’t see more than her outline in the pitch-darkness of the blackout exhibit, but it must be the fortyish-something woman whom he’d seen unloading things from her car and then going into the museum when he first arrived, though she was far too young to be Merope.

And Merope wouldn’t have called you Connor, he thought, so this woman’s clearly mistaken you for someone else. “I’m afraid you’ve—” he began, but she was plunging eagerly on.

“I saw you going into the exhibit, and I thought, that has to be Connor Cross.”