“Sir Godfrey, I’m serious—”

“And so am I. If you had not dissuaded the troupe from doing that odious play, I should have had to fling myself under one of the District Line trains.”

“Sir Godfrey, please don’t joke. I must know.”

“Very well then, I shall tell you. But first, I demand a forfeit.”

“A forfeit?”

“As Beauty was forced to pay a forfeit for straying into the Beast’s garden, so must you. My current plight is, after all, your fault. If I had died last night, I should have escaped doing the pantomime. Now I must put up with Mrs. Wyvern for a full month. I hold you entirely responsible.”

And I might be, Polly thought. I might be.

“I feel the least you can do,” Sir Godfrey went on, “for consigning me to what is, quite literally, a fate worse than death, is to keep me company during my ordeal.”

“Yes, all right. I promise. I’ll do the pantomime, if you’ll only tell me—”

“Excellent. ‘We shall sing like two birds i’ the cage,’ as soon as I’ve located another theater. I wonder if the Windmill would lend us their stage for a month. We could send you to ask them, in your eloquent bloomers—”

“You promised you’d tell me if I paid the forfeit,” Polly said. “How did I save your life, if I did save it?”

“You did, you have, sweet Viola, every day and every night since first you entered my life. And what an entrance! Worthy of the divine Sarah—a knock upon the door, and there you stood in the doorway—frightened, beautiful, lost. A creature from another country, washed up on the shores of St. George’s. And the embodiment of everything I thought the war had destroyed.”

He smiled at her. “During those first nights of the Blitz, it seemed to me that not only the theaters but theater itself and the Bard had become casualties of war. That Shakespeare’s quaint notions of honor and courage and virtue were all dead, murdered by Hitler and his Luftwaffe. And I felt as though I had been murdered along with them.

“And then you came,” he said, “looking like all of Shakespeare’s lovely heroines and loving daughters combined in one—Miranda and Rosalind and Cordelia and Viola combined into one—and restored my faith.”

She had been wrong. When he’d said she’d saved his life, he had been speaking figuratively, not literally, and her theory hadn’t been right after all.

“What is it?” Sir Godfrey said, frowning at her with concern. “Why do you look so disappointed? Do you regret saving an old man from despair?”

“No,” she said. “No, of course not. I only thought you meant I’d really saved your life.”

“But you had. There are a hundred ways a man can bleed to death. And he can be pulled from the rubble of bitterness, of despair, as well as from the wreckage of the Phoenix. And which rescue is the more real? Which mattered more at Agincourt, the longbows or Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech? Which matters more in this war, panzers or courage, HEs or love? Nothing you could have done for me, dear child, was more important than the restoration of my hope.”