He stopped, an odd look on his face.

“What is it?” Polly asked. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just occurred to me … I think I may already have saved it. The night I came through, I crashed into a stirrup pump, and two of the fire watch came down to investigate and found an incendiary which had burned through the roof. If I hadn’t been there—”

“They might not have discovered it till too late, and the fire—” Polly said, and stopped as well, thinking of the fire on the desk which she had put out the night they’d been trying to find John Bartholomew.

“And if my being there did save it, then it may do so again,” Mr. Dunworthy was saying, “even if I can only be at St. Paul’s for two weeks. But you will need to help me persuade them. And convince Eileen.”

Convincing Eileen proved to be the more difficult of the two. “But it’s dangerous,” she said. “The north transept—”

“Won’t be bombed till April sixteenth,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “I’ll phone in and tell them I’m ill that night.”

“What about the big raids on May tenth and eleventh? You said the entire city—”

“St. Paul’s wasn’t hit either of those nights,” he reassured her.

And it doesn’t matter, Polly wanted to shout at her. He won’t be here. His deadline will already have passed. And the chances are I’ll only have two weeks after that. If she had another task, it almost certainly lay between now and the end of the Blitz. There would be only occasional raids after that, but they’d had far fewer casualties. Which meant her deadline wasn’t the end of 1943. It was May eleventh.

But she couldn’t tell Eileen that. In the first place, she wouldn’t believe her. And in the second place, the task at hand was to convince her to allow Mr. Dunworthy to join the fire watch. So instead Polly said, “St. Paul’s won’t suffer any more damage till 1944 and the V-1 and V-2 attacks.”

“But if there won’t be any more damage, then why do you need to be in the fire watch, Mr. Dunworthy?” Eileen persisted.

“Because I may be the reason there wasn’t damage,” Mr. Dunworthy said, which didn’t help his case.

“No,” Eileen said firmly. “It’s too dangerous. The incendiaries and the roofs … You might fall.”

“None of the fire watch was injured or killed in 1941,” Mr. Dunworthy told her, and Polly wondered if that was a lie, if Mr. Dunworthy was hoping to die at St. Paul’s as well as work there.

“And being in the cathedral will give me opportunities to check the drop when no one’s around,” Mr. Dunworthy said, and Eileen eventually relented, though she insisted on walking him to and from the cathedral every night he was on duty.

“St. Paul’s may be safe,” she said, “but there’s still the journey there and back again. I have no intention of letting either of you get killed five minutes before the retrieval team arrives.”