“He’ll find out eventually,” Silver warned. “The lads are wondering what’s going on. Sooner or later you’ll run out of excuses for the good luck.”

“If we don’t run out of rotor settings first,” I pointed out.

“It’s the Lucky-Rotor Aero Race!”

I choked on laughter, smothering my face in my mattress for a moment.

“How long are the settings good for?” Silver hissed. “Two months?”

“How long is a Blenheim crew good for?” I whispered back.

He didn’t answer.

“Should I tell Cromwell?” I asked.

“No,” Silver said. “The lads need this as much as you do. It would be nice to make it to 1941.”

Silver was right about the weather—we had two glorious days of low sun. It was the beginning of December, but it felt like spring. When our new planes turned up and we tested them over the moors on low-level flight maneuvers, I half expected to see lambs and daffodils below us. Ellen went about without her mackintosh, whistling. The whole of B-Flight, Windyedge’s ground crew, and the visiting ATA ferry pilots who’d delivered the fresh Blenheims all piled into the Limehouse on the evening of the third. The pub was so full that people spilled outside, as if it were summer.

I didn’t see the old woman and the young girl, but I heard Louisa’s flute and Jane’s singing. They must have stayed in their room because it was so crowded downstairs; you couldn’t get to the bar, and the lads passed their pint glasses back over one another’s heads. But Louisa and Jane had their window open to the mild night, and outside you could hear them working through the Oxford Book of Carols, getting ready for Christmas. Every now and then the flute stuttered for a bit, as if Louisa were warming her fingers.

“Wow, I’ve got a headache,” Chip complained the next morning as we lined up to shave. “Too much flute tootling over at Nancy’s place.”

“The flute music gave you a headache?” Silver scoffed in disbelief. “Yanks must be lightweights! Are you sure it wasn’t the beer?”

“I’m not a Yankee,” Chip growled. “I’m from Texas. You’re the navigator—check a map! What do y’all think of a darkie learning Morse code, anyway?”

“Can you be more polite, and more specific?” I asked.

“The hired girl at Nan’s. She was practicing the Morse alphabet all evening.”

“What are you talking about?” Silver grumbled, muffled by foam and looking at himself in the mirror, not at Chip.

“She was tooting it on her flute. Took me back to when I was learning—it’s not easy, you know, until you’ve got an ear for it. And once you know it’s Morse you can’t stop listening, so that’s all I heard all evening—those durned ABCs up and down the scale, whistling up a storm!”