“I wish you’d tell me which wishing coins are Pimms’s ones. I want to put mine with them.”

“They don’t do a thing,” I said hollowly. “They’re superstitious nonsense. They—”

My voice rose to a sob. Couldn’t I have done anything else—convinced Jamie not to fly that way, that night? What if I’d got Felix Baer and Elisabeth Lind together earlier? What if I’d gone straight to Wing Commander Cromwell?

None of it seemed possible, but the what-ifs kept spinning in my head like a gramophone turntable that wouldn’t stop.

Miss Lind reached up and caressed my cheek with soft fingertips.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I know.”

I couldn’t imagine what it was like having to pretend your brother hadn’t just been lost at sea. Or wherever he was lost.

“I want my sixpence to be there too,” she said. “And I’m never coming back for it. I want it to be up there forever with the rest of them.”

I swallowed and nodded. “I’ll show you which is Jamie’s,” I told her softly.

The moon was waning and the freezing fog returned and Windyedge was quiet.

Phyllis wrote her horrid reports by the fire in the Limehouse. The ground crew helped with the heavy work as we tidied up Room Five. I did not believe anyone could ever sleep in it again, but we put it back to being Mrs. Campbell’s second-best double room. Everything in it still worked.

The policemen didn’t come back straightaway, but a doctor looked at Jane’s wrist, and said it would be fine and gave her strengthening exercises. After a few days, Ellen helped me bring her downstairs. Nobody fooled about on the piano. We couldn’t play records, though we read some of the album notes out loud. We swapped newspapers, doing the crosswords and fine-combing the casualty lists. The telephone never rang, and there were no planes to count in.

Exactly one week after the limekilns were bombed, as permitted hours began at half past five, I unlocked the front door for Mrs. Campbell. Standing in the vestibule, I heard tire chains and an unfamiliar engine laboring up the lane. I opened the door to look, just as a low-slung red motorcar coughed to a stalled halt in front of the Limehouse.

Flight Lieutenant James Gordon Erskine Murray Beaufort-Stuart climbed out.

He didn’t bother to open the car door. He crouched on the seat and swung his legs over the edge of the open top as if it were a hatch on a Blenheim bomber.

For a moment I thought he was a ghost.

Never mind all my modern education and not being a fool-fool country gal. I actually thought he must be a dead man walking. I thought it must be a ghost-car driven by a ghost.