He couldn’t not say it. He couldn’t not take the rosin with him. I had a charm too, in the breast pocket of my uniform beneath my flight suit, a perfectly round quartz pebble from the Iron Age hill fort on my father’s grouse moor.

“You’re welcome,” I croaked.

Our clothes were soaked with seawater and Colin Oldham’s blood. It was all over the cockpit, and we had to climb through it to get out the hatch.

Half an hour later I sat down in front of Flight Officer Phyllis Pennyworth, our brisk, chirpy robin of a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force interrogator who was in charge of grilling us after a mission—and I got so choked up I couldn’t talk. I sat for a while with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, and she just let me do that, didn’t say anything, knew what was coming—or guessed, anyway.

When I looked up, the pretty pink had faded a bit from her rosy cheeks. She loved us all very much. But in the debriefing room Pennyworth took care to be all business, and this time I was too broken and beat to do my job politely.

“Too many German planes to count,” I told her. “Bloody Jerries in their bloody Messerschmitt 110s. Those Luftwaffe night fighters. Like a swarm of hornets—they know where we’re coming from and what we’re after, and they’re a million miles an hour faster than us—”

“Not a million, Scotty,” Phyllis corrected gently. Using my nickname instead of my rank title the way most of my lads did, so that I knew she cared, but reminding me to be precise so she could make an accurate report. She was a stickler for rules herself, and she was scared of the Old Roundhead.

“Might as well be a million.” It came out as a sort of sob. “These old Blenheims we fly, these airborne buckets of bolts we’re in, these crates don’t have a chance against a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter!”

And I gave a real sob then, because of Colin.

I didn’t tell Phyllis Pennyworth about the mess. She’d seen our busted-up plane—half the glass in the front cockpit punched out, a furrow plowed in the airfield behind us by our tail because we’d lost the tail wheel, the gaping hole where the gunner’s turret used to be. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what had happened to Colin. She waited while I tried to pull myself together, and when I still didn’t say anything, she sighed and put down her pen and lit a cigarette for me.