“Being in His Majesty’s Navy, you’ll be interested in this,” Mr. Humphreys said, though the sailors showed no sign of it. They looked bored and fidgety. “Captain Faulknor was one of our greatest naval heroes, though he’s not so well known as Sir Francis Drake or Lord Nelson. He—”
“Mr. Humphreys,” Polly said, hurrying over. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I—”
“Miss Sebastian,” he said, turning in mid-gesture. “I’ve been hoping you’d come in! How fortuitous that you’re here today.”
He turned back to the sailors. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to speak with Miss Sebastian. I’ll be back directly.” He dragged Polly off toward the dome.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said, leading her into the choir. “He’s a great admirer of The Light of the World, just as you are. He spends hours and hours looking at it.”
“I’m afraid I’m in rather a hurry today—” she began, but Mr. Humphreys wasn’t listening.
“I saw him come this way when we were in the nave.” He led her into the apse. The altar was still blocked off for repairs. “Oh, dear,” he said, looking around at the ladders and scaffolding. “He’s not here. I’m certain I saw him—”
“Mr. Humphreys, I have a favor to ask,” Polly cut in. “I was hoping you could help me get taken on as an ARP warden.”
“A warden? That’s no job for a young lady,” he said, still looking vaguely around. “It’s dirty, dangerous work, what with the raids and all. And out in the winter cold all night. You’d catch your death.”
I’m going to catch my death no matter what I do, she thought.
“Being a warden’s no more dangerous than being on the fire watch,” she said, but Mr. Humphreys was still looking for this person he wanted her to meet.
“I do hope he hasn’t left,” he fretted, starting back along the choir aisle. “I did so want you to meet him. I’ve told him all about you. Such a nice gentleman. Do you know what he said the first time he saw The Light of the World? He said, ‘He looks as though he could forgive anything.’ So interesting, isn’t it, what people see?
Each time one looks at it, one sees something diff—”
“If not an air-raid warden, then some other Civil Defence job—”
“Mr. Hobbe—that’s the gentleman I want you to meet—has only just got out of hospital.” He peered into the dim recesses of the south transept. “He’s had rather a hard time of it, I’m afraid. He was wounded in a bomb blast, a head wound, and he’s still not entirely recovered. Let me just check the north transept,” he said, though Mr. Hobbe obviously wasn’t there—they’d just come from there.
The sailors weren’t there either. They must have seen their chance and fled.
“Mr. Hobbe is almost as fond of Captain Faulknor’s memorial as he is of The Light of the World,” Mr. Humphreys said, which Polly doubted. She wondered if he’d fled, too.
“Last week I found him here after the sirens had gone,” Mr. Humphreys went on obliviously, “sitting against one of the pillars, looking at Captain Faulknor’s statue.”
Which is impossible, Polly thought. It’s covered in sandbags.
“And when I began to tell him about Captain Faulknor’s tying the two ships together, he knew all about it. ‘It bound them into one,’ he said—”
“I think Mr. Hobbe must have gone home,” Polly said, “and I must go, too. If you could just tell me the name of someone I could speak to about getting hired on by Civil Defence, I—”
“But he can’t have gone home. I don’t believe he has one. I think it may have been destroyed in the same bomb blast. I’ve found him here at night several times since then.”
“At night?”
“Yes, and that first night, when I said I’d have one of the watch accompany him home—he’s not well, and I hated to think of him out in the blackout—I asked him where he lived, and he said, ‘It doesn’t exist.’ ”
“It doesn’t—?”
“Yes, dreadful, isn’t it, to think of him bombed out in this weather, with only a shelter to—”
“You said he’s been coming in every day,” Polly said. “For how long?”
“Several weeks,” he said, walking back out to the dome. “He began coming in shortly before the New Year. I’m afraid you’ve just missed him. What a pity. I did so want you two—”
“What does he look like?”
“Look like? He’s my age, or perhaps a bit older. Tall, thin, spectacles. I think he may have been a schoolmaster. He knows all about the history of St. Paul’s. He’s clearly troubled about something. I fear his family may have been killed in the bombing, he looks so sad. That’s partly why I wanted you to meet him. I thought your being interested in The Light of the World, too, might cheer—”
He stopped in midsentence. “I know where he’ll be,” he said. “He never leaves without taking a last look at it.” He started across the nave, but Polly had already passed him, running toward the south aisle, praying he was still there.
He was. He stood in front of the painting, his hat in his hands, his shoulders slumped tiredly, looking up at Christ’s face under its crown of thorns.
“One sees something different each time one looks at it,” Mr. Humphreys had said, and it was true. This time Christ looked not bored, not frightened, but infinitely sorry for both of them.
Polly stepped forward and put her hand on Mr. Dunworthy’s sleeve. “It’s all right,” she said, and began to cry.
“But you do know, don’t you,” he said, “that you committed the murders?”
—AGATHA CHRISTIE, THE ABC MURDERS
London—Winter 1941
POLLY LOOKED AT MR. DUNWORTHY STANDING THERE IN front of The Light of the World, and for a moment she thought she must have been wrong, as she had been wrong that night outside St. Paul’s, and it wasn’t him after all, but only someone who resembled him.
He seemed far older than the Mr. Dunworthy she knew, and his shabby coat, his worn hat, had an authenticity Wardrobe could never have managed. And he looked so weary. Mr. Humphreys had said he was “troubled” and “not well,” but it was far worse than that. He looked exhausted, broken. Defeated. Mr. Dunworthy had never been defeated by anything in his life.
But Polly had known even before she saw him that it was him—and worse, that the man she’d seen looking up at the dome of St. Paul’s that night had been him, too. And the reason he looked so defeated, so … beaten, was that he was as trapped and helpless as she and Eileen were. He wasn’t here as a rescuer. He was a fellow castaway.
But the mere fact that he was here at least meant that Oxford still existed. They hadn’t altered history and lost the war. And Oxford hadn’t been destroyed in some catastrophe. Everyone there wasn’t dead. And even if Mr. Dunworthy was shipwrecked, too, he was here, and she was overjoyed to see him.
“I’m so glad—” she began, and he turned and looked at her, but there was no surprise, no joy in his face, and as she stepped toward him, he backed away from her till he came up hard against The Light of the World.
Oh, God, Mr. Humphreys had said he’d been injured by a bomb blast, that he’d been in hospital. Could he have suffered brain damage? Could that be why he’d stared at her without recognition that night, and why he looked so afraid now? Because he didn’t know her? “Mr. Dunworthy?” she said softly because Mr.
Humphreys would be here any moment. “It’s me …”
“Polly,” he murmured. “It’s really you, isn’t it? It isn’t a dream? There were times in hospital when I thought that all of it—Oxford and time travel and you—was only a dream.”