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P.M. on December sixth and take one of the liberty launches—which ran until midnight—out to the ship, but according to his research, Waikiki on a Saturday night had been full of drunk GIs and sailors spoiling for a fight, and an overeager shore patrol. He couldn’t afford to be in the
New Orleans’
s brig when the Japanese attacked Sunday morning. Maybe he should see how far away from his drop the officers’ club was and whether launches had run to and from it that night. They should have. There’d been a dance there. He could—
    The phone rang. Michael leaped to answer it. “Hullo, Charles,” Shakira said. “Sorry I’ve been so long. I haven’t been able to find any Glenn Miller. I’ve located a Benny Goodman—”
    “This isn’t Charles, it’s Michael. Where are you?”
    “You don’t
sound
like Michael.”
    “I just got an American L-and-A implant,” he said. “Listen, when you were here, someone called for me—”
    “I wrote it all down for you,” she said, sounding annoyed. “The message should be there by the phone.”
    “But what did they say?”
    “I
wrote
it down,” she said, annoyed. “The order of your drops has been changed. You’re going to Dunkirk first. On Friday at 8 A.M .”

By your readiness to serve you have helped the State in a work of great value
.
    — QUEEN ELIZABETH IN A TRIBUTE TO THOSE WHO TOOK IN EVACUEES ,
1940

Warwickshire—February 1940
    IT BEGAN TO RAIN JUST AS EILEEN WAS ABOUT TO HANG out the laundry, and she had to string up the clothesline in the ballroom, amid the portraits of Lord Edward and Lady Caroline’s ruffed and hoop-skirted ancestors, and hang the wet sheets in there, which would take twice as long. By the time she finished, the children would be home from school. She’d wanted to be gone before they arrived. Last time the Hodbins had followed her into the woods, and she’d had to postpone going to the drop for another week.
    Again. The Monday before that she’d had to spend her half-day out fumigating the children’s cots for bedbugs, and the Monday before
that
she’d had to take Alf and Binnie over to Mr. Rudman’s farm to apologize for setting his haystack ablaze. They’d claimed they’d been practicing lighting signal fires in case of invasion. “The vicar says unless everyone does their bit we can’t win the war,” Binnie’d said.
    I have an idea the vicar would make an exception in your case
, Eileen had thought. But the Hodbins weren’t the only thing preventing her from going. Ever since Christmas she’d spent what was supposed to have been her half-day out soliciting for the saving-stamps drive or working on some other project Lady Caroline had devised for “assisting the war effort,” which somehow never involved
her
doing anything, only her servants.
    If I don’t go through to Oxford soon, they’ll think something’s happened and send a retrieval team after me
, Eileen thought. She needed to at least tell thelab why she hadn’t checked in, and perhaps persuade them to open the drop more often than one day a week. “Which means I need to finish hanging these wretched sheets before the Hodbins get home,” she said aloud to the portrait of an earlier Lady Caroline and her spaniels, and bent to take another sheet out of the basket.
    The kitchen maid, Una, was standing in the door. “Who was you talking to?” she asked, peering between the hanging lines.
    “Myself,” Eileen said. “It’s the first sign of going mad.”
    “Oh,” Una said. “Mrs. Bascombe wants you.”
    What now? I’ll never get away
. She hastily hung up the last sheet and hurried down the back stairs to the kitchen.
    Mrs. Bascombe was cracking eggs into a bowl. “Put on a fresh apron,” she said. “Her ladyship wants you.”
    “But today’s my half-day out,” Eileen protested.
    “Yes, well, you can leave after. Her ladyship’s in the drawing room.”
    In the upstairs drawing room? That meant someone had come to take their child home.