Etta wanted to ask him about Julian, but she also couldn’t let him drift away into a pool of terrible memories. She stepped back out onto what little was left of the sidewalk, cupping her hands over her eyes to shade them from the sunlight. “Well, I officially have no idea where we are.”
His jaw actually dropped. “Did I not say we needed a map…?”
She wasn’t about to let him win that argument. “Hold on—just a second.”
“Hold on to what?” he called after Etta as she walked away.
The shopkeeper she’d seen a moment before had ducked back into his store, and was now sweeping out the powdery dust and ash that had blown in from the street. She leaned in through the doorway.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m wondering if you could help me?”
The man leaned against the handle of his broom, the severe features of his face softening as he returned her smile. Behind him was a long wooden counter, with shelf upon shelf of dark bottles marked with paper labels. Some kind of pharmacy.
“An American?” he ventured. “Not the best time for a visit, I’m afraid. Unless you’re the first in a new wave of defenses? Are the Yanks finally jumping in?”
Probably he was joking, but there was a tremor in his voice as he said it, a vulnerability peering through the “business as usual” façade.
“Not yet,” she said, trying to keep her voice cheerful. “I think it’ll be a while.…”
And only after we’re directly attacked. But she couldn’t tell him that.
Etta felt it then for the first time—the fragility of the past. It was an eerie sensation to be in this shop, with its thousands of glass objects packed in so closely around her, and know that one slight misstep on her part could send them smashing to the ground. Etta doubted that telling this stranger about America’s entry into the war, if she presented it as a guess, would be enough to change anything in the timeline. But she wasn’t willing to bet that one small change wouldn’t send the future she’d known crashing down around her, shattered.
The man knelt to sweep the dust into a bin. “A waiting game, I expect. What can I help you with?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nicholas watching through the blown-out window frame. “I’m wondering if you could point me in the direction of the British Museum?”
His gray brows rose. “All you’ve got to do is continue east on this road. Make a left on Dean Street and a right onto Oxford Street, which’ll turn into Great Russell Street for you. Doing a bit of sightseeing, then?”
“Yes—I just wasn’t sure if I was headed the right way. Thank you so much, you’ve been a great help.”
She had already turned to the door when the man let out a faint laugh. “Miss—come back, miss—I should’ve told you straightaway. Can’t resist a bit of teasing now and then, especially in times like these.”
Uh-oh. That tiny bit of excitement was instantly scrubbed out.
“You can go to the museum, but I’m afraid there’ll be nothing to see,” he said. “They took out everything valuable last summer, and it’s been closed ever since.”
THE BRITISH MUSEUM WAS CLOSED.
She should have believed the shopkeeper, but it seemed impossible that they could have come all that way only to be met with locked, towering black gates. The somber stone building, with columns and reliefs inspired by ancient times, seemed to fade away the longer they stood there. It taunted them.
And just to put the last nail in the coffin of possibility, Etta took the harmonica out of the bag at Nicholas’s side—the harmonica she’d stolen out of Sophia’s trunk, seemingly identical to the one Cyrus had used to find the passage in New York—and blew a quick, hard burst of air into it. She strained her ears, trying to lean through the bars of the gate, like that could somehow help her hear a sound that wasn’t there.
“Nothing,” Nicholas said.
“Nothing,” she agreed, placing the instrument back in the bag and cinching it shut with more force than was probably necessary. “Even if the statues themselves were removed, I think I was still hoping the passage would be with them.”
“Perhaps we underestimated your mother,” he said. “I can’t imagine she would have made it so easy for anyone to find.”
“A World War isn’t enough of a hurdle?” Etta asked, rubbing her hand over her face. “Okay, okay…we just have to think this through.…”
“I do have an idea, but I’m afraid it’s terrible,” Nicholas said, surveying the lock on the gate and giving it another hard tug.
“A bad idea is better than no idea,” Etta said.
“I’m glad you feel that way, because this is an exquisitely bad one.” He turned toward her. “We can go around the back of the museum and I can lift you over the gate. You can then slip into the museum and hold any guards or curators inside hostage, until they give up the information about the location of the statues.”
“Hold them hostage?” she repeated.
“Don’t you know? That’s how real pirates like Blackbeard made most of their money. He ransomed whole cities,” he said. “I’ll even teach you how to use the revolver.”
Despite herself, Etta smiled. “I really appreciate the faith you have in my criminal abilities. But even if I find someone in there, I doubt they’ll be good for anything other than calling the police to pick me up. It seems like the kind of information people would do anything to protect.”
He leaned against one of the black bars. “Would they really have taken out a whole hoard of valuable items?”
She gestured to the streets around them—the pockets of rubble, the burned-out husks of buildings that were missing entire sections. “If they thought there was a chance that they might be destroyed or looted, then yes. I know you said you don’t really want to know about these things, but—Germany invades France and occupies Paris for most of the war. France does the same thing with the paintings and sculptures at the Louvre—the curators and volunteers bring them out to different hiding spots in the countryside, which saves them in the end.”
“When I first learned of this war, I believed Julian was trying to make a joke of me,” he admitted.
She nodded. “Well, it’s a good thing the museum thought ahead. One bomb, and thousands of years of art and culture could have been lost.”
A humming buzz overhead drew their gaze. Two planes—fighter planes, by the looks of them—made a pass, their long shadows sweeping over them. Nicholas stiffened beside her, and before she could ask what was wrong, he was already chasing them down the sidewalk, his gaze fixed on them with a wonder that made Etta’s chest ache. She stayed close on his heels, drinking in his wide eyes, the faint smile, until finally the planes disappeared into the horizon.
“Flying,” Nicholas muttered under his breath, as if still in disbelief. “It shouldn’t surprise me that men continue to think of grand new ways to kill one another, and with greater precision, but…” He shook his head. “If we take this to mean the statues aren’t here, is it worth finding them? Or is it a matter of taking another look at the clue and coming up with a better guess?”
“I felt so good about this,” Etta said, sounding as stubborn as she felt. “I think we’re on the right track. This is just a little setback. We’ll figure it out.”