The Rose Code / Кодекс розы (by Kate Quinn, 2021) - аудиокнига на английском

Prologue November 8, 1947 London The enigma arrived in the afternoon post, sealed, smudged, and devastating. Osla Kendall stood, twenty-six years old, dark haired, dimpled, and scowling, in the middle of a tiny Knightsbridge flat that looked as if it had been bombed by Junkers, wearing nothing but a French lace slip and a foul mood as she looked at the piles of silk and satin exploding over every surface. Twelve Days Until the Wedding of the Century! this morning’s Tatler had gushed. Osla worked for the Tatler; she’d had to write the whole ghastly column. What are YOU going to wear? Osla picked up a rose satin gown whorled with crystal beading. “What about you?” she asked it. “Do you say ‘I look simply smashing and I couldn’t care less that he’s marrying someone else’?” Etiquette lessons at finishing school never touched that one. Whatever the dress, everyone in the congregation would know that before the bride came along, Osla and the bridegroom were— A knock sounded. Osla flung on a robe to answer it. Her flat was tiny, all she could afford on her Tatler salary if she wanted to live alone and be close to the center of things. “Darling, no maid? No doorman?” Her mother had been appalled. “Move in with me until you find a husband. You don’t need a job.” But after sharing bedrooms with billet-mates all through the war, Osla would have lived in a boot cupboard as long as she could call it her own. “Post’s come, Miss Kendall.” The landlady’s spotty daughter greeted her at the door, eyes going at once to the rose gown slung over Osla’s arm. “Oooh, are you wearing that to the royal wedding? You look scrummy in pink!” It’s not enough to look scrummy, Osla thought, taking her bundle of letters. I want to outshine a princess, an actual born-to-the-tiara princess, and the fact is, I can’t. “Stop that,” she told herself as soon as she’d shut the door on the landlady’s daughter. “Do not fall in the dismals, Osla Kendall.” All over Britain, women were planning what they’d wear for the most festive occasion since V-E Day. Londoners would queue for hours to see the flower-decked wedding carriages roll past—and Osla had an invitation to Westminster Abbey itself. If she wasn’t grateful for that, she’d be just like those ghastly Mayfair moaners blithering on about how tiresome it was attending the social event of the century; what a bother getting the diamonds out of the bank, oh, woe is me to be so tediously privileged. “It’ll be topping,” Osla said through gritted teeth, coming back to her bedroom and chucking the rose dress over a lamp. “Simply topping.” Seeing London swanning about in banners and confetti, wedding fever whisking away November chill and postwar gloom . . . the fairy-tale union of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary and her handsome Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (formerly Prince Philip of Greece) would mark the dawn of a new age, hopefully one where ration laws were finally swatted down and you could slather all the butter you wanted on your scones. Osla was all in favor of ushering this new era in with a slap-up celebration—after all, she’d achieved her own fairy-tale ending by any woman’s standards. An honorable term of service during the war, even if she could never, ever talk about it; a flat in Knightsbridge paid for by her own salary; a wardrobe crammed with gowns all in the latest go; a job writing entertaining fluff for the Tatler. And a fianc? who had put a sparkling emerald on her finger; don’t forget him. No, Osla Kendall had no excuse to get in a blue funk. All the business with Philip had been years ago, after all. But if she could have cooked up an excuse to get out of London—found some way to be geographically elsewhere (the Sahara desert, the wastes of the North Pole, anywhere)—during the moment Philip bent his golden head and made his vows to England’s future queen, Osla would have taken it in a jiff. Ruffling a hand through disordered dark curls, she flipped through the post. Invitations, bills . . . and one square, smudged envelope. No letter inside, just a torn sheet of paper with a block of scribbled nonsense letters. The world tilted for a moment, and Osla was back: the smell of coke stoves and wet wool jumpers instead of furniture polish and tissue paper; the scratch of pencils rather than the hoot of London traffic. What does Klappenschrank mean, Os? Who’s got their German dictionary? Osla didn’t stop to wonder who’d sent the paper—the old pathways in her mind fired up without a hitch, the ones that said, Don’t ask questions, just get on with it. She was already running her fingers along the square of scribbled letters. Vigen?re cipher, a woman’s soft voice said in her memory. Here’s how to crack it using a key. Though it can be done without . . . “Not by me,” Osla muttered. She hadn’t been one of the boffins who could crack ciphers with a pencil stub and a little sideways thinking. The envelope bore a postmark she didn’t recognize. No signature. No address. The letters of the cipher message were so hastily slashed, it could have been anyone’s handwriting. But Osla turned the paper scrap over and saw a letterhead block, as though the page had been torn from an official pad. CLOCKWELL SANITARIUM “No,” Osla whispered, “no—” But she was already fishing a pencil stub from the nearest drawer. Another memory, a laughing voice intoning, These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away—English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day! Osla knew what the message’s key would be: LASSIES. She bent over the paper, pencil scratching, and slowly the cryptogram gave up its secrets. “STONEGROVE 7602.” Osla drew a breath in as the words crackled along the telephone wires all the way from Yorkshire. Astounding how you could recognize a voice in two words, even when you hadn’t heard it in years. “It’s me,” Osla finally said. “Did you get it?” Pause. “Goodbye, Osla,” her old friend said coolly. No who is this—she knew, too. “Do not hang up on me, Mrs.—well, whatever your name is now.” “Temper, Os. Feeling out of sorts because you’re not the one marrying a prince in two weeks?” Osla caught her lip in her teeth before she could snap back. “I’m not faffing about here. Did you get the letter or not?” “The what?” “The Vigen?re. Mine mentions you.” “I’m just home from a seaside weekend. I haven’t looked through the post yet.” There was a distant rustle of paper. “Look, why are you ringing me? I don’t—” “It’s from her, you understand me? From the asylum.” A flat, stunned silence. “It can’t be,” the reply came at last. Osla knew they were both thinking of their former friend. The third point in their shining wartime trio. More rustling, a tearing sound, then Osla heard a breath and knew that far away in Yorkshire, another block of code had come out of its envelope. “Break it, the way she showed us. The key is lassies.” “‘English lassies rustling papers through the sodden—’” Breaking off before the next word. Secrecy was too much a habit with them both to say anything significant over a telephone line. Live seven years with the Official Secrets Act round your neck like a noose, and you got used to curbing every word and thought. Osla heard a pencil working on the other end and found herself pacing, three steps across the room, three steps back. The heaps of gowns across the bedroom looked like cheap pirate’s loot, gaudy and half-submerged in the wreckage of tissue and cardboard, memories and time. Three girls laughing, doing up each other’s buttons in a cramped spare bedroom: Did you hear there’s a dance in Bedford? An American band, they’ve got all the new Glenn Miller tunes . . . The voice came at last from Yorkshire, uneasy and mulish. “We don’t know it’s her.” “Don’t be daft, of course it’s her. The stationery, it’s from where she—” Osla chose her words carefully. “Who else would demand our help?” Pure fury in the words that came spitting back. “I don’t owe her one bloody thing.” “She clearly thinks differently.” “Who knows what she thinks? She’s insane, remember?” “She had a breakdown. That doesn’t mean she went loony.” “She’s been in an asylum nearly three and a half years.” Flatly. “We have no idea what she’s like now. She certainly sounds loony—these things she’s alleging . . .” There was no way they could voice, on a public line, what their former friend was alleging. Osla pressed her fingertips to her eyes. “We’ve got to meet. We can’t discuss this any other way.” Her former friend’s voice was full of broken glass. “Go to hell, Osla Kendall.” “We served there together, remember?” On the other end of Britain, the handset slammed down. Osla lowered her own with shaky calm. Three girls during a war, she thought. Once the best of friends. Until D-Day, the fatal day, when they had splintered apart and become two girls who couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and one who had disappeared into a madhouse. Inside the Clock Far away, a gaunt woman stared out the window of her cell and prayed to be believed. She had very little hope. She lived in a house of the mad, where truth became madness and madness, truth. Welcome to Clockwell. Life here was like a riddle—a riddle she’d heard during the war, in a wonderland called Bletchley Park: “If I was to ask what direction a clock’s hands go, what would you say?” “Um,” she had answered, flustered. “Clockwise?” “Not if you’re inside the clock.” I’m inside the clock now, she thought. Where everything runs backward and no one will ever believe a word I say. Except—maybe—the two women she had betrayed, who had betrayed her, who had once been her friends. Please, the woman in the asylum prayed, looking south, where her ciphered messages had flown like fragile paper birds. Believe me. Eight Years Ago December 1939 Chapter 1 I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six, dressed in black satin with a string of pearls,’” Mab Churt read aloud. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said, you silly twit.” “What are you reading?” her mother asked, flipping through an old magazine. “Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.” Mab turned a page. She was taking a break from her dog-eared list of “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady”—not that Mab was a lady, or particularly well-read, but she intended to be both. After plowing through number 56, The Return of the Native (ugh, Thomas Hardy), Mab figured she’d earned a dip into something enjoyable like Rebecca. “The heroine’s a drip and the hero’s one of those broody men who bullies you and it’s supposed to be appealing. But I can’t put it down, somehow.” Maybe just the fact that when Mab envisioned herself at thirty-six, she was definitely wearing black satin and pearls. There was also a Labrador lying at her feet, in this dream, and a room lined with books she actually owned, rather than dog-eared copies from the library. Lucy was in this dream too, rosy in a plum-colored gym slip, the kind girls wore when they went to some expensive day school and rode ponies. Mab looked up from Rebecca to watch her little sister canter her fingers over imaginary fences: Lucy, nearly four years old and too skinny for Mab’s liking, dressed in a grubby jumper and skirt, forever pulling off her socks. “Lucy, stop that.” Tugging the sock back up over Lucy’s foot. “It’s too cold to be running around barefoot like a Dickens orphan.” Mab had done Dickens last year, numbers 26 through 33, plowing through chapters on her tea breaks. Blech, Martin Chuzzlewit. “Ponies don’t wear socks,” Lucy said severely. She was mad for horses; every Sunday Mab took her to Hyde Park to watch the riders. Oh, Lucy’s eyes when she saw those burnished little girls trotting past in their jodhpurs and boots. Mab yearned to see Lucy perched on a well-groomed Shetland. “Ponies don’t wear socks, but little girls do,” she said. “Or they catch cold.” “You played barefoot all your life, and you never caught cold.” Mab’s mother shook her head. She’d given Mab her height, an inch shy of six feet, but Mab stretched into her height with lifted chin and squared shoulders, and Mrs. Churt always slouched. The cigarette between her lips waggled as she murmured aloud from an old issue of the Bystander. “‘Two 1939 debs, Osla Kendall and the Honorable Guinevere Brodrick, had Ian Farquhar to chat to them between races.’ Look at that mink on the Kendall girl . . .” Mab cast an eye over the page. Her mother found it all enthralling—which daughter of Lord X curtsied to the queen, which sister of Lady Y appeared at Ascot in violet taffeta—but Mab studied the society pages like an instruction manual: what ensembles could be copied on a shopgirl budget? “I wonder if there’ll be a Season next year, what with the war.” “Most debs’ll be joining the Wrens, I reckon. It’s the Land Army or the ATS for folks like us, but posh girls all go for the Women’s Royal Naval Service. They say they got the uniform designed by Molyneux, him who dresses Greta Garbo and the Duchess of Kent . . .” Mab frowned. There were uniforms everywhere these days—so far, the only sign there even was a war. She’d been standing in this same East London flat, smoking tensely alongside her mother as they listened to the radio announcement from Downing Street, feeling chilly and strange as Chamberlain’s weary voice intoned, “This country is at war with Germany.” But since then, there’d hardly been a peep from the Huns. Her mother was reading aloud again. “‘The Honorable Deborah Mitford on a paddock seat with Lord Andrew Cavendish.’ Look at that lace, Mabel . . .” “It’s Mab, Mum.” If she was stuck with Churt, she wasn’t ruddy well putting up with Mabel. Plowing her way through Romeo and Juliet (number 23 on Mab’s list), she had run across Mercutio’s “I see Queen Mab hath been with you!” and plucked it out on the spot. “Queen Mab.” That sounded like a girl who wore pearls, bought her little sister a pony, and married a gentleman. Not that Mab had any fantasies about dukes in disguise or millionaires with Mediterranean yachts—life wasn’t a novel like Rebecca. No mysterious moneyed hero was going to swoop a Shoreditch girl off her feet, no matter how well-read. But a gentleman, some nice, comfortable man with a decent education and a good profession—yes, a husband like that was within reach. He was out there. Mab just had to meet him. “Mab!” Her mother shook her head, amused. “Who d’you think you are, then?” “Someone who can do better than Mabel.” “You and your better. What’s good enough for the rest of us isn’t good enough for you?” No, Mab thought, knowing better than to say so, because she’d come to learn that people didn’t like your wanting more than you had. She’d grown up fifth of six children all crammed together in this cramped flat that smelled of fried onions and regret, a toilet that had to be shared with two other families—she’d be damned if she’d ever be ashamed of it, but she’d be doubly damned if it was enough. Was it such a terrible thing, wanting to do more than work in a factory until you got married? Wanting more in a husband than one of the local factory workers, who would probably drink too much and eventually run out altogether like Mab’s dad? Mab never tried to tell her family they could make more of themselves; it was fine with her if they were happy with what they had, so why couldn’t they leave her alone? “You think you’re too good to work?” Mum had demanded when Mab protested leaving school at fourteen. “All these kids around and your father gone—” “I’m not too good to work,” Mab had flashed back. “But I’m going to work for something.” Even at fourteen, laboring at the grocer’s and dodging the clerks who pinched her bum, she’d been looking ahead. She got a clerk’s post and studied how the better customers talked and dressed. She learned how to carry herself, how to look people in the eye. After a year’s scrutiny of the girls who worked the counters at Selfridges, she walked through those double doors on Oxford Street in a cheap suit and good shoes that had taken half a year’s wages, and landed herself a job selling powder compacts and scent. “Aren’t you lucky,” Mum had said, as if it hadn’t taken any work at all. And Mab wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. She’d just finished a scrimped-for secretarial course, and by the time she turned twenty-two early next year she intended to be sitting behind some shiny desk, taking dictation and surrounded by people who said “Good morning, Miss Churt” instead of “Oi, Mabel!” “What are you going to do with all that planning?” her mother asked. “Get yourself a fancy boyfriend to pick up the tab for a few dinners?” “I’ve no interest in fancy boyfriends.” As far as Mab was concerned, love stories were for novels. Love wasn’t the point—even marriage wasn’t the point, not really. A good husband might have been the fastest way up the ladder toward safety and prosperity, but it wasn’t the only way. Better to live an old maid with a shiny desk and a salary in the bank, proudly achieved through the sweat of her own efforts, than end up disappointed and old before her time thanks to long factory hours and too much childbirth. Anything was better than that. Mab glanced at the clock. Time for work. “Give me a kiss, Luce. How’s that finger?” Mab examined the upheld knuckle where Lucy had run a splinter yesterday. “Good as new. Goodness, you’re grubby . . .” Wiping Lucy’s cheeks with a fresh handkerchief. “A little dirt never hurt anyone,” Mrs. Churt said. “I’ll draw you a bath when I get home.” Mab kissed Lucy, fighting irritation at her mother. She’s tired, that’s all. Mab still winced to remember how furious Mum had been, enduring such a late addition to a family that already boasted five children. “I’m too old to be chasing after babies,” Mum had sighed, watching Lucy crawl about the floor like a crab. Still, there hadn’t exactly been anything they could do about it except manage. For a little while longer, anyway, Mab thought. If she landed a good husband she’d wheedle him into helping her sister, so Lucy would never have to leave school for a job at fourteen. If he’d give her that, Mab would never ask for anything else. Cold slapped her cheeks as she hurried out of the flat into the street. Five days until Christmas, but no snow yet. Two girls in Auxiliary Territorial Service uniforms hurried past, and Mab wondered where she’d sign up if service became compulsory . . . “Fancy a walk, darling?” A fellow in RAF uniform fell into step beside her. “I’m on leave, show a fellow a good time.” Mab shot him the glance she’d perfected at fourteen, a ferocious stare leveled from below very straight, very black brows, then sped her pace. You could join the WAAF, she thought, reminded by the fellow’s uniform that the Royal Air Force had a Women’s Auxiliary branch. Better than being a Land Girl, stuck shoveling cow shit in Yorkshire. “Come on, that’s no way to treat a man going to war. Let's have a kiss . . .” He sneaked an arm around her waist, squeezing. Mab smelled beer, hair cream, and an ugly flicker of memory pushed upward. She shoved it down, fast, and her voice came out more of a snarl than she intended. “Bugger off—” And she kicked the pilot in the shins with swift, hard efficiency. He yelped, staggering on the icy cobbles. Mab pried his hand off her hip and headed for the Tube, ignoring the things he called after her, shaking off the shiver of memory. Silver linings—the streets might have been full of handsy soldiers, but plenty of soldiers wanted to take a girl to the altar, not just to bed. If there was anything war brought in its wake, it was hasty weddings. Mab had already seen it in Shoreditch: brides saying their vows without even waiting for a secondhand wedding dress, anything to get that ring on their finger before their fianc?s went off to fight. And well-read gentlemen rushed off to war every bit as fast as Shoreditch men. Mab certainly wasn’t going to call the war a good thing—she’d read her Wilfred Owen and Francis Gray, even if war poetry had been deemed too indelicate for “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady.” But she’d have had to be an idiot not to realize that war was going to change her world beyond rationing. Maybe she wouldn’t need to get a secretarial post after all. Could there be war work somewhere in London for a girl who’d come tops in typing and shorthand, some post where Mab could do her part for king and country, meet a nice man or two, and look after her family? A shop door banged open, releasing brief strains of “The Holly and the Ivy” from a radio inside. By Christmas of 1940, Mab thought, things might be entirely different. This year, things had to change. War meant change. Chapter 2 I need a job. It had been Osla’s first thought, returning to England at the end of ’39. “Darling, aren’t you supposed to be in Montreal?” her friend Sally Norton had exclaimed. Osla and the Honorable Sarah Norton shared a godfather and had been presented at court a Season apart; Sally had been the first person Osla telephoned when she stepped back on English soil. “I thought your mother shipped you off to the cousins when war broke out.” “Sal, do you think anything was going to keep me from finagling my way home?” It had taken Osla six weeks, seething and furious, to scheme an escape after her mother had shipped her to Montreal. Some shameless flirtation with a few influential men for travel permits, some creative fibbing to her Canadian cousins, a tiny bit of fraud—that air ticket from Montreal to Lisbon had been much better off with Osla than its original owner—and a boat ride out of Portugal later, voil?. “Goodbye, Canada!” Osla sang, tossing her traveling case into the taxi. Osla might have been born in Montreal, but she didn’t remember anything before arriving in England at the age of four, trailing behind a recently divorced mother along with the trunks and the scandal. Canada was beautiful, but England was home. Better to be bombed at home among friends than be safe and corroding in exile. “I need a job,” Osla told Sally. “Well, first I need a hairdresser because that horrid boat from Lisbon gave me lice, and I look like a dog’s dinner. Then I need a job. Mamma’s in such a pelter she’s cut off my allowance, for which I don’t blame her. Besides, we’ve got to poker up, as the Yanks might say, and do our bit for the war.” The old sceptred isle in her hour of need, and so forth. You couldn’t be booted out of as many boarding schools as Osla Kendall without picking up a good bit of Shakespeare. “The Wrens—” “Don’t talk slush, Sal, everyone expects girls like us to join the WRNS.” Osla had been called a silly deb enough times for it to sting—a burbling belle, a champagne Shirley, a mindless Mayfair muffin. Well, this Mayfair muffin was going to show everyone a society girl could get her hands dirty. “Let’s join the Land Army. Or make airplanes, how about that?” “Do you know anything about making airplanes?” Sally had laughed, echoing the dubious labor superintendent at the Hawker Siddeley factory in Colnbrook, where they applied several days later. “I know how to take the rotor arm off an automobile to save it being stolen by Huns if we get invaded,” Osla retorted pertly. And in no time at all she was clapped into a boiler suit, drilling eight hours a day in the factory training room beside fifteen other girls. Maybe it was dull work but she was earning a wage, living independently for the first time in her life. “I thought we’d be working on Spitfires and flirting with pilots,” Sally complained across the workbench on New Year’s Eve. “Not just drilling, drilling, drilling.” “No grousing,” the instructor warned, overhearing. “There’s a war on, you know!” Everyone was saying that now, Osla had observed. Milk run out? There’s a war on! Ladder in your stockings? There’s a war on! “Don’t tell me you don’t despise this stuff,” Sally muttered, banging her Dural sheet, and Osla eyed her own with loathing. Dural made the outer skins for the Hurricanes flown by RAF squadrons (if RAF squadrons actually flew any missions in this war where nothing yet was happening), and Osla had spent the last two months learning to drill it, file it, and pot-rivet it. The metal fought and spat and gave off shavings that clogged her hair and nose so thickly her bathwater turned gray. She hadn’t known it was possible to cherish a hatred this profound for a metal alloy, but there you were. “You’d better save some swoony RAF pilot’s life when you’re finally slapped onto the side of a Hurricane,” she told the sheet, leveling her drill at it like a gunslinger in a cowboy film. “Thank God we got tonight off for New Year’s,” Sally said when the clock finally ticked over to six in the evening and everyone streamed for the doors. “What dress did you bring?” “The green satin. I can slither into it at my mother’s suite at Claridge’s.” “She’s forgiven you for bunking out of Montreal?” “More or less. She’s chuffed about everything these days because she’s got a new beau.” Osla just hoped he wouldn’t be stepfather number four. “Speaking of admirers, there’s a gorgeous fellow I promised to introduce you to.” Sally threw Osla an arch look. “He’s the goods.” “He’d better be dark. Blond men simply aren’t to be trusted.” They pelted laughing through the factory gate toward the road. With only twenty-four hours off every eighth day, there was no point wasting a minute of those precious hours heading back to their digs; they hitched a ride straight into London in an ancient Alvis, its headlights fitted with slotted masks to meet blackout regulations, driven by a pair of lieutenants who were already absolutely kippered. They were all singing “Anything Goes” by the time the Alvis pulled up at Claridge’s, and as Sally lingered to flirt, Osla skipped up the front steps toward the hall porter who for years had been a sort of butler, uncle, and social secretary combined. “Hello, Mr. Gibbs.” “Good evening, Miss Kendall. You’re in town with Miss Norton? Lord Hartington was asking after her.” Osla lowered her voice. “Sally’s fixing me up with someone. Did she give you a hint?” “She did indeed. He’s inside—Main Lounge, Royal Navy cadet uniform.” Mr. Gibbs looked judicious. “Shall I tell him you’ll be down in an hour, once you’ve changed?” “If he doesn’t love me in a boiler suit, he’s not worth dressing up for in the first place.” Sally came dashing up and started interrogating Gibbs about Billy Hartington, and Osla sauntered inside. She rather enjoyed the stuffy looks from men in their evening tails and women in their satin gowns as she breezed over the art deco floors in a grubby boiler suit. Look at me! she wanted to shout. I’ve just finished an eight-hour day in an airplane factory and now I’m going to do the conga round the Caf? de Paris until dawn. Look at me, Osla Kendall, eighteen years old and finally useful. She spotted him at the bar in his cadet uniform, turned away so she couldn’t see his face. “You wouldn’t happen to be my date, would you?” Osla asked that set of rather splendid shoulders. “Mr. Gibbs says you are, and anybody who’s ever been to Claridge’s knows Mr. Gibbs is never wrong.” He turned, and Osla’s first thought was, Sally, you rat, you might have warned me! Actually, that was her second thought. Osla’s first thought was that even though she’d never met him, she knew exactly who he was. She’d seen his name in the Tatler and the Bystander; she knew who his family was and the degree to which he was related to the king. She knew he was exactly her age, was a cadet at Dartmouth, and had returned from Athens at the king’s request when war broke out. “You must be Osla Kendall,” said Prince Philip of Greece. “Must I?” She repressed the urge to pat at her hair. If she’d known she had a date with a prince, she would have taken a moment to brush the Dural shavings out of her curls. “Mr. Gibbs said you’d be along right about now, and Mr. Gibbs is never wrong.” The prince leaned against the bar, tanned golden, hair glinting like a coin, eyes very blue and direct. He took in her dirty boiler suit and gave a slow grin. Oh, my, Osla thought. That’s a smile. “Absolutely smashing getup,” he said. “Is that what all the girls are wearing this season?” “It’s what Osla Kendall is wearing this season.” She struck a magazine pose, refusing to regret the green satin gown in her bag. “I will not be confined within the weak lists of a country’s fashions—” “Henry V,” he said promptly. “Oooh, you know your Shakespeare.” “They crammed a bit into me at Gordonstoun.” He nodded at the bartender, and a wide-brimmed coupe frothing with champagne materialized at Osla’s elbow. “In between all the hiking and sailing.” “Of course you sail—” “Why ‘of course’?” “You look like a Viking; you must have put some time in on an oar or two. Have you got a longship parked round the corner?” “My uncle Dickie’s Vauxhall. Sorry to disappoint.” “I see you two are getting along,” Sally laughed, slipping up beside them. “Os, our godfather”—Lord Mountbatten—“is Phil’s uncle, so that’s the connection. Uncle Dickie said Phil didn’t know anyone in London, and did I know a nice girl who could squire him around—” “A nice girl,” Osla groaned, taking a slug of champagne. “There’s nothing more deadly than being called nice.” “I don’t think you’re nice,” the prince said. “Don’t you say the sweetest things?” Tipping her head back. “What am I, then?” “The prettiest thing I’ve ever seen in a boiler suit.” “You should see me pot-rivet a seam.” “Anytime, princess.” “Are we going dancing or not?” Sally complained. “Come upstairs and change, Os!” Prince Philip looked speculative. “If I made you a dare—” “Careful,” Osla warned. “I don’t back down from dares.” “She’s famous for it,” Sally agreed. “At Miss Fenton’s, the upper-form girls dared her to put itching powder in the headmistress’s knickers.” Philip looked down at Osla from his full six feet, grinning again. “Did you do it?” “Of course. Then I stole her suspender belt, climbed the chapel roof, and hung it from the cross. She kicked up quite a shindy over that. What’s your dare?” “Come out dancing as you are,” the prince challenged. “Don’t change into whatever satin thing you’ve got in that bag.” “You’re on.” Osla tossed down the rest of her champagne, and they piled laughing out of the Main Lounge. Mr. Gibbs gave Osla a wink as he opened the doors. She took one gulp of the icy, starry night outside—you could see stars all over London now, with the blackout—and looked over her shoulder at Prince Philip, who had paused to tilt his head up, too. She felt the champagne fizzing in her blood and reached into her pack. “Am I allowed to wear these?” She pulled out her dancing shoes: green satin sandals with glitters of diamant?. “A princess can’t conga without her glass slippers.” “I’ll allow it.” Prince Philip tugged the sandals away, then picked up her hand and placed it on his shoulder. “Steady . . .” And he knelt down right there on the front steps of Claridge’s to undo Osla’s boots, waiting for her to step out of them, then peeling off her wool socks. He slid her satin sandals on, tanned fingers dark against her white ankles in the faint moonlight. He looked up then, eyes shadowed. “Oh, seriously.” Osla grinned down at him. “How many girls have you tried this on, sailor?” He was laughing too, unable to hold his intent expression. He laughed so hard he nearly toppled over, forehead coming for a moment against Osla’s knee, and she touched his bright hair. His fingers were still braceleted around her ankle, warm in the cold night. She saw how passersby were staring at the girl in the boiler suit on the front steps of Mayfair’s best hotel, the man in naval uniform on one knee before her, and gave Philip’s shoulder a playful smack. “Enough swooning.” He rose. “As you wish.” They danced the New Year in at the Caf? de Paris, tripping down the lush carpeted stairs to the underground club. “I didn’t know they did the foxtrot in Greece!” Osla shouted over the blare of trombones, whirling through Philip’s hands. He was a fast, fierce dancer. “I’m no Greek . . .” He spun her, and Osla was too out of breath to continue until the music relaxed to a dreamy waltz. Philip slowed, raking his disordered hair back into place before gathering Osla up with one arm about her waist. Osla put her hand in his, and they fell easily in rhythm. “What do you mean, you’re no Greek?” she asked as couples bumped and laughed all around them. The Caf? de Paris had a warm intimacy that no other nightclub in London could match, maybe because it was twenty feet belowground. Music always seemed louder here, champagne colder, blood warmer, whispers more immediate. Philip shrugged. “I was carried out of Corfu in a fruit box when I wasn’t even a year old, steps ahead of a horde of revolutionaries. I’ve not spent much time there, don’t speak much of the language, and won’t have any cause to.” He meant he wouldn’t be king, Osla knew. She had some vague knowledge that the Greek royals had regained their throne, but Philip was far down the line of succession, and with his English grandfather and English uncle, he looked and sounded like any royal cousin. “You sound more English than I do.” “You’re Canadian—” “—and none of the girls I came to court with would ever let me forget it. But until I was ten, I had a German accent.” “Are you a Hun spy?” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know any military secrets worth seducing me for, but I hope that doesn’t put you off.” “You’re very ill behaved for a prince. A positive menace.” “All the best ones are. Why the German accent?” “My mother divorced my father and came to England when I was small.” Osla revolved under his hand in a spin, came back into the curve of his arm again. “She stuck me in the country with a German governess, where I spoke only German Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays, and only French Tuesdays-Thursdays-Saturdays. Until I went to boarding school, I only spoke English one day a week, and everything with a German accent.” “A Canadian who sounds like a German and lives in England.” Philip switched to German himself. “Which country really has a claim on the heart of Osla Kendall?” “England f?r immer, mein Prinz,” Osla replied, and switched back before they really could be accused of being Hun spies in this room full of tipsy, patriotic Londoners. “Your German’s perfect. Did you speak it at home?” He laughed, but the laugh had a sharp edge. “What do you mean, ‘home’? Right now I’m on a camp bed in Uncle Dickie’s dining room. Home is where there’s an invitation or a cousin.” “I know something about that.” He looked skeptical. “Right now I share digs with Sally. Before that, there were some dreadful cousins in Montreal who didn’t want me. Before that, my godfather let me stay with him while I did the Season.” Osla shrugged. “My mother has a permanent suite in Claridge’s, where I’m de trop if I stay longer than a night, and my father died years ago. I couldn’t tell you where home is.” She smiled, very bright. “I’m certainly not going to get in a flap about it! All my friends who still live at home are dying to get away, so who’s the lucky one?” “Right now?” Philip’s hand curled against her waist. “Me.” They waltzed in silence for a while, bodies moving in perfect ease. The dance floor was sticky with spilled champagne; the band dragged. It was near four in the morning, but the floor was still packed. No one wanted to stop, and that included Osla. She looked over Philip’s shoulder and saw a poster pinned to the wall, one of the ubiquitous victory posters that had sprouted like mushrooms all over London: WE BEAT ’EM BEFORE, WE’LL BEAT ’EM AGAIN! “I wish the war would get going,” Osla said. “This waiting . . . we know they’re going to come at us. Part of me wishes they’d just do it. The sooner it’s begun, the sooner it’s over.” “I suppose,” he said shortly, and moved so his cheek was at her hair and they weren’t eye to eye anymore. Osla could have kicked herself. All well and good to say you wished the war would kick off when you, being one of the gentler sex, wouldn’t be the one fighting it. Osla believed everyone should fight for king and country, but she was also aware that this was a very theoretical position when you were female. “I do want to fight,” Philip said into Osla’s hair as though reading her mind. “Go to sea, do my bit. Mainly so people will stop wondering if I’m secretly a Hun.” “What?” “Three of my sisters married Nazis. Not that they were Nazis when they first . . . Well. I’d like to shut up the fellows who think I’m slightly suspect because of the family sympathies.” “I’d like to shut up the ones who think a dizzy debutante can’t possibly do anything useful. Do you go to sea soon?” “I don’t know. If I had my way, I’d be on a battleship tomorrow. Uncle Dickie’s seeing what he can do. It could be next week, it could be a year.” Make it a year, Osla thought, feeling his shoulder firm and angular under her hand. “So, you’ll be at sea hunting U-boats, and I’ll be banging rivets in Slough—not too shabby for a silly socialite and a slightly suspect prince.” “You could do more than bang rivets.” He gathered her closer, not taking his cheek from her hair. “Have you asked Uncle Dickie if there’s anything at the War Office for a girl with your language skills?” “I’d rather build Hurricanes, get my hands dirty. Do something more important for the fight than bang typewriter keys.” “The fight—is that why you finagled your way back from Montreal?” “If your country is in danger and you’re of age to stand and defend it, you do so,” Osla stated. “You don’t cash in on your Canadian passport—” “Or your Greek passport—” “—and bunk out for a safer port of call. It’s just not on.” “Couldn’t agree more.” The waltz ended. Osla stepped back, looked up at the prince. “I should get back to my digs,” she said regretfully. “I’m knackered.” Philip motored Osla and the yawning Sally back to Old Windsor, driving as ferociously as he danced. He helped Sally out of the backseat; she gave his cheek a sleepy peck and negotiated her way across the dark street. Osla heard a splash and a yelp, then Sally’s voice called back sourly: “Mind your shoes, Os, there’s a lake in front of our door . . .” “Better put my boots back on,” Osla laughed, reaching for her diamant? buckles, but Philip swung her up into his arms. “Can’t risk the glass slippers, princess.” “Oh, really, now,” Osla hooted, settling her arms about his neck. “How slick can you get, sailor?” She could almost feel his grin as he carried her through the dark. Osla’s boots and evening bag dangled against his back, hanging from her elbow, and he smelled of aftershave and champagne. Philip’s hair was mussed and sweat-damp from dancing, curling softly against her fingers where her hands linked at the back of his neck. He splashed through the puddle, and before he could set Osla down on the step, she brushed her lips against his. “Gets it out of the way,” she said, flippant. “So there’s none of that terribly awkward will-we-won’t-we on the step.” “I’ve never had a girl kiss me just to get it out of the way.” His mouth smiled against hers. “At least do it properly . . .” He kissed her again, long and leisurely, still holding her off the step. He tasted like a blue, sun-warmed sea, and at some point Osla dropped her boots into the puddle. At last he set her down, and they stood a moment in the darkness, Osla getting her breath back. “I don’t know when I’ll go to sea,” he said at last. “Before I do, I’d like to see you again.” “Nothing much to do around here. When we aren’t banging Dural, Sal and I eat porridge and muck about with gramophone records. Very dull.” “I don’t imagine you’re as dull as that. In fact, I’ll wager the opposite. I’ll lay odds you’re hard to get over, Osla Kendall.” Any number of light, flirtatious replies sprang to her lips. She had flirted all her life, instinctively, defensively. You play that same game, she thought, looking at Philip. Be charming to all, so no one gets too close. There were always people angling to get close to a pretty brunette whose godfather was Lord Mountbatten and whose father had bequeathed her a massive chunk of Canadian National Railway shares. And Osla was willing to bet there were many more people angling to get close to a handsome prince, even one tarnished by Nazi brothers-in-law. “Come see me any night, Philip,” Osla said simply, playing no games at all, and felt her heart thumping as he touched his fingers to his hat and walked back to the Vauxhall. It was the dawn of 1940, and she had danced in the New Year in a boiler suit and satin sandals with a prince. She wondered what else the year would bring. Chapter 3 June 1940 Mab was doing her best to disappear into her library copy of Vanity Fair, but even Becky Sharp flinging a dictionary out a coach window couldn’t hold her attention when the train leaving London was so crowded, and when the man in the seat opposite was fondling himself through his trouser pocket. “What’s your name?” he’d crooned when Mab dragged her brown cardboard suitcase aboard, and she’d shot him her iciest glare. He’d been forced off to one side when the compartment filled up with men in uniform, most of them trailing hopefully after a stunning brunette in a fur-trimmed coat. But as the train chugged north out of London, the compartment emptied of soldiers stop by stop, and when it was just Mab and the brunette, the fondler began crooning again. “Give us a smile, luv!” Mab ignored him. There was a newspaper on the compartment floor, tracked with muddy boot prints, and she was trying to ignore that too—the headline screamed Dunkirk and disaster. “We’re next,” Mab’s mother had said as Denmark fell, Norway fell, Belgium fell, Holland fell, one after another like boulders rolling inexorably off a cliff. Then ruddy France fell, and Mrs. Churt gave even bleaker shakes of the head. “We’re next,” she said to everyone who would listen, and Mab nearly bit her head off. Mum, would you mind not talking about murdering, raping Huns and what they’re going to do to us? It had been a terrible row, the first of many once Mab had tried to persuade Mum to leave London with Lucy. Just for a while, she said, and Mum retorted, I leave Shoreditch feetfirst, in a box. And that row had been so bad, it was just as well that Mab had received this odd summons a week ago about a post in Buckinghamshire. Lucy didn’t really understand she was going away; when Mab had hugged her tight that morning before departing, she’d just put her head on one side and said “’Night!” which meant See you tonight! I won’t be seeing you tonight, Luce. Mab had never been away from Lucy overnight, not once. Well, Mab would take the train back to London the first day she had off. Whatever this post was, there had to be days off, even in wartime. And maybe her living situation in—what was this town called again?—would be decent enough she could see about moving her family here to the country. Better the middle of nowhere among green fields than soon-to-be-bombed London . . . Mab shuddered and went back to Vanity Fair, where Becky Sharp was headed for a new job in the country too, not appearing to worry much about her homeland’s being invaded. But in Becky’s day it had been Napol?on, and Napol?on didn’t have bloody Messerschmitts, did he? “What’s your name, lovely?” The fondler had switched his attentions to the little brunette in the fur-trimmed coat, who was now the only other passenger in the compartment. His hand began to work away in his pocket. “Just one smile, gorgeous—” The brunette looked up from her own book, flushing pink, and Mab wondered if she’d have to intervene. Normally she abided by a Londoner’s strict rule of keep your nose out of other folks’ business, but the brunette looked like an absolute lamb in the woods. Just the sort of female Mab both slightly resented and also envied—expensively dressed, pampered skin that a gushy novel would describe as alabaster, the sort of pocket-sized figure all women wanted and all men wanted to take a bite out of. The kind of silly overbred debutante, in short, who had grown up riding ponies and wouldn’t have to lift a finger to bag herself a husband of means and education, but was otherwise completely useless. Any Shoreditch girl could handle a train compartment lothario, but this little bit of crumpet was going to get munched right up. Mab laid down Vanity Fair with a thump, irritated with the fondler and rather irritated with the brunette too for needing rescuing. But before she could even snap Look here, you . . . the brunette spoke up. “My goodness, look at the tent in your trousers. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything quite so obvious. Most fellows do something incredibly creative with their hats at this stage.” The man’s hand froze. The brunette put her head to one side, eyes widening innocently. “Is something wrong? You aren’t in pain, are you? Chaps always act like they’re in such pain at this point, I’m nobbled if I know why . . .” The fondler, Mab observed, was red as a beet and had withdrawn his hand from his pocket. “. . . Really, do you need a doctor? You’re looking absolutely in the basket—” The man fled the compartment with a mutter. “Feel better soon!” the little brunette called after him, then looked over at Mab, eyes sparkling. “That fixed him.” She flung one silk-stockinged leg over the other with evident satisfaction. “Nice work,” Mab couldn’t help but say. Not such an easily munched bit of crumpet after all, even if the girl didn’t look a day over eighteen. “If I have to get rid of a fellow like that, I rely on a good icy stare or a kick in the shins.” “I can’t do an icy stare to save my life. This face simply won’t glower. If I try, fellows tell me I look adorable, and there’s nothing to make you flip your wicket like being told you’re adorable when you’re furious. Now, you’re clearly tall, and you’ve got eyebrows like an empress, so I’m sure you have a very impressive glare?” Tilting her head in invitation. Mab had been about to retreat into her book, but she couldn’t resist. Arching one brow, she looked down her nose and let her lip curl. “Now that’s a slap-up stare to freeze the marrow!” The brunette put out a hand. “Osla Kendall.” Mab shook it, surprised to feel calluses. “Mab Churt.” “Mab, that’s topping,” Osla approved. “I was going to guess Boadicea or Scarlett O’Hara; someone who could drive a chariot with knives or shoot Yankees on staircases. I got stuck with Osla because my mother went to Oslo and said it was too too utterly divine. What she meant was that I was conceived there. So now I’m named after a city that is being crawled over by Germans, and I’m trying not to take it as a prediction.” “Could be worse. What if you’d been conceived in Birmingham?” Mab was still trying to make sense of the girl’s work-roughened hands in contrast to her Mayfair drawl. “Surely those calluses didn’t come from finishing school.” “From building Hurricanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory in Colnbrook.” Osla saluted. “Who knows what I’ll be doing now. I was called to interview in London, and then the strangest summons arrived telling me to go to Bletchley station—” “But that’s where I’m going.” Startled, Mab dug out the letter in her handbag, much puzzled over when it had arrived in Shoreditch. Turning, she saw an identical letter in Osla’s hand. They held the sheets side by side. Osla’s letter read: Please report to Station X at Bletchley station, Buckinghamshire, in seven days’ time. Your postal address is Box 111, c/o the Foreign Office. That is all you need to know. Commander Denniston Mab’s was more official—I am desired by the Chief Clerk to inform you that you have been selected for the appointment of Temporary Clerk . . . you should attend for duty in four days’ time, traveling by the 10:40 a.m. train from London (Euston) to the third stop (Bletchley)—but the destination was clearly the same. “Curiouser and curiouser.” Osla looked thoughtful. “Well, I’m dished—never so much as heard of Bletchley or Station X.” “Me either,” said Mab, and wished she’d said “Nor I.” Osla’s polished voice and breezy slang were making her self-conscious. “I had an interview in London, too—they asked me about my typing and shorthand. They must’ve got my name from the secretarial course I took last year.” “They didn’t ask me about typing at all. This hatchet of a woman tested my German and my French, then told me to run along home. About two weeks later, this.” Osla tapped the letter. “What can they want us for?” Mab shrugged. “I’ll put my hours in for the war doing whatever they want. What matters to me is earning a wage to send home, and being close enough to London to visit every day off.” “Don’t be so prosy! We could be walking right into our own Agatha Christie novel here, The Mystery of Station X . . .” Mab adored Agatha Christie. “Murder at Station X: A Hercule Poirot Mystery . . .” “I prefer Miss Marple,” Osla said decidedly. “She’s exactly like every spinster governess I ever had. Just with arsenic instead of chalk.” “I like Poirot.” Mab crossed her legs, aware that her shoes, no matter how carefully she’d shined them, looked cheap next to Osla’s hand-stitched pumps. At least my legs are just as good as hers, Mab couldn’t help thinking. Better. That felt rather petty and mean-spirited, but Osla Kendall was so clearly a girl who had everything . . . “Hercule Poirot would give a girl like me a fair hearing,” she went on. “The Miss Marples of the world take one look and decide I’m a tart.” When the train drew to the third stop at last, Osla whooped “Tallyho!” but Mab’s hopes soon waned. Half a mile of suitcase dragging from the dreary, crowded station led them to an eight-foot chained fence topped by rolls of barbed wire. The gates were manned by two bored-looking guardsmen. “Can’t come in here,” one said as Mab rummaged for her papers. “Got no pass.” Mab brushed her hair out of her face. This morning she’d set it into perfect waves with kirby grips, and now she was sweaty and annoyed and her waves were falling out. “Look here, we don’t know what we’re supposed to—” “Come to the right place, then,” said the guard in a country accent she could barely understand. “Most of ’em here look as if they didn’t know where they was, and God knows what they’m doing.” Mab gave him the icy stare, but Osla stepped forward, all wide eyes and trembling lips, and the older guard took pity. “I’ll escort you up to the main house. If you want to know where you are,” he added, “you’re at Bletchley Park.” “What is that?” Mab demanded. The younger guard sniggered. “It’s the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain.” THE MANSION LOOKED out over a rolling green expanse of lawn and a small lake—redbrick Victorian with a green copper dome, stuck all over with windows and gables like a Christmas pudding studded with glac? cherries. “Lavatory Gothic,” Osla shuddered, but Mab stared enchanted, unable to keep herself from wandering off the path toward the lake. A proper country house and grounds like Thornfield Hall or Manderley, the kind of house that eligible bachelors were always renting in novels. But even here, war had placed its ugly mass-produced boot firmly on both mansion and personnel. Hideous prefabricated huts dotted the grounds, and people rushed haphazardly across the paths—fewer men in uniform than Mab was used to seeing in London, and certainly more women than she was expecting. They hurried between the huts and mansion in tweeds, knits, and abstracted expressions. “They all look like they strayed into a labyrinth with no exit,” Osla observed, following Mab toward the lake as the guard stood looking impatient on the path. “Exactly. Where do you think we—” They both halted. Crawling out of the lake, soaking wet, plastered with reeds, and clutching a tea mug, was a naked man. “Oh, hullo,” he called cheerfully. “New recruits? About bally time. You go on back, David,” he called up to the waiting guard. “I’ll take ’em up to the mansion.” Mab saw with some relief that the man wasn’t entirely naked, just stripped down to his drawers. Above them he had a freckled, concave chest; a face like an amiable gargoyle’s; and hair that even soaking wet was clearly as red as a telephone box. “I’m Talbot, Giles Talbot,” he explained in an Oxbridge drawl, wandering over to a heap of clothes on the bank as Osla and Mab murmured their introductions and tried not to stare. “Took a jump in the lake after Josh Cooper’s tea mug. He chucked it into the reeds, working through some problem or other. Trousers,” Giles Talbot muttered, shaking out his clothes. “If those buggers in Hut 4 hid them again—” “Can you tell us where we’re supposed to go?” Mab interrupted, irritated. “There has to be someone in charge of this madhouse.” “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Giles Talbot buttoned his shirt, then shrugged into an old checked jacket. “Commander Denniston is the closest we’ve got to a warden. Right-ho, follow me.” Hopping first on one foot and then on the other to pull his shoes over bare feet, he set off toward the mansion, shirttails flapping over wet drawers and bare white legs. Mab and Osla looked at each other. “It’s all a front,” Osla whispered. “We’re going to be drugged as soon as we set foot into that hideous house and then sold into durance vile, just you wait.” “If they were trying to lure us into durance vile, they’d send someone more appetizing than a half-naked stork,” Mab said. “What is durance vile, anyway . . .” The mansion’s entrance hall was oak-paneled and spacious, with rooms branching off each side. There was a pegboard with a copy of the London Times pinned up, a Gothic-looking lounge, a grand staircase visible through a pink marble arcade . . . Giles whisked them upstairs into what looked like a bay-windowed bedroom turned private office, bed replaced by cabinets, everything reeking of cigarette smoke. A small harassed-looking man with a professorial forehead looked up from the desk. He didn’t sputter at the sight of Giles’s naked legs, just remarked, “You found Cooper’s tea mug?” “And some new recruits, fresh off the London train. Aren’t they getting prettier? Miss Kendall here could whistle a chap off a branch any day of the week.” Giles beamed at Osla, then looked up at Mab, who topped him by half a head. “Lord, I love a tall woman. You’re not pining for some RAF pilot, are you? Don’t break my heart!” Mab pondered getting out the icy stare but put it away unworn. This entire atmosphere was simply too strange to offend. “You’re a fine one to talk about looks, Talbot. I’ve never seen anything as unappetizing as you lot of skinny Cambridge boffins.” Commander Denniston—at least, that’s who Mab presumed it was—shook his head at Giles’s bare white legs, then looked at Osla and Mab’s identification and letters. “Kendall . . . Churt . . .” “My godfather might have been the one who put my name forward,” Osla prompted. “Lord Mountbatten.” He brightened. “Then Miss Churt will be the one from the London secretarial pool.” He gave back their papers, rising. “Right. You have both been recruited to Bletchley Park, the headquarters of GC and CS.” What’s that? Mab wondered. As if reading her mind, Giles volunteered, “Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society.” Commander Denniston looked pained but plowed on. “You’ll be assigned a hut, and your head of hut will fill you in on your duties. Before that happens, my job is to impress upon you that you will be working in the most secret place in Britain, and all activities here are crucial to the outcome of the war.” He paused. Mab stood frozen, and she could feel Osla at her side equally motionless. Bloody hell, Mab thought. What is this place? He continued. “The work here is so secret that you will be told only what it is necessary for you to know, and you will never seek to find out more. Besides respecting internal security, you will be mindful of external security. You will never mention the name of this place, not to your family or friends. You will find that your colleagues refer to it as BP, and you will do the same. Above all, you will never disclose to anyone the nature of the work that you do here. To reveal the least hint might jeopardize the whole progress of the war.” Another pause. Are they training us to be spies? Mab wondered, astonished. “Should anyone ask, you are doing ordinary clerical work. Make it sound dull, the duller the better.” Osla piped up, “What work will we be doing, sir?” “Good God, girl, have you listened to a single word I’ve said?” Impatience crept into Denniston’s voice. “I don’t know what you will be doing, in any specific way, and I don’t want to know.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two sheets of yellowish paper, laying one in front of each of them. “This is the Official Secrets Act. It clearly states that if you do any of the things I have warned you against, if you disclose the slightest information which could be of use to the enemy, you will be guilty of treason.” The silence was absolute. “And treason,” Commander Denniston finished mildly, “makes you liable to the most extreme penalties of the law. I’m not sure at the moment whether that’s hanging or firing squad.” It couldn’t get any quieter, but Mab felt the silence congeal. She took a deep breath. “Sir, are we allowed to—refuse this post?” He looked startled. “There’s no pistol to your head; this isn’t Berlin. Refuse, and you will simply be ushered off the premises with strict instructions never to mention this place again.” . . . And I’ll never know what really goes on here, Mab thought. He laid two pens before them. “Sign, please. Or not.” Mab took another breath and signed across the bottom. She saw Osla doing the same. “Welcome to BP,” Commander Denniston said with the first smile of the exchange. Just like that, the interview was over. Giles Talbot, still with his damp shirttails flapping, steered them out into the hall. Osla gripped Mab’s hand once the door shut behind them, and Mab wasn’t too proud to grip back. “Wouldn’t take it too seriously if I were you.” Incredibly, Giles was chuckling. “That speech is a knee-weakener the first time you hear it—Denniston was out when it was my turn, and I got the whole harangue from a wing commander who pulled a pistol out of his drawer and said he’d shoot me if I broke the sacred secrecy of et cetera, et cetera. But you get used to it. Come along, let’s get your billets sorted—” Mab halted at the staircase, folding her arms. “Look here, can’t we get a hint now about what this place actually does?” “Isn’t it obvious?” He looked surprised. “GC and CS—we call it Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society because the place is packed with Oxford dons and Cambridge chess champions, but it stands for Government Code and Cypher School.” Mab and Osla must have looked baffled, because he grinned. “We’re breaking German codes.” Chapter 4 The day the Bletchley Park boarders were due to arrive, Beth Finch lost half an hour down the center of a rose. “Really, Bethan, I’ve been calling and calling. How long have you been sniffing that flower?” I wasn’t sniffing it, Beth thought, but didn’t correct her mother. Sniffing a rose was at least normal—roses smelled nice; everybody agreed on that. Not everybody looked at a rose and got entranced not by the scent but by the pattern of it, the way the petals overlapped like stairs winding inward . . . inward . . . she’d run her finger gently along the spiral, moving toward the center, only in her mind there wasn’t a center with stamens. There was just the spiral, going on and on toward infinity. It sounded very poetic—“What lies at the center of a rose?”—but it wasn’t the poetry that entranced Beth, or the scent. It was the pattern. And before she knew it she’d lost half an hour, and her mother was standing there looking cross. “They’ll be here soon, and look at this room!” Mrs. Finch took the bud vase from Beth, placing it on the mantel. “Wipe down the mirror, now. Whoever these girls are, they won’t have anything to complain about in this house. Though who knows what kind of girls are boarding away from home, anyway? Leaving their families for a job—” “There’s a war on,” Beth murmured, but Mrs. Finch had been on a tear since learning that, being in possession of a spare bedroom with two narrow beds, they would be required to billet two females working at nearby Bletchley Park. “Don’t tell me it’s the war. It’s flighty girls taking any excuse to bolt out on their families and get into trouble.” Mrs. Finch moved about the room in small quick motions, straightening the bedside-table doily, tweaking the pillowcase. She and Beth had the same mouse-fair hair, the same nearly invisible brows and lashes, but Beth stood round-shouldered and slight while her mother was imposing, handsome, her bust like a prow. “What kind of war work are they going to be doing in the middle of Bletchley?” “Who knows?” The war had sent such ripples through their sleepy little village: blackout preparations, the call for Air Raid Precautions wardens, Bletchley Park just down the road suddenly a hub of mysterious activity . . . everyone was curious, especially with women coming to work there as well as men. Women were flinging themselves into all sorts of new ventures these days, according to the papers—joining the FANYs to be nurses or shipping overseas with the women’s Royal Navy. Every time Beth tried to think herself patriotically into one of those roles, she broke out in a cold sweat. She knew she’d be expected to do her bit, but she’d volunteer for something behind the scenes, something even utter idiots couldn’t muck up. ARP First Aid, maybe, rolling bandages and making tea. Beth was hopeless at most things. She’d been hearing that all her life, and it was true. “These boarders had better be decent girls,” Mrs. Finch was fretting. “What if we end up with two tarts from Wapping?” “I’m sure not,” Beth soothed. She didn’t even really know what a tart was; it was her mother’s all-purpose condemnation for any female who wore lipstick, smelled of French scent, or read novels . . . Guiltily, Beth felt the weight of her latest library paperback in her pocket. Vanity Fair. “Run out to the post office, Bethan.” Mrs. Finch was the only one to call Beth by her full name. “I can feel one of my headaches coming on . . .” Massaging her temples. “Rinse out a cloth for me first. Then after the post office, the corner store.” “Yes, Mother.” Mrs. Finch patted her shoulder fondly. “Mother’s little helper.” Beth had been hearing that all her life, too. “Bethan is so helpful,” Mrs. Finch loved to tell her friends. “What a comfort to think she’ll be with me when I’m old.” “She might still marry,” the widow down the street had said at the last Women’s Institute meeting. Beth had been making tea in the kitchen, but the old woman’s whisper carried. “Twenty-four years old—that’s not utterly hopeless. She hardly has two words to say to anyone, but that doesn’t bother most men. Someone might still take her off your hands, Muriel.” “I don’t want her taken off my hands,” Mrs. Finch had said with that brisk finality that made everything seem preordained. At least I’m not a burden, Beth reminded herself. Most old maids were just a drain on their families. She was a comfort, she had a place, she was Mother’s little helper. She was lucky. Tugging at the thin mouse-fair plait hanging over one shoulder, Beth went to put the kettle on, then wrung out a cloth in cold water the way her mother liked. Bringing it upstairs, she darted back down and set off on errands. All Beth’s siblings had settled out of town when they married, but not an afternoon passed when Beth wasn’t dispatched to post a letter full of maternal advice or a package with a maternal decree. Today Beth posted a square package to her oldest sister, who’d just delivered a baby: one of Mother’s samplers, a wreath of pink roses round the words A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place. An identical sampler hung over Beth’s bed and over the bed of every new baby born to the Finch family. It was never too early, Mother said, to instill proper notions about one’s place. “Have your boarders arrived yet?” the postmaster inquired. “They’re peculiar fellows, some of them. Mrs. Bowden at the Shoulder of Mutton inn, she’s got a pack of Cambridge dons coming and going at all hours! That won’t please your mother, eh?” He waited for a response, but Beth just nodded, tongue-tied. “Something not right with that last Finch girl,” the postmaster whispered to his clerk as she turned away, and Beth felt herself flushing crimson. Why couldn’t she manage ordinary small talk? It was bad enough being slow-witted (and Beth knew she was), but did she have to be so flustered and awkward as well? Other girls, even the dimmest, seemed able to look people in the eyes when spoken to. It was one thing to be quiet, another thing to freeze in every social gathering like a frightened rabbit. But Beth couldn’t help it. She dashed home just in time to lift the kettle off the heat. At least the Finch household had been assured it would be girls boarding, not men. If life were a novel, the mystery boarders would have been dashing young bachelors who would then immediately have vied for Beth’s hand, and Beth couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying. “Beth,” Mr. Finch called absently from his armchair, doing the crossword. “‘A freshwater fish of the carp family,’ five letters.” Beth flipped her braid back over one shoulder, laying out the tea things. “Tench.” “I thought bream—” “Bream puts a B into Seventeen Down.” Beth reached for the teapot, perfectly able to envision the crossword, glimpsed this morning when she’d set the paper by her father’s breakfast plate. “And Seventeen Down is codify.” “Seventeen Down—‘to organize into a system, as in a body of law,’ six letters—right, codify.” Her dad smiled. “I don’t know how you do that.” My one talent, Beth thought, rueful. She couldn’t cook, she couldn’t knit, she couldn’t make conversation, but by God, she could finish the Sunday crossword in eight minutes flat without a single mistake! “‘Unlucky or ill-fated,’ seven letters—” Beth’s dad began, but before she could say hapless, footsteps sounded outside, and their boarders were being ushered in with a clatter of suitcases. Mr. Finch held the door, Mrs. Finch shot downstairs like a ferret into a rabbit’s burrow, and by the time Beth had taken care of the kettle, introductions were flying. Two girls, both clearly younger than Beth, entered the spotless kitchen and immediately seemed to take up all the air. Both were brunettes, but that was where the similarity ended. One was dimpled and beautiful and wrapped in a fur-trimmed coat, chattering in a very posh accent. The other was about six feet tall with severe features, perfect red lipstick, and black eyebrows arching like cavalry sabers. Beth’s heart sank into her shoes. These girls were just the sort who made her feel clumsy, slow, and, well, hapless. “So pleased,” Mrs. Finch managed to say through pursed lips, “to welcome you to my home.” Her gaze traveled up and down the tall brunette, who returned the stare coolly. Tart, Beth knew her mother was thinking. Who knew about the dimply girl, but the one with the eyebrows had without a doubt been classified as a tart before she spoke a single word. “We are so chuffed to be sent here,” the dimply girl gushed, curly lashes working up a breeze of enthusiasm. “One can always tell nice people, can’t one? I knew the moment I saw your absolutely topping vegetable garden . . .” Beth could see her mother thawing at those polished Mayfair vowels. “We hope you’ll be teddibly comfortable here,” she said, her own accent hitching north. “You’ll share the room beside my daughter, first floor. The toilet—the loo, that is—can be found at the bottom of the garden.” “Outside?” The smaller brunette looked startled. The tall one shot her an amused look. “You’ll get used to it, Osla Kendall. I’ve never lived in a single flat with a loo inside.” “Oh, shut up, Queen Mab!” Mrs. Finch frowned. “What is it you young ladies will be doing over at Bletchley Park?” “Clerical work,” Osla said breezily. “Such a snore.” Another frown, but Beth’s mother left it for now. “Lights out at ten. Hot baths every Monday, no dawdling in the tub. We have a telephone”—proudly; few homes in the village did—“but it is for important calls only. If you’ll come upstairs . . .” The kitchen seemed to echo when the newest additions to the household swept out. Dad, who hadn’t said a word after shaking hands, sat back down with his newspaper. Beth looked at the tea tray, scrubbing her hands up and down her apron. “Bethan . . .” Mrs. Finch swept back into the kitchen. “Don’t just stand there, take up the tea.” Beth made her escape, glad to be spared the dissecting of the two lodgers she was certain her mother was about to deliver. She paused outside the spare room door, mustering the nerve to knock, and heard the rustling of suitcases being unpacked. “. . . one bath a week?” Mab’s voice, crisp and scornful. “I call that stingy. I’m not demanding hot water; I don’t mind a cold-water scrub, but I want clean hair however I can get it.” “We’ve a washstand at least—hello again!” Osla Kendall exclaimed as Beth came in. “Tea, how scrummy. You’re a darling.” Beth couldn’t remember ever being called a darling. “I’ll leave you,” she muttered, but she saw a copy of Vanity Fair unpacked from one of the bags and exclaimed despite herself, “Oh! That’s a good one.” “You’ve read it?” Beth flushed to the roots of her hair. “Don’t tell Mother.” “Wouldn’t dream of it!” Osla plucked a scone off Mrs. Finch’s second-best china. “No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to. Curl up with us and have a chin-wag . . .” Without knowing how it happened, Beth found herself perched on the end of Osla’s bed. It wasn’t much of a conversation; she hardly said two words as the other girls nipped back and forth about Thackeray and whether they should start a literary society. But they both smiled at her periodically, all encouraging glances. Maybe they weren’t quite so intimidating after all. Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history? Too soon to tell . . . but perhaps this was, in fact, going to be one of them. Twelve Days Until the Royal Wedding November 8, 1947 Chapter 5 Inside the Clock Three girls and a book—that was how it all began. Or so it seemed to the woman in the asylum, lying in her cell, fighting the cocktail of lethargy that had been pumped into her veins. “Our institution is very progressive,” a balding doctor had said when she first arrived, spitting and struggling, at Clockwell Sanitarium. Nearly three and a half years ago—6 June, the day of the Normandy invasions, the day that began Europe’s liberation, and her own imprisonment. “You may have heard horror stories about patients chained to walls, hosed with ice water, and so forth. We believe in gentle handling here, mild activity, sedatives to calm the nerves, Miss Liddell.” “That is not my name,” she had snarled. He ignored her. “Take your pills like a good girl.” Pills in the morning, pills at night, pills that filled her veins with smoke and her skull with cotton wool—who cared then about mild activity? There were blunted tools for working in the rose garden around the big gray stone house; there was basket-weaving in the common hall; there were novels with missing pages—but very few patients made use of these things. Clockwell’s inmates dozed in armchairs or sat outside blinking at the sun, eyes dulled and dreamy from the fog they swallowed every morning in tablet form. Progressive treatment. This place didn’t need chains or electrical shocks; it didn’t need beatings or ice baths. It was still a killing bottle, an eater of souls. Her first week here, she’d refused to swallow anything the doctors gave her. She got the syringe instead, orderlies holding her down for the needle prick. Afterward she stumbled back to her cell—they could call it a room, but any room with locks on only the outside was a cell: window barred with mesh, bed bolted to the floor, a high ceiling so she couldn’t reach the light fixture to hang herself. She thought of hanging herself that first week. But that would have been giving in. “Looking well today!” The doctor beamed, popping in on his daily rounds. “Still a bit of a cough from that springtime bout of pneumonia, eh, Miss Liddell?” The woman registered under the name Alice Liddell no longer bothered to correct him. She swallowed her pills obediently, then as soon as he left went to the plastic basin that served as a chamber pot at night. Forcing her fingers down her throat, she threw the tablets up in a wash of bile, then reached an indifferent thumb into the mess and ground everything together so the nurses wouldn’t guess. She’d learned a few things in three and a half years. How to vomit up her medicine. How to fool the doctors. How to slide past the orderlies who were spiteful and cultivate the ones who were kind. How to keep her sanity in the midst of madness . . . because it would be easy, so easy, to go authentically mad here. Not me, thought the woman from Bletchley Park. She might have been sitting gray-faced and coughing in a madhouse cell, but she had not always been this. I will survive. I will get out. Not that it would be easy. The walls circling Clockwell were high and barbed; she’d walked them a thousand times. Every entrance—the big gates at the front, the smaller access doors used by the grounds crew—was locked, the keys kept under guard. And even if she could get past that wall, the nearest town was miles away across barren Yorkshire moors. A slippered woman in an institutional smock stood no chance; she’d merely wander the gorse until she was recaptured. She’d known from her second week here that if she was to get out, she would need help. She’d smuggled her ciphered messages out last week. Two desperate missives launched into the void like messages in bottles, sent to two women who had no reason to help her. They betrayed me, the thought whispered. You betrayed them, the whisper said back. Had they received the letters yet? If they had, would they listen? London Osla stood in her lace slip and robe, looking at the message that had thrown such a spanner into her day. The echo of the telephone’s furious slam on the other end of the line in Yorkshire still reverberated, along with her former friend’s choked voice. Go to hell, Osla Kendall. A clock ticked in the corner, and a blue satin dress slid off the heap on the bed. What she would wear to watch Princess Elizabeth marry her own former boyfriend now seemed the stupidest bit of bobbery in the world. Osla flung down the cipher message, and sunlight bounced green sparks across the lines of code, reflected off the big emerald ring her fianc? had put on her left hand four months ago. Any other woman, Osla reflected, would have run to her husband-to-be if she got menacing letters from a madhouse inmate. It was the sort of thing fianc?s liked to know, if the women they loved were being threatened by lunatics. But Osla knew she was not going to tell a soul. A few years at Bletchley Park turned any woman into a real clam. Osla sometimes wondered how many women there were in Britain like her, lying to their families all day, every day, about what they’d done in the war. Never once saying the words I may just be a housewife now, but I used to break German ciphers in Hut 6 or I may look like a brainless socialite, but I translated naval orders in Hut 4. So many women . . . by the end of the war in Europe, Bletchley Park and its outstations had four women to every man, or so it seemed when you saw the swarm of Victory-rolled hair and Utility frocks come spilling out at shift change. Where were all those women now? How many men who had fought in the war now sat reading their morning newspapers without realizing the woman sitting across the jam-pots from them had fought, too? Maybe the ladies of BP hadn’t faced bullets or bombs, but they’d fought—oh, yes, they’d fought. And now they were labeled simply housewives, or schoolteachers, or silly debs, and they probably bit their tongues and hid their wounds, just like Osla. Because the ladies of BP had certainly taken their share of war wounds. The woman who had sent Osla the Vigen?re square wasn’t the only one to crock up and end in a madhouse, gibbering under the strain. Get me out of here, the ciphered message read. You owe me. The cipher message said a lot of other things, too . . . The telephone shrieked, and Osla nearly jumped out of her skin. She snatched up the handset. “Did you change your mind about meeting?” It surprised her, the thrum of relief that went through her. No love lost between herself and her old friend, but if she had someone to face this problem with— “Meeting whom, Miss Kendall?” The voice was male, insinuating, oilier than Brylcreem on a Cheapside shoe salesman. “Where are you off to? Private rendezvous with the royal fianc?, perhaps?” Osla straightened, jangling nerves subsiding in a rush of straightforward loathing. “I don’t remember which scandal rag you write for, but stop talking slush and bugger off.” She banged down the handset. The sheet sniffers had been haunting her doorstep ever since the royal engagement had been announced. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t anything to find; they wanted dirt. One hour ago, she’d been looking for any excuse to get away from them, from the wedding hysteria, out of London altogether . . . She heard the furious voice through the telephone again: Go to hell, Osla Kendall. “Oh, plug it,” Osla said aloud, making a sudden decision. “I’m coming to talk to you whether you like it or not.” Because nothing about the woman in the madhouse could be discussed by telephone, and the only person she could talk to about it lived in York now. A long, long way from London. Two birds, one stone. Seven Years Ago June 1940 Chapter 6 Dear Philip: I work in a blinking madhouse, Osla imagined scribbling to her fair-haired prince—not that she could give him details about her new job in those letters posted to Philip’s ship, but she’d got into the habit of talking to him in her head, spinning the straw of daily life into entertaining gold anecdotes. It’s a small madhouse tucked inside a larger one. The large one is Bletchley Park, the small one is Hut 4. Hut 4 simply defies description. She’d turned up for her first shift promptly at nine the morning after signing the Official Secrets Act, thrilled to her bones to be doing something more important than pot-riveting seams. All she wanted in this world was to prove herself, prove once and for all that a Mayfair giggler who’d curtsied to the king in pearls and plumes could poker up in wartime and serve as well as anyone else. Could do something important, even . . . Well, banging Hurricanes together might have been useful, but this was in a different class. Osla had already vowed she’d stick it out here, no matter how hard it was. She was only sorry she and Mab wouldn’t be working together. Dear Philip: The girl I’m billeted with is simply divine, and I forbid you to ever meet her because you would probably fall in love on the spot and then I would have to hate her. Not you—you wouldn’t be able to help yourself; Mab would wing a superb eyebrow at you and that would be that—but I can’t afford to hate her because it’s clear I will need allies if I am to survive in the house of the Dread Mrs. Finch. More about her later. Osla and Mab had sauntered to the gates of Bletchley Park in the bright June morning, where Mab was shunted to Hut 6 and Osla to Hut 4. “Well then . . .” Mab perched her little chip hat at an aggressively chic angle. “Show me just one eligible bachelor, Hut 6, and we’ll get along fine.” Osla hoped Mab was met by a more appetizing specimen than the fellow who answered her own knock: a stocky balding fellow in a Fair Isle jumper. “German naval section,” he greeted Osla as she stepped into the long green-painted building squatting next to the mansion like a frog. “You’ve got the German, then?” “You mean have I got a German tucked in my handbag?” Osla quipped. “’Fraid not, darling.” He looked blank. She sighed, spouting some Schiller in her impeccable Hochdeutsch. He waved for her to stop. “Good, good. You’ll assist with the registration, the W/T sorting, the teleprinted traffic . . .” He whisked her inside the hut and showed her through: two large rooms separated by a door, a small room at the end, another little room after that which had been subdivided even smaller. Long tables heaped with papers and atlases, swivel chairs, pigeonholes, green steel filing cabinets . . . it was stiflingly hot, the men in shirtsleeves while the women patted perspiring faces with handkerchiefs. With a distracted “Have a go!” he passed Osla over to a motherly middle-aged woman who took in the new arrival’s evident confusion with a smile. “It wouldn’t be any clearer if he tried to explain. These Oxbridge types are hopeless at explaining anything.” Dear Philip: My entire introduction to the world of codebreaking was “Have a go!” The middle-aged woman introduced herself as Miss Senyard and made introductions to the others—a few girls like Osla, all Mayfair diction and pearls; a few girls with “university” stamped all over them, all efficient and friendly as they showed the new girl the ropes. Some were sorting wireless telegraphy forms; some were collecting unknown German naval codes and identifying call signs and frequencies with slashes of a pencil. Osla received a towering stack of loose papers and a punching machine—“Take these signals and bind them up properly, dear. It’s the early naval Enigma traffic; poor Mr. Birch’s cupboards are positively overflowing and we’ve got to get it filed.” Osla studied a sheet: a report of some kind, translated German broken and patchy as if parts of the sentence hadn’t come through. “Why is this in German and not that?” she asked the girl next to her, nodding at the cards with their keys and call signs, much of it gibberish. “This is the undeciphered stuff. We log it, register it, then it goes out to the naval section boffins to be broken. The boffins are the brainy ones.” Admiringly. “Who knows what they do or how they do it, but the undeciphered stuff comes back to us broken into readable German.” “Oh.” That was where the important work was done, then. Osla wrestled with the punching machine, fighting a sense of deflation. Punching holes to bind papers together and stick them in cupboards—was this really the best use of her language skills? Had she managed yet again to land in a place where the real work was being done by someone else? Not that she was going to get in a wax about needing to be important, she just wanted to be used well . . . Never mind that, she scolded herself. It’s all important. And it’s only your first day. “What do we do with all these reports and signals, then? Once they come back broken into German.” “It’s all translated, logged, analyzed. Miss Senyard’s box files have copies of every German naval and naval air signal—periodically we get someone in a tearing hurry, requesting a copy of this report or that one. And we send the raw decrypts to the Admiralty, as well as reporting by telephone. We’ve got a direct line; Hinsley rings since he’s liaison, then they give him the brush-off and he goes about muttering insults for the next hour.” “Why do they brush him off?” “Would you believe it if some reedy Cambridge student from the middle of nowhere called to tell you where the U-boat wolf packs were, and when you asked how that information was obtained, his reply was You don’t need to know?” Dear Philip: The Admiralty currently making decisions for your beloved navy lurches along on shrugs, shoeboxes, and ignorance. Is this entire war run by idiots? That would explain why we’re on the verge of being invaded. Not that she ever would have written Philip anything so defeatist. Osla kept her letters cheerful; the last thing a man at war needed was gloom from the home front. But to herself, in her own head, she didn’t mind being pessimistic. It got difficult keeping your chin up, all the while imagining what London would look like once the Jerries had nailed German street names over the signs to Piccadilly and St. John’s Wood. It could happen. Not that anyone said it, but everyone was in a pelter worrying that it would happen. The Americans weren’t coming to the rescue. Most of Europe had fallen. England was next. That was the bleak reality. I might see the news here first, Osla thought, reaching for a new report. She might know before anyone else in the country—before Churchill, before the king—when they were being invaded, because the next decoded German report might be orders for a pack of destroyers to sail for Dover. Just because the brainy boys here could decode what the Nazis said to each other, that didn’t mean they could stop it. I don’t know what you’re doing in there, Osla thought to the boffins breaking codes for the U-boat packs that hunted ships like Philip’s, but do it faster. That made her wonder. “If this is naval section, can we look up our own ships in the decrypted reports? See if the Germans have flagged them in their radio traffic?” Like HMS Kent, currently bearing a certain fair-haired royal midshipman toward Bombay . . . “Or are we not allowed to ask about such things?” The orders had been no talking to anyone outside Bletchley, and no talking to anyone outside or inside about one’s work, but those instructions still left quite a few gray areas. Osla had no intention of breaking the Official Secrets Act on her very first day. Dear Philip: I’m going to be hanged for treason, or possibly shot by firing squad. “We all talk in-hut,” the reassuring answer came. “It’s all right as long as everything you learn stays in-hut. You can try looking up a ship if you’ve got a fellow on board, but you can’t pass on anything you find to his mum.” That wouldn’t be a problem, Osla reflected. Philip never mentioned his mother. He’d talk about his sisters, the ones who had married Nazis and to whom he could no longer write; he’d talk about the sister who died in a plane crash with her entire family a few years ago; he’d even mention his long-estranged father—but never his mother. “So, your shipboard friend—” A nudge. “Fianc??” “Oh, just a boyfriend,” Osla murmured, banging away at the punching machine. She’d had boyfriends since she was sixteen, casual crushes conducted over late-night dancing and the occasional kiss in the back of a taxi. Nothing serious. Philip had gone to sea in February; they’d barely known each other six weeks—dancing at the Caf? de Paris when Osla got a night off from the Hurricane factory; long evenings when he’d drive to her shared digs and lie with his head in her lap as they listened to gramophone records and chatted the night away. “Are you falling for your handsome prince?” Sally Norton teased one evening after Philip ambled out after midnight. “He’s not my prince,” Osla retorted. “He’s looking for a girl to splash out with before going to war, that’s all. For me, he’s just another boyfriend.” Except Philip was the only one who made her bones burn. The first kisses of her life that felt dangerous. The last night before he’d shipped out, he’d gripped her hand tighter than usual and said abruptly, “Write to me, Os? If you do, I’ll write to you. I haven’t anyone to write to, really.” “I’ll write,” Osla had said, no jokes, no teasing. He leaned in for another of those long, heated doorstep kisses, the ones that went on and on, his hands moving across her back, her fingers deep in his hair. Before he pulled away, he pressed something into her hand and then leaned down and crushed his lips to her folded fingers for a long moment. “So long, princess.” She’d opened her hand and seen the cool glitter of his naval insignia like a little jeweled pin. As she fastened it to her lapel like a brooch, she warned herself again, Careful. Her mother spent all her time making a mug of herself over unsuitable men, and Osla was determined to be the apple who fell a long way from that tree. Someone came over, a scholarly type in an unraveling jumper, interrupting Osla’s musings. “Give me a hand, girls? I need this report . . .” And he rattled off a series of numbers. “Make him out a copy, dear,” Miss Senyard directed, pulling the report, and Osla obeyed as the man nearly danced on his toes with impatience. Osla remembered red-haired Giles saying the Park was stuffed with Oxford dons and Cambridge chess champions, and wondered where he worked—if he was one of the brainy ones working the middle stage of this process: taking the raw gibberish from German radio traffic, the stuff they were registering and logging, and breaking it apart until it was something that could be read, translated, analyzed, and filed in sections like this one. “Thanks.” The man flew off with his copied report, leaving Osla feeling both pleased and deflated, and she went back to binding and filing signals. She had absolutely no idea what had just happened, why that one report had been needed, and she never would know. That was all right; it was important to someone, and she’d played her part . . . but there wasn’t any doubt this job was a lot simpler than she’d hoped for. The pace might have been frenetic, but anyone with a teaspoon of brains and a little attention to detail could bind and file. Dear Philip: Am I an ungrateful cow if I’ve gone from wishing I could do more for the war than bang sheets of Dural, to wishing I could do more for the war than wield a punching machine? “My job’s a yawn, so let’s hear about yours,” Osla told her billet-mate that night. Mab had just slipped in from the outdoor loo, and Osla lay across her narrow bed in slip and knickers, trying to get in a chapter of Vanity Fair before lights-out. “Day one—how was it?” “Not bad.” Mab stripped out of the robe she’d donned to go downstairs, standing in her own slip and knickers. “Can’t say much more than that, can I? All this secrecy; are we even allowed to ask each other ‘How’s work?’” Mab’s slip was nylon and very worn. Osla, in peach silk with French lace inserts, remembered the girls of her deb season tittering about the poor girls, by which they meant the ones who wore the same frock twice in one week . . . she’d watched Mab unpack exactly four dresses from her suitcase into their shared wardrobe, all perfectly pressed, and felt self-conscious unpacking more than four of her own. “Mind you,” Mab went on, picking up her hairbrush, “I don’t think our nosy landlady cares about secrecy. Did you see her pursing her lips over supper when we wouldn’t answer every question?” “And good luck to anyone else trying to get a word in.” Osla had tried to ask the washed-out daughter a thing or two, but the poor mouse hadn’t uttered a peep around her mother’s peppering questions. Osla still wasn’t sure if the girl’s name was Beth or Bess. She wondered if she could get by with darling through the entire war. “I’ll tell you one thing about my hut.” Mab’s hair crackled as she stroked the brush vigorously through it. “It’s got my future husband in it somewhere. I’ve never seen so many eligible bachelors in my life.” “Oooh. Glamour boys?” “I said eligible, not glamorous.” Mab gave that grin of hers, the one that cracked the cool, guarded expression on her rather severe face and made her look like a pirate who had spotted a Spanish treasure galleon on the horizon. HMS Queen Mab, out to chase and board the unsuspecting bachelors of Bletchley Park, thought Osla. “Anyone in your hut catch your eye?” “Oh, I’m not looking for a fellow,” Osla said airily. Dear Philip: It’s a madhouse, and maybe my job’s a touch undemanding . . . but I think I like it here. Chapter 7 June 1940 If Bletchley Park had a motto, Mab thought, it would be You dinnae need to know. “Are the other huts set up like this one?” Mab asked as she was whisked through the central corridor of Hut 6. “You dinnae need to know,” said her new supervisor, a middle-aged woman with a crisp Scottish voice. “You’re assigned to the Decoding Room . . .” And she ushered Mab into a box of a place, all lino and blackout curtains, filing cabinets and wooden trestle tables. But it was the two machines that made Mab stare: awkward composite things bristling with three rows of keys, a set of wheels on one side, big spools of tape somehow attached. Mab thought they looked like a cross between a typewriter, a shop till, and a telephone switchboard. A woman sat hammering at one of the machines, hunched like Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame had been number 34 on “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady”). “Miss Churt, is it?” The Scotswoman led Mab to the unoccupied machine. “Most of our girls are Newnham College or Girton College; where did you graduate?” “Claybourn secretarial course, top of my class.” Take that, Girton College. Mab wasn’t going to be embarrassed by her lack of schooling any more than she was going to be embarrassed by her nylon underwear in the face of Osla’s French lace slips. “I suppose it disnae matter,” the Scotswoman said dubiously. “This is your Typex machine. It’s mocked up to decipher the encrypted messages the Germans send by radio to their officers in the field. Each service of the German armed forces sends those messages using a service-specific key, over their own wireless networks, and the settings of that key are changed daily. Our listening stations across Britain and abroad intercept these messages, transcribe them, and send them to BP. By the time they make their way to the Decoding Room, they are given to you as coded messages.” She held up one finger. “You will be given settings, a different setting for each key”—a second finger—“you will align your machine to those settings”—a third finger—“and you will punch the coded messages into the machine so they can be decoded into German. Do you understand?” Not really. “Yes, of course.” “You’ll get an hour at noon for dinner, and there is a toilet block outside. This hut works round the clock, Miss Churt. Fourteen days on the nine-to-four, then fourteen days on the four-to-midnight, then twelve days on the midnight-to-nine.” The Scotswoman bustled off to some other compartment of Hut 6. The girl at the other Typex machine, snail-hunched in a pebbly jumper, slid a stack of papers over as Mab took her seat. “That’s the rest of the day’s Red,” she said without preamble. “Bit late today. The boys in Hut 3 get tetchy if we haven’t got it for them by breakfast. Here’s the setting.” She showed Mab how to fix up her Typex machine for decoding Red traffic: the order for the three wheels; then something she called the Ringstellung, rattling off numbers that each equated to a letter of the alphabet . . . Mab followed along, head swimming. “Then a check to be sure the setup’s correct; set each of your three wheels to A and type out a keyboard alphabet. If it corresponds exactly letter for letter, you’re ready to start. See?” Not really. “Yes, of course.” “Now you just bang through each message as fast as you can.” Indicating the big spools of tape attached to the Typex. “Type in the encrypted stuff, and it’ll feed out in plain-text letters. If it looks like German, pass it on. If it looks like rubbish, put it aside and one of the more experienced girls will take a second crack at it.” “I don’t speak German—” “You don’t have to. Just recognize it. The tricky part is looking past the five-letter clumps everything is sorted into, but you’ll get the knack.” Mab stared at the stack. “We’ll never get through all of this.” “Up to a thousand messages a day in Red since France was overrun,” the girl said, which made Mab feel no more confident. Slowly she picked up the first message. Blocks of letters: ACDOU LMNRS TDOPS—on like that for a whole page. Mab looked at her partner, hunched over her own identical sheet of nonsensical five-letter groups, and wondered what Lucy was doing, back home. I shouldn’t have left you for this, Luce. You’re alone with Mum in a city that’s going to get bombed any day, and I’m stuck in a hut typing ruddy nonsense. But there wasn’t any use whining about it, so Mab squared her shoulders, typed a few letter groups that the other girl had said were the introduction and signatory, then began on the main message: ACDOU LMNRS TDOPS FCQPN YHXPZ . . . To her surprise, the letters came out different: KEINE BESON DEREN EREIG NISSE. “Keine besonderen Ereignisse,” said the girl to Mab’s left. “You’ll see that one now and then. I know a bit of German by now—it means ‘no special developments.’” Mab stared at the message. No special developments. So this message wasn’t too important, then . . . or maybe it was. Maybe it came from an area where developments were expected. Maybe that was critical news. She kept typing, and the machine kept spitting out five-letter clumps of German until the end. “What do we do with these when—” “Write the final position of the wheels under the message setting, sign it, stick the original decrypt to it, and put it in that tray. Keep going through your stack—things will get slow later, but we’re in a rush now to get all the Red decoded.” “What is Red? If I can ask.” “Red’s the key for German air force communications.” “Why Red?” Mab asked, fascinated. A shrug. “It was the colored pencil the boffins were using when they were first figuring out how to crack it. We’ve also got Green, Blue, Yellow—all different keys for different traffic.” “Who are the boffins?” “The brainy boys who make the initial breaks. They work out the setting for each cipher—if they didn’t, we wouldn’t know how to set our machines to decode all the messages.” Patting the Typex’s three wheels. “The Jerries change the settings every day, so every night shift as midnight ticks over, the boffins start all over again, figuring out the new setting for every—single—key.” “How?” “Who knows? However they do it, we decode it and then it moves off to Hut 3 for translating and analysis.” Mab supposed that was what the German-speaking girls like Osla did: take this mess of German in five-letter blocks and turn it into nice legible English reports. Air force communications, army communications, intercepted at distant listening stations (whatever those were—Mab imagined men in headphones listening in on German radio channels, jotting Morse madly), then whirled through the various Bletchley huts so university boys could crack them open, so typing-pool girls like Mab could decode them, so bilingual girls like Osla could translate them. Like a conveyor belt at a factory. We’re reading your post, Mab thought, picking up the next report. Take that, Herr Hitler. She hammered another message out on the Typex, taped and processed it, reached for another. By noon she had the knack of scanning those five-letter clumps, seeing which were rubbish and which were German. Her back hurt from curling into a C, her fingers were sore from hammering the stiff keys, but she was smiling. Look at me, she thought. Mabel from Shoreditch, decoding ruddy Nazi intelligence. Mum would never have believed it, even if Mab had been able to tell her. It was two more days before Mab got a look at the men her seatmate called the boffins. “This box of pencils and supplies is for the boys in the next room. Miss Churt, take it over.” Mab obeyed, dying for a look at the other denizens of Hut 6. Stalky, red-haired Giles Talbot answered her knock. “Oh, it’s you! ‘Divinely tall goddess—’” “Tennyson,” she said, pleased to recognize the quote. He grinned up at her. “Don’t tell me you ended up in our ring of the Inferno, Miss Churt?” “Decoding Room,” Mab answered, reflecting that it was strange to see Giles in trousers, not just white legs stuck all over with duckweed. “Do make it Mab, not Miss Churt.” “If you’ll make it Giles, O faerie queene—” “Spenser! And yes, I will.” Mab handed the box of supplies over, looking around. Another stuffy room crammed with men hunched over desks, every surface heaped with scraps of paper, pencil stubs, and jumbled strips of letters. The fog of concentration in the room was as thick as the fug of cigarette smoke as the men muttered and scribbled. They looked like they were at the absolute end of their tether, like they’d fallen off another planet. But Mab would eat her hat if these weren’t the brainy boys who cracked the keys . . . and she’d bet they were all Cambridge or Oxford boys, too. Her hopes rose. University degrees weren’t exactly thick on the ground in Shoreditch. Of course, a good university didn’t mean a good man. Mab of all people knew that. She shoved that particular memory away before it could curdle her stomach into an icy ball, down, down, bloody go away—and smiled at the roomful of potential husbands. Just let one of you be nice as well as educated and gentlemanly, and I will make you the best bloody wife you ever dreamed of. “What’s a girl to do for fun round here when shift’s over?” Mab asked Giles with a dazzling smile. “There are more recreation clubs here than you can shake a stick at. Highland dancing, chess—” “I’m not one for reels or game boards. Do you like books? Osla Kendall and I are starting a literary society—” “Love a good yarn. I’m your man.” Maybe you are, thought Mab, who had made up the literary society on the spot. Not the lure she’d have used for the lads back home, but in this crowd . . . “First meeting Sunday next. Bring the boys.” She aimed another smile round the room and went back to her Typex. “I’m knackered,” Osla groaned when Sunday next finally arrived. “The work’s not hard, but every day it feels like the pace doubles.” “My hut, too.” If it had been peacetime, the frenetic rate of the work would have given Mab thoughts of transferring elsewhere, but with a war on, all you could do was grit your teeth. She reached up to fluff her hair. “Forget the work for a night. It’s time for fun.” The Shoulder of Mutton inn was to host the first meeting of the Bletchley Park Literary Society—Giles said their fish and chips weren’t to be missed, and after Mrs. Finch’s leaden stews, fish and chips sounded like heaven. “I nabbed a fellow for tonight’s meeting, by the way—just for you.” Osla too sounded like she was determinedly putting her very long week behind her, along with the war and everything else unpleasant. “He’s Hut 8, simply scrumptious. The tallest thing you’ve ever seen; positively made for a six-foot wife. You won’t be stuck in flats your entire life.” “I don’t mind men who are shorter than me. I mind men who are touchy about being shorter than me.” “What about Giles, then? He’s too much the jester to get in a wax about anything, much less tall women.” “Something tells me he’s the bachelor type . . . we’ll see after tonight.” Mab grinned. “The nice thing about meeting men here is that they can’t drone about what they do. They actually have to talk about books or the weather—” “Or, God forbid, ask you a question or two about yourself.” Osla grinned back, swinging her crocodile handbag. “Are you heading chez Finch first to change?” “Yes, red print frock.” “You’ll look slap-up. I don’t think I’ll bother changing, just nip straight there all scruffy and ink stained, and no one will look at me when you swan in.” Osla could roll in a gutter and still everyone would look at her, Mab thought. Even at the end of a very long shift, she looked rumpled and adorable rather than frazzled and exhausted. It should have been easy to resent Osla, but Mab couldn’t quite manage it. How could you resent a girl who scouted men over six feet tall for another girl’s husband pool? “There you are,” Mrs. Finch greeted Mab as she came into the scrubbed kitchen. “Working on a Sunday, I see.” “No rest when there’s a war on, Mrs. F.” Mab tried to slide past, but Mrs. Finch blocked her way. “Now why won’t you just give us a hint what you do?” she said with a little laugh. “What do you all get up to behind those gates, my goodness—” “Really, it’s too boring to talk about.” “You can trust me!” Mrs. Finch was clearly not giving up. Her voice was cozy, but her eyes had a certain gleam. “Just a hint. I’ll dole you a bit extra from the sugar ration.” “No, thank you,” Mab said coldly. “Such a careful one.” Mrs. Finch patted her arm, gleam in the eye hardening, but she moved out of the way. Mab rolled her eyes at the retreating back, not realizing until she heard the nearly inaudible voice that Mrs. Finch’s colorless daughter was sitting in the corner of the kitchen, shelling peas. “You should just tell Mother something. She won’t be satisfied till she knows.” Mab looked at the other girl. Hardly a girl; she was twenty-four and she volunteered with the Women’s Voluntary Services when she wasn’t being run off her feet by her mother—but she gave the impression of a girl, with that colorless skin that showed every wash of emotion and those eyes that never rose from the floor. Mab couldn’t help a flash of annoyance. “I’m not here to satisfy your mother’s curiosity, Bess.” The girl flushed dull red. “Beth,” she said almost inaudibly. She sat shoulders rounded, like a puppy whose cringing practically invited a certain kind of person to give a good kick. As she carried the shelled peas to the counter, Mab could see the outline of a paperback hidden in her skirt pocket. “Done with Vanity Fair yet?” Beth flinched, fiddling with her plait’s stringy ends. “You didn’t tell Mother, did you?” “Oh, for—” Mab swallowed some less than polite words. A woman of twenty-four should not be apologizing to her mother about a library habit. Grow a spine, Mab wanted to say. While you’re at it, put a lemon rinse on that hair and try looking people in the eye. If there was anything Mab couldn’t stand, it was limp women. The women in her own family were hardly perfect—in fact, most of them were flint-hard cows—but at least they weren’t limp. Beth sat back down at the kitchen table. She’d probably sit here the rest of the night until her mother told her to go to bed. “Get your coat, Beth,” Mab heard herself saying. “W-what?” “Get your coat while I change. You’re coming to the first meeting of the Bletchley Park Literary Society.” Chapter 8 The Shoulder of Mutton reared its thatched head at Buckingham and Newton roads, the bar cozy and bright, the private sitting room low beamed and inviting. It was everything Beth feared about social gatherings: tight quarters, loud noises, cigarette smoke, fast conversation, strange people, and men. Anxiety choked her throat, and she couldn’t stop fiddling with the end of her plait like it was a lifeline. “—you billet here, Giles?” someone was asking the lanky red-haired man. “Blimey, you got lucky.” “Don’t I know it, Mrs. Bowden’s a gem. Not much bothered by rationing; I swear she’s queen of the local black market. We’ve got the private room, get your drinks . . .” Beth found herself clutching a sherry she didn’t dare sip. What if her mother smelled liquor on her breath? “Swig that down,” Mab advised. “W-what?” Beth was eyeing the group piling around the table. Osla, laughing as an army lieutenant lit her cigarette . . . several gangling academic sorts gawping at Mab like puppies . . . red-haired Giles and a truly massive black-haired man who had to duck under the rafter . . . all of them worked at the mysterious Bletchley Park, so what was Beth doing here? She didn’t know what to make of these people—some looked so shabby in their patched tweeds that her mother might have taken them for tramps, but they talked in such overeducated drawls she could hardly understand a word they said. “Relax,” Mab said. She had a glass of beer, and she’d thrown one leg over the other in casually elegant fashion. “We’re only here to talk books.” “I shouldn’t be here,” Beth whispered. “It’s a literary society, not a bordello.” “I can’t stay.” Beth set her sherry down. “My mother will pitch a fit.” “So?” “It’s her house, her rules, and I—” “It’s your house, too. And really, it’s your father’s house!” Beth’s words dried up. Impossible to explain how slight a presence her father really was in the Finch household. He never put his foot down. He wasn’t that kind of husband, that kind of father. The finest of men, Beth’s mother always said smugly when other women in the village complained of overbearing husbands. “I can’t stay,” Beth repeated. “‘The greatest tyrants over women are women,’” Mab quoted. “Have you read that far in Vanity Fair?” She arched one brow, then addressed the men across the table. “So, shall we vote on a book every month? How shall we tally up—” “Popular vote,” one of the skinny academics was saying. “Or the ladies will have us all reading romantic tosh—” “Romantic tosh?” Osla demanded, squashing in on Beth’s left. “The last thing I read was Vanity Fair!” “That’s about girls, isn’t it?” Giles objected. “It’s written by a man, so that’s all right,” Mab said tartly. “Why do you men get the swithers if you have to read anything written by a female?” Osla wondered. “Aren’t we a century out from poor Charlotte Bront? signing herself Currer Bell to get published?” Fish and chips arrived, leaking grease. Beth didn’t dare touch hers, any more than the sherry. Nice girls did not eat in public houses; nice girls did not smoke or drink or argue with men . . . Osla’s a nice girl, Beth thought, marshaling arguments for later. Nothing Mab did was going to find approval with Mrs. Finch, but Osla was another story. She’s been presented at court; you can’t say she isn’t a lady, Mother! And here Osla was crunching up chunks of fried cod, swilling sherry, and arguing with Giles about Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, obviously having a grand time. Somehow Beth didn’t think that argument was going to weigh much with her mother, either. Mrs. Finch wasn’t going to care about anything except that Beth had gone out, without permission. “I vote for Conan Doyle,” the huge dark-haired man on Beth’s right was saying. “Who doesn’t like Sherlock Holmes?” “You’ve already read everything Doyle ever wrote, Harry . . .” He didn’t look like a Harry, Beth thought, trying not to stare at the man. He wasn’t just enormous—nearly a head taller even than Mab; broad enough he’d nearly turned sideways through the door—but he was black haired and swarthy, almost dark skinned. Beth could imagine the village ladies whispering, “Is he a wog or an Eyetie?” but he didn’t sound like a foreigner. He had exactly the same university drawl as the rest. “Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian,” he said, catching Beth’s eye. She flinched. “What?” “My father’s family is originally from Malta, my mother was born to an Egyptian diplomat and the daughter of a banker from Baghdad.” He grinned. “Don’t be embarrassed; everyone wants to know. I’m Harry Zarb, by the way.” “You speak English very well,” she managed to reply. “Well, my branch of the family’s been London based for three generations, I was baptized Church of England, then went through Kings College in Cambridge like my father and grandfather before me, so . . . be rather embarrassing if I didn’t speak English well.” “I—I’m so sorry,” Beth whispered, mortified. “Look like me and everyone thinks you were born in a tent on a sand dune.” He shrugged, but Beth was too embarrassed to answer. She let the talk pass over her head, reaching for the newspaper abandoned at the next table and turning for the crossword. It was half obliterated by grease stains but she fell into it gratefully, doing it up with a pencil stub. “You went through that like a Derby winner,” Osla laughed, but Beth just stared down at her feet. Would this night never be over? ONE LOOK AT her mother, sitting at the kitchen table with her Bible, two bright spots of color flaring in her cheeks, and Beth shriveled down to her bones. “Now, you mustn’t put yourself in a pucker, Mrs. F,” Osla attempted with her winning smile as they filed into the kitchen. “It’s not Beth’s fault—” “We dragged her out,” Mab added. “Really—” “Hadn’t you better get to bed, girls?” Mrs. Finch looked at the kitchen clock. “Lights out in twenty.” There wasn’t anything the other two could do but go upstairs. Mrs. Finch’s nose twitched at the smells of cigarette smoke, beer, sherry. “I’m sorry, Mother—” Beth began, but that was all she managed to say as her mother seized her arm. “The whole village will be talking. Did you think about that?” Mrs. Finch didn’t shout, she spoke sorrowfully. That made it so much worse. “The ingratitude, Bethan. The disgrace.” She held out her Bible, open to Deuteronomy. “‘If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them—’” “Mother—” “Did you think that didn’t apply to daughters? ‘They shall say to the elders of the city, “This daughter of ours is stubborn and rebellious, she will not obey us, she is a glutton and a drunkard—”’” “I didn’t drink a drop—” Mrs. Finch shook her head sadly, holding out the Bible. Beth took the heavy book and held it straight out, tear-blurred eyes fixed on the page of Deuteronomy. The longest she’d ever had to hold it up was thirty agonizing minutes. Surely it being so late, Mother wouldn’t— “You’ve disappointed me, Bethan.” A hard pinch to the inside of Beth’s arm as the Bible began to droop, then the gentle disapproval flowed on. Beth had behaved shamefully. She had disgraced her mother, who took care of her when she was too slow-witted and head-in-the-sky to look after herself. Beth was lucky she’d never marry and have children, so she’d never know how they broke your heart . . . Fifteen minutes later, Beth was hiccupping with sobs, tears dripping off her hot cheeks, arms shaking and burning with the effort to keep the book level with her eyes. “Of course I forgive you, Bethan. You may lower the Bible.” A pat instead of a pinch to Beth’s arm as she dropped the book. “This is bringing on one of my headaches . . .” Beth flew teary eyed for a cold cloth, a footstool. It was half an hour before she was allowed to go to bed. Her arms hung loose as noodles, muscles aflame. Finally daring to massage the tender flesh inside her elbow—Mrs. Finch had strong fingers; they pinched so hard—Beth reached the first landing and heard voices through Osla and Mab’s door. “—poor Beth,” Osla was saying. “She could grow a spine,” Mab responded tartly. “If my mother went at me like that at my age, I’d dish it right back.” “She’s not you, Queen Mab. I’ve never seen anybody so perfectly, hopelessly Fanny Price in my life.” Mab made an inquiring noise. “You know, the dishrag heroine in Mansfield Park, who goes about looking like a dog’s dinner and raining on everyone’s fun? Don’t tell me you haven’t read Austen—” Beth didn’t wait to hear any more. Tears sliding from her eyes all over again, cheeks burning with dull humiliation, she stumbled into her bedroom. How idiotic, how pathetic, thinking that because the Bletchley Park girls threw her a few nice words like a bone to a dog, they actually liked her in the slightest. Even more idiotic and pathetic to think that just because the redbrick mansion down the road had become a hive of wartime activity, life would change. Nothing for Beth was going to change, ever. Chapter 9 June rolled into July, and Osla was dying for a project. Work in German naval section might have carried on at a frenetic pace, but it was about as intellectually taxing as noughts and crosses. I need a challenge, Osla thought, yawning as she helped Miss Senyard notate unknown German codes to be passed up the ladder for identification. Or at least I will when I’m back on days . . . The nine-to-four shift wasn’t bad, but when the shift change rolled around to the four-to-midnight, Osla had to fight to keep herself from falling in the dismals. It was one thing to trip home after midnight because you’d splashed out at the Caf? de Paris. It was quite another to fall into bed at one in the morning after a night spent making preparations for when the enemy invaded. “There are plans to organize a mobile section of GC and CS,” Miss Senyard told her girls, quite matter-of-factly. “Those members of German naval section chosen will be supplied with special passports in preparation for hasty departure.” So they can bunk off into the hills and keep up the fight once the Germans have taken over here, Osla thought with a sick twist of her stomach. Until now she’d been able to contemplate her country’s takeover in the abstract, a black cloud on the horizon—but to see practical preparations being made for the day German tanks came rolling through Bletchley village . . . If Miss Senyard’s announcement had come during day shift, Osla might have been able to toss her head in defiance: We will never need a mobile GC and CS to flee into the hills, because you’ll never pull this invasion off, Herr Hitler. You’ll have to run your tanks over my dead body and the dead bodies of everyone else in Britain first. But in the eerie, stuffy blackness of night, Miss Senyard’s announcement and its implications seeped into Osla’s bones like poison. If documents were being issued and orders passed down, it was fairly obvious Germany would be invading very soon. Dear Philip: If you stop getting my letters . . . “At least we’re not on night shifts yet,” one of her fellow indexers yawned, noting Osla’s long silence. “The brainy boys work a midnight-to-nine shift too, because the Jerries change all the cipher settings at midnight.” “I wonder how they do it—break the ciphers.” Osla wondered if she could learn to do it herself, get a transfer from filing and binding to something more taxing. Something to keep her mind from the invasion. “Not that one would ever ask; you just know Commander Denniston would have you dragged out behind the mansion and shot. But one can’t help wondering. They must be fearfully clever fellows.” “Not only fellows.” The answer surprised Osla. “There’s a whole clutch of girls in Knox’s section, that little outbuilding by the stable block? The harem, they call it, because Knox only recruits women.” “Let me guess—they’re all slap-up lookers, and none over twenty.” Osla wasn’t eager for that kind of transfer, much as she wanted more useful work. “No, it’s not like that. Hinsley was raving a month ago how Knox poached a German-speaking girl he wanted for our section, a girl named Jane—well, I’ve seen Jane and she’s got a bill like a duck. No one trying to stack his office with lookers would pick her. She’s brainy, though. The brainy girls go to Dilly Knox. No idea what they do.” That was the thing about the Park; gossip ran fluid as a river, but no one knew anything for certain. Midnight had descended black and cloudless as Osla yawned her way out of Hut 4. Codebreakers and linguists were fleeing for home and bed, as another stream of rumpled academics and girls in crepe frocks trudged in on the dreaded night shift already looking absolutely knackered. “If Mrs. F knocks on our door at six in the morning again, I’ll pitch a fit,” Mab grumbled, sauntering to join Osla. “I need my beauty sleep tonight. I’m going for lunch with Andrew Kempton before tomorrow’s shift.” “Is that the third man asking for a date, Queen Mab?” “Fourth.” Mab didn’t sound smug, just matter-of-fact. “He was born in Whitstable, read German philosophy at Cambridge, no parents—” “Feel his withers and examine his teeth while you’re at it. Are you taking a dead set at the delicious Harry Zarb, too?” “He’s married,” Mab said, regretful. “At least he dropped that in right away. Most men only tell you they’re married after trying to get a bit of the old you-know.” “Married, what a shame. You two would have had the world’s tallest children.” All the marriage talk made Osla think of the perennial spinster in the Finch household, and the lurking desire for a project reappeared after the night’s horrified preoccupation with the German invasion. “We need to do something about Beth. The Dread Mrs. Finch has her thoroughly nobbled.” “You can’t help people if they won’t help themselves. She won’t even look us in the eye since the literary society meeting.” Osla was quite certain, after that night two weeks ago, that she’d seen bruises all over the inside of Beth’s arm. The kind made by strong, pinching fingers targeting the sensitive skin inside the elbow, like a bird pecking at the tenderest part of a plum. Introducing a little fizz and fun into Beth’s life without putting her mother in a pucker—now, that was a project worth tackling. Osla and Mab were rounding the corner through Bletchley village, walking down the center of the road to avoid the muddy ruts on the verge, when a set of headlights reared behind them. Osla shrieked and leaped into a bush, and Mab staggered and fell into a deep rut. The car ground to a halt, the driver’s door flying open. “Are you all right?” A man came round the bonnet, his shadowed shape hatless and stocky. By the flare of the car’s headlights, he lifted Osla easily out of the bush. “I didn’t see you till I rounded the bend.” “Partly our fault,” Osla said, getting her breath back. “Mab—” Stiffly, her friend picked herself up. Osla winced. Even in the indirect glare of the masked headlights, she could see that Mab’s crisp cotton print was mud from collar to hem. Reaching down, Mab slipped her left shoe off and examined the snapped heel, and Osla saw her face crumple in the shadows. Every night she watched Mab polish those cheap shoes before bed, no matter how tired she was, to give them a Bond Street shine. “I’m sure we can fix it,” Osla began, but Mab’s crumpled expression vanished. She drew back and hurled the broken shoe straight into the chest of the man who’d nearly run them off the road. “What are you doing taking a turn at that speed, you bloody bastard!” she bellowed. “Are you blind, you stupid bugger?” “Clearly,” the man said, barely catching the shoe. He stood half a head shorter than Mab, a shock of russet hair falling over his forehead as he shaded his eyes to look at her. “My apologies.” “We were walking in the middle of the road,” Osla pointed out, but Mab stood on her one shod foot in the mud and let the stranger have it. He let it rain down, expression more admiring than horrified. “Blew your tire,” Mab finished with a withering look. “Guess you’ll have to get down in the mud and change it out.” “Would if I could,” he replied. “I’ll just leave the car and head for the station. Are there any trains this late?” Mab folded her arms, cheeks still scarlet with indignation. “Easier to put the spare on, if you’ve got a kit.” “Haven’t a clue how.” Mab slipped out of her other shoe, whizzed it into his hands, marched in her stocking feet through the mud to the car’s boot, and hurled it open. “Have my shoes properly mended, and I’ll change your ruddy tire.” “Deal.” He looked on, grinning, as Mab began yanking out tools. “How do you know how to change a blinking tire?” Osla wondered. “I haven’t the foggiest.” “A brother who works in a garage.” Mab rolled up her skirt at the waist to keep it out of the mud. Her flat stare promised the stranger slow, painful death if he ogled her legs. “Have you got a torch? Shine it over so I can see what I’m doing.” He deposited Mab’s ruined shoes on the bonnet and switched on his torch, still grinning. “You two are BP workers?” Osla smiled politely, not answering that question on an open road. “Are you, Mr. . . . ?” “Gray. And no. I’m in one of the London offices.” Intelligence, Osla thought, approving of his vagueness. Or Foreign Office. “I was running some information to Commander Denniston personally, from my own boss. He was late getting me a reply, hence the midnight drive.” Osla offered a hand; he shook it over the beam of the torch. “Osla Kendall. That’s Mab Churt, cursing at your tire.” “I’ll need help winching up the car.” Mab’s irate voice floated up. “Not you, Os—no sense both of us ruining our stockings.” Osla watched as Mr. Gray lent a hand. He stayed to lug the spare through the dark and pass a few more tools, until Mab snapped, “You’re in my way, now; just hold the torch.” “Pity you don’t work at BP instead of London, Mr. Gray,” Osla said as he straightened. Hard to tell in the dark, but he looked thirty-six or thirty-seven, his face broad and calm and creased with smile lines. “We need more fellows in our literary society.” “Literary society?” He had a country voice, soft midland vowels. He spoke to Osla, but he was watching Mab do something incredibly capable to the spare tire. “I thought you BP girls were all maths-and-crosswords types.” Something niggled at the back of Osla’s mind. Something about crosswords . . . “There.” Mab straightened, pushing her hair off her muddy cheek. “That should get you to London, Mr. Gray, then you can get the other patched.” Her eyebrows lifted. “I’ll expect my shoes back good as new.” “You have my word, Miss Churt.” He shouldered his blown tire so he could sling it into the boot. “I don’t want to be found dead in a gutter.” Mab nodded grudgingly, turning to look at Osla. “Coming, Os?” “You go,” Osla said as Mr. Gray nodded farewell in the dark and slipped back into his car. The bit about crosswords had dropped in her head with a click. “I’ve had an absolutely topping idea.” She hadn’t been back inside the mansion since her first day; even at midnight, it hummed like a beehive with exhausted men in their shirtsleeves. Osla couldn’t get in to see Commander Denniston, but red-haired Giles was in the conservatory flirting with a typist, and Osla nipped her hand through his arm. “Giles, d’you know if Denniston’s still recruiting?” “Crikey, yes. The rate traffic’s mounting, they can’t vet people fast enough.” “I remember hearing something about crosswords . . .” “There’s a theory that crossword types, maths types, and chess-playing types are good at our sort of work. Personally I think it’s bollocks. I certainly can’t tell a rook from a bishop—” Osla cut him off. “My landlady’s daughter is an absolute whiz at crosswords.” “That mousy little thing you brought to the Shoulder of Mutton? Are you mad, you dim-witted deb?” “Her name is Beth Finch. And don’t call me that.” Osla remembered how fast Beth had finished the newspaper crossword at the pub. Osla Kendall, not only are you not a dim-witted deb, you are a genius. Because maybe what Beth needed was a peroxide rinse, a new dress in the latest go, and a date with an airman or two, but she wasn’t going to get any of those things if she never got out of the house. Even sitting behind a typewriter or binding signals on night shift had to be better than toiling for the Dread Mrs. Finch until the Nazis came goose-stepping into Bletchley. “Take a puck, Giles, and put in a word with Denniston. Beth’s going to fit right in at Bletchley Park.” Chapter 10 August 1940 You’ll do.” Beth stared in utter horror. “Were you worried, Miss Finch?” The tired-looking man—Paymaster Commander Bradshaw, as he’d introduced himself at the start of Beth’s interview—stamped something on the file in front of her. “It’s not all Oxford graduates here, you know. Your background came in clean as a Sunday wash, and being a local girl, we won’t have to billet you. Start tomorrow; you’ll be on the day shift. You’ll need to sign this . . .” Beth didn’t even hear the dire imprecations of the Official Secrets Act as they were rattled off. They weren’t supposed to take me, she thought in a blur of panic. It had never occurred to her that Bletchley Park would hire her, even when the summons came a week ago. “It only says to present myself for an interview,” Beth had reassured her mother, who had slit Beth’s letter open when it arrived and demanded explanations. She’d present herself as called, but the Park wouldn’t have any use for her. Far too stupid, she thought, wondering how they’d got her name at all. And the interview, conducted in a muggy back room behind the redbrick mansion’s staircase, had seemed utterly routine: questions about typing and filing, which Beth couldn’t do; education, which Beth didn’t have; and foreign languages, which Beth didn’t speak. She whispered one-word answers, mind half on the strange things she’d seen while trudging up to the mansion: a man cycling through the gates wearing a gas mask as though he expected an attack any moment; four men and two women playing rounders on the lawn . . . Even as she walked up the drive, Beth had already been relieved at the thought of going home and telling her mother it was all over. Then, suddenly: You’ll do. “S-surely there’s a mistake,” she managed to stammer. But Mr. Bradshaw was shoving a pen at her. “Sign the Act, please.” Dazed, Beth signed. “Excellent, Miss Finch. Now for your permanent pass—” Mr. Bradshaw broke off as a commotion resonated outside. “Good Lord, these codebreakers are worse than quarreling cats.” Out the door he went. Beth blinked. “Codebreakers?!” Following him out toward the entrance, she saw a weary-looking gentleman in shirtsleeves addressing a grizzled professorial type who was limping up and down the oak-paneled hall—“Dilly, old thing, do stop roaring.” “No, I will not,” roared the man with the limp. To Beth he looked like the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, which Osla and Mab were reading for the first literary society book pick: long, gangling, faintly comical, eyes snapping behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Denniston, I won’t have my work passed off half-done—” “Dilly, you haven’t got the personnel, and you keep turning down the new ones I send you.” “I don’t want a yard of Wrens all looking the same—” “We haven’t even got any Wrens—” “—and I don’t want any debutantes in pearls whose daddies got them into BP because they knew someone at the Admiralty—” “This one might do, Dilly,” Mr. Bradshaw interrupted, and Beth shrank as every eye in the hall turned to her. “I was going to put her into administration, but you might give her a trial first if you’re shorthanded.” “Eh?” The White Knight turned with a glare. His eyes behind the glasses raked Beth, and she stood frozen. “You’re good with languages?” “No.” Beth had never felt so shy, slow, stilted, and stuck in her life. From Commander Denniston’s grateful glance at Bradshaw, she knew perfectly well this was a diversion—chucking her into the line of fire to avert further shouting. Her face burned. “What about linguistics? Literature?” the White Knight fired off. “Even maths?” “No.” Then for some reason, Beth whispered, “I—I’m good at crosswords.” “Crosswords, eh? Peculiar.” He pushed his glasses further up his nose. “Come along.” “Miss Finch hasn’t got her official pass yet—” “Has she signed the Act? Let her start. As long as you can shoot her if she blabs, who cares about the pass?” Beth nearly fainted. “I’m Dilly Knox. Come with me,” the White Knight said over his shoulder, and led her through the looking glass. What is this place? Trailing after Mr. Knox as he limped out of the mansion toward what appeared to be a converted stable block, Beth couldn’t stop Lewis Carroll from chaining together in her whirling head. Her brain did that sometimes, went flashing down an association and kept linking others to it to make a pattern. Glancing up at the bronze-faced clock mounted on the half-timbered upper tower, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see the hands running backward. Why hadn’t Osla and Mab warned her? But they couldn’t say anything; they’d signed an oath . . . and now, so had Beth. Whatever happened here now, she wasn’t going to be able to tell her mother a thing. Her stomach swooped. Mother is going to be furious. Beyond the old stable yard was a compact single-storied block: three brick cottages joined together in a single whitewashed unit, with two doors. Mr. Knox struck open the rightmost. “We work here,” he said, beckoning Beth through a corridor. “It’s like a great factory, the rest of BP. Here’s where we do proper cryptography.” Cryptography, Beth thought. I now do cryptography. There was no Wonderland inside the desk-crammed, chalk-dusty room where he led her, just five or six women hard at work—short and tall, pretty and plain, looking as young as eighteen or as old as thirty-five in their jumpers and skirts. None looked up. “Were you shouting at Denniston again, Dilly?” an older woman with straw-fair hair asked. “I was sweet as a lamb. I told him just last week that he couldn’t—” “Dilly darling, no.” The woman was manipulating a set of cardboard strips in a pattern Beth couldn’t follow. “You didn’t tell Denniston anything last week.” “Didn’t I?” He scratched his head, all his earlier rage seemingly dissipated. “I rather thought last week one had said the right thing . . .” “One hasn’t said anything before today. One hasn’t spoken to Denniston at all for two weeks.” The straw-haired woman exchanged smiles with the younger girls. “That would explain why he looked so puzzled.” Mr. Knox shrugged, turning back to Beth. “Meet my ladies.” He gestured to the room. “Dilly’s Fillies, they call ’em at the mansion. Utter rot, but around here, if it rhymes, it sticks. Ladies, meet—” He looked at Beth. “Did you tell me your name?” “Beth Finch—” “Ladies, Beth Finch. She’s . . .” He trailed off, patting his pockets. “Where are my glasses?” “On your head,” at least three of the women said, without looking up. He located his spectacles and draped them over his nose. “Take a desk,” he said, waving at Beth. “Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes.” He flung himself down at a desk by a window, fumbling for a tin of tobacco and seemingly forgetting Beth’s existence. Most of the girls went right on working as though this were a perfectly normal state of affairs, but the small woman with the straw-fair hair rose, extending a hand. “Peggy Rock.” One of the older women, thirty-five or thirty-six, a plain face that sparkled with intelligence. “I’ll show you the ropes. That’s Dillwyn Alfred Knox,” she said, pointing to the White Knight, “and he was breaking German codes back in the Fourteen–Eighteen War. Dilly’s team here researches the stuff that has to be lockpicked rather than brute-force assembly-lined through the other huts. Right now we’re working the Italian naval Enigma—” “What’s Enigma?” Beth said, utterly bewildered. “The machine the enemy uses to encrypt most of their military traffic,” Peggy said. “Italians and Germans, naval traffic and air traffic and army traffic, and every cipher has a different setting. The machine has, well, let’s just say a dizzying number of setting combinations, and the settings change every day, so that should make whatever they encrypt with Enigma unbreakable.” She gave a small smile. “Not as unbreakable as they think.” Did Osla know all this? Beth wondered. Did Mab? “We tend to get a bit more of the big picture here than the others at BP,” Peggy added as if reading her mind. “They’re such fiends for compartmentalization here—most people just see the bit in front of them, and maybe they put a bit together from what they see going in and out of the other huts, but that’s all—” “Utter rot.” Dilly’s voice floated from his desk. “I want my girls to have a large, unhampered range. You benefit from seeing the whole picture, not bits and pieces of it.” “Why?” Beth asked. “Because we do the tricky part.” Peggy Rock spread her hands. “The traffic gets registered and logged elsewhere, and once it’s broken it gets translated and analyzed—but we do the important bit in the middle. The prying-it-all-open bit, every message individually. We use a technique called rodding to identify the start position of the message as seen through the window indicator setting. Let me show you—” “I won’t understand it,” Beth blurted out. “I’m not clever, you understand? I can’t do—” Rodding. Cryptography. This. Her chest was tight; her breath heaved; the walls pulsed around her. It paralyzed her to stray even a few steps outside her usual routine, and here was a whole new world. Any moment now she was going to panic. “I’ll hold you back,” she insisted, close to tears. “I’m too stupid.” “Really?” Peggy Rock looked at her calmly, fanning out a handful of those curious cardboard strips like a winning hand of cards. “Who told you that?” Chapter 11 I miss you, Os. I miss you a shocking lot, to be honest. Philip’s handwriting was clear, no flourishes. Seeing it always made Osla’s heart thump. Shut up, heart, she scolded. “Mrs. F’s really having a go.” Mab was eavesdropping unashamedly downstairs, head poked into the dark landing. Beth’s first shift at Bletchley Park had been today, right after her interview, and Mrs. Finch had been twitching. Now Beth was back, not that they could hear her. Just her mother’ s insistent voice, quoting something from the Bible about For son treats father contemptuously, daughter rises up against her mother— “Should we pop down?” Osla looked up from the bed where she was curled rereading Philip’s old letters. “Interject various patriotic things like ‘Let your daughter work, you meddling cow, there’s a war on’?” “We’ll only make things worse,” Mab said. “Mrs. F’s on Ezekiel now.” Gnawing her lip, Osla turned back to Philip’s salt-stained letter from May. Being transferred to the Kent when I was just getting used to the Ramillies; that was a bit of a letdown. None of the ratings here are all that keen on having royalty aboard, even third-rate royalty like me. You should have seen the eyes rolling when I first came on. Whisper is we’re off to hunt for some action soon. Don’t worry, darling girl— He hadn’t seen any action with the Kent, but now he was being transferred again, to her sister ship—who knew where it would take him? Osla shivered. U-boat wolf packs roaming the sea, and of course he'd want to charge right into the thick . . . “Here she comes,” Mab whispered as Beth’s footsteps came up the stairs. Osla slid off the bed, tucking Philip’s letter into her copy of Through the Looking-Glass. When Beth appeared on the landing, Osla and Mab whisked her into their room and shut the door. “Well?” Osla checked Beth’s arms—no bruises, thank goodness. “Your mother can’t refuse, surely! You know, I thought it might take longer when I put your name in. Sometimes the vetting takes weeks—” “So you did recommend me.” Beth’s voice was flat. “Yes.” Osla smiled. “I thought you might need an excuse to get out of the house—” “You thought.” Osla had never heard Beth interrupt anyone, but she cut Osla off now. Her cheeks flared scarlet. “You know what I think? I think I wanted to be left alone. I think I want my mother not to be angry with me, or make me hold the Bible up for twenty minutes. What I don’t want is a job with strange people doing work I don’t understand.” “We were just as lost the first few weeks,” Mab reassured. “You’ll get the hang of it. We were just trying to—” “You want me to grow a spine.” Beth’s imitation of Mab’s voice was savage. “But maybe you two should have thought that somebody like me—someone perfectly, hopelessly Fanny Price—would have been happy to stay home where she belongs.” She whirled out of the room. Her bedroom door banged a moment later. Mab and Osla looked at each other, stunned. “I should have asked before I put her name up.” Osla sank down on the bed. “I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in.” “You didn’t mean to—” “—boss her about like her mother does?” Mab sighed. Dear Philip, Osla thought. I have, if you will pardon the phrase, made a royal muff of things. Chapter 12 September 1940 Hallo, can we sit here?” Two weeks ago, Beth would have jumped out of her skin. Now she felt so weary and low, all she did was nod at the two young men who joined her table in the mansion dining hall. “I know you.” The massively built fellow with the black hair paused as he set down his tray. “You were at the first meeting of the Mad Hatters.” “. . . What?” “The literary society. We did Through the Looking-Glass, and at the second meet-up, Giles brought bread and margarine, moaning how Alice at least got butter when she had tea with the Mad Hatter. We’ve been the Mad Hatters Tea Party ever since. Less pompous than the BP Literary Society.” The black-haired fellow snapped his fingers. “You were only at the first meet-up, weren’t you? Don’t tell me . . . Beth Finch.” A grin. “I’m good with names.” Beth managed some kind of smile, pushing her food around her plate. It was two thirty in the morning, middle of night shift, and the converted dining room smelled of Brylcreem, stale fat, and kidneys on toast. All around, night-shift workers were grabbing seats, some half-asleep, some bright eyed and joking as if this were midday break at any ordinary job. Beth’s stomach still wasn’t used to cafeteria-style cooking, and after nearly a month her skin should have stopped prickling when she was surrounded by strangers, but it just wouldn’t. “Mr.—Zarb?” she managed to say as he and his friend slung in opposite. “Call me Harry. This is Alan,” he added, indicating the young man beside him, who stared at the ceiling as he munched. “Alan Turing. We all call him the Prof, because he’s such a clever bugger . . .” Everyone here seemed to go by nicknames or first names. Everyone here seemed eccentric, too—look at Mr. Turing (Beth couldn’t bring herself to think of a man she’d just met as either Alan or the Prof), with an ancient tie holding up his flannel trousers instead of a belt. “These kidneys are abysmal,” Harry Zarb went on cheerfully. “Not fit for a dog. If my son were here, he’d say we need to get a dog, so the kidneys wouldn’t go to waste. All conversational roads lead to requests for a puppy, at least in my house—” Beth had always wanted a dog, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. Fleas . . . “I saw you headed into the Cottage yesterday,” Harry went on, addressing Beth. “Knox’s section? You must be a clever one. Dilly only takes the brainy girls for his harem—” Beth burst into tears. “Steady on—” Harry fumbled for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said harem. No one means anything off-color by it. Dilly’s a good chap—” “Excuse me,” Beth sobbed, and ran out of the room. Bletchley Park at night might have been the dark side of the moon: every hut window blacked out to block the smallest chink of light. Beth fumbled her way across the lawn, tripped over a wooden bat left over from someone’s afternoon rounders game, and finally just stopped, worn out to the bone. It was exhausting, spending your day being stupid. Over three weeks she’d been working at the Cottage: staring at blocks of Enigma code, trying to manipulate her cardboard rods the way she’d been shown, trying to make sense of the nonsense. Hour after hour, day after day. Beth knew she was a dolt, but you’d think with three weeks of solid concentration she might achieve something. There was something on the other side of the curtain of code, she could feel it, but she couldn’t get there. She was stymied. Thoroughly dished, darling, as Osla would have drawled. Utterly nobbled. Completely graveled. “You’re obsessing too much,” Peggy Rock had said. “Think of it as a word game.” “I don’t understand it—” “You don’t really have to. Doing this work is a bit like driving a car without having a clue what’s under the bonnet. Just have at it.” Peggy had been very encouraging; so were all the other girls. But they had their own mountain of work; none of them could stand looking over Beth’s shoulder all day. They sat with their crib charts and Italian dictionaries, flipping lettered rods about, and periodically someone would say something inexplicable like “Got a beetle here . . . ,” and someone else would say, “I’ve got a starfish,” and send Beth even deeper into despair. “It’s all Greek to me,” she burst out her first week, and Dilly Knox had chortled, “M’dear, I wish it were!” “He’s a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek,” Peggy whispered, also laughing, and Beth shriveled in her chair. Dilly was very kind, but he got so wrapped up in his own work that he barely seemed to know where he was, much less anyone else. The only reason Beth could think why she hadn’t been sacked by now was because everyone was too busy to realize what a dismal flop she was. And then to go home every single day and face her mother, so hurt she wouldn’t even speak to Beth, even when Beth turned over her entire Bletchley Park salary as Mother insisted . . . “You have no idea what you’re doing to her,” Dad had said yesterday, shaking his head. Osla and Mab were giving Beth a wide berth; Beth flinched when she remembered how she’d hissed at them, but she wasn’t sorry. Osla shouldn’t have meddled. Beth Finch didn’t belong here, and that was a fact. I’m packing it in, she thought. Tomorrow. Three weeks ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of marching up to the imposing Christmas-cake fa?ade of the mansion and resigning, but now she knew she could screw up the courage. Only a few girls were inside the Cottage when Beth slipped back inside—most worked days alongside Dilly. Sliding out of her cardigan, Beth sank behind her desk looking at the mess of paper slips. “The thing about the Enigma machine,” Peggy had said (though Beth hadn’t even seen an Enigma machine), “is that it’s got a great big gap we can exploit. You press the A key on the keyboard, an electrical current passes through the three wheels and a reflector, which sends the current back through the wheels and lights up the bulb of a different alphabet letter on the lampboard—A scrambles out as, say, F. Press the A key again, and another current goes through, and this time it scrambles out as Y. There’s no direct equivalent, A won’t always equal F—A always comes out different; that’s why Enigma’s so hard to crack. Except for one thing, thank goodness. The machine won’t let A ever come out as A. No letter can ever be encrypted as itself.” “That’s a gap?” Beth had said, utterly adrift. “About as wide as the English Channel, duckie. Look at any block of encrypted letters: ADIPQ. Well, you know A is any letter but A, D is any letter but D . . .” Peggy had paused to light a cigarette. “Most messages that are encrypted have common phrases or words—cribs, we call them. For Italian Enigma, most messages start out with the officer the message is intended for: Per Comandante. So, slide through each block of letters looking for a string where not one letter matches up with P-E-R-X-C-O-M-A-N-D-A-N-T-E—the X for the space between the words—and there you are; it’s a match. I’m not saying it’s easy,” she added. “We’ve been banging our heads on Italian Enigma for months, trying to figure out if it’s the same machine they used in Spain in the thirties when Dilly broke their codes before. But this is how it’s done—this is how you find your way in.” Peggy saw Beth’s despairing look. “Look, it’s a bit like playing Hangman in a foreign language. You have a phrase that’s all blank spaces, you guess a letter that’s common in most words, and maybe it fills one or two slots in the phrase. Then you guess another letter, and the more you get, the more of the phrase you can see.” She smiled. “What I’m saying is, stop focusing and let your mind play.” WIQKO QOPBG JEXLO began the code in front of Beth, five-letter block after five-letter block. She looked at the clock. Three in the morning. Without any hope at all, she put in PERXCOMANDANTE for the machine’s right-hand wheel and began trying different positions—rodding, Peggy called it, because of the slim cardboard rods with letters printed along them in the order they appeared in the wiring of each Enigma wheel. Peggy had shown Beth how to slide the rods under the encoded text to try to find a point where the text of those all-important common phrases began to appear. Cribs, Beth reminded herself, not phrases. Everything has a special name here. It sounded easy, looking for places where there was no letter overlap, but there were seventy-eight different trials to make in order to cover all twenty-six positions of each of the machine’s three wheels . . . Her eyes were aching by the time she found something. The first three letters paired up with the rod, P-E-R . . . but it gave the fourth letter as S, not X. She nearly switched over to the next, but paused. Is there another crib starting PERS? Beth wavered, then swiped Dilly’s Italian dictionary and flipped to P. Persona . . . personale . . . “Jean,” she asked the nearest girl, “could personale be a crib?” It was the first time she’d addressed anyone in the Cottage unprompted. “Maybe?” came the distracted answer. Beth swiveled in her chair, flipping her plait over one shoulder. “Personale,” she muttered. Meaning “Personal for.” Surely the Italian navy had occasion to mark things Personal for ____. It gave her five more letter couplings to check: she had P-E-R-S; now to try for O-N-A-L-E— Clicks. She’d heard the other girls tossing that word around for weeks, and now she saw why, because things were going click right on the rods in front of her. Direct clicks when both letters of a crib phrase came up side by side on the same rod; Dilly called them beetles for some reason. Then cross-clicks when one crib letter came up on one rod, and the other on a second rod; Dilly called those starfish, and Beth’s breath stopped when she realized she had one. She hadn’t been able to see it before, it hadn’t made sense, but suddenly this bit right in front of her came swimming out of the rows of letters. Well, if it was “personal for,” then it stood to reason that next there would be a name, a rank, an honorific . . . She pulled out two letters, N-O. Beth dropped her rods and went pawing through the cribs again. Signor? Painstakingly she pulled S-I-G-out of the mess, then the R, then gobbledygook that was probably a man’s name. But she had enough, she could go after some of the missing rod couplings now . . . Her braid fell over her shoulder again, getting in the way, and she twisted it up behind her neck and pushed a pencil through it. Another click . . . “Beth,” one of the other girls said. “Go home, your shift’s over.” Beth didn’t hear. Her nose was almost touching the paper in front of her, the letters marching along in a straight line over her rods, but somewhere behind her eyes she could see them spiraling like rose petals, unspooling, floating from nonsense into order. She was working fast now, sliding the rods with her left hand, elbow holding the Italian dictionary open. She lost an hour on a crib that didn’t work, then tried another and that was better, the clicks started coming right away . . . Dilly Knox came in, already looking exhausted. “Anyone seen my ’baccy?” The new shift of girls went on the usual hunt for his tobacco tin. “What are you still doing here, Miss—what’s your name again? I thought you were on the night shift.” Beth just handed him her worked-out message and waited, pulse racing. She’d never felt like this in her life, very light and remote, not entirely back in the present. She’d been going at it six straight hours. The message was a mess of scribbles, still gobbledygook in patches, but she’d broken it open into lines of Italian. Her boss’s smile made her heart turn over. “Oh, well done!” he all but caroled. “Well done, you! Bess?” “Beth,” she said, feeling a smile break over her face. “What—what does it say?” He passed it off to one of the other girls, who spoke Italian. “Probably a routine weather report or something.” “Oh.” Her cautious, dawning pleasure sank. “It doesn’t matter what it says, dear girl. Just that you broke it. We’ve had such trouble cracking Italian Enigma since they entered the war. This might be the best break we’ve had in ages.” “. . . It is?” Beth looked around at the others, wondering if they’d think she was showing off. But they were grinning; Peggy clapped. “It was an accident—” “Makes no difference. That’s how it happens. Now we have this, we’ll get the rest quicker. Until the Eyeties change things up, at any rate.” He gave her a swift assessing look. “You need breakfast, a proper one. Come with me.” DILLY DROVE HIS Baby Austin out through the gates of Bletchley Park like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were after them and was soon tearing up Watling Street with absolutely no regard for either tank traps or passing traffic. At any other time, Beth would have been sure she was about to die in a ditch, but rather than clutching the door and whimpering, she sat statue-passive in the passenger seat. She was still coming down from another world, electric and distant, spirals of letters turning lazily behind her eyelids. Dilly didn’t seem to expect conversation. Hands only now and then connecting with the wheel, he careened them down Clappins Lane and then a long woodland drive, pulling up at last before a gracious, gabled manor house. “Courns Wood,” he announced, swinging out of the car. “I call it home, though with the war on, I’m hardly here. Olive!” he called, moving into a dim paneled hall. A plump graying woman appeared, dusting flour off her hands. “My wife,” Dilly said, somewhat unnecessarily. “Olive, meet Beth—a budding cryptanalyst in need of sustenance.” “Hello, dear,” Mrs. Knox greeted Beth tranquilly, as if utterly unsurprised to find a disheveled young woman trailing behind her husband after what had very clearly been a long night. If you were married to Dilly Knox, perhaps you got used to living in a perpetual Wonderland. “Could you eat an omelet?” she said, then answered her own question, clearly seeing Beth was beyond speech. “I’ll bring two. Library, dears . . .” Somehow Beth found herself in a disorganized study lined with books and warmed by a roaring wood fire, gin and tonic in her hand. “Drink up,” Dilly said, mixing one for himself and settling into a leather chair opposite. “Nothing like a stiff gin after a hard night with the rods and cribs.” Beth didn’t stop and think, What would Mother say? She just lifted her glass and drank half. The gin fizzed like sunshine and lemons. “Cheers.” Her boss raised his own glass, eyes sparkling. “I think you’ll be a good addition to the Cottage, m’dear.” “I thought I was going to be sacked.” “Nonsense.” He chuckled. “Now, what did you do before coming to BP?” Nothing. “I was just—the daughter at home.” “University?” Beth shook her head. “Pity. What are your plans?” “What plans?” “After the war, of course!” There were tank traps the length of Watling Street, and every headline was full of German Messerschmitts poking their snouts over the coast. “Are the Germans going to give us an after the war?” Beth heard herself wonder. It was the kind of thing no one said aloud, but Dilly didn’t chide her for letting down morale. “There’s always an after. Just depends what it looks like. Finish that drink; you’ll feel worlds better.” Beth lifted the glass again, then stopped. She realized in a sudden rush of returning caution how this looked: a girl of twenty-four drinking gin at ten in the morning with a man in his fifties, alone in his private library. What other people might think. He seemed to know what was flashing through her mind. “You know why I only want gels for my team?” he asked, eyes no longer vague behind the glasses. “Not because I want pretty faces around me, though heaven knows you’re all nicer to look at than a lot of university swots with horse teeth and dandruff. No, I take gels as my new recruits because they are far better, in my experience, at this kind of work.” Beth blinked. No one had ever told her young ladies were better at any kind of work than men, unless it was cooking or sewing. “These young mathematicians and chess players in the other huts—they do similar work to what we do, rodding and cribs, but men bring egos into it. They compete, they show off, they don’t even try to do it my way before they’re telling me how to do it better. We don’t have time for that, there’s a war on. And I’ve been doing this work since the last one—I helped crack the Zimmermann telegram, for God’s sake.” “What’s that?” “Never mind. What I’m saying is, I don’t need a lot of young cockerels chesting about, competing with each other. Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen. That’s why I like fillies instead of colts, m’dear, not because I’m building a harem. Now, drink your gin.” Beth drank it. Mrs. Knox brought their breakfast, retreating with another tranquil smile, and a wave of hunger nearly flattened Beth. “I don’t know if I can do it again,” she found herself admitting even as she balanced the plate on her lap. No food had ever tasted so good. “Yes, you can. Practice makes perfect. I’ve turned more schoolgirls into first-rate rodders than I can count.” “I didn’t exactly get much training when I started.” Dilly chewed a forkful of his own omelet. “That’s because I want you coming to it fresh and inventive, not with every instinct and impulse trained out of you. Imagination, that’s the name of the game.” “It’s not a game.” Beth had never contradicted a superior in her life, but in this cozy library overlooking a tangled garden, none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply. “It’s war.” “It’s still a game. The most important one. You haven’t seen an Enigma machine yet, have you? Monstrous little things. The air force and naval machines have five possible wheels, which means sixty possible orders depending on which three are picked for the day. Every wheel has twenty-six possible starting positions, and the plugboard behind it has twenty-six jacks. That makes one hundred and fifty million million million starting positions . . . and then the Jerries change the settings every twenty-four hours, so every midnight we have to start over. That’s what we’re up against. The Italian Enigma machine isn’t quite such a beast—no plugboard—but it’s quite bad enough.” Dilly toasted her with a tilted smile. “It’s odds to make you weep, which is why we must think of it as a game. To do otherwise is sheer madness.” Beth was trying to figure out how many zeroes there were in one hundred and fifty million million million, and couldn’t do it. They kept spiraling behind her eyelids in five-block chunks, 00000 00000 00000, down into the rose’s heart. “If the odds are that bad, we won’t ever do it.” “But we are. The Polish cryptanalysts were reading German Enigma traffic since the early thirties, and breaking back in after every change until ’38—we’d be nowhere without them, and now we’ve picked up the torch.” Another silent toast for the Poles. “Bit by terrible bit, we’re doing it.” “Do the Germans really have no idea?” “None. Our fellows are very careful at the top level, how they use the decrypted information we give them. I understand there are rooms of intelligence chaps here who do nothing but mock up plausible ways our information could have been found by some other source than breaking Enigma.” Dilly waved a hand. “Not our business, that part. But they must be doing it right, because the Jerries don’t seem to have realized we’re reading their post. German arrogance—they’ve got their perfect machine, their unbreakable system, so how could anyone possibly be getting around it? Especially a lot of scrubby English lads and lasses in the middle of the countryside, going at it with nothing more than pencil stubs and a little lateral thinking?” “What’s lateral thinking?” “Thinking about things from different angles. Sideways, upside down, inside out.” Dilly set his empty plate aside. “If I was to ask what direction a clock’s hands go, what would you say?” “Um.” Beth twisted her napkin. “Clockwise?” “Not if you’re inside the clock.” Pause. “See?” He smiled. “. . . Yes,” said Beth Finch. THERE WERE NO smiles the following day when she reported for her next shift. Dilly looked preoccupied, shoving Beth some new crib charts. “No Italian Enigma today. The Hut 6 lads need help getting through this lot; it’s piling up and it’s critical. German Enigma, mostly the Red traffic . . .” Beth automatically coiled her plait up on the back of her head, jamming another pencil through to keep it off her neck, waiting for the nerves to swamp her as they had every day for weeks. The terrible fear that she’d fail, that she was stupid and useless and wasting everyone’s time. The fear came, the worry, the nerves—but much diminished. What Beth primarily felt was hunger: Please, God, let me do it again. Chapter 13 September 1940 Your shoes, Miss Churt, proved broken beyond repair. I hope you will allow me to replace them, with my apologies for ruining their predecessors. —F. Gray Mab let out a surprised hmph, footsteps slowing as she came into Bletchley village. A package had come in her batch of post, which like everyone else’s was delivered to Bletchley Park from a PO Box in London, then sorted and sent to each hut section to be picked up after shift. Mab had torn open the envelope from Lucy first (another crayon drawing of a horse, this one with a purple mane), then turned to the package with its brief cover note. She caught her breath as she lifted out a pair of shoes: no staid replacement for her now-deceased sensible pumps, but patent-leather slings with a French heel, not too fancy for day, but perfectly gorgeous. “Apology accepted, Mr. Gray.” Mab grinned at the shoes. “Pity I didn’t have you lovely things last night.” She’d had a dinner date with Andrew Kempton—Hut 3, sweet fellow, bit of a bore, getting quite starry-eyed. Mab thought he’d make a very decent husband, the sort who wore starched pajamas and made the same jokes over every Sunday roast. She’d allowed a good-night kiss after dinner, and if things kept progressing, she might allow him a button on her blouse . . . No more than one, unless things proved serious. A girl couldn’t let herself be carried away in the heat of the moment—that was for men, who had nothing to lose. Mab was humming Bing Crosby’s “Only Forever” as she came into the house. The sound of the radio drifted from the parlor—everyone was gathered round, Mr. Finch fiddling with the dial. The voice of Tom Chalmers over the BBC filled the room. “. . . can see practically the whole of London spread around me. And if this weren’t so appalling . . .” Osla was standing with enormous eyes, arms wrapped around her own waist. Beth leaned against her mother, who clutched her hand rather than pushing her aside as she’d been doing lately to punish Beth for getting a job. Mab took another step, staring at the radio. “The whole of the skyline to the south is lit up with a ruddy glow, almost like a sunrise or a sunset—” Osla spoke in a monotone. “The Germans are bombing London.” THE PRIME MINISTER’S bulldog voice, coming through the radio: “No one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method . . .” Churchill sounded so calm, Mab thought. How could he? The iron hammer of the Luftwaffe had turned away from the RAF airfields to pound London into glass. Over the radio Mab had listened frozen to descriptions of flame billowing, buildings collapsing, wave after wave of German bombers pulsing overhead dropping incendiaries on the East End docks from London Bridge to Woolwich. There was nothing there of military value, nothing. Only Londoners. Those monsters, Mab thought. Those monsters. Churchill’s voice bulled on: “Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty . . .” Duty? Mab thought. Over four hundred dead had been reported after the morning of the first raid alone. Her knees had given out when she was finally able to put a call through to her family and hear Lucy’s bright chattering voice. “It was loud! Mum and I ran underground—” “Did you?” Mab had slid down to the hall floor, back against the wall. Oh, Lucy, why didn’t I bring you with me? Why didn’t I make Mum leave? And now here they were, days later, and Churchill was intoning, “This is a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm . . .” Bugger that, thought Mab. “No,” said Hut 6’s head of section, the moment Mab accosted him the next day. “Leave will not be granted for you to go to London to see if your boyfriend is safe.” “It’s my mother and sister, not my boyfriend, and I don’t need a full day. Just half—” “You think everyone else isn’t asking for the same thing? Go back to work, young lady.” “If you’re hoping the chief staff officer will overrule your hut and grant you leave,” Harry Zarb greeted Mab as she stamped toward the mansion, “he won’t.” “Mind-reader, are you?” Mab snapped. “Lucky guess.” Harry was standing just outside the mansion, gazing over the lawn, cigarette smoldering between his big fingers. “I’ve been here a while smoking most of a pack, and people keep going in looking hopeful and coming out swearing.” Mab’s temper subsided. She liked Harry, after all—a wry, funny regular at the Mad Hatters Tea Party. “Can I have one?” Nodding at his cigarettes. He passed her a fag. Mab remembered being sixteen, going to films to study how the American stars smoked—how to let your hand linger around a man’s as he struck a match for you. Another bit of methodical self-improvement like her reading list, like polishing her vowels. How ridiculous it all seemed. Mab didn’t bother cupping Harry’s hand as he lit her cigarette, just sucked down the smoke as fast as she could, like any man recently off a hard shift of war work. “You’re lucky,” Harry said at last. Her anger flared again. “I’ve a sister and mother in the East End, which is getting flattened by Heinkels. You have a wife, you said—is she in London? Have you got family in any of the zones being pounded?” “No, I got a billet close by when I came to BP. Sheila’s in Stony Stratford with Christopher.” A flash of quiet pride in his voice. “That’s our little boy.” “They’re safe in the country, and I’m glad. But my family’s not. So no, I don’t think I’m lucky.” A tense pause. “I was trying to see if I could get released from here to enlist,” Harry said at last. “I got the brush-off from Denniston; it was Giles who told me why. None of us fellows will ever be allowed to enlist. Not one, no matter how great the need. Because what if we get captured, knowing about all this?” A gesture at the lake, so peaceful with its paddling ducks; the ugly huts buzzing with secrets. “So I’m here for the duration.” Harry looked at her over a vast shoulder. “You know what people think when they see a young strapping fellow like me not in uniform? At least no one thinks worse of you for being here.” Mab was used to the size of him by now, but reassessing the long limbs and broad chest, the massive frame that could fill a doorway, she could well imagine the glares: Harry Zarb was exactly the physical specimen made for a uniform. “It’s not like this work’s less important,” she said, lightening her tone. “And your little Christopher would rather have his dad at home, not at the front.” “I’ll tell him that, next time some grandmother spits on me at the park when I take him to spot planes.” Harry dropped the butt of his cigarette, trying for a smile. “Listen to me whinge—I’d better get back to my hut. See you at the next Tea Party, Mab. Hold firm, eh?” “Hold firm,” Mab quoted back. Bloody Churchill. She finished her cigarette in the dusk, fingering Lucy’s latest drawing in her pocket. The horse with the purple mane. Hold firm. She managed almost an entire week. It was near ten o’clock; Osla stood before the mirror yanking a comb through her hair, and Mab lay paging through Osla’s copy of Through the Looking-Glass. The Mad Hatters were reading The Hound of the Baskervilles now, but Mab hadn’t managed to finish the Carroll. “I hate this book,” she heard herself saying, suddenly and viciously. “Everything upside down and nightmarish, who writes a book like that? The whole bloody world is already like that!” Her voice cracked. She’d had such a terrible fight with her mother over the telephone yesterday, first begging, then shouting at Mum to put Lucy on the next evacuee train out of London, anywhere out of London. Mrs. Churt wouldn’t hear of it; she maintained that the Jerries weren’t making her move one foot out of her home, nor Lucy neither. All very well and good for morale, that kind of attitude, but Lucy was a child. People were saying over a hundred London children had been killed in that terrible first raid alone— She fired Through the Looking-Glass across the room into the hall. “Bugger you, Mr. Carroll. Bugger you and your Jabberwocky—” Her voice broke. Mab hadn’t wept since that one terrible night when she was seventeen, the night very thoroughly buried in her memory, but now she curled up on her counterpane, shuddering with sobs. Osla sank down beside her, arms folding around Mab’s shoulders. Through tear-choked eyes Mab saw Beth in a hideous flannel nightdress, standing awkwardly in the open doorway. “Your book,” she said, holding out Through the Looking-Glass. She didn’t seem to know whether to leave or to come embrace Mab too, so she shut the door and stood by Mab’s bed. Mab couldn’t stop sobbing. All the tension and dread that had wound her tighter than a clock since war had been announced unspooled in one violent fit of weeping. She looked up, tears falling, as Osla squeezed her shoulders and Beth shifted from foot to foot. “How long?” She said it brutally, not caring if it was defeatist. “How long before we have Panzers rolling down Piccadilly?” Because even if the bombs missed Mum and Lucy in Shoreditch, the imminent invasion wouldn’t. “It might not happen,” Osla said hopelessly. “The invasion can’t go if the tides aren’t—” “The invasion was postponed.” The words flew out of Beth as if fired from a rifle. Mab and Osla both stared at her, plain prim Beth in her nightdress buttoned to the throat, flushing so crimson she nearly glowed. “Beth—” Mab’s mind flashed with all the things she was and wasn’t allowed to ask, knowing they’d already transgressed those bounds. “How do you know . . .” She couldn’t make herself finish, but she couldn’t make herself take the question back either. Her heart pounded, and the room was so quiet she almost thought she could hear Beth and Osla’s hearts thudding too. The lights went out all at once—Mrs. Finch turning everything off at the main below, determined no one would keep a light on past her curfew. Mab nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden blackness. An instant later, Beth’s small cold hand found her wrist, presumably Osla’s too, because in the pitch darkness she pulled the three of them together, so close their foreheads touched. “The invasion has been postponed,” Beth repeated in a nearly soundless whisper. “At least, I think it has. Some of my section were sent to help Hut 6 work on overflow German air force traffic. The message was broken at the desk next to mine—it was about airlifting equipment on Dutch airfields being dismantled. There was more, I don’t know what, but the way the hut head reacted . . .” “If the loading equipment was dismantled, the invasion is being pushed back.” The words burst out of Osla as though Beth’s confession had shattered a dam. “That could explain the messages I saw in German naval section, going out to all naval networks—” “But in my section we’re still getting messages on the buildup of forces,” Mab contributed, feeling her own dam break. “So surely it’s just a deferment, not a cancellation—” “But it probably means next spring at the earliest,” Osla finished. “No one would want to launch invasion barges in winter tides.” They all took that in, still frozen together with their foreheads touching in the blackness. “Who else knows about this?” Mab whispered at last. “A few hut heads. Mr. Churchill, surely—he can’t make it public; he probably won’t rule out invasion this year until he’s utterly certain. But he and the people at the very top—they know.” Osla gulped. “And us.” This is why they don’t want us talking to each other, Mab thought, remembering Commander Denniston’s strictures. We all just see one piece of the puzzle, but when we start talking and put them together . . . “You can’t tell.” Beth’s words rushed. “You can’t tell anyone we’re safe until spring, no matter how scared they are. I shouldn’t have told you. I—” Her breath hitched. “Denniston could sack us, put us in prison—” “He won’t find out. And we can’t be the first to compare notes, no matter what they threaten—” “You know how many girls ask me to look for whatever ship their boyfriend or brother’s on, because I’m in German naval section?” Osla said softly. “They aren’t supposed to, but they do.” The invasion postponed. It didn’t mean safety from bombing; it didn’t mean safety next spring . . . but it had been so long since they had heard any good news at all, it felt like a much bigger weight lifted than it really was. Yes, there would still be air raids. Yes, the Germans might cross the channel next year. But who knew where they’d all be next year? All you could think about in wartime was today, this week. There wouldn’t be any German barges rolling into Dover this week, and knowing that, Mab thought she could go back to work and hold firm. “I swear right now,” Mab whispered, “I won’t say a word to my mum or anyone outside this bedroom. No one here will get in trouble with Denniston because of me.” “I still shouldn’t have told.” There was an agony of shame in Beth’s voice. Mab surprised herself by pulling Beth into a ferocious hug. “Thank you,” she muttered. “I know you won’t do it again, but—thank you.” When a girl has broken national security to ease your mind about your family’s lying in the path of an invasion route, she has officially become a friend. Eleven Days Until the Royal Wedding November 9, 1947 Chapter 14 London Marry for friendship, not love,” Osla had heard her mother quip. “Friends listen better than lovers!” So what did it say when you got engaged to a friend and he didn’t listen a whit? “Darling,” Osla said, trying to keep her voice even. “I’ve asked you repeatedly not to call me kitten. I’ve told you nicely that I dislike it; I’ve told you firmly that I despise it; I’m telling you now that I loathe it with every fiber of my being.” Even more than she loathed being called a silly deb. “Claws in, kitten!” He chuckled down the telephone line, still in bed by the sound of him. “Why the early call?” Osla gave a measured exhale. “I’ll be out of town for a few days. Old friend in a bit of a flap.” “I thought you were coming over tonight.” His voice lowered. “Staying over.” I’m sure you can find someone else to fizz your sheets while I’m gone, Osla thought. He certainly hadn’t given up other women since their engagement, and Osla supposed it didn’t matter. They had an understanding, not a great love. Let’s give it a go, Os, had been his marriage proposal. Romance is for bad novels, but marriage is for pals—pals like us. Why did I say yes? she sometimes wondered when she looked at the emerald on her finger, but a scolding reply always followed fast on that thought’s heels. You know perfectly well why. Because it had been July, the whole world positively kippered over Princess Elizabeth’s recently announced engagement to Philip, and Philip’s wartime girlfriend had turned overnight to an object of pity. Suddenly it didn’t matter that Osla wrote for the Tatler, loved her work, and splashed out at the Savoy every Saturday night with a different beau—all that mattered after the royal engagement was that she was a pathetic ex-debutante, jilted by the princess’s future husband and still unmarried. A week of pitying glances and sheet-sniffing journalists, and Osla had quite simply crocked up. She’d walked into the next party wearing a black satin frock slashed practically to the waist, ready to say yes to the next halfway suitable man who took a dead set at her, and an old friend had sidled up and said Let’s give it a go. And really, it was all going to be fine. They wouldn’t be like those deadly old-fashioned couples who lived in each other’s pockets. They weren’t in love, and who needed to be? It was 1947, darling, not 1900. Better to marry a friend, even one who called her kitten, than expect some grand romance. A friend whose presence at the royal wedding would assure all onlookers that Osla Kendall was a radiant fianc?e, not a bitter old maid. “Sorry to snaffle your plans, darling, but I’ll be back before you miss me.” Osla rang off, then whisked downstairs with her traveling case. A taxi screeched to a halt, and soon Knightsbridge fell behind her. The thought of her fianc?’s eyes was replaced by the memory of a woman’s serious blue gaze—the eyes of the woman who had disappeared three and a half years ago into Clockwell. The last time Osla had seen those eyes, they’d been wide and bloodshot as she simultaneously wept and laughed, rocking back and forth on the floor. She’d looked utterly on her beam ends, like she belonged in an asylum. The cipher message crackled in Osla’s pocket. You owe me. Maybe I do, Osla thought. But that doesn’t mean I believe you. Believed the other half of that desperately scribbled message, the very first line, which Osla had read and reread in shock. But she remembered those blue eyes, so painfully earnest. Eyes that had never lied. What happened to you? Osla wondered for the thousandth time. What happened to you, Beth Finch? Inside the Clock “Into the garden, Miss Liddell! We want our exercise, don’t we?” Beth caught herself rocking again, back and forth on her bench, as she wondered what was going on in the world outside. At BP she’d been better informed than anyone outside Churchill’s cabinet. Living here in this wool-padded ignorance— With an effort, Beth stilled herself. Only madwomen rocked back and forth. She wasn’t mad. Not yet. “Miss Liddell—” The matron hauled her up, voice dropping from sugary to sharp as the doctors bustled out of earshot. “Outside, you lazy bitch.” The thing Beth hated most here: anyone could touch her whenever they wanted. She had never liked to be touched unless it was on her own terms, and now every day there were hands: at her arms to steer, at her jaw to pry her mouth open, touching, touching, touching. Her body was no longer her own. But she moved out into the garden, because if she didn’t she’d be dragged. “That Liddell gives me the shivers,” Beth heard the matron mutter an hour later, sharing a cigarette in the rose garden with another nurse. “Underneath that empty stare it’s like she’s thinking how to take you apart.” Correct, Beth thought, maintaining her vacant look as she wandered the roses. “Who cares what they’re thinking, as long as they’re quiet?” The nurse shrugged. “At least we don’t have the dangerous ones like at Broadwell or Rampton. They’re docile here.” “They’re docile, all right.” The matron reached over to the vacant-eyed old woman who had been wheeled out to the garden in her bath chair and tapped hot cigarette ash onto her wrist. No response, and both matrons giggled. Endure. Beth picked up the discarded, half-smoked cigarette after they wandered away, taking a welcome drag. Just endure. She left the rose garden and wandered the high outer wall, which had been cleared of trees or shrubs or anything that might provide help climbing upward. A trio of burly orderlies walked the perimeter every hour, looking for knotted sheets or makeshift ropes flung over the walls. Not looking too seriously; it had been years since anyone tried to make a break for it. I intend to be the next, Beth thought. And then I will come for the person who put me here. Three and a half years, and she still wasn’t entirely sure who that was. She’d told her former friends as much in her cipher message: Osla and Mab— There was a traitor at Bletchley Park, selling information during the war. I don’t know who, but I know what they did. I found proof it was someone who worked in my section—but whoever they are, they had me locked up before I could make my report. You may hate me, but you took the same oath I did: to protect BP and Britain. That oath is bigger than any of us. Get me out of this asylum, and help me catch the traitor. Get me out of here. You owe me. “Everyone in, now! Exercise over.” The same hard-faced matron called across the garden, sounding impatient. “Pick up your feet when I talk to you, Liddell.” Giving Beth’s arm a hard, careless twist as she passed. Beth lifted the still-smoldering cigarette she’d managed to conceal between two fingers and planted the burning end on the matron’s hand. “Not. My. Name.” Two orderlies dragged her to her cell, face stinging with slaps. Beth fought every step of the way, clawing and spitting as they buckled her into the straitjacket. She tried to lie low, oh, she did, but sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. She snarled as she felt the needle’s prick, felt her veins filling with smoke, felt herself heaved like a hay bale onto her cot. The furious matron lingered as everyone else left, waiting until she could spit down Beth’s cheek. It would dry and be mistaken for drool, Beth knew. “You can lie in those sheets till you’ve pissed them, you little cow. Then you can lie in them a while longer.” Go to hell, you starched bully, Beth tried to say, but a fit of lung-rattling coughs erupted, and by the time she was done hacking, she was alone. Alone, straitjacketed, drugged to the gills, with nothing to think about but the traitor of Bletchley Park. Mab and Osla would surely have the letters by now, Beth thought dizzily. The question was, would they dismiss her claim as a madwoman’s paranoid fantasy? Or would they believe the unbelievable: that a traitor had been working at Bletchley Park and passing information to their enemy? Six Years Ago March 1941 BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS BP’S NEW WEEKLY: EVERYTHING WE DINNAE NEED TO KNOW! March 1941 Bletchley Bletherings has it on good authority that some unknown prankster smeared Commander Denniston’s office chair with strawberry jam during night shift. Waste of good jam, says BB! This month’s Mad Hatters Tea Party is discussing The Great Gatsby. It is officially Giles Talbot’s turn to bring the topper—for all you gigglemugs who have not clapped eyes on this monstrosity, picture a Dickensian stovepipe festooned with false flowers, ancient Boer War medals, Ascot plumes, etc. The topper is worn in dunce cap fashion by any Mad Hatter to propose the Principia Mathematica for the monthly read (that’s you, Harry Zarb), preface every statement with “I’m sorry” (ahem, Beth Finch), or otherwise wet-blanket the proceedings. BB doesn’t see stovepipe toppers catching on any time soon in Vogue . . . Speaking of fashion trends, London continues to sport 1941’s enduring, classic combination of shattered buildings and bomb craters, topped with eau de Messerschmitt and a dashing plume of smoke. Bomb away, Krauts—the boffins and debs of BP will still flood into London every night off and dance defiant in the rubble. There’s a war on, after all, and tomorrow we might be dead! —Anonymous Chapter 15 Osla crawled along the floor, blinded by blood. “Daisy Buchanan is one of those girls who goes about pretending they’re ever so fragile,” Mab proclaimed, “and really they’re as tough as old boots.” “I thought she was a bit sad,” Beth ventured. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” “Beth said I’m sorry again!” A chorus of laughter from the Mad Hatters, and the ancient festooned hat was lobbed toward Beth . . . That wasn’t right, Osla thought dimly, feeling blood run into her hair. She wasn’t at the Mad Hatters Tea Party anymore. That had been this afternoon, everyone wrapped in their coats against the March chill but determined to discuss The Great Gatsby in the spring sunshine on the lake’s shore. Mab with her legs elegantly crossed, Harry stretched full-length leaning on an elbow in the grass, Beth primly upright with her tea mug. “You’re very smart today, Os.” That had been Harry, packing away the hat and the books post–Tea Party. “Night off?” “I’m catching the evening train to London.” Osla patted her bag, which she’d crammed that morning with her favorite Hartnell evening dress: emerald green satin that sluiced over her skin like water. “I’ve got an old friend on leave from his ship; we’re going to splash out at the Caf? de Paris.” The Caf? de Paris . . . Osla looked around, blinking blood out of her lashes, but couldn’t see anything through the splintered darkness but rubble and overturned tables. Humped forms lay along the floor. Her eye refused to recognize them, what they were. There—the famous nightclub staircase, taking you from the street to the intimate underground splendor of cocktail tables and champagne dreams. Osla tried to seize the bannister and haul herself upright, but she tripped over something. Looking down, she saw a girl’s arm, its dainty wrist still looped with a diamond bracelet. The girl’s corpse sat slumped and armless in a blue chiffon gown at the nearest table. “Oh,” Osla whispered, and threw up into the rubble. Her mind was full of broken glass, her ears rang with sirens, and it was all coming back. She looked around at the carnage that had, minutes ago, been London’s most glamorous nightclub—the safest in the city, its manager boasted. The Blitz couldn’t touch you here, twenty feet belowground, so dance the night away. “Philip,” she heard herself whispering, “Philip . . .” Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his band had packed the floor, the Caf? de Paris jammed with dancers as the trumpets blared. Even when the area between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square was being strafed by German bombers aboveground, here you could forget the air raids. Here you were safe. Perhaps it seemed heartless or foolhardy to dance when the world above was pounded by fire, but there were times you had to either dance or weep—and Osla chose to dance, her hand in her partner’s strong tanned one, his arm in its naval uniform snug about her waist. “Marry me, Os,” he said into her ear, spinning her through the tango. “Before my leave’s up.” “Don’t talk drip, Charlie.” She executed a flashy turn, smiling. “You only propose to me when you’re half-sauced.” Osla couldn’t help but wish she were doing the tango with Philip tonight, but he was still out to sea. Charlie was an old chum from her deb days, a young officer heading out into the teeth of the Atlantic. “No more marriage proposals, I mean it!” “That Canadian heart of yours is frozen solid—” Snakehips and the band swung into “Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!” and Osla threw her head back to sing along. Winter was over and warmth starting to creep back over Britain; the government might still have been on alert for a German invasion, but Osla hadn’t heard a peep in BP about any such operation moving forward. Maybe the headlines were still bleak, and maybe Osla was still bored to tears filing and binding in Hut 4—all right, not just bored but smarting from some drawling comment she’d overheard about Miss Senyard’s flock of dim-witted debs in pearls—but there was, overall, a great deal more to sing about in this dawning spring of 1941 then there had been in the autumn of ’40. Snakehips sang away, dark skinned and slender in his white jacket, dancing with all the fluid grace that had won him his nickname. “He warbles it better than the Andrews Sisters,” Osla half shouted over the music, jitterbugging away in her green satin pleats, and she never heard the two bombs that hit the building aboveground, then rattled down the ventilation. She only saw the blue flash exploding before the bandstand, and in the instant before everything went away, saw Snakehips Johnson’s head blown from his shoulders. And now here she was, rocking back and forth on the floor, evening dress covered in blood. There was more light now, torches blinking on as survivors picked themselves up. A man in RAF uniform, trying to stand when one leg had been blown off at the knee . . . a boy who barely looked old enough to shave, trying to lift his moaning dance partner off the floor . . . a woman in a sequined gown crawling through the rubble . . . Charlie, Osla thought—there he was, faceup on the dance floor. The blast had exploded his lungs out onto the front of his naval uniform. Why had the bombs killed him and flung her clear? It made no sense. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t move. Someone buffeted down the stairs, shouting, and suddenly there seemed to be a rush of feet and bouncing torch beams. “Please,” she tried to ask the man who had run past, who was now moving from body to body. “Can you help—” But the man wasn’t here to help; he was yanking bracelets off a woman’s bloodied arm, then moving to a disembodied torso by the stage and rummaging for a wallet. It took her a long moment to see it for what it was. Looting, he was looting the bodies—a man had come into a room full of dead and wounded, and he was looting their jewelry— “You—” Osla struggled upright, fury like glass shards in her mouth. “You—stop—” “Gimme that—” A young man with sandy hair reached out, and pain bolted down Osla’s spine as she felt her earring torn away. “Gimme that too,” he said, fingers fastening around Philip’s jeweled insignia. “You can’t—have it,” Osla heard herself scream, but her limbs were moving with jerky uncertainty, and she heard the strap of her dress tear. Then a voice snarled, “Get the hell off her—” and a champagne bottle swung in a short arc through the flickering dark. There was a sound like a china plate hitting a brick floor, and Osla’s attacker dropped where he stood. She felt a gentle hand on her arm. “You all right, miss?” “Philip,” she whispered. She still had the naval insignia, clenched so tight in her palm she could feel its edges cut. “I’m not Philip, sweetheart. What’s your name?” “Os—” she began, and her teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t finish her own name. “Like Ozma of Oz?” The man’s voice was light, soothing. “Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt. Then we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain.” He had a torch; he guided her to the nearest chair. Her eyes were blurring so badly she couldn’t see what he looked like. She had a vague impression of lean height, dark hair, an army uniform under a greatcoat. Who’s Ozma of Oz? The man who had attacked her lay limp among the rubble. “Is—he dead?” Osla jerked. “I don’t care if he is. Christ, the blood in your hair . . . I can’t see if you’ve got a wound under there.” He picked up the champagne bottle he’d swung against the looter’s skull, popped the cork, and poured gently over Osla’s hair. Pinkened bubbles streamed down her neck, still cold from the ice bucket. She shivered, starting to weep. “Philip . . .” “Is that your boyfriend, Ozma?” The man was examining the back of her head now, sorting through her champagne-soaked curls. “It doesn’t look like this is your blood. Keep still, there’s aid workers on the way—” “Philip,” Osla wept. She meant poor Charlie, but her tongue wouldn’t produce the right name. She tried to stand—she should be helping, finding bandages for the others, doing something—but her legs still would not move. “Keep still, sweetheart. You’re in shock.” The dark-haired man shrugged out of his coat and draped it around her shoulders. “I’ll try to find Philip.” He’s not here, Osla thought. He’s in the Mediterranean, being shot at by Italians. But her Good Samaritan disappeared before she could tell him, moving to bend over an RAF captain who lay against the wall. The dark-haired man yanked a tablecloth off the nearest table to wad against the other man’s wounds, then a line of chorus girls in feathers and sequins hid him from sight as they stumbled past weeping—they must have been shielded in the wings when the bombs went off . . . Time slipped sideways for Osla. She was on a stretcher suddenly, still huddled in the greatcoat, and aid workers were lifting her up the stairs to the street above, where someone made another examination. “We can take you to the doctor, miss, but you’ll wait hours while they see the bad cases first. My advice is go home, clean up, see your doctor in the morning. Is there someone at home waiting for you?” What do you mean, “home”? Philip had said that at the Caf? de Paris on New Year’s Eve. Home is where there’s an invitation or a cousin. Osla, standing in her bloodied dancing slippers on the rubble-strewn street, had no idea where her own home was. She was a Canadian living in Britain; she had a father under a gravestone and a mother at a house party in Kent; she had a billet in Bletchley and a thousand friends who would offer her a spare bed, but home? No. None. “Claridge’s,” she managed to say, because at least she could have a hot bath in her mother’s empty suite. She’d have to catch the dawn milk train to get back to Bletchley in time for her shift. Once at the hotel, it was a long time before she could get undressed. She couldn’t bear to touch the bloodied fastenings of her favorite, utterly ruined gown, couldn’t bear to shed the overcoat, which was soft and worn and held her in its warm arms. She didn’t even know her Good Samaritan’s name, and he didn’t know hers either. Sit down, Ozma . . . we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain . . . “Who does this belong to, Miss Kendall?” Mrs. Finch asked the following day. Beth was usually the one she pounced on post-shift, saying reproachfully that if she was finally done with her very important work, there were spoons to be polished—but today it was Osla she was waiting for, holding out the greatcoat Osla had worn home and hung on the peg. Mrs. Finch squinted at the name tape inside the collar. “J. P. E. C. Cornwell—who is he?” “I have no idea,” said Osla, taking the coat and hobbling upstairs like an eighty-year-old woman. Every joint in her body hurt; she had not slept at all and gone straight from London into her day shift. The scent of blood and champagne lingered in her nostrils. “What’s wrong?” Mab said, following her in and slipping out of her shoes. “The way you’re moving—” Osla couldn’t bear to explain. She muttered an excuse and crawled into her narrow bed, trembling somewhere deep inside, hugging the coat, which smelled like heather and smoke. I want home, she thought nonsensically. It wasn’t enough anymore just to fight, to do her part for this country she loved and take her fun where she could. Osla Kendall was exhausted and scared, aching for a door to walk through—a door with welcoming arms inside. She wanted to go home, and she had no idea where to find it. Chapter 16 FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MARCH 1941 BP fellows, if you’ve got two girls on a string and are trying to keep them from finding out about each other, exercise caution. In other words, don’t take your secretarial-pool blonde to the Bletchley Odeon, where you also take that brunette amazon you met by the lake on your tea break, or the amazon in question will rumble your game . . . Lousy—little—toad,” Mab muttered, striking each key on her Typex with special venom. Months she’d been going to films and dinners with Andrew Kempton, nailing a fascinated expression on her face as he went on about the lining of his stomach and his chilblains. Maybe he was a little dull, but she’d thought he was kind, sensible, honest. Someone to offer contentment as well as stability. He’d said he wasn’t seeing anyone else; he’d hinted about introducing her to his parents. And all the time, a mansion typist on the side! Well, so much for honesty. He’d clearly seen Mab as nothing but a girl to play with. Men all think that about you, a poisonous whisper said at the back of her mind. Cheap stupid slut. For a moment she could feel his breath in her ear, the man who’d said that. Then she shoved him back in the dark corner where he belonged and bent over her Typex again, setting her wheels in today’s configuration for Red. Mab still had plenty of candidates in the marriage pool, men who would be kind and sensible and honest, not just making a show of it. She finished her message and taped it up, pausing to blow on her hands. The in-hut temperature was arctic; every woman in the Decoding Room was huddled over her Typex in coat and muffler—and there were several more machines now, from the days it had just been two. Thank goodness they no longer had to run outside to get their decrypted messages out for translation and analysis; that work had moved to the hut right next door, and the boffins had been quick to rig a shortcut for passing information between the two. Mab took up the broom leaning against the desk, banged it briskly against the wooden hatch now seated in the wall, then slid the hatch open and called, “Wake up over there!” into the tunnel. Someone at the other end in Hut 3 shouted, “Bugger off,” and then with a series of clanks, a wooden tray was yanked into the room. Mab dumped her stack of papers in, tugged the wire to send it back, then returned to her Typex. The next report came out with a gap of gibberish in the middle, but Mab was long past the days of having to give the dud reports over to someone more experienced. “Machine error, or radio signal fading out during interception . . .” She put a request through to the Registration Room, asking them to check the traffic registers—if the message had been intercepted and recorded twice, you could often get the missing code groups from the second version . . . A harried-looking man in a Fair Isle sweater blew into the Decoding Room. “I need the tallest girl you’ve got,” he said without preamble. “The new operation in Hut 11—we’ve been sent seven Wrens for operators, but we need an eighth, and she’s got to be five eight at least. Who’s the tallest here?” Eyes went to Mab, who straightened to her full five eleven. “Splendid. Grab your kit.” “Is this a temporary reassignment, or—” “Who knows in this madhouse? Quick, now.” Mab gathered her things, frowning. She wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the Hut 6 Decoding Room. The pace was killing, but after nearly nine months she was good at her job. They were more than just typing-pool girls here, she’d come to realize—it took imagination and skill to take a corrupted message and juggle wheel settings until it came clear, or to work through potential Morse errors and find the one that had thrown a message off course. She’d come to feel a certain thrum of satisfaction watching a block of five-letter gibberish sort itself under her fingers into tidy blocks of German. Well, it didn’t matter what she found satisfying; she’d work wherever she was told. Mab hurried across the gravel path toward Hut 11, squinting in the pale spring sunshine. It was Lucy’s birthday soon; she’d arranged for the day off and was planning to take a cake to Sheffield, where Lucy was now thankfully living with their aunt, at least while London continued to be pounded by the Luftwaffe. Poor Luce didn’t like Sheffield or their aunt, who had four children and hadn’t wanted to take on a fifth (at least until Mab promised to send a weekly chunk of her BP wage). But even if Lucy was lonely, she was safe. Mum refused to move from Shoreditch, and Mab woke every day with the knowledge that this might be the morning she learned a bomb had flattened her mother’s building. “Good, the replacement.” Mab found herself yanked into Hut 11 by a fellow she recognized from standing in line for tea at the kiosk set up by the Naval Army and Air Force Institutes—Harold Something. Hut 11 was airless and cold, smaller than Hut 6, and not subdivided, one big room that managed to be both cavernous and claustrophobic. Along one wall stood a row of Wrens, all staring at the monstrosities in the middle of the room. “Ladies,” said Harold Whoever, “meet the bombe machines.” They were bronze-colored cabinets, massive things at least six feet high. The front held rows of circular drums, five inches in diameter, letters of the alphabet painted round each one. In this dark hut they loomed like trolls under bridges, like giants turned to boulders by sunlight. Mab stared, mesmerized, as Harold continued to speak. “You’re here to help break German codes, ladies, and the bombe machines have been designed by some of our cleverer chaps to help speed that process up. It’ll be tedious work keeping these beasts going, and precision is essential, so I’ve been authorized to share a bit more than usual about what they do.” He patted one of the massive cabinets like a dog. “Every cipher has a great many possible machine settings, and we can’t get any further on the decoding till we have the settings, and it’s slow going getting those by hand. These beasts will speed everything up, and that’s where you ladies come in. The brainy fellows will send over something like this.” Harold held up a complicated diagram of numbers and letters like nothing Mab had ever seen in Hut 6. “Called menus—” “Why, sir?” one of the Wrens ventured. “Probably because menu sounds better than worked-out guess.” Harold pushed his spectacles up. “You take the menu, plug up your machine accordingly—the plugs in the back correspond to the positions on the menu. Then start the machine up, and let her rip. Each wheel on the bombe”—he indicated the rows on the nearest machine—“goes through thousands of possible settings, faster than anyone could do by hand. It finds a possible match for the wheel wiring and ring setting, as well as one possible match for a plugboard letter. That leaves, oh, a few million million possible settings to check the other plugboard possibilities. When the machine finally stops, you’ll use the checking machine to match the stop position of the bombe, make sure you haven’t got a false positive, and so forth. Assuming you haven’t, you alert the boffins back in their huts that you’ve broken their setting for that key, then plug your machine up for the next menu and the next key. Questions?” About a thousand, Mab thought. But that wasn’t how it was done here; at BP it was just button up the questions and have a go. “Miss Churt and Wren Stevens, I’m putting you on this machine here. Someone named her Agnus Dei, or maybe just Agnus—” Aggie, Mab thought, already disliking her. The machine’s back looked like a knitting basket crossed with a telephone switchboard—a mass of dangling plugs and great crimson pigtails of plaited wires like snarled yarn, snaking down through rows of letters and numbers. Wren Stevens looked similarly nonplussed. “I thought I’d ship out somewhere glamorous if I joined the navy,” she whispered to Mab as Harold began showing them how to keep the wires apart with tweezers. “Out to Malta or Ceylon, getting my drinks poured by lieutenants. Not buried in wiring in the middle of Buckinghamshire!” “Good luck getting out now you’re in,” Mab said, still staring up at Aggie. “Nobody transfers out of BP unless you fall pregnant or go crazy, so take your pick.” Servicing Aggie was like ministering to some cranky mechanical deity. Mab’s arms ached after an hour of hoisting heavy drums into their slots; her fingers were pinched red from the heavy clips that snapped each drum in place. Plugging up the back was a horror: wrestling with a mess of wires and coupling jacks, trying not to set sparks off, squinting at a menu that looked like an arcane diagramming exercise or maybe a spell for raising the dead. Mab jumped, fingertips buzzing, as a prickle of electricity shocked her for the fourth time, and set the machine going with a muttered curse. With all the bombes at full roar, the din of Hut 11 was incredible, pounding her ears like hammers. “Work at the other drums while you wait for the machine to stop,” Harold shouted over the noise. Mab pried open the drums to reveal circles of wire inside, going at the nest with tweezers to make sure not even a single one brushed against another and shorted the electrical circuit. Within the hour her eyes were smarting from the concentration and her reddened fingers pricked by copper wire. “What happens if the wires touch?” she called over the din. “Don’t let the wires touch,” Harold replied simply. Mab worked, sweat collecting between her aching shoulder blades, cuffs and wrists growing greasy from the bombe’s fine spray of oil droplets. Pushing limp, sweaty hair off her forehead, she straightened as Aggie stopped dead, every drum frozen. “Did we break it?” Mab asked as the other machines whirred. “No, she’s telling you it’s time to check her results.” Harold showed Wren Stevens how to take the reading from the other side of the bombe, run it through the checking machine. “Agnus found the setting. Job’s up, strip her down, load the new drums, get the next menu going. Well done.” He pushed another diagram into Mab’s hand. She knew it was for an army key because she’d seen the name on reports coming through her Hut 6 Typex, but everything else on the menu was a mystery. This was an earlier part of the BP information loop than she was used to seeing—the part that helped spit out those blocks of five-letter-grouped reports that landed on the desks of the Decoding Room women. Mab couldn’t help a shiver. Working in the Decoding Room had a sheen of normality to it; a roomful of women hammering at Typex machines wasn’t so different from a roomful of secretaries in an office, chattering about wasn’t Gone with the Wind a swooner and have you seen the film yet? No one could chat in this din; no one would be admiring each other’s frocks when they were all dripping sweat in the windowless fug of machine oil. Mab had worked since she was fourteen, and she already knew there wasn’t a job in the world that could make this one seem normal. She finished plugging up Aggie and stood back. “Start her up.” “BREAK TIME,” HAROLD called sometime later, tagging half the girls. “Relieve your partner in an hour.” Mab didn’t want food, she wanted air. The Wrens headed for the NAAFI kiosk for tea, but Mab flopped on the lake’s grassy bank. Her ears rang dully from four hours of Aggie’s din; her fingers were pricked and stinging. She sucked down a cigarette and pulled her newest book out but gave up after five minutes. The Mad Hatters had picked a poetry collection for this month’s read—Mired, it was tersely and ominously called, a volume of Great War battlefield verses—and the rhythmic iambic pentameter beat in the same clackety-clack pattern as the bombe machine’s drums. “No, thank you,” she said aloud, tossing the book onto the grass. “I don’t much like that book either,” a male voice remarked behind her. Mab tilted her head back, looking up the rumpled suit to the broad face with its laugh lines. He looked vaguely familiar . . . “It was very dark when we first met,” he said, smiling. “You changed my tire on a midnight road. Did the shoes fit?” “Beautifully, thank you.” Mab smiled back, placing his face if not his name. “You really didn’t have to send them.” “My pleasure.” “Don’t suppose you could spare a cigarette?” Mab was down to her last one and had a feeling she’d need it badly at the end of shift. He produced a cigarette case. “I thought you didn’t work at BP.” “No, London. Got sent over on a bit of business.” Foreign Office? MI-5? Unnamed London fellows were always coming and going with their document cases and specially issued petrol coupons. Mab cast an appraising eye up at the chestnut-haired fellow, who gazed over the lake in silence. Good shoes, silver case for his cigarettes, rather lovely smile. What was his name? She didn’t want to admit she’d forgot altogether. “Don’t care for poetry?” she said, nodding at her discarded volume. A shrug. “Francis Gray isn’t terrible.” Educated London men liked girls who could talk about the use of metaphor and simile—you just had to be slightly less knowledgeable than they were. “‘The skyline, scarred with stars of rusted wire’—good lines, really, it’s just that the overall theme’s a bit obvious. I mean, equating a wartime trench to a sacrificial altar isn’t exactly original, is it?” “Hackneyed,” he agreed. More silence. “It’s this month’s pick for the Mad Hatters,” Mab tried again. “The BP literary society.” She got another of the lovely smiles, but no reply. Didn’t this one talk at all? She cut her losses, stubbing out her cigarette. “That’s the end of my tea break, I’m afraid.” “Do you really dislike Gray’s poetry?” the chestnut-haired man asked. “Or are you pulling my leg?” “I don’t dislike him. He’s just no Wilfred Owen. Not his fault—wasn’t he an absolute child when he wrote this?” One of those fellows who had lied about his age and enlisted far too young, Mab recalled vaguely, shoving her book into her handbag as she rose. “I didn’t know anything about poetry at seventeen.” “Sixteen.” “Pardon?” “He was sixteen. Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy going for a curry your next day off? I know a very decent Indian restaurant in London.” “I like curry as much as the next girl.” She’d never tasted it. He stood looking up at her with that faint smile, apparently unfazed by the fact she was half a head taller. Wasn’t that unusual for short fellows. “When’s your next day off, Miss Churt?” “Monday next. And I’m ashamed to admit I don't remember your name.” Mab really did feel embarrassed about that. “Francis Gray.” He tipped his hat. “Foreign Office official and mediocre poet, at your service.” Chapter 17 FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MARCH 1941 BB doesn’t dare say a word about recent rumblings of upcoming action in the Mediterranean, therefore the biggest news of the week is the roach found in the night-shift pudding served at the dining hall . . . Mother, I’m going to be late—” “If you could wring out another cloth for my forehead . . . It feels like a spike is going through my temples.” Mrs. Finch’s eyes were shut tight in the darkened bedroom. Beth flew for a cloth. “I really do have to go now—” “You do your best, Bethan.” Feebly. “I understand you don’t have time for your mother—it’s just so hard being left all alone . . .” Beth was nearly crying in frustration by the time she managed to get free. Her father shook his head as she struggled into her cardigan. “Who is going to make your mother a nice cuppa, with you off at work?” You could put a teakettle on yourself, Dad, Beth couldn’t help thinking, even as she slipped out. But by the time she burst into the Cottage with a “Sorry I’m late, sorry—” the frustration and anger were gone, her brain wiped clean as a slate. It happened so fast now: in the time it took to run out her own front door and through the Cottage door, Beth’s mind shut an entirely different door on everything at home and simply locked it away for later. “We’re shorthanded till midnight,” Peggy said from the next desk. “Jean’s home with ’flu, Dilly’s having another row with Denniston, so have at it.” Beth pulled out her crib chart and her pocket Italian dictionary, fiddling with the end of her plait. Something going on in the Mediterranean, maybe something big. If only the Italian naval stuff weren’t so quirky—and there was so little of it; hardly enough to work with . . . Lining up her rods, Beth got a set of easy breaks, then groaned when the next message came out of the basket. A short one—the short ones were always nasty. Ten in the evening before it clicked into place. Normally the messages meant nothing, just Italian she couldn’t read, but she could make this one out. “Peggy,” Beth whispered, suddenly cold. Peggy came over. She froze when she read the words in Beth’s pencil scrawl, translating the Italian. “‘Today 25 March 1941 is the day minus three.’” The words stung Beth’s lips. She looked up at Peggy. “What’s happening in three days?” “WE’RE SWAMPED WITH urgent traffic.” Beth forced herself to look the head of Hut 8 in the eye. “We need anyone you can spare.” Peggy was on the Cottage telephone ringing Dilly, calling in Jean ’flu or no ’flu, summoning the whole team, and she’d sent Beth across to Hut 8 to beg reinforcements. They borrow our people; now it’s time to return the favor. Normally Beth would have stood hunched in an agony of shyness getting the words out, but the code still had her in its spiral grip, the one that took her outside her own awkward self. “Please?” “Oh, for—” The hut head strangled some impolite words. “You can have Harry Zarb. I can’t spare more.” Beth nodded, arms wrapped around herself in the chilly spring night, waiting until Harry came shouldering out in his shirtsleeves. “Hallo,” he said cheerfully. “Need a hand with the dago traffic? I can say dago,” he said, noticing Beth’s wince. “I get called a dago often enough, if not a wog. It’s your inevitable fate if you’re any darker than paste in Merry Olde England. Here—” He’d been about to shrug into his disreputable jacket but dropped it over Beth’s shoulders instead. She started to demur, but he brushed that aside. “What’s the rush in Dilly’s section?” Beth filled him in as they crossed the dark grounds. She was used to seeing Harry among the Mad Hatters, where he was wry and relaxed, leaning on his elbows in damp grass by the lake or scattering toast crumbs on his book, but he was a different man on the BP shift clock, alert and focused, brows mobile as he listened. He let out a low whistle at Today is the day minus three, stride lengthening until Beth had to trot to keep up. As Harry ducked into the Cottage, Peggy was on the telephone snapping, “—don’t care if your nose is running like the Thames, get back here . . .” “So this is the famous harem?” Harry glanced around, looking enormous and disheveled in the cramped clutter of desks. “Hugh Alexander owes me tuppence; he made a bet you’d have mirrors and powder rooms. Where can I work? It sounds like it’ll be a full house.” “Share my desk.” Thank goodness Hut 8 had given her someone familiar, Beth thought, not a stranger who would take over her space and freeze her solid with nerves. He pulled up a stool on the other side of Beth’s desk, black hair flopping, reaching for pencils that looked like twigs in his huge hands. “Cribs?” Beth pushed a crib chart over. “Italian for English, cruiser, submarine. Here are the rods—” “Inglese, incrociatore, sommergibili,” he read off the slip. “Christ, listen to us butcher the poor Italian . . .” They reached simultaneously for the stack of messages and fell headlong into the spiral. “TODAY IS THE day minus three.” Every time someone got up from their desk, they chanted it aloud. And then it became “Today is the day minus two” because none of Dilly’s team left the Cottage, not for so much as a cup of Ovaltine. “I brought you some clothes.” Osla passed Beth a package at the door, peering over at Peggy, who was coming downstairs from the attic yawning. “Are you all sleeping here?” We take turns on the attic cot, when we sleep at all. Beth had done ten hours straight in her chair, fifteen hours, eighteen—she could barely even see Osla, pretty and worried looking. Beth muttered her thanks, going to the loo to tug on a new blouse and underclothes, then staggered right back to her desk, where Harry passed her a cup of chicory coffee and her rods. Something big. They all knew it, and nine of the Cottage’s eighteen women had been seconded to it, working like madwomen. Dilly had disappeared so far down into his rods he was barely even present—Beth saw him try to stuff half a cheese sandwich into his pipe instead of his tobacco as he muttered his way through a new message. She merely removed the pipe from his hand, pulled the mangled sandwich out, placed the tobacco in his palm instead, and returned to her desk. Jean was running a fever by now, honking through pile after pile of handkerchiefs as she rodded and rodded and rodded. Sometimes someone would doze off at her desk, and then someone else would chuck a blanket over her shoulders and let her doze ten minutes, before giving a nudge and a reminder of “Today’s the day minus one.” “Who’s our CIC in the Mediterranean?” one of the girls asked. “Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham,” Peggy said. “Dilly said he’s been notified something will be coming down.” If we can find out what. Beth reached for her next stack, only to touch the bottom of the wire basket. Dilly’s Fillies paced like racehorses in their stalls then, waiting for the sound of wheels in the stable yard, which meant the dispatch riders had arrived with saddlebags full of new Morse code messages to decrypt. “Beth?” Harry touched her arm, and she blinked—she’d got so used to his taking up the other side of her desk, she barely noticed he was there. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go—my son’s peaky and I’ve got to help my wife. Just a few hours—” Beth nodded, chewing a thumbnail, her mind still tumbling among the blocks of Enigma. Was there ever anything more aptly named . . . “You’re good at this.” Harry shrugged into his jacket. “Very good. I’m working at a gallop, keeping up with you.” She blinked again. Ever since realizing she wasn’t so terrible she was going to be sacked, she hadn’t stopped to wonder if she was good. She’d never been good at anything in her life. “I like it,” she heard herself saying, voice hoarse from going hours without saying a word. “I—I understand it.” “Me too.” Harry had circles under his eyes and a distant, absorbed expression. Beth guessed he wasn’t seeing her much more clearly than she was seeing him. “I could do this all day and be fresh at the end. It’s just the old mortal frame that gets in the way. Pity we aren’t machines like the ones they say are in Hut 11.” Beth nodded. The physical needs that got in the way of work had annoyed her these last two days—the need to bolt a cup of tea, the need to stretch her aching back. Irritably, she realized she was starving. “I could do this all day, too,” she found herself confessing. “All day and all night.” “And it’s a good thing we can. It’s the most important commodity of all, isn’t it?” “What, codes?” “What the codes protect: information. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re fighting a war with swords, with bombers, or with sticks and stones—weapons are no good unless you know when and where to aim them.” Hence, us. Beth smiled. Harry glanced at his watch, looking torn. “I’ll be back in a few hours, but my hut head wants me back at my usual work, not here. I hate not seeing this through . . .” Beth pulled herself out of the mental teleprint with an effort. “We’ll send word if we need to borrow you again. For now, go home.” “Just long enough to take Christopher’s temperature, give him a bath, and explain again why he can’t have a puppy.” Harry grimaced. “Poor sprat, I hate disappointing him. What father doesn’t want to give his son a puppy? But with me on night shifts and his mum at the WVS canteen, it’s just not on.” “I always wished for—” The sound of motors came rumbling from the stable yard car park then, and Beth broke off. She and the other girls were on their feet in a flash, logjamming in the doorway, exhaustion-lidded eyes suddenly sprung wide. They nearly clawed at the saddlebags to get at the new messages, even as the dispatch riders laughed, “It’s got to be registered, ladies . . .” By the time they trooped back to their desks, Harry had gone and the wire baskets were filling up again. A very long message came among the new arrivals, so long they all stood staring as it unrolled over Dilly’s desk. “Battle orders,” he said quietly. “Stake my pipe on it.” They looked at each other, nine worn-out women with ink-stained fingers and no nails left to gnaw. Everyone took a section back to her desk, and then, Beth thought, they all went a little bit mad. She didn’t remember the following day and night, none of it. Only the rods sliding back and forth and her mind clicking away, looking up and realizing the sun had moved halfway down the sky or gone down altogether, then back to the rods and the clicks. It was nearly eleven at night before Dilly called a halt. “Show me what you’ve got, ladies. We’re out of time.” Beth looked at Peggy, haunted. Peggy looked back, equally stricken. Out of time? In dreadful silence, they collected around Dilly’s desk again, putting their bits of message together. A frizzy-haired girl named Phyllida was sobbing. “There was a whole block I couldn’t get into, not a single click—” Peggy put an arm round her. Dilly’s hand moved at speed as he translated the decrypted lines from Italian to English—Beth could see the linguist and professor he’d once been, in the days before when he’d translated ancient Greek texts rather than military secrets. At long last, he looked up. “Not that you’re usually told details,” he said matter-of-factly, “but given the work you gels put in . . . the Italian fleet is planning a major hit on the British troop convoys in the Mediterranean.” The stillness was absolute. Beth looked at her pencil-smudged fingers. They were trembling. “Cruisers, submarines, planned locations, times of attack . . .” Dilly flung down his pen, shaking his head. “It’s nearly the whole battle plan. You’ve done it, ladies. You’ve done it.” Peggy pressed a hand over her eyes. Phyllida kept crying, but in a kind of exhausted relief. Beth blinked, her mouth dry, not certain at all how to react. You’ve done it. She couldn’t take that in. Our Beth’s not too bright . . . Pity that Finch girl is so slow . . . “I’ll take this over.” Dilly staggered as he rose, and they all reached out to steady him. He looked exhausted, Beth realized, unshaven and unsteady after so many hours at work. More than exhausted—ill. “I’ll take it,” Beth said. “This needs to be transmitted on the Admiralty teleprinter straightaway,” Dilly called. “Dear God, let Cunningham not muck it up . . .” Beth went out into the dark, not realizing until she felt water on her face that it was pouring rain. She didn’t feel the cold or the raindrops; her feet flew as she ran under the clock tower along the path, battle plans in hand. She didn’t know where the Admiralty teleprinter was, so she sprinted to the mansion and with both hands heaved the double doors open. The night shift looked up as Beth Finch blew into the hall on a black gust of rain, hair plastered to her face, grim as death, holding the Cottage’s precious work. Her work. “Get the watchkeeper,” said Beth, giving the first direct order of her life. “Get the watchkeeper now.” SHE DIDN’T GO back to the Cottage for her coat and handbag. She had her BP pass in her pocket, and she stumbled straight from the mansion to the Park gate and out, down the pitch-dark road through the rain. Exhaustion crashed through her in waves, battering ocean swells like those long Mediterranean rollers pushing all those Italian subs and cruisers through the night as they aimed for those precious British ships . . . but it was someone else’s job to think about them. Admiral Whoever. She couldn’t remember his name. She couldn’t remember anything that didn’t come in five-letter blocks. The sound of a whimper came quietly through the dark. Beth barely heard it, but her feet paused. She felt her way forward in the rain, toward the chemist’s shop—long shut up of course; it had to be near midnight. The whimper sounded again from the shop steps. She crouched down, peering through her soaked hair, and realized the small huddled bundle was a dog. Beth stared at it, exhausted. It glared back, shivering, showing its teeth feebly. It tried to bite when she lurched forward and picked it up. Beth ignored that, feeling the animal’s shuddering bony ribs against her arm. The rain was coming down harder, and she turned to trudge the last dark quarter mile to her house. A light burned in the Finch kitchen. Beth’s mother was sitting at the table in her dressing gown, hands folded round a cup of Ovaltine, Bible at her side. When Beth squelched through the kitchen door, Mrs. Finch burst into tears. “There you are—three days with no word! I—” She brought herself up short, seeing the bundle in Beth’s arms. “What’s that?” Beth, still numb, tugged a pristine stack of towels from the drawer and began rubbing the dog down. A schnauzer, she saw as the gray fur began to stand out in drying tufts. “My good towels—that thing is sure to have fleas—” Mrs. Finch floundered. “Get it out of here!” Beth opened the icebox. Inside was a plate with a slice of Woolton pie, probably her supper. She put it on the floor and, in a remote stupor, watched the half-starved schnauzer attack it. He had a little square head and a wiry beard like a tiny kaiser, and he kept glaring around him even as he wolfed down the pie. “That animal is not eating off the second-best china!” Mrs. Finch looked more shocked than Beth had ever seen her in her life. She reached for her Bible as if it were a lifeline. “This lack of respect, Bethan—‘The eye that mocks a father and scorns a mother . . .’” Proverbs, Beth thought. Mrs. Finch held the book out, but for the first time in her life Beth didn’t take it. She was too tired to hold the Bible in front of her until her arms trembled and her mother’s rage was mollified. She just could not do it. With one indifferent hand she pushed the book away and stood watching the dog clean the plate. Mrs. Finch’s mouth opened and closed, saying something, but Beth couldn’t listen. Her mother’s dutiful little helpmeet wasn’t here, wasn’t back yet from three days sunk in Enigma. Tomorrow, she’d apologize. Or maybe she wouldn’t. “—and that dog is not staying!” her mother concluded in a stifled shriek. “You put it out right now!” “No,” said Beth. She picked up the not-noticeably-grateful schnauzer and lugged him up the stairs past Osla and Mab, who were eavesdropping wide-eyed on the landing, and into her bedroom. She made a nest of blankets for him, observing without much interest that he did, in fact, have fleas. Then Beth and her new dog slept like the dead. Eleven Days Until the Royal Wedding November 9, 1947 Chapter 18 Inside the Clock Clockwell was a place of the living dead, Beth thought. The doctors might fiddle about with recreation therapy and hypnosis treatments, but the patients of the women’s ward rarely seemed to recover and go home. They stayed here: docile, drugged, fading, and gone. Bletchley Park had broken German codes, but the asylum broke human souls. Some of the patients were mad as hatters; some suffered such violent swings of emotion they couldn’t cope with the outside world . . . but there were others, Beth had discovered over the years. The woman who had been left money her brother wanted, and he’d got her certified and locked up before she came of age to inherit it . . . The woman who had been diagnosed with nymphomania when she confessed to her new husband that she’d had a few lovers before they married . . . And the silent woman who did nothing all day, every day, but play board games. Backgammon, Go, chess with chipped queens and rooks—Beth had never played any of them before Clockwell, but she’d learned fast opposite the sharp-eyed woman who played like a grand master. “Does the name BP mean anything to you?” Beth had asked once over a chessboard. Bletchley Park had recruited many chess players. But the woman checkmated her without responding. This afternoon they were playing Go in the common room, a game Beth found trickier and more interesting than chess, advancing fast and vicious against each other as Beth thought about who the Bletchley Park traitor might be. The years she’d spent brooding on the question should have sanded its anguish away, but hadn’t. It was someone who worked in Dilly’s section, after all—which meant one of her friends had betrayed her. Which? Beth looked at the Go board full of black and white stones. Three and a half years pondering the question, and she still wasn’t sure who on the Knox team had been the black stone among the white. It wasn’t her, and it wasn’t Dilly—everyone else was suspect. “Examination time, Miss Liddell. Come along.” Puzzled, Beth left the common room with the nurse. She hadn’t been scheduled to see the doctor that day. “What’s this for?” she asked the doctor as he examined her skull, but he only chuckled. “Something that will make you feel much better! That mind of yours is overactive, my dear. You need a calm, untasked brain if you’re to recover.” Untasked? Beth nearly spat. She had lived with an untasked brain the first twenty-four years of her life, a black-and-white film of an existence. She didn’t want a calmed, soothed mind; she wanted impossible work that her brain converted to the possible by the simple process of wringing itself inside out until the job was done. Every day for four years her brain had been tasked to the breaking point, and she had lived in glorious Technicolor. “What do you mean, ‘untasked’?” she asked the doctor. He just smiled, but a certain mutter caught Beth’s ears later as she was released back into the common room. “—glad when that one has the procedure.” A sniff from the matron whose arm Beth had burned with a cigarette. “They usually stop being troublesome after a lobotomy . . .” The rest was lost as the woman whisked away. For the first time in weeks, the thought of Bletchley Park’s traitor was utterly wiped from Beth’s mind. Slowly, she sat down at the Go board again; her partner slid a black piece forward as though she’d never left. “Do you know what a lobotomy is?” Beth asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word, flesh crawling with unease. She wasn’t expecting an answer, but the woman on the other side of the Go board raised sharp little eyes and drew one finger like a scalpel across her temple. York Mab massaged her forehead as a familiar voice drilled through the telephone, finishing-school vowels hitting her ear like crystal spikes. “What do you mean, you’re here?” “Just biffed in from London,” Osla said. “Only arrived in York an hour ago.” Mab’s hand dropped, making a fist in the burgundy folds of her skirt. “I told you when you rang yesterday, I don’t want to meet.” Osla’s voice out of the blue, the Vigen?re square—it had all unsettled Mab badly. She’d burned the message from the madhouse, told herself to forget about it, and busied herself settling two sandy, clamoring children back home after a weekend running up and down the beach under Bamburgh Castle. “I’m here,” Osla repeated implacably. “I know you’re hacked off about that, but we may as well meet.” “I’m too busy,” Mab lied. “I’m putting supper on.” She’d been in the dining room, in fact, determinedly not thinking about Beth Finch’s cipher message, planning the party she was hosting in honor of the royal wedding. A dozen friends would come in their best frocks, and they’d pooled their butter and sugar rations so they could have scones and a Bakewell tart while listening to the BBC broadcast. Mab knew her husband would laugh at the royal wedding fever, but he and the rest of the men would secretly hang on the broadcast, too. Planning the party hadn’t entirely distracted Mab from the worry of hearing Beth’s name for the first time in years, but it made for the kind of morning Mab didn’t think she’d ever stop cherishing, after having lived through a war when parties had such a desperate edge. And now the afternoon’s peace had shattered. “Look, I haven’t dragged myself all the way north to get snubbed like a Utility frock in a New Look Vogue spread,” Osla said. “I’ve got a room at the Grand—” “Of course you’re at the poshest hotel in York.” “Well, I didn’t see you volunteering your spare room with spontaneous cries of welcome so we could braid each other’s hair at night and trade secrets.” Prickly silence fell. Mab realized she was gripping the hall table to stay upright. She knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t help the panic bubbling in her throat. She had so thoroughly buried everything that happened at the Park, damn it—once the war was done, she’d bricked those experiences up behind a wall in her mind. But now Osla was on the other end of the telephone, and Beth had returned through the lines of a cryptogram. You never backed down from a fight in your life, Mab told herself. Don’t start now. So she met her own eyes in the gilt-framed mirror over the telephone, imagining she was meeting Osla’s gaze. “I don’t know what you thought coming here would accomplish.” “That’s a bit steep, darling. You know we have to talk face-to-face about Beth.” Pause. “If she really was put in that place unfairly—” “If she’s sane, the doctors would have released her.” “Doctors already think normal women are potty because we have monthlies. When was the last time your doctor gave you more than an aspirin unless you had a note from your husband?” Mab remembered giving birth to her son, how her doctor had said in the middle of her contractions that she was making too much fuss and it had been scientifically proven that labor pains could be entirely controlled by appropriate breathing. Mab had been in too much agony to rip his ears off and tell him to control that pain with appropriate breathing. “What I’m saying,” Osla continued, “is if she’s asking us for help, after everything that happened, it means she’s absolutely dished and has no one else.” Mab’s mouth was dry. “I have a family now. I’m not putting them at risk for a woman who betrayed me.” “She says we betrayed her, too. And she’s not entirely wrong.” You owe me. “What do you think of the rest of her letter?” Mab blurted out. “Do you believe it?” It hung unsaid: Do you believe there was a traitor at BP? A long silence. “Bettys tea shop,” said Osla. “Tomorrow, two o’clock. We’ll talk.”