The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  One night, the fog left the city in the hours before dawn, replaced by a deadly cold. The river began to close, floes shuddering together into a great expanse of ice between Blackfriars and London Bridge that filled with adventurers and shopkeepers. A fair sprung up. Hawkers and pickpockets strolled the ice. Baiting pits and brothels appeared overnight, penny coins disappearing into pockets and purses, or sometimes into the tiny fissures in the ice.

  It was the coldest winter in memory, but the princess took the bear’s ears in her hands, warming them both, and led him out onto the ice. He walked between the bookstalls and mummers, the princess crouched on his shoulders like a jockey, the tiger stripes of her hooded cloak bright against the bear’s tobacco-colored fur.

  The story had had no end; they never did. Instead Alec had stopped and taken her hands in his, kissing her palms and fingertips. Later June had sat in the compartment of the train back to Bletchley, thinking about her future with Alec. In the rhythm of train on track she had heard the bear and his princess, the whisper of skates on ice.

  * * *

  • • •

  In November, a letter comes: Alec and his navigator, Tim Yates, are being temporarily reassigned to train Royal Canadian Air Force pilots in Ontario. June stares at the letter, relieved that she will not have to make excuses or pretend to live in London, and then feels guilty for the relief. She can’t tell from the way he’s written whether he’s excited—shouldn’t he be? Isn’t it a mark of favor that they think he is that good a pilot?

  When she writes back, she tells him how proud she is of him. How much she loves him. How much she hopes he will continue to write, no matter where he is. She fills pages with words she knows are true, trying to ignore the prickling feeling of everything she’s not saying.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Japan strikes at the United States that December, Hut 7 goes into overdrive. The Emperor must be stopped. But despite everything June and her cohort do, despite the sudden long, aching nights of taking apart the codes, Japan continues to march across the Pacific. In February, Singapore falls, and hundreds of British citizens, civilian and military, are swept into POW camps. The war is global now, and there are days when June hardly thinks of Alec, or Fenbourne, or anything but the swirl of ciphers she’s been given to solve. The heel of her hand takes on a dark sheen from the endless rub of thin paper and the thick black pencils they use. Information trickles in about troop movements or the shift of a Japanese carrier from one part of the Pacific to another. At Bletchley Park they benefit from the lack of cooperation between Japan’s army and navy, from the Emperor’s arrogance about the West’s inability to understand the Japanese language, and from the ornate, flowery tone the signal operators layer into the messages—each honorific adds a bit more to the codebreakers’ roster of understanding.

  The lake freezes, and frost bristles on the windowpanes. Some of the girls organize skating parties, and one morning at the edge of the woods a herd of deer appears, hoofing gently at the frozen ground to shift what’s left of the grasses. In the vast great hall of the manor, the codebreakers and analysts and secretaries put on sometimes-ribald panto shows. Some of the men have come to Bletchley from careers as musicians or actors, and June is astonished by the caliber of their entertainments. She is less astonished by the way her colleagues seem to pair off, and by how much it makes her miss Alec. When his letters come, his handwriting often drifting into illustrations of the sky or trees or something else that’s caught his eye, she keeps them close.

  Winter deepens, and she takes to doing her work with her hands half-warmed in fingerless gloves, a muffler tight around her throat. June spends most of the winter with her haversacks of messages on A4 paper, painstakingly crafting the paraphrases designed to confuse the Japanese if, God forbid, the British codebreaking work should fall into enemy hands. The Axis nations cannot know that the Allies have cracked their codes. Thus, “Troops of 19th Division will attack April 15” becomes “Expect attack from east mid-April, probably division nineteen.” Place names are replaced with code words or left out entirely, numbers written out, dates blurred into rough timeframes. The paraphrases she slips into a customized pair of envelopes—an inner envelope with one coded address, an external one with another. Those, in turn, vanish with the dispatch riders, out of sight and out of mind. It is more tedious work than the loops of the codebreaking itself, but she finds a quiet satisfaction in the process of information moving through the channels Britain has created so laboriously.

  Still, the conflict in the Pacific spreads as Japanese forces conquer territory. June and her colleagues have to break codes and transcribe messages faster than ever—there are at least twenty different code and cipher systems the Japanese are using, perhaps more. Her cryptanalysis relies on a working knowledge of the transliteration of the kanji pictograms and kana phonetic symbols into a Romanized alphabet. The Japanese have built a new version of Morse, quite unlike the international code June has known since childhood—this version has twice as many signs, one set for the kana syllables and another for the Romaji letters. And throughout both sets of signs are the honorifics and epithets of the Emperor’s hierarchy. For June, the paired signs make a beautiful, imposing litany.

  Most of the messages come through in sets of two-kana groups that stand in for phrases and four-kana groups that mean a particular word or number. And, as she grows more familiar with the basic pattern in which most Japanese radio operators transmit information, the better she internalizes the kana she sees most often. Even when the Japanese change their code books every fortnight or so, June’s turns at the wireless have taught her the idiosyncratic touches of different operators, and there are a handful of planes whose messages she can identify whether or not they change their call signs.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the world thaws and the parklands around the manor blossom green and gold again, relief escapes the buildings like water over a dam. June and her friends bicycle out into the countryside, despite the lingering damp. The geese take back their spots on the lake and hiss and honk at anyone foolhardy enough to row out too close.

  At the end of April, when June has been at Bletchley Park not quite a full year, she finds herself traipsing down to the lake with a group of girls, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and an old plaid blanket. The spring sun is low in her face and it’s a bit chilly yet, but breathing something that doesn’t taste like smoke and pencil nubs feels good. There are four of them, a determined group of picnickers brought together by Portia Wallace and Sybil de Cler, a pair of Hut 4 girls from families with the wherewithal to make sure they have the best cigarettes, a decent claret, even nylons. June likes Sybil well enough, but Portia can be tiring—she’s being courted by an army man from HQ, and rarely misses a chance to mention him. Sarah Crossley is a clerk’s daughter from Yorkshire, a brilliant Wren from a poor family, come to Bletchley Park to work with the enormous Bombe machines that break the codes in Hut 11. They have found one another time and again over the last year, and at this point June knows the friendships are as much a respite for the other girls as they are for her. With these girls, she can be normal, more or less—they’re all too clever by half, aren’t they? And better for it?

  They settle onto the blanket, keeping an eye out for the terrible geese. Sybil kicks off her shoes and rolls up her trouser legs, stretching her toes into the cool grass.

  “God,” Portia says, “look at you, rolling about.”

  Sybil smiles. “Practically indecent,” she says wryly. “Not my fault my skin calls for air.”

  “It smells like home, nearly,” Sarah says. She sits on the corner of the blanket, her arms wrapped around her knees, eyeing the picnic basket that Portia has casually settled among them.

  Sybil sits up again, her attention shifting to the basket also. “What riches, Wallace?”

  “Watercress sandwiches,” Portia says
. She throws back the basket’s lid and shuffles through the contents. “Egg mayonnaise on toast as well. Chicken and leek pies. Potted eel. A bit of trifle.” She lifts out each item and lays it on the blanket with a showy wave of her hands.

  “Anything to drink in there?” Sybil peers into the basket.

  “Not my department,” Portia says, smiling.

  “As it happens,” June says, “I’ve brought this.” She reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls out a bottle of Champagne from before the war.

  “God bless the Honorable Alastair Corbett,” Portia says.

  Sarah says, “He makes me nervous, a bit.”

  “He makes us all nervous,” Portia says. She tilts her head. “Well. Not June.”

  June laughs. “I’ve known him longer.”

  “Are you and he . . . ,” Sarah trails off, blushing.

  “Attwell is hardly his type,” Sybil says. “I was in town a few months ago and saw him coming out of a theater with a girl who looked rather cheap, if you take my meaning.”

  “An actress?” Portia shrugs.

  “Actress,” Sybil says, chuckling. “If that’s what you’d like to call a girl like that.”

  “You never know,” Sarah says.

  “In any event,” June says, eager to stop talking about Floss and his personal life before Sybil says anything more damning, “it seemed like a good day to open this.”

  “It’s always a good day for bubbles,” Sybil says.

  Portia smiles and hands around the sandwiches on thin porcelain plates. “When John and I marry, we’ll have ever so much Champagne.”

  Sarah says, “And dancing?”

  “Oh, yes,” Portia says. She accepts a glass and sips. “We’ll drink and dance all night. My sister says there’s a jazz band she knows. It’ll be marvelous.”

  “I’m not giving this up for anything, least of all a man.” Sybil leans forward, gesturing at the lake. “Perhaps I’ll feel differently when the war ends, but right now . . .” She shrugs and smiles at Portia. “You and June seem to have it all worked out, though.”

  Portia nods, but June looks up, alarmed. She had never thought of herself as being like Portia, and the idea that Portia’s path is hers . . . How can that be? She’s engaged, but until now she hasn’t really understood how that affects how people see her. That even someone like Sybil looks past the codebreaker, past the triumphs of math and patterns and logic, and instead sees someone’s future wife and someone else’s mother.

  She wants to say something—but what? And to what purpose? Difficult enough that she will have to have that conversation with Alec, but must she really defend herself against this from Sybil as well? More than ever she realizes the necessity of making Alec understand, truly understand, what she means by that yes she gave him. He knows her better than anyone, miles better, but what if he sees her as Sybil does? Could she blame him if he can’t see the shift in who she is now from who she was before the war?

  * * *

  • • •

  Six weeks later, she’s summoned to the chief’s office, where Floss is waiting—they’re moving her again. She smiles, eager to continue the work wherever they need her most, but she’ll miss Bletchley Park. She has friends here. She fits. Where? she asks. Back to Scarborough? Back to London? Floss shakes his head, his eyes glinting wolfish in the noonday sun where it pushes through the half-pulled blackout curtains. The Far East Combined Bureau, he tells her. Colombo. She stares at him, speechless first with shock and delight, and then with the worry about what this would mean to Alec.

  That night she sits in Hut 7 and works until dawn, listening to the wireless and writing down clusters of kana syllables. She focuses on the encryptions harder than ever; if she is busy enough she may not have to consider the layers of worry tugging at her about Colombo. It has been almost two years of the lie, but at least the lie has been roughly the same—not clerical, not really, but close. All these months, all those nights in the hut, the stubs of pencils chewed by the glow of the too-bright overhead lights, walking back to her lodgings and trying not to step on the frogs that creep out of the lake and infest the walkways . . . This has been her life, and she has found her footing in sending letters to Alec that tell him she’s okay, and feeling useful, without really saying anything at all about where she is or what she’s doing.

  So she packs her valise and says goodbye to her friends, and in the early part of the summer she finds herself back at the Thames, boarding a ship that will take her to India, where she will transfer to a series of trains and ferries to Colombo. Not telling Alec where she is when she’s in Britain has been hard enough—but to keep from him that she will be in Ceylon, in the very shadow of India? It is impossible, and she wants more than ever to tell him, knowing that he would feel in his chest the tightening of their overlapping lives, as she does. But she can’t, no matter how hurtful she finds the responsibility of keeping the truth to herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  During the weeks at sea, she practices her Japanese and walks the perimeter of the ship every evening. During her walks, she watches the water carve away from the prow of the ship, drinks weak gin and tonics with the cluster of Wrens she’s sailing with. Increasingly, she wonders whether that is a path she should consider—the responsibilities and privileges of the uniform pull at her. She is part of something immeasurably important now, but what would it be like to be official, to expand her service from civilian life to the Wrens? But how then to reconcile that idea with marriage to Alec? If he is expecting a wife who will dedicate herself to the management of home and hearth, is that someone she can be? For that matter, if she were to become a Wren and he is a pilot in the RAF, would a marriage even be possible? Separate paths and separate postings, trying to match up their leaves and furloughs until one of them sees fit to retire from service?

  She pushes the idea away—right now those questions cannot be her prime concern. Her country needs her; her king is sending her to lead other young women in the war against Japan. She is a civilian, nominally attached to the Admiralty, and she knows that if her ship, or her person, falls into Japanese hands, none of that will protect her. Since the fall of Singapore, there have been rumors of what it’s like in the Japanese POW camps, but she can’t quite think about that possibility head-on. Worse, though, is the knowledge that she carries secrets like other women carry virtue. It is imperative that she remains free—if she is captured, there is the risk that the Japanese will learn about the work being done against them at Bletchley Park, Hut 7’s success with Purple and JN25 and the other codes, the systemic work creeping along to dismantle the Emperor’s secrets. If she is captured, it is best for King and Country if she is not taken alive.

  And if she is? Who will tell Alec? Who will tell her parents? What will they think, if they hear that she has been captured in the waters off Ceylon? If Burma or India fall to Japan, and she is taken to one of the nightmare camps in Sumatra? Is it really possible that they will never know where she is unless she dies? What damage would it do to her parents, or to Alec? It is unbearable to consider.

  1942, the East

  June’s days aboard the transport ship are full of sun and the angling of birds overhead, the scent of old rope and steel railings in the summery Mediterranean light.

  At dusk, she stands on the deck of the ship, amazed by how different the night sky is as they move farther south. Perhaps Alec could tell her how to adjust to find the familiar constellations, but he is thousands of miles away, on an entirely different continent. It’s been almost a year since she’s seen him, since she’s felt his skin close to hers. When they are apart, it is much easier to not think about what she’s not telling him. It is baffling to her that she can leave the country—board a ship that will take her to the other side of the world—and yet not tell the man she’s going to marry. Especially when the other side of the world is, as far as their rela
tionship and his life are concerned, his. Not hers.

  The perils of the journey help distract her. The Mediterranean is infested with mines and U-boats, and the waters along the Arabian Peninsula are not much better. Twice now she has put pen to paper and written out her fears, which have added to the list of things she will never be able to tell Alec. And twice she has lit those papers from a candle and let them burn. Every day it feels like luck to make it to sunset—does Alec feel the same, when his days come to a close? She wants to believe that training other pilots is safer, but there are always stories about random mishaps. The margin for survival in the RAF does not seem wide enough. At least he’s flying with Tim Yates and not a stranger in the air.

  She lies in her bunk at night listening to the ship, to the other girls in her cabin and down the corridor. They murmur together or pray, play endless hands of cards, talk about their dreams and about the men they hope to marry after the war. They have made it through the day, and now they must make it through the night, when the fear of being sunk is compounded by the crawling horrors of the ship’s infestations. Some nights it feels more like a vigil, listening to the susurrus of water against the groaning steel of the ship. But then the patterns—all those maps and codes and ciphers June holds in her marrow—invariably slip back into place, and her heart steadies.

  * * *

  • • •

  When at last they reach Bombay, June stands on deck, trying without success to reconcile what feels increasingly like two separate lives—the commitments to Alec and to her work. Confronted with the reality of India, she understands differently the scale of what she is not telling Alec. She’s known, of course, what this would mean to him, but now . . . It feels bigger, more of a problem.