by Kate Quinn
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.
