by Kate Quinn
If you would like to call on Osla Kendall when you are next in England—
Osla hesitated then, not entirely sure how to finish. She didn’t want to give her Good Samaritan the idea she was angling for a date—she could hardly remember anything about him except for his greatcoat, his uniform, his calm voice—but she really did want to shake his hand for the service he’d rendered her.
—I would be delighted to deliver your coat, and my thanks, in person.
“I’D LIKE A transfer, Miss Senyard.” Osla met the older woman’s eyes square. “My language skills are going to pot, binding reports and sticking cards in boxes.”
Miss Senyard clicked her tongue. “The work we do might seem unrewarding, but it’s very important.”
“I have excellent command of plain and technical German. There must be other jobs here in German naval section that could use me.” Osla gave her most winning smile. Since practically her first day here she’d found the work dull, but since surviving the bombing she’d become abruptly, violently fed up. She’d nearly died at the Café de Paris; she was not going to stagger back to BP and waste her hard-won skills on a job any schoolgirl with a little filing experience could handle. She was still alive, and she was going to do more with that life—for one, fight harder against the utter monsters dropping those bombs. “Do you know some of the chaps call our section the Debutantes’ Den?” she asked Miss Senyard. “Let me prove I’m more than a silly socialite, Miss S.”
“I’ll hate to lose you, Osla.” Miss Senyard sighed. “But with technical German, I suppose you could join the German translating section. I’ll speak to Mr. Birch.”
“Thank you, ma’am! You should put Sally Norton on translating too; her German’s as good as mine.” Sally had been recruited to Bletchley Park just this spring and landed under Miss Senyard too, to Osla’s delight.
“Any other personnel changes you’d like to make?” Amused.
“No, ma’am.” Osla was transferred in no time, still part of Hut 4 but to a different section where a gaggle of tweedy men who’d read German at university and a cluster of twinset-wearing women who’d been “finished” in Munich and Vienna sat at a long table translating cipher messages. They made room with cheery waves, shoving over a stack of decrypts. “Decoded fresh out of the Typex machines; turn it into plain English.”
Osla pulled her pink wool jacket more tightly around herself in the hut’s chill—these green clapboard walls were slow to warm in the watery spring sunshine—and started translating the first cipher message. Details on a U-boat wolf pack, picked up by Morse code listeners in a Y-station in Scarborough, according to the labels. “What do we do if there are bits missing?” Whole chunks of the paragraph in front of her trailed off into blanks.
“Fill it in, given context. We don’t always get all of it, and that’s all there is to it.”
What if that’s the part that’s crucial? Osla thought, staring at the blank in the message. What if that’s the part that will save lives? Well, she’d wanted harder work, more important work—here it was. She picked up her pencil, flipping her German dictionary open. Die Klappenschrank, what did that mean . . .
“You should have hopped jobs at the end of March,” a girl across the table said as she finished her first message. “Thrilling reading, let me tell you—all the traffic from Matapan coming through!”
My boyfriend was at Matapan, Osla wanted to say. Because he got transferred to the Valiant. It wasn’t till I saw the information coming through my hands in Miss Senyard’s section that I realized the Valiant was at the battle . . . and I haven’t heard from him since.
She cut that fear off before it could grow out of proportion. Philip hadn’t written because he was busy, for God’s sake. Or maybe he’d forgot all about her, given her the old heave-ho. Fine—at this point she just wanted to know he was safe. Then she’d care about whether she’d been ditched or not.
And surely he was safe. She’d heard the newsreel in the little Bletchley Odeon, turned to stone in her seat, listening to the announcer over the tinny, triumphant music: “These are some of the ships that destroyed at least three Italian cruisers and three destroyers, and crippled and possibly sank a battleship, without casualties or damage to themselves!” “Without casualties” . . . yet, Osla knew how idiotically optimistic newsreels could be. Even in an overwhelming victory, men died. Victory came at a cost. Osla had filed the cost of victory away every day in shoeboxes.
“These are the fifteen-inch shells that shattered a brand-new cruiser with one salvo . . . ,” the newsreel had blithered on, and she had fought down a surge of nausea, imagining what a shell like that could do to a man’s taut strength and golden skin, his clever brain inside its fragile skull. This wasn’t a fairy tale; princes died as easily as any other men.
But if he was dead, surely it would have been reported. A prince’s death on the front lines would be news. Unless the report wasn’t in yet . . .
That gnawing fear for Philip had been the final straw that tipped Osla into begging for more vital work than copying, binding, and filing. If she was going to hurt this much, be this afraid, she was damned well going to be doing something more important.
“Wasn’t it terrible seeing those Italian prisoners in the newsreel?” she heard herself asking. “The ones our ships fished out of the sea. I keep wondering how many drowned.”
The others looked at her, surprised. “They’re Eyeties,” said a girl with a Veronica Lake wave. “If they didn’t want to get sunk by British destroyers, they shouldn’t have been cheering Mussolini.”
“Maybe not, but . . .” Osla trailed off, frustrated. The Café de Paris explosion seemed to have blasted a layer off her polished surface, left her easy prey not only to fear but to sympathy. Looking at the bleak-faced Italians in the newsreel had nearly brought her to weeping, knowing that for every one plucked from the sea, another two or three had surely burned or drowned. So many across the world dying every day. Osla couldn’t stop thinking of them: English, French, her own fellow Canadians, Australians, Poles . . . yes, even Germans and Italians. They were enemies, but they bled, too. They died. When was it bally well going to stop?
She’d probably know before the newsreels did, when it ran across the table in front of her for translating. There was small, cold comfort in that—that she’d clawed her way to a more vital place in BP’s ladder, and here she might know first that the war was over. Even if only by minutes.
“COME IN.” A worried-looking woman in an old green cardigan answered Osla’s knock. “Sheila Zarb, delighted to meet you . . .” Harry’s wife rushed off again before anyone could thank her for hosting tonight’s Tea Party. Osla smelled stewed tea as she moved into the shabby little house. A child was roaring in the next room.
“Ah, domestic life,” mused Giles, ducking in after Osla. “Why wait for death?”
“Don’t be beastly,” Osla retorted, slightly disgusted with herself for noticing that Harry’s wife didn’t have nearly the educated vowels he did. You don’t be horrid either, Osla scolded herself as she and Giles crowded down the narrow passage. And then Osla really felt like a worm, because Sheila Zarb reappeared carrying her howling son, his sticklike legs hanging against his mother’s side encased in metal braces like torture contraptions. Polio, surely—Osla had gone to boarding school with a girl who had braces like that.
“Welcome to the madhouse.” Harry emerged into the hall behind his wife, scooping the child out of her arms. “Come in, parlor’s that way. Christopher, chap, I know you hate your braces, but you’ve got to wear them.”
Harry’s son narrowed his eyes mutinously, still bawling. “What a darling,” Osla managed to say over the din. “How old?”
“Turned three in January.”
The boy looked far too small for three, thin and wasted when he should have been sturdy and bouncing. He had Harry’s jet-black hair and eyes but was sallow from ill health.
“I know what this sprat needs.” Mab squeezed out of
the parlor behind Harry, balancing a glass of sherry and the festooned top hat. She addressed Christopher, completely at ease. “Want to wear the Mad Hatter’s topper? It’s magic, you know.”
Little Christopher stopped yelling to consider. Mab plunked the hat on his head, Harry gave her a grateful look, and they all maneuvered into the parlor, where more Mad Hatters were passing toast and discussing Mired: Battlefield Verses by Francis Gray. “I prefer Siegfried Sassoon,” someone was complaining.
“‘Altar’ is my favorite sonnet of Gray’s, too eerie for words—”
“Who cares about his poetry? I want dirt on the poet.” Giles turned his angelic smile on Mab. “Dish, faerie queene. You had dinner with the chap, and Bletchley Bletherings says he’s taking you out again next week—”
“To a concert, nosy—”
“Sorry!” Beth slipped in, flushed and late. “I had to let the dog out. If he has an accident inside, Mum swears she’ll get rid of him.”
“Beth!” Harry maneuvered his huge frame onto the nearest chair, keeping Christopher and his braces deftly balanced on one knee. “Haven’t seen you since, well, you know.” He grinned, and Beth flushed, looking into her teacup Harry was filling one-handed.
“Well, well,” Giles murmured in Osla’s ear, alight with mischief. “Has our wallflower got a crush?”
“Don’t talk slush,” said Osla, who had been wondering exactly the same thing.
“Maybe he’s got one, too.” Giles’s voice dropped even further, inaudible under the buzz of conversation to anyone but Osla. “Our Beth’s a clever girl, and something tells me Harry doesn’t get much brainy conversation from the missus.”
“You infernal snob—”
Sheila reappeared, carrying an apron under one arm. “Sorry to leave you with bath and bedtime,” she said low voiced to her husband as the Mad Hatters passed the teapot. “The canteen manager is insisting I cover—”
“Go on.” Harry passed a hand over his son’s black hair. “I’ve got him.”
Sheila leaned down and pressed her lips to Christopher’s cheek, and Osla found herself pushing back tears, looking at all the tenderness being poured on the scrawny child curled into his father’s arms with complete trust. She’d have given up both legs altogether for a childhood home where there were warm laps to be counted on and kisses on the cheek at night—for any kind of home now. Something else she’d learned, the night after Café de Paris’s destruction—how little of a home she really had.
Well, so what? Osla told herself fiercely. You have so much else. You even finally have a job that matters. In a world at war, surely it was greedy to want both—a job that mattered, and a home to welcome you afterward.
So Osla pinned a smile in place as the discussion got under way, and dug out a scrap of paper to jot ideas for the next Bletchley Bletherings, which she typed up every Wednesday. A lively discussion on Francis Gray’s battlefield verses, though BB wonders if war poetry is quite The Thing for morale. If you finished your shift translating, say, a U-boat casualty list, do you really want to discuss the crushed idealism of a lost generation drowned in Flanders mud as depicted in harrowing iambic pentameter? Or would you rather read some Jeeves & Wooster?
Copies of BB were invariably zinging through every hut in Bletchley Park by Friday, followed by snorts of laughter. Osla couldn’t make herself laugh these days, but by God she could dash off a weekly gossip sheet that had the whole Park fizzing.
Chapter 21
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MAY 1941
* * *
Sound of singing heard from Knox’s section recently—intoxicated singing, if BB is any judge . . .
* * *
Not a one of you fillies can carry a tune in a bucket,” Dilly remarked. “Thank God you can break codes.” He conducted them with his pipe as they roared on with the next verse of his poem, specially written for the occasion:
When Cunningham won at Matapan
By the grace of God and MARGARET—
It was thanks to that girl, the admiral said,
That our aeroplanes straddled their target!
Peggy Rock shook her head smiling as Beth and the others shouted her name. Every woman in the Cottage had a verse of her own.
When Cunningham won at Matapan
By the grace of God and BETH—
She’s the girl who found the planes
Our ships did then evadeth!
“I didn’t really find the planes,” Beth objected, “I found the coordinates—”
“Try making coordinates rhyme with anything!” Peggy replied.
“Estimates,” Beth said instantly. “Bifurcates. Expectorates—”
Peggy threw a wine cork at her. It was the first real opportunity they’d all had to celebrate their triumph: during those heady days after the victory, there had been new work to do. But today, Dilly had sent Beth and Peggy down to the Eight Bells pub to bring back as much wine as they could carry: Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham himself, hero of Matapan, was coming to Bletchley Park to personally thank Dilly and his team.
When they finished singing, they raised their glasses to their boss. “To Dilly Knox,” said Peggy. “The reason we’re all here.”
Dilly took his glasses off, blinking rather hard. “Well, now,” he said. “Well, now—”
They crowded around him in a rush. Beth pushed down her dislike of being touched so she could hug everyone within reach. Her throat was so choked with feeling she could hardly breathe.
“Oh, lord,” someone called in sudden panic, “is that the admiral? I swear I heard a staff car—”
They were all lined up outside the Cottage, very serious and well combed (and slightly squiffy on bad Chablis), by the time Admiral Cunningham in his gold-braided uniform came stalking along with a smiling Commander Denniston. Beth could hardly look the great man in the face as he shook hands down the line. “We have had a great victory in the Mediterranean,” he said at the end, holding the glass someone had managed to find for the nasty wine. “And it is entirely due to Dilly Knox and his girls.”
A very solemn moment, broken when the admiral turned and Beth saw the back of his immaculate dark uniform was blotched with white. “The Cottage was just whitewashed,” giggled two of the younger women. “We maneuvered him to brush against the wall.”
“That’s no way to treat an admiral!” But Beth found laughter rising in her like golden bubbles, the triumph and the unaccustomed drink going to her head, and when the hero of the Mediterranean realized what had happened and shook his head in rueful amusement, Dilly’s entire team burst into howls of laughter.
Beth was still smiling as she let herself in the door at home. “Not much to smile about from where I’m standing,” her mother sighed. “It’ll be tripe and liver hot pot for supper if I can’t find an onion at the shop. And an entire basket of socks to darn!”
“I’ll do it.” Beth kissed her mother’s cheek. I met an admiral today, Mother. He said his victory was entirely due to me and the people I work with. She wanted to say it, so badly. She wanted her mother to be proud.
All she could do was offer to darn socks.
“Take That Dog outside,” Mrs. Finch warned, collecting her shopping basket. “I swear it’s waiting for me to turn my back so it can make a mess . . .”
Beth still couldn’t believe she’d won in the matter of the dog. If it hadn’t been for that strange, exhilarated exhaustion that gripped her after breaking the Italian battle plan . . . her mother hadn’t even quoted Deuteronomy at her the following day. Even Deuteronomy apparently had nothing to say about daughters who stayed out for three nights on shift work. The dog was seemingly just one more straw on the heap.
“You know, a dog keeps burglars away,” Mab had told Mrs. Finch with a dark look implying hordes of would-be intruders, and Osla had launched a long, drawling anecdote about how “Princess Margaret has a topping little dog like that, did you see in the Tatler . . .” So the dog stayed, and Beth took h
im outside with the basket of socks, so she could do her darning on the sunny front stoop.
“Funny-looking dog,” the next-door neighbor said as the schnauzer trundled crossly around Mrs. Finch’s immaculate victory garden. “What’s his name?”
“Boots.” The name had been an accident—Mab had asked, “What’ll you call him?” and Beth, still exhausted from codebreaking and expecting the question Where did you find him?, had mumbled Boots, since she’d picked him up outside the chemist’s.
Osla and Mab came swinging through the front gate in their blush-pink and smoke-blue coats, passing Mrs. Finch as she departed for the grocer. “Isn’t this sun bliss?” Mab sat down on the front step beside Beth. “Did you hear there’s a dance in Bedford? An American band, they’ve got all the latest Glenn Miller tunes.”
“Who?” Beth asked, rummaging for yarn.
“Told you she wouldn’t know who that was.” Osla grinned, sitting on Beth’s other side. “Brains like hers are too busy keeping up with brilliant things to get chuffed about the latest tunes!”
“It doesn’t take brilliance, the sort of thing I do. Just sideways thinking. Here—” Beth hesitated, looking around. No one in earshot. Pushing the darning basket aside, she pulled out a scrap of paper and sketched quickly. “This is a Vigenère cipher. Dilly has me doing them for practice in my spare time—it’s a historic codebreaking exercise, miles different from what we do now, so it’s nothing you aren’t allowed to know. I’ll have you solving one in twenty minutes.” Still buoyed up by the Cottage celebration, the wine, and the admiral’s handshake, Beth had an unaccustomed urge to share what she could do. “Here’s how to crack it using a key. Though it can be done without . . .” She demonstrated. Mab and Osla both had a go, half laughing and half fascinated. It took longer than twenty minutes, but eventually they both cracked it. “See? Not so hard.”
