by Kate Quinn
Beth fought a swell of unease. “What kind of surgery?”
Shrug. Beth sat behind the game board, fighting her disquiet. A matron came in with a list of tomorrow’s visitations, but Beth ignored her. In three and a half years she’d only had one visitor.
That was why it had taken so long to smuggle her coded letters out to Osla and Mab.
So many dead ends . . . Trying to sneak the cipher messages out with the asylum post. Trying to bribe an orderly to post them off-grounds. Wheedling a fellow inmate into sealing a letter inside one of theirs. She’d been shut down or caught every time—Miss Liddell, no post in or out for you! When she’d been sent here, MI-5’s instructions had clearly been strict: an inmate like Beth with her headful of secret information was not allowed to exchange news with the outside world.
Only a few weeks ago had she finally been able to send her ciphered call for help.
“Visitor, Miss Liddell!” the nurse had sung out, shocking Beth speechless. Three and a half years with not a single visitor from the outside world . . . Harry? she’d thought, pulse ratcheting as she approached the visiting room.
“Bethan.” Her father stood in the middle of the room, which could have been her mother’s parlor except that all the knickknacks were bolted down to stop hysterical inmates from hurling them at their visiting loved ones. Seeing her father’s horror as he registered her chopped hair and gaunt face, Beth wouldn’t have minded slinging a vase or two. “Are you—all right?” he ventured as the orderlies left them alone.
“Do I look all right?” Beth had answered coldly.
“You look . . .” He trailed away. “Are you improving? I’d love to have you home again.”
“Why? Mother wouldn’t.”
“Of course she would! Well, not that she said—that is, she doesn’t know I’m here.” An unnecessary statement if there ever was one, Beth thought. “She’s visiting your aunt in Bournemouth, and I thought I’d—”
“Sneak out behind her back?” Beth’s throat burned constantly from throwing up her pills twice a day; looking at her father, it felt like she was choking out hot coals along with words. “More than three years, Dad. Not one visit.”
“Your mother didn’t think . . . that is, we decided to give you time to heal.” His eyes darted across her smock, her chapped lips. “They said it was a good place.”
“Mother was only too happy to believe that, I’m sure. A place where I’m no longer underfoot, embarrassing her.” Beth choked herself off. She could rage at her father forever, but all that would do was drive him away. Don’t waste this chance.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, making her voice gentler.
He relaxed then, telling family news, answering questions she kept innocuous. No, he didn’t know what had happened to Boots . . . Beth choked down bitter disappointment but kept nodding.
“I’d get you out if I could,” her father had said at last, hesitant. “The Bletchley fellows said parental rights didn’t have sway here. You’re committed as an employee of the government, by order of the government, for your own good and for the sake of security.”
“I know.” Perhaps the right person could make enough fuss to get her case reviewed, but her father didn’t have it in him to kick down doors in London. He had barely summoned the nerve to visit her today behind his wife’s back. Her contempt nearly choked her, but at the same time she wanted to cry, remembering how he’d let her help with his crossword when she was small. Oh, Dad . . .
Then she remembered how he’d stood by her entire life while her mother bullied her.
“Dad, I need you to do something for me.”
“Bethan, I can’t—”
Her voice cracked across the room like a whip. “You owe me.”
And he’d walked out with two scribbled cipher messages in his pocket, promising to post them to Mab and Osla wherever they might now be living.
He promised he’d do it, Beth thought now, two weeks later, staring at an empty game board. He’d promised.
But no one had come.
York
Mab couldn’t sleep.
Go to Clockwell, or not?
It was near midnight when she slipped out of bed and tiptoed downstairs to sit in the dining room’s big window. The table was stacked with damask napkins—Mab had brought them out to iron for her royal wedding listening party. There had been a certain amount of hilarity when her husband caught her practicing folding them into swans.
I used to decode Nazi battle orders, Mab thought, and now I’m folding napkins into swans.
The switch her life had made sometimes astounded her. She’d be going through the market squeezing pears for ripeness, or sharing a gossip with her neighbors, and it would hit her all over again: just a few short years ago she would have been surrounded by racketing machines, exhausted and oil stained and pushed to her limit, but doing something that mattered. Now she had peace, prosperity, all the things she’d dreamed of during the war years, and sometimes it felt . . .
Mab searched, but there wasn’t a word. It wasn’t that life now didn’t matter—by God, it did. Being able to bring up your children in peace, praying the peace would last, was a gift she would never cease treasuring. Looking at the stack of napkins, she wondered if it was purpose she missed; hands that folded damask swans yet yearned for war machines . . . She looked upward to where her husband slept, wondering if he ever felt a similar restlessness in turning his skills from war to peace. If he did, he never said so. These were things no one seemed to say. They all just put the war behind them and got on with it.
And is that such a bad thing? Mab scolded herself. Perhaps life wasn’t exactly exciting anymore; there were no great sweeps of passion or purpose to her days, but there was no grief or stress, either. Adventure, excitement, passion; those things were unreliable. The Bletchley Park years had offered all that, love and change and friendships to outlast the world, or so it seemed—but all that had come crashing down, and Mab had built this new life over the ruins, stone by painful stone.
Why on earth would she risk it all for a woman she hated?
But . . .
You may hate me, Beth had written, but you took the same oath I did. And whether Beth was mad or conniving, she had risked a great deal to reach out past asylum walls for help.
Mab scowled, and made a decision.
Four Years Ago
October 1943
Chapter 51
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, OCTOBER 1943
* * *
Bletchley Park is infested—not by mice, but by Yanks. Pestus Americanus can be identified by its unnaturally white teeth and Camel cigarettes . . .
* * *
Mab shattered into pieces exactly three hundred and forty-four days after Lucy and Francis died. She worked out the figure in the sickroom, as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
She’d been called to demonstrate the one remaining bombe machine in Hut 11A. All the others had been moved to outstations, along with the Wrens who serviced them, but demonstrations were still required from time to time, and a cluster of Americans was getting the show now. “This is how we set the bombe in motion,” Mab said tonelessly over the machine’s racket.
“Awfully finicky work.” A lieutenant hovered, jostling. He had fair hair and an easy smile and was probably just trying to be friendly, but Mab could hardly stand looking at him. She didn’t want to be friendly. The only reason she’d returned to Bletchley Park was because it was work here or do service elsewhere; because working here meant she could help stop the German bastards who had killed her family—and finally, because Francis would have been disappointed if she’d curled up in bed after the funerals and let the grief eat her alive. He’d have told her to carry on the fight.
So Mab had come back to BP a shocking two days after Francis’s funeral—she knew people had whispered—and she hadn’t missed a shift since. She threw herself into her work, and why not? Francis and Lucy were dead, and that
wasn’t a false stop. She couldn’t wire her life up like a bombe and get it running again. Everything had just—stopped.
“Marvelous machines I’ve seen here,” the Yank wittered on, oblivious. “And so many attractive ladies. As far as I can tell, the machines were made by the British Tabulating Machine Company and the ladies by God!”
He honked laughter. Mab looked at him. She didn’t lower her eyebrows in her old scowl, she just gazed at him blankly until his smile dripped away. Mab didn’t know what was in her gaze these days, but very few people seemed to want to meet it for long.
She finished with the drums, changed up the wheel orders, checked the wires on the new wheels. Her lips were cracked and dry from the hut’s airlessness; Mab reached for her pocket mirror and set it above the bombe’s cables, pulling out her lipstick. She had a scraping of Elizabeth Arden Victory Red left in the tube—a sudden memory flashed of the time Lucy had rummaged in her cosmetics and used half a tube daubing her face in war paint. I shouted at her. Why did I do that? Mab’s hand shook as she lifted the lipstick, steadying the mirror with her other hand, and an electric shock from the cables jolted thorough the metal mirror to her fingertips. She turned numbly, and the American let out a surprised shout, pointing at her throat. Mab raised her stinging fingers and touched something sticky, saw red on her fingertips.
I’m dead, she thought calmly, looking in the mirror and seeing the red line across her windpipe. But it wasn’t blood she smelled on her fingertips, just lipstick. The recoil of her electric-shocked hand had jerked the lipstick across her own neck; it must have looked like she’d cut her own throat.
I’m not dead, she tried to say, looking at the ash-pale Yanks. Instead, she found herself laughing at a high pitch, laughing and shaking beside the bombe machine, which kept on with its horrible, monotonous whirring. Mab tried to steady herself, but somehow slipped to her knees instead on the oily floor, still laughing, smearing and tearing at the red line on her throat.
Then there were hands pulling her away from the bombe. “Get her to the infirmary.” When Mab pulled herself together, she was standing wan and swaying before a starchy-looking matron in a ward she’d never set foot in before.
“What’s the matter with you, then?”
“I don’t know,” Mab said, dazed. “What month is it?”
The woman looked at her a moment. “October, love. ’Forty-Three.”
Ten months since she’d buried Francis and Lucy. Ten months. Soon it would be a year. Where had the days gone? Mab couldn’t remember getting out of bed this morning, or taking the transport bus here. She didn’t know if she was on day shift, evening shift, or night shift. She clutched for the blanketing cotton wool that had battened her senses for months, but it thinned and shredded, electrified away. Mab began to cry in huge wrenching sobs.
She hadn’t cried since Coventry.
“That’s all right, love.” The matron steered her to a narrow white bed behind a screen. “You’ve got a touch of nervous exhaustion, I’ll wager. Four days’ bed rest—”
“My husband is dead,” Mab managed to say. She wanted to add my daughter is dead, but she couldn’t have anyone thinking that Lucy had been a bastard, and she couldn’t say my sister after a lifetime of saying nothing else. So just—“My husband is dead.”
“I haven’t got a cure for that, love. I wish I did.” Giving Mab’s shoulder a squeeze. “But plenty of sleep and water will still do you some good. Strip down and climb in—”
“Job’s up,” Mab whispered. “Job’s up, strip down . . .” She peeled out of her black crepe, crawled between the sheets, and slept like the dead for nearly three days.
When she woke, she saw two male blurs at her bedside, one huge and dark, one skinny and ginger. The sight of any man who wasn’t Francis sometimes hurt her, but Harry and Giles were so absolutely, comfortingly different in every way that she could look at them without flinching.
“Sleeping Beauty awakes,” Giles said. “The Mad Hatters have been dropping in between shifts to see if we can catch you when you aren’t snoring.”
—You snore—Francis’s voice. But a very ladylike snore . . .
“We brought the Mad Hatter’s topper,” Giles was burbling, oblivious. “Thought it might be just the thing.” He plunked the outrageous object into her hands, and Mab stroked the spray of silk flowers, trying to remember when she’d last gone to a Tea Party. She couldn’t even remember when she’d last read a book. I’ve gone a little mad, she thought unsteadily, mad as the Mad Hatter. She didn’t think it was over yet, either. There were broken pieces jabbing everywhere inside, now that the cotton wool was gone.
“You just missed Beth,” Harry was saying, linking his big hands between his knees. “She had to go on shift. And she’s not really sure what to do around sickbeds. You aren’t a line of code, so she’s stumped.”
You and Beth? Mab wondered, looking at him. There was a thing a man’s eyes did when he was in love, a softening at the very centers—she’d learned that from Francis. Abruptly, she wished Harry would go. She didn’t want to look at a man in love when she’d lost her own. Mab remembered reading something rubbishy about the ennoblement of grief . . . what rot. Grief didn’t make you noble. It made you selfish and hateful. She made herself smile at Harry, but she was glad when he left.
Giles lingered, looking like a bony heron perched on his too-low stool. “You want to scream,” he said, “don’t you?”
“Yes.” Her hand left the Mad Hatter’s topper and crept up to her throat where the line of lipstick had looked like a knife slash. I wish it had been.
“What you need,” Giles said, “is a transfer.”
“Where?” When the bombes were moved out and the Wrens with them, Mab had been stuck back in Hut 6, first on a Typex, more recently in the Machine Room, where she mechanically sorted and tested bombe menus. “I’m not a brain like Beth or Harry. I don’t speak German; no use pushing me in with women like—”
Osla. The name stuck in her throat like a spike of ice. Perhaps she didn’t loathe Osla with the visceral hatred that had gripped her after the funeral, but a tiny whisper inside remained uncompromising: If you hadn’t let go of Lucy’s hand . . .
It wasn’t fair. Mab knew it wasn’t fair. She knew if she picked her anger apart, the feelings beneath would be far more complicated than simple hatred. But she didn’t have the energy, and every day the gulf grew wider, so Mab simply kept to the road of avoiding her old friend. Hating Osla was less complicated, more comforting—and avoiding her was child’s play. Keeping your distance from someone at BP was easy if you didn’t work the same hut or shift schedule. Mab had moved from their shared room to a parlor cot, so even billeting under the same roof, she hardly ever crossed paths with Osla.
“There are all kinds of posts here,” Giles continued. “You’re not tied to Hut 6—let’s see if we can get you swapped into the mansion. Travis’s team, maybe . . . I’ll pull strings.”
“Thank you,” Mab managed.
He seemed to realize what an effort it took her. “Things have been damned awful for you this year. I’m sorry.”
Sorry. Everyone told her they were sorry. Why didn’t they tell her how to go on living, instead? How to keep going, day after day, when soon it was going to be a year since she’d buried Lucy and Francis—then two years—then three?
Why did no one tell her how to keep living?
Chapter 52
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, NOVEMBER 1943
* * *
To the American officers who condescended to tell the ladies in Knox’s section how to do their work—all BB can say is: Really, gentlemen? Did you fail to notice these women have a CMG on their wall? You don’t win the Companionship of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George for Best Radishes in the Victory Garden . . .
* * *
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom about the bough . . .’” Dilly’s voice echoed, happy and careless.
“But it’s covered in snow,” Beth answered aloud, looking at the tree arching overhead. Earlier this year, a warm winter had meant it blossomed unseasonably fast; she’d come to Courns Wood with Abwehr traffic, alternating days with Peggy, and she and Dilly would spread a blanket in his garden and sit boxing and rodding as white petals drifted down. Now it was nearly winter; the cherry tree was bare.
And Dilly Knox was dead.
Beth stood alone under the tree—but not really alone. Turning her head, she could imagine Dilly beside her so vividly: smoking his pipe, no longer gaunt and graying because in her imagination he was restored to health. When she came here, she could replay entire conversations they’d had before he died, tell him what had happened since, imagine his answers . . . sometimes she pictured him sitting in the desk beside her at work, so she could ask his advice on a tricky crib.
“Gives me the creeps when you do that,” Phyllida said, shivering. “It sounds proper mad, you having conversations with a dead man.”
“It helps me work.” Cope, too.
“The cherry covered in snow, that’s the poem’s third verse,” Dilly went on in Beth’s imagination. “You should read more poetry, m’dear.”
“When?” Beth asked the dead man. She tossed a stick for Boots, who ignored it as he trundled over the frozen ground. Her dog looked like a grumpy tin of Scottish shortbread in a little tartan coat Mab had made out of an old blanket. Mab . . . but Beth pushed that familiar guilt away. “I’ve been trying to break back into the KK traffic, Dilly.” A pinch during Operation Torch had produced a multi-turnover Abwehr machine, rewired and used for a link that hadn’t been broken cryptographically before. “Six weeks of back traffic broken, but we haven’t been able to get back in. Where’s the time for poetry?”
