by Kate Quinn
That’s the honey in the pot, Osla thought sickly. Not just a princess who was a suitable match for a prince . . . not even the fact that his relatives approved. Princess Elizabeth brought the one thing those without homes couldn’t resist—the thing Osla herself wanted desperately. Lilibet came with a family ready-made, close-knit, and loving. A family, all tied up in a bow with the future queen of England, who was a serious girl rather than a silly deb.
An oasis in the desert, surely, for a boy raised without a home. A boy who’d grown into an ambitious man . . . Osla knew Philip so well; of course he was ambitious. What man in his lonely, barebones position would turn down such a chance—status, wealth, power, allied to a loving family and a girl he thought he might very well be able to love?
No one, Osla thought.
“I can’t think about any of this yet,” Philip went on. “Not until the war is done. There’s not room for it. But Lilibet said she’d keep writing. She’s never stopped.” He looked at Osla. “You stopped.”
The breath left Osla as if she’d been punched.
“I’ve told you things I never told anyone, Os. About Cape Matapan, lining up targets in the dark and watching them go down. Then I go off to sea again and you stop writing. So I think you’re cooling off, you’re backing away, and I should let you because you’re right—I didn’t get into things with you thinking it was something for the long run. So if you want to back off, it’s only fair to let you. But I get home and you’re in my arms at Christmas like nothing’s happened, and you’ve got my head spinning all over again, but you won’t tell me why you went off me, or even that you’ll write again . . . I may have misled you, but we’re pots and kettles here. You’ve misled me, too.”
That’s not my fault, Osla wanted to snarl. I’ve protected you—I stayed away to keep London intelligence off your back—but she couldn’t say any of that. He waited for explanations, but the Official Secrets Act sat around her neck like a lead collar.
“At least with Lilibet,” he said at last, “I know where I am.”
“Do you know who you are with her?” Osla lashed back. “With me, you’d simply be Philip. With her you’d always be the queen’s husband. Do you think you’re built for that, playing Albert to her Victoria? I don’t think you are. You’ll be dead of boredom in three years.”
Now he was the one who looked like he’d been hit.
The silence stretched, endless, taut, terrible. Somewhere distant, a clock chimed. Finally Osla rose, unpinned the naval insignia from her dress, and placed it in his palm. “Good luck with the Whelp.” Avoiding his stricken gaze, she walked carefully, one step after the other, across the platform toward the ticket booth, where she could find out what the next train was back to Bletchley. Part of Osla hoped Philip would come after her—that the pull between them would defeat the promise of a family, and a royal one at that. But she knew he wouldn’t.
She knew something else as well. If she put enough steps in line, one after the other, she would get there—to the ticket booth, to Bletchley, to the rest of her life—without crumbling into pieces. In the grand scheme of things, losing Philip wasn’t remotely important. Not in a world where there were invasions of Europe being planned, where millions around the globe were dying. It didn’t matter at all that she felt like she was being torn apart inside by white-hot pincers.
You’ll get over it, Osla told herself. There’s a war on.
Philip’s voice came softly behind her: “Let me at least take you home, princess—”
Osla flinched like a lash had torn across her back. She turned in time to see Philip frozen midsentence, visibly realizing how ill advised that choice of endearments had been. She stood, spine straight, letting him get a good look at the rage in her eyes.
“I’m no princess, Philip,” she said at last. “You’ve already got one.”
Chapter 58
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, APRIL 1944
* * *
A thought, boffins and debs, and BB is aware it’s a radical one: can we all perhaps retire the word wog from our vocabularies? Such an amusing term, such a joke, such an affectionate bit of slang to toss about in a moment of high-spirited fun . . . yet BB does not find the term particularly entertaining, and neither do those who hear it aimed at them, judging from their expressions.
* * *
Get off—” Beth waded into the scrum of children, grabbing a towheaded boy and a redheaded boy. They had Christopher Zarb on the ground in his own front yard and were pelting him with mud.
“He won’t fight,” the redhead jeered. “Just like his dad—”
Beth hauled off and smacked him on the back of the head. “Get out of here.”
The boys ran. “My mum says you don’t deserve to live in England if you won’t fight for it,” one yelled over his shoulder. “Stupid wogs . . .”
Christopher sat in the dirt, trying not to cry, brushing mud off his braces. Beth’s heart squeezed. “Don’t listen to them.” She held out a hand, rather awkwardly, to her lover’s son. “Come on, we’ll get you cleaned up.”
Sheila was inside laying out bread and marg for this month’s Tea Party, but she swooped down on her muddied son. “Was it that Robbie Blaine again? The little bugger . . .”
“You take care of Christopher,” Beth said, “I’ll finish up here.” She was early, the first one arrived. Harry came in as she was putting the kettle on, and he looked grim as Beth told him what had happened.
“Those little bastards have been after him for months. When I bang their heads together, their fathers come at me.” Harry passed her a tea towel. “With luck, it’ll slack off by next week.”
“What happens then?”
A long pause. “I leave.” He looked her in the eye. “I’ve enlisted, Beth.”
A frozen, crystallized moment as they stood there in the cramped kitchen. Then Beth let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You aren’t allowed.”
“It is if you go for the Fleet Air Arm,” Harry said quietly. “The naval air service. Anyone shot down in the Fleet Air Arm goes down at sea—no risk of capture, no risk to BP.”
“Commander Travis wouldn’t—”
“Travis gave permission to Keith Batey in Hut 6, back in June ’Forty-Two. Now me. I was going to tell you after the Tea Party, but—” Harry took a breath. “It’s done, Beth.”
“No.” It came out reflexively, rushing through her throat in something very close to a whimper. She stood clutching the tea towel, suddenly terrified.
“I see you told her.” Sheila stalked into the kitchen, pushing a strand of hair back into its string snood. “You talk to him, Beth. I’ve already worn my voice out. Maybe if he won’t listen to his bloody wife, he’ll listen to his bloody mistress.” Glaring at Harry.
“Be fair,” he said, attempting levity. “Mistress implies a kept woman, and nobody’s keeping Beth anywhere she doesn’t want to be.”
The joke fell flat. Sheila turned around and began slamming cups about, leaving Beth to the attack. She crossed her arms, swallowing her fear. “How long have you been planning this?”
“January.”
When she and Harry had quarreled over which was the worthier fight—the fight with a gun or the fight with a pencil. Neither of them had mentioned that quarrel since. Harry had been tender, pulling her into the cradle of his big body every time they came together, and she’d fallen into him gratefully, glad not to rehash the argument. She’d been grateful, and he’d been planning this all along. Beth gulped in a long breath, and with the air came rage.
“You idiot,” she told Harry. “Your section needs you.”
“Quite honestly, they don’t. This isn’t ’Forty-One, not enough people and everyone scrambling. It’s not even ’Forty-Two, with the terrible shutout. You know how big my section is now? BP’s turned into a well-oiled machine, thousands of cogs all doing their jobs. One cog won’t matter.”
“You aren’t a cog. They can find more chess players and m
aths students, but they can’t find another Harry Zarb.” Her words scrambled, tumbled, pleaded. “They can’t replace you.”
“Yes, they can.” His voice was gentle, and she hated it. “I’m not special, Beth. You could do my job better than me. So can women like Joan Clarke, who’s one of the best brains in my section. That was the argument that clinched Travis—the ladies here have proved they are perfectly capable of handling the work. So let them do it, and let the men who want to join up go to the front while they can.” Pause. “There’s a big push soon. You know there is.”
The Allied invasion. Everyone knew it was coming.
“You can’t say one more body in that fight won’t make a difference,” Harry continued in that gentle voice. “Every one will count. Any number of qualified women can do my job. But those women can’t join the Fleet Air Arm, which I can. And the Fleet Air Arm needs men.”
“They don’t need you.” But that argument wasn’t working, so Beth switched tack. “What about your son? He needs both of you—”
“Sheila’s parents have agreed to take up the slack.”
“That will be a joy,” Sheila muttered at the sink, banging cups. “You get to slag Krauts over the Atlantic, and I get to listen to my mother tell me I’m doing Christopher’s braces up wrong—”
“If you go down in the middle of the ocean, he will be fatherless. She will be widowed.” Beth waved at Sheila. “Are you that selfish, Harry?”
“No.” A glint entered his voice like a gleam off metal. “What’s selfish is keeping myself bunked up in a safe, cushy job here in Bucks while every other able-bodied man in this country is expected to put his life on the line. They have children and wives, too—it doesn’t exempt them from the danger. I have no right to keep myself safe for my family when they can’t do the same, simply because they don’t have my university degree and my easy out.”
“Oh, don’t be so everlastingly noble,” Beth snarled as Sheila snapped, “Christ, you’re an ass.”
Harry just looked at them both steadily, immovable as a granite pillar in the cramped kitchen. “I’m going,” he said when they were finished. “I love that boy upstairs more than the world, and I love both of you, but I’m going.”
To her own horror, Beth flew at him and began hitting him wherever she could reach. She couldn’t stop. The panic was clawing its way out of her like a trapped bird. “Bastard,” she jerked, realizing she was on the edge of tears, slamming at him with her fists. “You bastard—” Harry stood quietly, taking the blows. Sheila was the one who yanked her back.
“Stop that. People are looking.”
At the door, Beth saw a cluster of newly arrived Mad Hatters hesitating uncertainly—Giles and Mab, the wide-eyed Glassborow twins. Beth turned away to hide her face as Harry awkwardly welcomed everyone inside. She wanted to keep pounding at him till he was bloody. She wrapped her arms around herself, hunching her shoulders, humiliated to have lost control so completely.
“Why were they arguing?” she heard Valerie Glassborow whisper to her twin as they went into the parlor.
“Does someone have to tell you what a ménage à trois is, child?” Giles asked, overhearing. “It’s not going to be me . . .”
Beth seized her coat. “I’m not staying.”
Harry followed her out into the spring twilight. “Beth—”
“You’re a bloody mathematician, not a flier.” She wrenched away before he could touch her arm. “You can do so much more here at BP, and you’re still going to leave out of some—misplaced sense of nobility. And you’re going to die in the middle of the Atlantic—” Beth felt tears rising up her throat at the thought of Harry’s sinking under a glinting sea in a plane riddled by Luftwaffe fire. His complicated, questing brain turned to gray pudding, never to work out U-boat settings or theorize mathematical proofs again. The war had made a waste of so many men; why did it have to waste her beautiful, brilliant Harry?
Do you love me? Harry had asked her in January, and she hadn’t known how to answer. Was this his way of finding out?
“I hate you,” she whispered, aware she sounded like a child, too devastated to care. “Don’t you dare write to me when you leave, you walking-dead fool. Don’t you dare.”
Nine Days Until the Royal Wedding
November 11, 1947
Chapter 59
Inside the Clock
It was only in the darkest, bleakest hour right before dawn that Beth could ever bring herself to contemplate the last name on her list for the position of Bletchley Park traitor.
Giles, a possibility. Peggy, another possibility. The rest of Dilly’s section, suspects every one.
And finally . . . Harry.
Beth squeezed her eyes shut in the blackness of night, pushing down a fit of coughing. Not Harry.
But he had worked Knox’s section from time to time, when they needed extra hands. She could even remember his arguing for greater aid to the Soviets, back in the days when they’d been losing millions to Hitler’s eastern advance.
Harry, a traitor.
It can’t have been Harry, Beth thought, defending him as she had a thousand times. It wasn’t just a cry of He wouldn’t do that to me. Harry had been in the Fleet Air Arm when the traitor wrecked Beth’s life.
But what if he hadn’t gone to the Fleet Air Arm? What if that had only been an excuse, and he’d gone . . . elsewhere? If he’d somehow monitored activity in ISK, or had someone monitoring it for him, when Beth finally cracked that fatal message of Dilly’s abandoned cipher?
Far-fetched . . . but in three and a half years, Harry had never come to Clockwell. When the war ended, she’d pinned her hopes on seeing him come striding through the iron gates. He might not have been able to leave his regiment during the fight, but when the war was over, Harry would have come for her. Even if they’d quarreled before he left, nothing would have kept him away if he’d learned she was here.
They’re going to perform surgery on me, Harry. Beth thought of her silent Go-playing partner, her one friend—taken away for surgery, not returned yet. A lobotomy, like Beth? Who knew? They’ll cut me open, and I don’t know what they’ll do after that. Come get me before . . .
But he’d never come.
So . . . on one extreme, he was dead and had never learned what happened to Beth. On the other extreme, he was the traitor, and he’d put her here, and he didn’t care if she died here.
Beth buried her head in her pillow and wept.
York
“Is this about my piece on Ascot hats?” Osla cradled the telephone between ear and shoulder, hooking up her stockings. She hadn’t expected her boss from the Tatler to ring her here in York. “I winged it over your desk before I left London.”
“Yes, I saw it—”
“Can I take a puck at turning it into a sort of upper-crust satire? It’ll be an absolute screamer—”
“No, keep it straightforward. But this isn’t about your piece, Miss Kendall.”
Osla glanced at the time. If she was late checking out, she’d miss her morning train to Clockwell.
“You asked for a few days off. I think we’d better make your absence indefinite, until after the royal wedding.”
She felt her jaw tightening. “Scandal rags still got the swithers?”
“Ringing round the clock for you. Take time away until things die down. It’s not as if the world will fall apart if we don’t have articles on Ascot hats.”
Osla breathed through her nose. “When can I come back?”
“Well . . . you’re getting married soon, so—”
“What’s that got to do with it?” No one ever seemed to believe Osla wanted to work. Maybe fluffy, funny pieces on Ascot hats weren’t exactly changing the world, but after translating so much tragedy at BP, Osla thought the world needed fluff and fun. She loved her job, damn it. “I have no intention of stopping after the wedding.”
“Is your chap on board with that?”
Who cares? Osla wondered, reaching for her sh
oes. I don’t make a fuss who he fizzes the sheets with behind my back; he won’t make a fuss about my job. She issued her boss a few reassurances, rang off, then telephoned her fiancé. No answer, and she put down the handset with a guilty twinge of relief that she wouldn’t have to talk to him, conjure up a story . . .
“You could do better, darling,” her mother had told her upon meeting Osla’s future husband. “Really you could.”
No, I can’t, Osla thought now, thumb running over her emerald ring. If Philip had taught her anything, it was not to trust passion. Far better to settle for reality: a job she loved and a friend she liked, even if he called her kitten and was probably gadding the weekend away with some tart from Whitstable.
Hauling her traveling case downstairs, Osla hailed the doorman. “If you’d be a lamb and call me a taxi—”
She stopped. Leaning against a well-maintained old Bentley parked opposite, looking smart in black trousers, enormous sunglasses, and a slouch-brimmed hat, was Mab.
Three Years Ago
May 1944
Chapter 60
Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan
Please tell me broken hearts aren’t fatal. Please tell me this feeling won’t kill me. Right now I wish it would. Float me a message in a bottle, Mr. Cornwell, and tell me it will be all right . . .
You could feel it, Osla thought, when something big was coming at Bletchley Park. Maybe no one traded details of their work, but you couldn’t mistake the taut, febrile excitement in the canteen when waves of cryptanalysts sprinted in, bolted revolting platefuls of cheese and piccalilli without complaining, and sprinted out with pencils already in hand. You felt it. The temperature across BP rose like mercury in a thermometer.
The invasion was coming.
