The London Restoration

by Rachel McMillan

  “I took several of his classes.” Diana brightened. She hadn’t had much time for Rick after she began seeing Brent, but a familiar name from a world she missed brought a smile to her face.

  They were doing important work, but that didn’t mean there weren’t unending days of doldrums. When the messages they intercepted and archived were constant, her brain spiraled. But she could always rein it back in during nights with Fisher, Simon, and Villiers at the local public house that showed her the life she had missed by keeping to herself during undergraduate studies.

  “You’re nowhere near King’s and still defending a thesis,” Simon would josh to Diana when she fell into another Wren spiel.

  “Get us another pint, would you, darling?” Fisher didn’t look up from his next move, more interested in chess and clearly wanting to keep Simon’s attention on the board and not Diana’s architectural facts.

  “Get your own, Carne,” Simon retorted.

  “It’s alright. I was going anyway.”

  The Bletchley men were always in the mood for debate, especially when two or three sheets to the wind. Diana needed little but a loud voice and a few glasses of lemonade to rouse her into extolling the virtues of her favorite architect. She missed Brent. She missed London, but the community at Bletchley contained a spark and intelligence that mimicked what she was sure she had missed during her freshman years at King’s. It wasn’t unlike college with late-night pub nights, couples using the bench near the pond for a midnight rendezvous, horrible canteen food, and even badminton on the lawn.

  In some ways Diana had been given a second chance to live her life as it was always meant to be.

  Villiers heralded a loud, “Hear! Hear!” and raised her sherry glass, as if to stir the whole of an unhearing crowd of card players and dancers just finding the beat of a tune spilling from the nearby and static-riddled wireless. Villiers never talked about what she did, of course, but she had infiltrated every space of the Park. She was striking to look at and opinionated. Yet unwaveringly professional. Though it seemed she was speaking fast and loose given her passion and strong gaze, Diana recognized her talent lay in her ability to inspire others to believe that she had welcomed them into her confidence. Whereas, in actuality, she displayed a carefully calculated suit of armor.

  “They say war is a man’s job. But there are three to one of us here. If war is just a man’s job and they all leave for North Africa and the Sudan and heaven knows where else, then is the country just to fall apart in their absence?” Villiers shook her head. “It is because we are the seams, Diana. Here, there are two possible outcomes to every problem: the right or wrong one solved the traditional way and the right or wrong one solved in such an interesting and nonconforming way that the solution will echo decades after.”

  Villiers tapped the ashes from her cigarette. “We are in the latter, Little Canary.” She smiled for Fisher and Simon. “And because we are women, we are a far sight better than you lot at it. Women know how to look at something and think about it, not only for its objective solution but one that thinks of the emotional consequences.”

  “Are you admitting that you are a woman?” Diana laughed. She didn’t want Villiers to suspect she saw the dart of her glance in Simon’s direction in that exact moment she spoke of emotional consequences.

  But Sophie Villiers was right: Bletchley Park was a female domain. Women drinking pink gin and painting the illusion of stockings from bottles when nylons were hard to come by. Many tried to draw the attention of men. Smart men: for the most part the workers were culled from academia. And some of these men were as accustomed to social situations as a duck in Antarctica.

  Devoid of her own romance, Diana focused on the potential of others. When you fell in love, she supposed, you were predisposed to notice its signs in other people. Simon’s features softened when Sophie Villiers was near.

  At Diana’s jest, the dimple that always formed during Simon’s witty banter with Villiers smoothed away. He turned and their eyes met. For a moment something crossed his face, a little like a plea, a little like embarrassment. Villiers and Simon were connected.

  Fisher chose that moment for another customary grilling. “How did you meet your boyfriend, Diana?”

  “Bit of a swerve in subject, Fish.” Simon took a swig of lager.

  “At Great St. Bart’s.” Diana flushed a little at her ear tips. A memory tugged of russet oranges and yellows before London was swirled in unending gray. “In the churchyard. It was so perfect that autumn. Everything was perfect. He was sketching the churchyard. It’s one of my favorite spots in the city, and inside is a gorgeous Lady Chapel. It’s tucked in Cloth Fair so you don’t immediately see it, but it’s close enough to the hospital. It’s one of Prior Rahere’s buildings. He went on a pilgrimage to Rome and had a Saul of Tarsus moment. Just like the story of St. Paul in the Bible.”

  “Calm down there, Canary,” Villiers said kindly. “The faster you talk, the more it looks like you are going to spin yourself into a dither and off your chair.”

  “London, as we knew it, is one big dust pile. Tipped-over building blocks.” Simon tapped the ashes of his cigarette.

  But Diana refused to see London as it was in their conversations and the newspapers. She continued to see it as it could be.

  “Cocoa, Diana?” Simon asked one afternoon when her eyes were crossing over her work. She nodded and followed him.

  “Cheers.” He tinked his mug with her own. Mugs were hard to come by in the huts, and Simon and Diana were fastidious with theirs. It was said Professor Turing over in Hut 8—Villiers’s side of the Park—chained his to the radiator so no one would nick it.

  Diana rolled her shoulders. There seemed to be a constant crick in her neck these days from leaning over her typewriter.

  Simon had a kind smile that reached his eyes and crinkled them a little—rather like Brent’s. “Very pious of you.” He fingered the rim of his mug.

  After a day of listening to the click of heels across the floor, the reverberations of slamming doors, the clack of typewriter keys and transmissions, the constant low of a wireless, and the snaked beep of incoming signals, the hum of the pub was a reprieve. A different kind of noise. The Bletchley huts were persistently noisy, every slight sound an echo in the perimeter of a stuffed, windowless room.

  The nurses had started jolting people with ultraviolet experiments because of the workers’ lack of exposure to sunlight. Trapped like sardines in a can with nothing but winter black when they shuffled out exhausted after the night watch. She supposed the pub entrapped them too. But at least on their own terms.

  “I miss the light. The natural light. In the nave churches.” Diana turned her cheek as if to feel the sun. “Like Stephen Walbrook. You’ve been? It’s all curved and vaulted. But that light through the clerestory windows. The spaces you have to look up to see.” She breathed in sharply. “Just lower than the oculus or that top window that gives it the look of a sort of lantern.” She sipped her cocoa and checked to see if she was boring Simon.

  “Oculus?”

  Diana nodded. “In French the term is oeil-de-boeuf.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” Simon translated. “I suspect you have a perspective of the world that no one else does. Being able to be so passionate just about light. You’re an interesting woman, Diana.”

  “I would almost think you fancy me, Simon.” She laughed nervously. She knew better. So did he.

  Simon straightened, adjusted his glasses. “What does that . . . ? Never mind. We’re stuck in this rummy tin can for heaven knows how many hours a day, and I realize there is a whole side to you that I don’t know.”

  “That goes both ways. Tell me something you’re passionate about.”

  “Other than chess?”

  “Yes, other than chess.”

  “Right now I am passionate about seeing beyond the war. It won’t last forever and we won’t always be in this bleak tin can with rubbish tea and unlimited rubbish cocoa. It will be a new
world. And we will need to change it.”

  “Change it?”

  “Well, for one, we’ll have to rebuild all the churches Jerry keeps blasting.” But there was a slight tonal shift in his voice she hadn’t heard before. “You, of course, remember when Coventry was bombed?”

  “The loss of a beautiful cathedral.”

  Thereafter, she told Simon all about the churches. The protruding chancel and tower porch at Magnus the Martyr, that St. Mary-le-Bow was the first city church built in the reconstruction after the fire. That Wren married math and imagination together so the whole of London was his complicated symphony. Numero pondere et mensura: by number, weight, and measure was what he ascribed to. All the while believing the absolute truths of geometry and arithmetic.

  “I hadn’t realized you were so interested in all of this. You made fun of me. You and Fisher when I first came here.”

  Sometimes she would see something change slightly in Simon, a sort of invisible mask that would close him off from her.

  “We see each other more than anyone else in our lives,” he said easily. “I am merely taking an interest.”

  Yet, with the exception of his favorite chess moves and his teasing of Villiers, she knew little about him. He remained a closed book.

  Turning the next chapter on Fisher, however, came more easily the closer they worked together. For one, she could tell by the slightest shift in his body language when he was bored. After his day’s transcriptions were done, his brown eyes opened on her with an almost lethargic glint. “You want to learn more about patterns?”

  “Yes!”

  Fisher took out a pencil and fresh piece of paper. “Well, now we have machines and keys. In the Boer War and the Great War, a type of cipher was popularized. Some posh gent it is named for. A Playfair cipher. It is like an elaborate crossword puzzle.”

  “I like crossword puzzles.” Diana massaged her fatigued neck muscles.

  “Then let’s play. Come here.”

  Diana carried her metal chair to his side of the desk and leaned in.

  He drew a grid and then another and walked her through every step of filling each square with a sequence of letters. She had to combine the sequence from opposite corners.

  “But you need a key,” Fisher said. “Some use a Bible, a dictionary, a book that anyone might have in their library. Others are far smarter. If it were me, I would play with people’s perceptions. I would lean into the psychology of it all. How many times have you been able to decrypt a message just on feeling?”

  “Several times. I just will the letters to mean something.” She smiled. “Must seem silly.”

  “No. It seems like human nature. Not my favorite subject but undoubtedly something that needs to be accounted for when engaging an enemy.”

  Diana pressed her index finger to her lips. “Do you have any enemies, Fisher?” She couldn’t imagine this introspective and bright young man having offended anyone for any reason.

  “Everyone has enemies, Diana. Even if one cannot see them.”

  “You don’t mean me?”

  Fisher gave a lopsided grin. “You might be an exception.” He paused, pressing his pencil to a new sheet of paper divided by the squares outlining a potential cipher. Together, they played for another hour at least. Then he rose and brushed his cold lips against her cheek. “You, Diana Foyle, are a doll. An absolute doll.”

  She blushed at the compliment. Something in Fisher’s rigid stance and the dry, chalky press of his lips beneath her cheekbone explained so much about him. The man was a foreign zone when it came to human touch. While Diana had been shy and preoccupied by the degree and research she meant to conquer in honor of her father, Brent Somerville had intercepted her path so that touch and connection became second nature to her. But Fisher . . .

  Diana smiled. “And you, Fisher Carne, are one of the smartest men I have ever met.”

  She relayed all of this to Brent when her call was patched through with as many staticky signals and connections as a telephone Frankenstein.

  “You’re like sunshine. I bet they all line up for a bit of it. Don’t be scared, Diana. Make new friends. Christopher Wren, for all of his charms, is a poor date to the cinema.”

  “Make new friends.” And she had. Fisher, Simon, and Villiers. Real friends. Friends who didn’t misinterpret her sharing of favorite facts as an opportunity to show off. Friends whose company she looked forward to sharing at the end of a long day.

  Diana realized she was carving out a new part of herself that had been previously hidden. Brent didn’t realize it had taken everything within her to approach him at Great St. Bart’s. He didn’t see her straighten her shoulders or register the even breaths that smoothed her voice into something in the vicinity of confidence. He didn’t see . . .

  Or did he?

  Chapter 14

  October 1945

  London

  “You can’t come round the flat, Simon, while my husband is at work. If the landlady saw me admitting a single man who is not a redheaded professor . . .” Diana tugged her sleeves over her bruised wrists. She set her mop down and tugged at the kerchief tied in her hair.

  “You’re doing a rather horrible job of pretending to keep house. What is burning?”

  “Drats!” Diana dashed to the kitchen and opened the oven door. Enveloped in smoke, she coughed, grabbed a dish towel, and waved away the black cloud until confronted with a ruined rectangle.

  Simon watched, amused, from the door. “Smells wonderful.”

  “Oh, shut up!” She tossed the dish towel onto the counter. “Well, my flour rations have spread far.”

  “Where’s this relic?” He motioned her back into the sitting room.

  “Brent has it at the office.”

  “Langer rang from Vienna. A similar artifact was found on an arrested double agent. Not as old as this one but from the Habsburg Empire.”

  “What are Soviet agents doing with artifacts?”

  “Nest egg maybe? Who knows.” He removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket and passed it to her.

  The infinity symbol, then:

  птица

  шпиль

  “Russian?”

  Simon nodded. “The words for bird and steeple.”

  “Wren churches?”

  Simon raised a shoulder. “Could be.”

  “That’s so ironic, isn’t it? A Soviet agent using Wren churches?”

  “Or a double agent,” he supplied.

  “Who just happens to use the thing I love most in the world?”

  “Well, at least you’ll enjoy yourself. An agent was apprehended near Piccadilly Circus last night. That’s where the note was found. Another suspected agent was found dead in his apartment building. Strangulation.”

  Diana shuddered. “When you said this was dangerous—” She stopped. “But this is putting a pretty big hole in your church theory.”

  “Except for that note. I still have my hunch, Diana. That the two are related. But I don’t like where it is leading. So keep your gun close at all times.”

  The clock above the mantel began to chime. “You have to go. Brent will be home soon and he can’t see you here.” She began to assure him that she would take Brent to a church that night but recalled how he had advised her against it. Better to just go ahead and report to him afterward.

  “Hold on to that relic. Don’t go donating it to a museum just yet.”

  She nodded. “I won’t.

  “Take care, Diana.”

  She was attempting to salvage what was left of dinner when Brent appeared. He brushed his hair from his forehead, his glance hovering between curious fondness and annoyance as he took in the mop and the unmopped floor. The duster on the undusted table.

  “You’ve been busy,” he said with an affectionate smile.

  * * *

  “I know . . .” Diana stopped and started. “I know that you like things in a precise line. I know that you want things in order and I know that I . . .
The kitchen . . .” It wasn’t just the kitchen. It was the entire flat. Brent took in the scraps and scrapes and spills, satchel still over his shoulder, hat still on his head.

  Diana’s hair was tied with a kerchief, a slipshod bow at the front of her forehead. Her soiled apron was splashed with flour. The squares of hard biscuits in her tin could not have fully appreciated her sacrifice in rolling the hard dough. She had worsened the stain on one of his best shirts and ironed a hole into a tweed vest. The larder was a hodgepodge, the Frigidaire a strange, solitary home for baking soda and a solitary egg. She was a terrible housekeeper.

  He should want a woman who could darn socks and boil an egg. Instead, he chose the woman who would sabotage a bowl of oatmeal, who would somehow—illogically—turn toasted bread into a war zone. Dishes a small child would feel natural at creating, she ruined. Her heart was in her eyes, lips tightened expectantly. Offering nothing but barely passable fare and wrought-iron pans overstaying their welcome on rusted elements.

  “Di, this is quite . . . quite . . .” Diana was a stranger to measuring cups, but he loved her beyond equation. He stepped closer. This was what he dreamed of. To come home from a long day and find her here. Sure, the flat was a disaster, but his heart flipped at the sight of her efforts.

  “I’ll learn.” Diana’s fingers wandered across his shoulder blades as his mouth lowered to her ear. “Did you have a good day?”

  “Brought up Luther. Unintentionally started a debate on the justification of works and grace.” He stalled. “I also gave Rick Mariner the relic, Diana.”

  “Without consulting me?”

  “I think we both had enough danger the other night. It’s safer with him. What do we possibly need it for?”

  “But you said we were keeping it. That first night.”

  “And then I saw you had a gun and then we went to Walbrook where you were assaulted. What were you planning on doing with it anyway? Pawning it?”

  “No, of course not. I just . . .”

  “It’s not a rabbit’s foot or a penny farthing. We have to give back a priceless treasure. I trust Rick to do what’s right with it. Come sit down.” With the exchange of the relic, Brent was more determined than ever to erase every last secret between them. Diana moved the mop. She helped him out of his coat and took his hat and case. He occupied the couch, watching her deposit his things near the hat stand.