The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  She drew the blackout curtains, sealing the join with buttons, pulled her electric lamp on its thin flex towards the middle of the room and sat with her legs splayed wide.

  There was no way in any language the letters could make sense. There were repeated consonants, quadruple consonants, double Qs. She took paper and a biro from the bureau and scribbled them down:

  XWCWPTWDRQJSMZVGTNRQJZVIFUZHPZV

  on one side, then

  YWXIUUZApLLTJVGRQQKMDAZAWCZRBBZRSNFVBZK

  The first thing she noticed — the only thing she noticed — was that there were no breaks between the letters. Enigma intercepts came in blocks of five. But that could just have been the way the wireless operators took them down. These letters on the other hand kept a continuous path with no space for word gaps. It was as if they were part of the picture. They seemed to be winking at some meaning that was staring her in the face.

  With a start she realised she was biting the inside of her cheek, and as the pain hit her suddenly, so did a thought. It was a shocking, horrid thought, but one that must be confronted. No matter who had sent it, no matter what their purpose, sending coded letters to her was as fine a message as waving a red flag at a Spanish bull. And within that message one strong, sickening, unthinkable question had to be asked: this person, this cryptologic amber craftsman, whoever they were, wherever they lay low — did they know what she was doing at Bletchley Park?

  That Honey had ended up at Bletchley Park had always seemed to her to be a matter of fate, the origins going back far further than that meeting between Henry Deschamps and the man he called K. Although the official story was that K had struck up conversation over a game of blackjack, and made discreet enquiries at the table as to who might possess a trustworthy, stout-nerved daughter they could spare for the war effort, Honey believed the true reason she had ended up there was set in motion before she was born.

  There were no possessions left in the house as mementos of Ivan — or was it Ivor? — Korichnev. Even his name had been obliterated as far as she could trace. All the old programmes she went digging for had Martha down by her maiden name, or the name on Honey’s birth certificate, until she became Deschamps, round about Christmas 1918.

  But there was a playbill for a production of a Stravinsky ballet at the Coventry Opera House, undated, with no names on it. And at some point there had definitely been a book.

  She must have been eleven or twelve and Dickie fifteen or sixteen when he stopped telling stories about his father and shut up shop whenever she asked. Before then however he had given her plenty of scraps, enough to paint a picture. It was an impressionist’s picture, made of parts that didn’t quite fit. But then it had been the era of cubism, and Honey had not found it strange that an ear could sit in the middle of a face, a room could be made of triangular shards, and one’s family history could be splintered into pieces here and there. According to Dickie, Ivan Korichnev had come from a political group of artists, for whom destabilising the bourgeois was art’s calling: art that threw light on its own construction; art that broke rules; art that provoked you to find it ugly or cruel. Dickie said he hadn’t had much success as a composer, and it had driven him mad. He trialled new ways to approach composition, and in doing this he had stumbled on the idea of the cipher.

  Ivan — or Ivor – had composed a piece using words from the Bible substituted for musical notes. According to Dickie he had followed this up with a piece based on the Communist Manifesto, and one using poems by Pushkin. Dickie’s explanation for the absence of manuscripts for these was that their mother had burned them in the days after his flight.

  This was plausible. Martha had no tolerance for atonal music. She was a woman whose flesh was built from emotion. People who loved her called her ‘whimsical’, ‘capricious’, ‘diva’. Directors she had crossed called her ‘bitch’, ‘vixen’, ‘dragon’. She loved the giant arias: Puccini, Bizet and Saint-Saëns. She had little time for Mozart. She sobbed when Wagner was adopted by the Nazis.

  The more wild and swollen Martha’s emotions grew, the more introverted and mathematical grew their father. He reached back further in time. He travelled into worlds of alchemy and algebra. He began making ciphers into music. At some point in their childhood Dickie had produced his copy of Figley’s Book of Ciphers as evidence. He had shown her the inscription ‘Love from Papa’; the florid signature that followed. It was all that was left as a memory of their father, and it was Dickie’s constant evidence of his existence. Ivan had been trying, through naming musical notes by their Latin letters and scrambling those letters into a cipher, to create something honest, whose purity lay embedded in its form. ‘If a note,’ Dickie said, ‘relates to its alphabetical representative, then music can be enciphered just as letters can. Unravel the music and you’ll find something that is true.’ It hadn’t made sense to the child her, and she wasn’t quite sure it did now. She couldn’t remember how the book came in, but it did.

  According to Dickie their father had written a masterpiece for piano, voice and dancer in this way. But nothing remained of this work. He’d destroyed it somewhere down the line. If it had survived, it would have been too dangerous for the masses, Dickie had said. No, Figley’s Book of Ciphers was all that was left, and Honey, when she grew into an introverted child who chewed her dress hems and wouldn’t speak at nursery, was proof, said Dickie, of their father; she was her father’s daughter. Dickie on the other hand was proof of their Russian heritage, for he was a great dancer — indeed Madame . . . what was her name? The woman with the black bun and the wooden cane, Dickie’s Russian ballet mistress — had said so. Dickie was the finest little ballet boy in his class. Dickie rarely got the slap on the calves. Dickie was destined to greatness. What was that if not a sign that Russian music was in his blood?

  This cipher book. Figley’s. She couldn’t remember what the cover looked like but she remembered its fudge-scented paper. Dickie always used to have it with him on trains. It was some kind of totem for him. It had spurred her on to learn to read, to look over his shoulder when he was absorbed in it, to try to grasp its meaning. She fixated on it during those journeys, taxi rides, at the back of the theatre while their mother was rehearsing. But always the ideas had remained just out of reach. She couldn’t grasp the concepts, she was a year or two too young. And then one day the book disappeared. Perhaps it had been victim to a spring clean, given to a charity bazaar, or sent overseas with the Red Cross. Perhaps her mother had found it and burned it. Honey had never seen it since.

  When she learned to love crosswords, when she took up languages and studied their sounds and tones, which used the same building blocks as English but created different results, she hadn’t thought of Figley’s Book of Ciphers. But she’d had it there, in her mind, a skewed corner of the picture that you couldn’t see properly unless you turned the whole thing upside down or on its side. She knew the book was there somewhere in her childhood memories, but only the way she knew about uncles in far-off countries, and her father, and God.

  She ran her hand again over the carved letters vining the amber panels. Amber, postmarks, codes. It pointed in one direction. But directions, if you didn’t read them right, could always mislead.

  The difference between a code and a cipher was a matter of words. Codes replaced words and phrases with one alternative that only the two parties on either end could understand. Ciphers were what Enigma produced, letter-for-letter substitution. The advantage of a cipher was that there were potentially limitless keys. Finding the right one was about trial and error, knowledge or machinery. The disadvantage of a cipher was that the interceptor almost always knew they were looking at one. Codes on the other hand could replace whole words for other meaningful words. The clock strikes in spring. Hand me the blue folder. Keep mum.

  On her first day at the Park, after she had replied to and signed the letter her stepfather had brought home; after she had followed the instructions and taken the train to Bletch-ley; after she had made the telepho
ne call from the station, waited for the car, sat freezing in the back while it crawled a slow path towards the mansion; after she had paused at the gate while the Military Policemen checked the identity cards of everyone inside, their rifles pressed flat between their bodies and the car doors; after she had stepped out onto the gravel, taken a seat opposite the man in the oak-panelled room who introduced himself as Captain Tiver; after she had taken his expensive pen, tried not to sweat on its enamel octagonal casing, placed her quivering hand so that nib met paper and scratched a leaky signature across the Official Secrets Act; after she had done all that, Tiver had taken a revolver from his desk, thumped it on the wood, and said as calmly as if he was ordering sherry, ‘If you break the Official Secrets Act, I’ll shoot you myself.’

  Keep mum. What ran through her mind now was the foolish Wren who had dug out her papers for the ITAF man in the dark of the street. ‘You shouldn’t have shown me those,’ he’d said. But he’d asked for them.

  What if someone was asking for her papers now, using these little elaborate nuggets of amber? ‘You keep your mouth shut,’ Tiver had said, ‘and you’ll do fine here. But shut means shut, about everything. If someone in Hut 8 knows what colour the walls are in Hut 3, I’ll know they’ve been talking, and I’ve already told you what I do with people who talk. In medieval times they’d have cut out your tongue. Now any fool can write we have to cut out more than your tongue. Britain doesn’t mess around with traitors; never has, never will.’

  She saw a sandbagged cubbyhole, a leather brace, the short muzzle of Tiver’s gun. Did they blindfold you when they shot you for treason? Or did you have to stare at the flash that shot out the front of the muzzle just before you lost consciousness?

  No, she must not tell. She must not tell a soul what was sitting in her hands. Still, as she settled on that thought it scalded inside.

  Bletchley had filled her with secrets from her very first day, until she itched. But the secret of Bletchley was nothing in that moment compared to the secret in her hand, something too close to her heart to even make sense of. Why would her father be trying now, to reach her? Why now?

  The numbers of those murdered Soviet men she had read in the day’s intercepts flashed in her mind. If he lay dying in another country, and he knew that he had just this tiny window of time . . .

  There was no talking between huts, it was true. But there was someone she could talk to.

  Honey heaved herself to her feet, kicking back the rag knots onto the warm patch of floor. She pulled open her stiff second drawer and found a pair of stockings to replace the ones she had taken off — she hated to redress in dirty stockings even if taking them off only for a second — and tugged them on. She slipped her feet into tennis plimsolls, scraped her hair off her face into a beret and wrapped the amber slices in a bitten old fur muffler. She put on her coat, and put her ear to the door.

  One of the Steadmans was snoring in the parlour, the other was clattering in the scullery.

  If she were to leave to go wandering in the blackout they would want to know why. It was too late for the cinema, and the Eight Bells would have the dancing girls on by now. If she said she was going to the British Restaurant they would want to know why she didn’t eat her cold tray supper. If she said she was meeting a friend from the train they would want to know where they were going to stay.

  She went over to the window. The flower beds below looked soft but the frost was deceptive and besides it would be muddy and she’d make a noise. Within arm’s reach was the top of the apple tree.

  She climbed onto the sill and stuck out her leg towards the tree. Her mother had made her take ballet as a child, with the same terrifying Russian ballet mistress with the scarlet mouth, and she was still supple. She stretched her foot to reach the most promising branch. It bowed and bent, but then it held. With the muffler spilling fur out of her pocket she reached with both hands and found dead leaves that allowed her just enough purchase to pull a small tangle of branches forward. Clinging with faith she brought her other leg into the tree. Her window remained open. It would be chilly when she returned. But that didn’t matter. It was more important she see Moira.

  Chapter 7

  A military van loomed close, invisible until it was almost touching her side. Its louvre eyes made tawny stripes on the grit. As she looked up she saw the canvas and rope ties, the bulk of the bodies travelling inside, the faceless driver in a tin hat. The crackle of tyres yawned, then retreated.

  She should have been used to it by now, these things, these vehicles that came creeping out of the darkness with their military cargos shifting round the country, but she wasn’t. She checked her pocket, but she’d come out without her torch.

  She had not become used to any of it in fact; not the butter ration, not the signless railway stations, not the sparseness of toy displays in shop windows — no metal trains or aeroplanes this year, only wood, wooden soldiers — and, most of all, not the boys in uniforms that didn’t quite fit. Skinny forms, awkward hips in khaki bulk, an actuary’s sloped shoulders in an Air Raid Warden’s jacket, her dentist passing on Home Guard parade, someone else’s son with a rifle chafing his shoulder, and then the men in plain clothes — nice suits — who were the most furtive and frightening of all.

  The high street was a muddle of shapes. She picked her way like a goat up a mountainside, stepping high where she thought pebbles and kerbs might be, feeling walls of moonlit stone. No sight of diners in the restaurants behind the walls, no steamed-up pub windows showing customers with pints of froth. Her lips braced against the cold breeze and she walked on.

  She had to count off the lanes. Moira’s was the third. Her iron gate needed oiling; the sound nearly shot Honey out of her skin.

  She thought for a brief second about throwing a stone against the window, but after a quick vision of an awkward explanation to the emergency glaziers she settled for the door. It was answered by a woman with a round pink face under a white cap, and a baby barnacled to the side of her body. Her brow creased in surprise.

  ‘Is this where Moira Draper lives?’

  The woman’s frown deepened, then she peered closer. ‘Are you creeping around in the blackout? In this chill?’ The idea seemed so preposterous that Honey felt foolish.

  ‘Work matter. Rather urgent.’

  ‘Ah, she’s just back, you see.’ The woman all but winked. The billeting officers had done their work well. Not like the man above the baker’s who had pestered so ferociously his billettee girls about the work they did that they reported him and he was banned from hosting more – which might, all along, have been his plan.

  Moira’s landlady tipped her head back and rolled her eyes towards the stairs. She never asked what the girls at ‘the Park’ did. She widened the door. The baby cawed and she pushed its fist gently into its mouth.

  ‘I’ll call her down.’

  ‘No, don’t. I’ll see her in her room.’

  ‘You don’t want the parlour?’ She seemed almost hopeful. Honey looked beyond her past the open door that led off the hall, and saw a case of ornaments on different levels of shelving. There were china spaniels with golden chains, a woman with a shepherdess’s crook, clinging on to her bonnet. The wallpaper was new, little coloured spirals and splashes, blue, red and mustard. The hall smelled gluey and clean. In a frame on a dark wood plant stand was a picture of a young man in dress uniform.

  ‘It’s you.’ Standing at the top of the stairs Moira’s cheeks were flushed — or rouged, Honey couldn’t tell from the distance — and her eyes looked energetic. She leaned on the bannister. She was wearing a long cream silk robe, of the style popular in the twenties, her arms swimming in the wide sleeves, frayed at the collar and hem. ‘You’d better come up.’ Her hair was frizzy, as if she had been bathing and had forgotten to wrap it in a towel.

  As Honey passed her into the bedroom, she whispered, ‘You have wood bark on the hem of your coat.’ So that was the sort of thing one spotted when one had a cryptanalyst�
��s brain.

  Honey brushed herself down. Moira swooped in and caught the debris before it fell on the rug then dusted it between her palms into the waste paper basket.

  Honey stood in the centre of the room, feeling brutally exposed. Quickly, before she changed her mind, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the fur.

  Moira looked at it. ‘Don’t tell me you came picking your way through the blackout to ask me to darn some roadkill.’ She laughed and sat down on the bed on top of a satinette pillow. She picked up a lipstick case from the table next to her and with a butter knife began scraping out the remnants and packing them into a second case. A selection of other cases was scattered at her side. Underneath them a magazine lay open at an article: ‘Death of a Dinner Gown’. There was a how-to section on taking your debutante nan’s old ball dresses and making them into glamorous draping slacks. On the walls were torn pictures from more glossies, Cecil Beaton shots of very lean women in Make Do and Mend. A pillbox of marge coupons lay open by the bed along with reels of cotton, needles and scraps of haberdashery. Beauty is your Duty. Never forget that good looks and morale go hand in hand. So this was what she did for the war effort now. A picture came to life in Honey’s mind of the first time she had seen Moira, scraping and scrabbling through the cool spring woods beside the Park lake, gathering bluebells for a sick man she’d been in love with back then. She’d torn her high heel in the undergrowth and had waded back into the sludgy muck to retrieve it. She had always taken that much care in her appearance, but looking at the spill of sewing stuff and magazine patterns it seemed as if it had become an obsession.

  Honey let the fur fall open. The amber pieces tumbled out and she caught them with her palm, one by one, with tiny clacks.

  Moira put down both knife and case and leaned in.