by Kate Quinn
She wasn’t expecting an answer, but the woman on the other side of the Go board raised sharp little eyes and drew one finger like a scalpel across her temple.
York
Mab massaged her forehead as a familiar voice drilled through the telephone, finishing-school vowels hitting her ear like crystal spikes. “What do you mean, you’re here?”
“Just biffed in from London,” Osla said. “Only arrived in York an hour ago.”
Mab’s hand dropped, making a fist in the burgundy folds of her skirt. “I told you when you rang yesterday, I don’t want to meet.” Osla’s voice out of the blue, the Vigenère square—it had all unsettled Mab badly. She’d burned the message from the madhouse, told herself to forget about it, and busied herself settling two sandy, clamoring children back home after a weekend running up and down the beach under Bamburgh Castle.
“I’m here,” Osla repeated implacably. “I know you’re hacked off about that, but we may as well meet.”
“I’m too busy,” Mab lied. “I’m putting supper on.”
She’d been in the dining room, in fact, determinedly not thinking about Beth Finch’s cipher message, planning the party she was hosting in honor of the royal wedding. A dozen friends would come in their best frocks, and they’d pooled their butter and sugar rations so they could have scones and a Bakewell tart while listening to the BBC broadcast. Mab knew her husband would laugh at the royal wedding fever, but he and the rest of the men would secretly hang on the broadcast, too. Planning the party hadn’t entirely distracted Mab from the worry of hearing Beth’s name for the first time in years, but it made for the kind of morning Mab didn’t think she’d ever stop cherishing, after having lived through a war when parties had such a desperate edge.
And now the afternoon’s peace had shattered.
“Look, I haven’t dragged myself all the way north to get snubbed like a Utility frock in a New Look Vogue spread,” Osla said. “I’ve got a room at the Grand—”
“Of course you’re at the poshest hotel in York.”
“Well, I didn’t see you volunteering your spare room with spontaneous cries of welcome so we could braid each other’s hair at night and trade secrets.”
Prickly silence fell. Mab realized she was gripping the hall table to stay upright. She knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t help the panic bubbling in her throat. She had so thoroughly buried everything that happened at the Park, damn it—once the war was done, she’d bricked those experiences up behind a wall in her mind.
But now Osla was on the other end of the telephone, and Beth had returned through the lines of a cryptogram.
You never backed down from a fight in your life, Mab told herself. Don’t start now. So she met her own eyes in the gilt-framed mirror over the telephone, imagining she was meeting Osla’s gaze. “I don’t know what you thought coming here would accomplish.”
“That’s a bit steep, darling. You know we have to talk face-to-face about Beth.” Pause. “If she really was put in that place unfairly—”
“If she’s sane, the doctors would have released her.”
“Doctors already think normal women are potty because we have monthlies. When was the last time your doctor gave you more than an aspirin unless you had a note from your husband?”
Mab remembered giving birth to her son, how her doctor had said in the middle of her contractions that she was making too much fuss and it had been scientifically proven that labor pains could be entirely controlled by appropriate breathing. Mab had been in too much agony to rip his ears off and tell him to control that pain with appropriate breathing.
“What I’m saying,” Osla continued, “is if she’s asking us for help, after everything that happened, it means she’s absolutely dished and has no one else.”
Mab’s mouth was dry. “I have a family now. I’m not putting them at risk for a woman who betrayed me.”
“She says we betrayed her, too. And she’s not entirely wrong.”
You owe me.
“What do you think of the rest of her letter?” Mab blurted out. “Do you believe it?”
It hung unsaid: Do you believe there was a traitor at BP?
A long silence. “Bettys tea shop,” said Osla. “Tomorrow, two o’clock. We’ll talk.”
Six Years Ago
April 1941
Chapter 19
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, APRIL 1941
* * *
What is there to talk about but our smashing victory in the Mediterranean? Ever since our boys broke the back of the Italian navy off Cape Matapan, someone here must have reason to grin like a cat with the cream! Since we’ll never know who, let’s speculate instead if whale meat is back on the evening-shift menu at the dining hall, and which fetching BP amazon has a dinner date in London with a war poet . . .
* * *
Mab stuffed the latest installment of Bletchley Bletherings into the bin before heading off shift. Who’s writing this stuff? Even the establishment officer didn’t know who submitted the weekly anonymous gossip sheet to be pinned up on the mansion noticeboard every Friday, but Osla’s money was on Giles, and Mab was inclined to agree. “Write me up again in your illicit gossip column and I’ll skin you,” she warned him, breezing through the gates.
“Who, me?” Giles grinned. “Knock ’em dead, Queen Mab.”
Mab smiled. She’d pressed every crease out of her berry-colored crepe dress, slipped on the French slings Francis Gray had given her, and Osla had lent a stunning cashmere wrap—as Mab dashed to catch the train, she knew she was looking her best. Mabel Churt from Shoreditch, taking supper with a rather famous war poet—that would be something to tell Mum.
He didn’t look like a war poet—waiting for her on the platform in London, Francis Gray could have been any small-town countryman on his yearly trip to the capital, stocky and silent in a gray civilian suit, battered homburg in one wide hand, certainly no languid literary lion. Yet—“You’re very lovely, aren’t you,” he said quietly in greeting, taking her in head to toe.
“Thank you.” A man who could deliver a compliment without slavering or fumbling—that, after months of dating awkward university boys, felt refreshing. Mab’s heart glowed just a little as she took his arm. All around swirled a river of uniforms hastening about their business: ack-ack girls headed for their shifts on the antiaircraft guns, fire wardens tramping toward the nightly watch on St. Paul’s, everyone seemingly engaged in war business . . . but not Mab, not tonight. She was climbing into a taxi with a man who thought she looked lovely, and he was giving directions to Veeraswamy on Regent Street—an Indian restaurant, imagine that, with waiters in white turbans and shades of red and gold all around. Mab for the first time in days was able to put the bombes and their rackety clack-clack-clack behind her. She was going to take this evening and enjoy it.
Or rather, she’d try to enjoy it. Difficult when Francis Gray wouldn’t bloody well talk.
“Tell me about your writing,” she began after the waiter had taken their order. “I’m a great reader, but I don’t know a thing about what it takes to put words on paper.” She rested chin on hand with a fascinated expression, ready to listen at length.
“I don’t, either,” he replied with a smile.
She waited, but he didn’t seem inclined to say more. “I know you published Mired after the Fourteen–Eighteen War.” The facts about him at the back of the slim volume of poetry had been sparse, but she had gleaned what she could. “You wrote them during your time in France?”
He rotated his glass. “After.”
“Goodness, you were still very young.” He’d enlisted at sixteen in the last six months of the war, which made him thirty-nine now. “Of course, I saw a good many boys in my neighborhood lying about their age to join up in this war. I suppose it’s natural to want to serve before the world thinks you’re ready.”
He shook his head. “They’ll learn.”
“I wonder if they’ll become poets,
too.”
“Hopefully not. The world has too many bad poets.”
“Not you.”
“I hear my themes were a bit obvious.”
Mab repressed a blush, thinking of their last meeting. It was like something out of a bad farce, criticizing a writer’s work to his face, oblivious. Still, she wasn’t going to reverse herself and get obsequious now; if he’d asked her for a date after she’d already shredded his iambic pentameter, he clearly wasn’t looking for slavish praise. “Thematically they aren’t the most original I’ve ever read,” she said, adding a bit of sparkle to the eye, “but your use of language is lovely.” That wasn’t just flattery, either.
“I’ll take your word for it,” the poet said. “Haven’t read them in years.”
The waiter brought the first course. Mulligatawny soup, whatever that was—bright yellow, practically glowing. Mab picked up her spoon warily. “I heard you were invited to meet the king, at the ten-year anniversary of the peace.”
“Yes.”
“What was he like?”
Another smile. “Kingly.”
Mab suppressed a flash of irritation. Why wouldn’t he talk? Normally her dates never shut up: you asked a leading question or two and they were off to the races.
“Having served in one war,” she tried, “it must be very surprising to find yourself neck-deep in another.” The soup was hot and pungent on her tongue. What was her breath going to smell like if he tried to kiss her good night?
A faintly bitter slant to his mouth. “Wars are cyclical. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when they come round again.”
“What do you find different, this time?”
“I’m older.”
All right, he didn’t want to discuss this war or the last—fair enough. “So tell me about your work in London—whatever can be told, anyway.”
“It’s dull. Very.”
For God’s sake, Mab thought. It really wasn’t fair to make your conversational partner do all the work on a date. Why don’t you ask a question or two, Mr. Gray?
But he clearly wasn’t going to, so she tried again.
“Where do you live, when not in London?”
“Coventry.”
“So when you go home, you can say you’re being sent to Coventry,” she joked.
He smiled.
“I suppose you’ve heard all the jokes about being sent to Coventry.”
Another smile, but no reply.
The soup disappeared, replaced by something called chicken madras. Mab stared at it. It was bright orange. I am eating orange food with a mute, she thought.
Matapan. Surely he could talk about the recent battle off Cape Matapan. Anyone could make conversational hay out of the greatest naval victory since Trafalgar. “Isn’t the news about Matapan wonderful?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
“Three heavy cruisers and two destroyers sunk on their side, none on ours.” Mab quoted the newspaper she’d devoured with a bar of ration chocolate at the NAAFI kiosk on break. “A few thousand of Mussolini’s boys killed, none of ours. I’d say that’s wonderful.”
He shrugged. “Unless you’re among Mussolini’s few thousand.”
Another conversational topic as dead in the water as those Italian cruisers. Mab took a slightly defeated bite of chicken. It filled her mouth with flame. She set her fork down, trying not to choke.
“Too spicy?” he asked.
“Not at all,” she managed to say. She’d be boiled in oil before she reached for her glass.
He forked up a mouthful of his without the slightest discomfort. All right, then, Mab thought.
She sat back, crossed one leg over the other, and composed her burning lips in a smile. He smiled back, eating. The sound of a sitar plinked. The waiter took Mab’s explosive orange chicken away. Pudding arrived, something called halva that had absolutely no resemblance to pudding, but at least it didn’t ignite in her mouth like petrol. She finished it, put her fork down, and smiled again.
“You don’t seem particularly shy,” she said at last. “So what is it?”
His fork paused. “I beg your pardon?”
“Most quiet men are quiet because they’re shy. But I don’t think that’s you, Mr. Gray, so is there any particular reason you’re not contributing to the conversation beyond monosyllables?”
“I don’t particularly enjoy talking about myself, Miss Churt.”
“All right. I understand that, especially when one has a job one isn’t allowed to discuss. But you could ask me about myself, you know, or comment on the weather, or the food. Because it’s frankly rather rude, sitting there expecting me to carry all the conversational weight. Why do I have to entertain you for the entire evening, and you somehow don’t feel the need to reciprocate?”
“I never asked you to entertain me,” he replied mildly.
“It’s the usual expectation, Mr. Gray. A gentleman invites a lady to dinner, she accepts, and they make an effort to amuse one another. I promise you, I’m quite entertaining if given a smidgen of encouragement. I can imitate Churchill better than the man himself, I have an arsenal of jokes from the arcane to the profane, I’ve read numbers one through eighty-three of ‘One Hundred Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady’ and have opinions on all of them.” Mab pushed back her chair and stood up. “If you will excuse me, I’m going to the powder room. When I get back, I wouldn’t mind having an actual conversation. Pick a topic—I promise I will hold up my end.”
She half expected another shrug but got an unexpected grin.
“You should wear six-inch heels,” Francis Gray said. “You’d be halfway to seven feet tall, and that speech would come out even more like a queen issuing a proclamation.”
“Short men don’t like very tall heels,” she parried.
“I happen to like amazons.” He ran a hand over his chestnut hair, hesitating. “I hate talking about myself, Miss Churt, so I assume others do too. I like silence, so I forget it makes others uncomfortable. I do apologize. When you get back from the powder room, I won’t be such a pillar of salt.”
She smiled, went off to freshen up her lipstick, then slid back into her seat with a slight resurgence of that glow from the beginning of the night. “Why do you dislike talking about yourself?”
He made a wry face. “Because people hear the word poet and get silly ideas.”
“What, you aren’t a poet?”
“I was an idiot of sixteen who ran off to war because I thought it would be some glorious adventure. When I realized it was not I wrote a few insipid, childish verses about my time in the trenches rather than eat my service revolver. I haven’t penned so much as a limerick since.” He took out his cigarette case. “I’m not a bloody poet, if you’ll excuse my language. Just a chap with an office job who likes quiet.”
She rested her chin in her hand. “All right, then.”
They talked about his childhood home in Coventry, a small lovely city now half leveled by German bombs. Mab spun a few anecdotes about her billet-mates: “A human mouse who doesn’t have two words for anybody but works with the brainiest people we have, and a Canadian deb who will short-sheet your bed and freeze your knickers outside the window in winter . . .” They talked about whether America would join the war and if the Italians were finished in the Mediterranean. Mab still found herself doing most of the talking, but at least he did his part asking questions and listening to the answers. When silence fell again, Mab was content to let it stretch, watching cigarette smoke wind between his blunt fingers. “Would you mind if I asked why you invited me to dinner, Mr. Gray? It’s been a lovely time, but . . . well, you clearly aren’t wooing, and if you were looking for a bit of something else, you’d have had your hand on my knee before the soup was ordered.”
“I have no expectations, if that’s what you’re fearing.” He gave a half smile. “You’re a bit young and vibrant for a crumbling stone on a heath like me.”
“You aren’t old, if that’s what you mean. M
en my age are callow and boring.” Older men liked to hear that, and quite often it was true. Of course, plenty of older men were also callow and boring, not that they liked to hear that quite so much. “Why invite me out, if you didn’t expect either entertainment or romance?” She was genuinely curious.
“A reminder of civilization . . .” He trailed off. “Miss Churt, I’ve seen two wars. If I can sit in a lovely restaurant, eat a good curry, look at a lovely woman—that’s a respite. A nice little illusion.”
“Civilization isn’t an illusion.”
“Oh, it is. The horrors are real. This”—waving a hand—“is all gossamer.”
Mab was taken aback. “What a horrible thought.”
“Why? Illusion makes for a nice show, while it lasts.” He offered her a cigarette. “Why don’t we order coffee, and you can tell me more about your day-to-day?”
He was diverting her, but Mab decided to take the diversion. “My landlady is carrying on like something out of Dickens, or maybe Bram Stoker, because her mousy daughter took in a stray dog. Oh, the tears. I can’t say it’s a nice dog; it has fleas and it bites. But I’m on the dog’s side if just to see the pinched old cow pitch a screamer every time it trundles into the room threatening to shed on her horrible Methodist furniture.” Mab pressed a trembling hand to her temples in her best parody of Mrs. Finch.
The smile lines about his eyes deepened.
“I told you I can imitate Churchill, too, didn’t I?” Mab flashed a V sign, deepened her voice. “‘Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty . . .’”
“Uncanny,” Francis Gray said.
“And this is my little sister, Lucy, begging for a pony . . .”
Chapter 20
To Mr. J. P. E. C. Cornwell,
Forgive me for not knowing how to address you—you washed my hair in champagne when the Café de Paris was bombed, after knocking out the man who tried to rob me, and then you lent me your coat. My wits were sufficiently rattled that I never asked your name. Your coat has a label of J. P. E. C. Cornwell, and I managed to find an address attached to a J. Cornwell in London—but when I attempted to post it, the package was returned to me with a covering note. Apparently you shipped overseas shortly after our brief meeting. If this follow-up note finds you—I’m forwarding it to who I presume is your landlady—I wish you the very best of luck in the fight to come.