by Kate Quinn
Mab coveted that dress more than air. “I can’t . . .”
Osla paid absolutely no attention, bless her. “It won’t hit the ground on you, since Mamma’s much shorter, so we’ll hem it to the knee. Knee-length is better for a day wedding, anyway. Now, for Beth . . . we’ll be your bridesmaids, of course. This smoke-blue chiffon would look scrumptious with some sashing . . .”
“This has been a very strange night,” Beth said, sitting on the bed drinking straight from the champagne bottle. She looked tipsy and tired, but a smile hovered at the corners of her lips. “A very strange night,” she repeated, looking at Boots ensconced on the nearest down pillow, snoring.
Osla raised her glass, beautiful alabaster face flushed pink. “To Mrs. Gray.”
“And to you, Os.” Mab lifted her own glass. “And Beth—” She wanted to say something about what they meant, the two of them. How she’d never in her life had such friends. But she didn’t have the words to explain how much she felt, so she just raised her champagne, throat choked. “To Bletchley Park.”
Ten Days Until the Royal Wedding
November 10, 1947
Chapter 30
York
Osla could feel the waiter of Bettys tearoom hovering, irritated that the woman in the scarlet New Look coat and smart black toque hadn’t ordered yet. Osla kept watch through the floor-to-ceiling windows for Mab’s tall figure hurrying across the square but couldn’t stop looking at the shop sign. Bettys. The lack of apostrophe was driving her potty. Why couldn’t people punctuate properly, for God’s sake?
And suddenly Mab was standing in the doorway, dressed in the latest go: huge-skirted midnight-blue coat, tiny sapphire-blue hat tilted over one eye at an insolent angle, black pearls at her ears and throat. Her gaze crossed the room to Osla with the force of a rifle shot. Take the high road if she pulls out her claws, Osla told herself, gazing back without smiling. Stick to the matter at hand.
“Tea?” The waiter sprang forward as Mab rustled through the nest of little tables and elegantly dressed women, and sank down at the table Osla had chosen—a secluded nook against a window, where no one would be able to hear their conversation if they whispered.
“A pot of Earl Grey,” Mab said, as Osla said, “Scones, please.” The waiter whisked off, and Mab arched those scimitar eyebrows. “Scones? I thought you’d be watching your figure for the royal wedding.”
So much for the high road or the matter at hand.
“Such a thumping bore,” Osla said airily. “Can’t believe I have to dig out Mamma’s diamonds just to park myself in that old stone heap with a stunning view of a column and absolutely nothing else.”
Mab tugged off her ink-blue gloves. “You’re in the papers even this far north. The scandal rags, anyway. So much speculation about whether a certain dark-haired Canadian beauty would attend Prince Philip’s stag party.”
“You know the scandal rags.” Osla stripped off her own gloves so Mab could see the emerald. “Thank goodness my fiancé doesn’t give any credence to gossip columns.”
Mab admired the ring. “Pity green doesn’t suit you . . . Does your fiancé know the reason for this little jaunt?”
“Naturally not, darling. I’ll wager your husband doesn’t either. Just like he doesn’t know you chose him less for his smile and more for his assets.”
“I’m a practical woman, Os. You’re the one writing Tatler fluff. Fairy stories . . . only in those, doesn’t the girl usually get the prince in the end?”
The waiter chose that moment to return with tea and scones. Flowered Minton cups and saucers clattered in the charged silence. They sipped, staring daggers.
“Look, let’s stop talking slush,” Osla said finally. “Much as I would like to sit here trading unpleasantries, we have a decision to make.”
Beth hovered almost visibly at the table. Mab’s mocking expression shuttered, and her voice automatically dropped to a murmur inaudible to anyone but Osla. “I have trouble believing this guff about a traitor. If someone had been selling information to the Germans, the Luftwaffe would have bombed us flat. The fact that we went through the war without being targeted proves they never found out we were reading their bloody post.”
Osla had thought of that, too. “They could have been running counterintelligence, feeding false information to misdirect us.”
“Then they wouldn’t have lost.”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t the Jerries this traitor was selling to.”
“But the war’s over. Why is this still so urgent?”
“Don’t be dense; treason has no expiration date. And her note said this traitor is still very much a threat—”
“That sounds like a madwoman’s paranoia to me,” Mab stated.
“Paranoia, or just someone who worked at BP? Look at us.” Osla gestured around the tearoom with its dazzle of crystal and silver, its brocade drapes. “We picked the table furthest from the others, and even so we’re whispering and breaking off every time someone walks near. When I had a tooth worked on last year, I was so worried I’d mutter something classified while sauced on chloroform, I made them do the whole procedure while I was awake. It was agony.”
Long pause. “I wouldn’t take anything for pain when I gave birth.” Mab stirred her tea, looking like it killed her to agree with anything Osla said. “The same reason.”
“See? We’re all paranoid. It’s second nature by now. Beth’s being cautious, not necessarily lying.”
“Or she believes her own story. People who are insane tend to do that.”
Osla picked a scone off the untouched plate. “If she’s insane.”
“Remember how hysterical she was at the end? We both thought—”
“I know,” Osla admitted. “But looking back now . . . did she go mad or just get pushed to the brink? We were all strained to the limit by that point. I was on my beam ends, you were getting bottled every night—”
“I was not.”
“You were a blinking mess, and everyone knew it.”
Mab glowered, recrossing her legs under a swath of midnight-blue crinoline. “You think Beth’s sane, then?”
Osla looked at her scone, which she’d reduced to a pile of crumbs. “Until the day she was carted away, I’d have laid money that Beth Finch was the least likely person at BP to crock up. She was a perfectly functioning machine. And even if she did crock up, she might have got better. People can.” Osla remembered Philip’s telling her how his mother had recovered from her breakdown and been released from Bellevue. Iron will, he’d guessed. Who had a more iron will than Beth?
Mab looked at her. They took simultaneous gulps of Earl Grey, and Osla had the feeling they were both wishing it were gin. Maybe they should have met in a pub, not a tearoom.
“Even if she’s not mad,” Mab said finally, “I can’t swallow this idea that one of Beth’s friends in Knox’s section was a rat. They were supposed to be the best of the best. Who on earth could it be?”
“That’s why we have to ask Beth.” Osla looked her in the eye. “That’s why we’re going to Clockwell.”
Inside the Clock
The asylum nurses talked of nothing but the royal wedding.
“Eight bridesmaids, all dressed by Hartnell. Princess Margaret, of course—”
Shut up about the wedding, Beth would have liked to shout through the door of her cell. Talk about this surgery the new doctor here is so keen on, this lobotomy.
“—Princess Alexandra of Kent; Lady Caroline Montagu-Douglas-Scott—”
Beth turned over on her cot, trying to listen, pushing down the wet cough that had lingered since her springtime bout of pneumonia. She was trying to get an afternoon doze—last night had stretched empty and sleepless, with the relentless seeping cold and her bitter flashing back to the minutes she’d spent on her knees before the red-haired orderly.
“—you know the princess had to use clothing ration coupons for her wedding dress, just like any other bride. I remember my sister’s wedding during the war, she
made a veil out of parlor doilies—”
Beth remembered Mab’s wedding in London. The dash to the registry office, Mab in her ivory satin pleats; the wedding breakfast at Claridge’s of ham salad and champagne followed by eggless cake; little Lucy twirling in a borrowed frock of pale pink lace as Mab and Francis were practically carried upstairs to the bridal suite . . .
That was a beautiful day, Beth thought, swallowing more coughs. No pompous Westminster ceremony could match it. Though ironically, Osla’s escort to Mab’s nuptials was the bridegroom of the upcoming royal wedding.
“Have you seen Prince Philip’s picture?” A sigh from one of the nurses outside. “So handsome.”
“He’s German, though. You’d think our princess could do better than a Hun.”
“I thought he was Greek . . .”
“He fought on our side. Besides, the Germans aren’t enemies now. I’d be a lot more worried if he was a Russky . . .”
Russia—the new enemy. When Beth wasn’t sifting through mental evidence on who Bletchley Park’s traitor might be, she pondered who they might have been working for. She was fairly certain it couldn’t have been Germany—the evidence she’d decrypted had been Soviet in origin, not German. Besides, if the Nazis had had access to the kind of information that passed through Dilly’s section, they would surely have targeted Bletchley.
Silence outside. The nurses had moved on. Beth gave way to a fit of coughing, the sound from her lungs wet and ugly. The pneumonia will come back this winter, she thought, hacking into her pillow. And this time it might kill me.
If this lobotomy surgery didn’t, whatever it was . . . but Beth pushed that thought away. She coughed up what felt like half a lung and finally turned over, mind limping in old, spent circles. Osla and Mab, cryptograms and traitors, Germany and Russia . . . the traitor had to have been working for the Soviets. The USSR and Britain had been allies back then, but that didn’t mean Churchill trusted them—Beth could well imagine Uncle Joe snooping for more information than his colleagues were willing to share. And BP had always had its share of Marxist sympathizers, political dabblers from Cambridge and Oxford who quoted Lenin and talked about the proletariat.
Which of my friends sympathized with Russia? she wondered now. And wished for the thousandth time that she hadn’t been so far inside the spirals of her work that she missed the discussions flying around her in Knox’s section.
Because the war against Germany might have been over, but the struggle against the Soviet Union was only beginning. And Beth, doubling over in another fit of hacking, couldn’t help but wonder if the traitor who had put her here was still sending information to the USSR.
Five Years Ago
February 1942
Chapter 31
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, FEBRUARY 1942
* * *
The madhouse has a new warden! Commander Travis has taken over from Denniston, at least on the Service side. Good luck to him controlling the inmates . . .
* * *
Not you again,” Commander Travis said ominously.
“Is that any way to greet your favorite naval section translator, sir?” Osla grinned.
The other men in Travis’s office—suited types, probably London intelligence men—gave censorious frowns, but Travis just sighed. “What is it this time? Sneaking an electric cooker ring into the signals cupboard so you could make toast on the night watch?”
“That was last week,” Osla said.
“Sneaking into the new block the minute the walls were half-constructed, riding the wheeled laundry bin down the hall into the gentlemen’s loo?”
“Two weeks ago.”
Travis sighed again, looking out the window where, distantly, off-duty codebreakers were ice-skating on the frozen lake. “Then enlighten me.”
“No pranks this time, sir.” Though Osla didn’t see what was wrong with a few hijinks. BP needed a little laughter to keep up morale—after the jubilation of December, everyone rejoicing in the joy of the Americans’ entering the war, the New Year hadn’t really started with a bang. The Yanks might have been in the fight but weren’t here yet, and the fall of Singapore last week with more than sixty thousand British, Indian, and Australian soldiers heading into Japanese POW camps had plunged the entire Park into gloom. And something dire was happening in Hut 8 with the German naval codes—Osla had no clue what, but Harry and the rest of his section were going around looking like absolute death. “I’m actually here to make a point, Commander Travis,” she said, bringing herself back to business.
Travis and the men behind him watched with bemusement, then embarrassment, then alarm as Osla fished discreetly among her clothes, removing a folded square of paper from her skirt waistband, another tucked inside her stocking top, and a third that had been wedged into a T-strap pump. She laid all three on Travis’s desk. “Nobody saw me smuggling these out of Hut 4, sir.”
His voice went from weary to cold. “What do you mean by sneaking decrypted intelligence out of your workplace?”
“Just blank scrap paper.” Osla unfolded each square, demonstrating. She wasn’t dim enough to try to illustrate her point here with real cryptograms. “I am proving to you that it is too blinking easy to get bits of paper out of one’s hut. Ever since I went to work as a translator, I’ve been noticing how simple it would be to smuggle messages out of BP. I thought if I brought it to your attention—”
“There is no one here who would think to misappropriate intelligence, Miss Kendall. Our people are thoroughly vetted.”
“I’m not saying it’s likely we’ve got a spy at BP, sir. But if the wrong person here was blackmailed or threatened into obtaining information, they could do it rather easily, depending on where they worked—it’s the simplest thing in the world to tuck a slip of paper in your brassiere when everyone’s yawning on night shift.” The men shifted at the word brassiere, and Osla nearly rolled her eyes. Point out a security leak and they shrugged; mention a woman’s underclothes and everyone got in a wax. “Obviously I only know about naval section, but areas like mine would seem the obvious places to tighten up. Where the information goes through the translators and is legible—”
“I don’t think we need security advice from a silly deb,” one of the intelligence men behind Travis said rather nastily.
“You clearly need it from someone,” Osla shot back.
“Miss Kendall, I’m sure you meant well, but the matter has been considered. Stick to doing your job,” Travis said sternly, “and writing your gossip-page fluff.”
Osla refused to ask how he knew she wrote Bletchley Bletherings. This was an intelligence facility, after all. “Just because I write gossip-page fluff”—And what on earth is wrong with fluff if it makes people laugh during a war, for God’s sake—“it does not mean I have fluff between the ears.”
“Your concern about our security is noted. But it was very foolish to smuggle anything out of your hut, even blank paper. Go back to your section, and do not pull a trick like this again.”
Osla stamped out, fuming. “In hot water?” Giles greeted her, leaning against one of the stone griffons flanking the mansion’s front doors.
“Yes, and this time I didn’t deserve it.” What would it take to ever, ever be taken seriously? Osla knew she was the best translator in her section; she maintained a cracking pace of work and still found time to dash off a weekly chin-wag that had the entire Park in stitches; she had brought a legitimate potential security problem to the attention of her superiors—yet she was still just a bit of Mayfair crumpet. “Why aren’t you ever in trouble, Giles? You take so many cigarette breaks, I’m amazed you get anything done at all.”
“I’m not on break this time.” Giles exhaled a stream of fragrant smoke. He refused to smoke anything but Gitanes; who knew what he paid for them on the black market. “My hut head told me to take twenty before he knocked my block off.”
Osla blinked. “What about?”
“I was at the
NAAFI kiosk getting some tea and listening to Harry express the rather mild opinion that the Russkies might be doing a touch better against Operation Barbarossa if we actually shared information with them. Uncle Joe being an ally, after all.”
“How do you or Harry know we aren’t sharing it?”
“If the Russians saw half the stuff that passes through my hut, they wouldn’t be getting stomped quite so thoroughly on the eastern front.” Giles offered Osla a Gitane. “Harry got quite hot under the collar about it.”
“Maybe they aren’t properly using the information we give.”
“No, I suspect the PM is keeping his cards close. Doesn’t trust Uncle Joe.”
“Nothing we can do about that, surely.”
“That’s what I told Harry, but he was on a bit of a rant, and then my hut head said that was commie talk. Harry said you didn’t have to be a commie to want to help an ally, I said he had a point, and my hut head told me to take twenty or he’d pound me.” Giles rolled his eyes. “It was Harry’s rant, not mine!”
“Yes, but Harry’s enormous. No one’s going to threaten to pound him.” If I were Harry’s size and a man, they’d have taken me seriously in that office . . . Osla took a long drag, still hacked off at that contemptuous silly deb from the intelligence fellow. “I really cannot stand those MI-5 types.” She was going to absolutely roast them in the next BB.
“It’s mutual, I assure you,” Giles said airily. “Intelligence chaps hate that the information they rely on comes from the kind of people they used to bully at school. Namely women, weedy fellows who were better at maths than games, and pansies.”
“Who here’s a pansy?” Osla asked, intrigued.
“Angus Wilson, for one. You hear things about Turing, too.”
“Goodness, who knew?”
“Me, because I’m all-knowing.”
“You’re not all-knowing, you’re annoying,” Osla informed him.