by Kate Quinn
“He’ll be giving some other girl the same line in a week.” Mab quoted the rhyme: “‘Same old Yank, same old tune.’”
She hadn’t known Wren Bishop, but the news cast a pall over her mood. She couldn’t muster a smile on the train ride north the following morning, not until she descended in a fine mist of Lake District rain and saw Francis. He was leaning against the station wall, hat brim slanting over his brow, and when he looked up and saw her he went utterly still. Mab stood, letting him look, letting the other passengers stream around her. She’d scoured London for the hat—pale straw, with a cornflower-blue ribbon round the crown and silk netting. As close as she could find to the hat he’d described the long-ago girl choosing in a Paris shop in 1918, in the letter Mab had read about three hundred times. She’d spent a shocking amount of money on it, and she didn’t care. Mab lifted her chin, straightened the hat as if before an imaginary mirror, raised her eyebrows.
By the time he was done kissing her, the hat had fallen off and blown clear across the station. “That’s no way to treat a poetical inspiration,” Mab scolded, retrieving it.
“How did you find the exact one?” He placed it tenderly back over her hair.
“By enduring the rolled eyes of every clerk in London when they heard me ask for ‘wafty sort of netting.’ You couldn’t have been more specific in your details when you decided to fix this memory in your mind forever?” Mab slid her arm through his. “Remembering spotted netting or close-weave netting would have been a lot more helpful.”
“I stand by wafty. I know nothing about female attire. Let’s get to the hotel so I can peel you out of yours.”
I don’t deserve this, Mab thought as they tumbled into bed. I don’t deserve him. She’d always thought of being a good wife in terms of keeping a tidy house, setting a good table, warming a welcoming bed . . . how did you return this? This quiet, devastating riptide of devotion? How did you earn it?
“Mab?” Francis said in astonishment when she dragged herself out of bed in the pink light of dawn as he was pulling on his walking boots. “You don’t have to come along on my morning walks. You hate rising early, you hate getting your hair wet—”
“It’s time I learned to be a country lass,” Mab said determinedly. “Long walks in the woods, sensible shoes. I’ll love it!”
She was cursing inside before they made it out of Keswick. “There’s a lovely view up the hill quite close,” Francis said—apparently quite close meant five miles. He strode along easily, hands in his pockets, shaking off whatever cobwebs of war came in the night, so Mab did her best to struggle in silence, her hair flattening in the fine drizzle.
She was too out of breath to enjoy the view when they reached the top. It was pouring anyway, too hard to see anything but gray waves of rain gusting across Derwentwater. Francis whistled through his teeth as he looked off the rocky point over the water. The bloody man wasn’t even out of breath. “Well, it’s usually a lovely view,” he remarked.
“Spiffing,” Mab bit off, massaging her toes.
“All right, country lass.” Francis grinned. “How much did you hate this?”
“I look at a view like this,” Mab said, waving a hand at the water, the trees, the sweep of clouds, “and I want to see something paved.”
“That’s my city girl.” He slid an arm around her waist. “Maybe tomorrow morning we both stay in bed. Stow the hike.”
“At least it’s not hot.” Mab gave a half smile. “You wouldn’t believe the sweatshop my hut has turned into.” She told him the story of the Wrens’ stripping down and working in their underwear, glad she could tell him about her work, even if just a little. She’d hate to be Osla, always keeping mum with her royal suitor. Francis laughed as Mab finished, and she felt rich. He still didn’t laugh very often.
“You realize every chap at Bletchley Park will turn into a Peeping Tom once the word gets round? And when the Yanks arrive—”
Mab’s smile faded as she remembered the Yank who had supposedly got Wren Bishop into trouble.
“What’s that you just thought of?” Francis caught the flicker of her expression.
“A Wren I heard about at BP.” Leaning back against the nearest rock, her shoulder against Francis’s, Mab surprised herself by telling him. She hadn’t ever imagined talking to a husband about such things.
“Poor girl.” He shook his head. “That’s . . . ugly.”
“An old story,” Mab said. “Women get in trouble, and if the men won’t marry them, there’s only a handful of choices. Hoping for a miscarriage”—or doing something to help that along, something that might well kill you in the process—“or going off somewhere to have the baby and give it up.”
“Or going somewhere with your mother, somewhere no one knows you, and giving her name at the hospital instead of your own,” Francis said calmly. “Then going home and telling your friends and family she had the baby and you have a new little sister.”
Mab froze. For a moment she thought her heart had stopped altogether.
“Oh.” He turned, hands in his pockets, looking wry. “I wasn’t trying to give you a shock . . . I thought you’d guessed by now that I knew.”
Mab still didn’t know if her heart was beating or not. “How—” she managed to say before her throat locked.
“The first time I saw you with Lucy. The way you looked at her, just a flash when you touched her hair.”
I gave myself away, Mab thought. So much obsessive discretion over the years, and all it took was the wrong glance when someone who cared was watching.
“It didn’t shock me, Mab. I’ve heard of such things before.”
It hadn’t been till weeks after that horrible night Mab had been left by the side of the road that she’d realized Lucy was coming. By then she’d have rather been torn apart by red-hot fishhooks than ever, ever contact Geoffrey Irving again.
“It’s why the first thing you asked of me was how I felt about taking Lucy into our home,” Francis said. “I could see why it meant so much.”
“My mother—isn’t a very good mother.” Mab felt the words wrench and twist, as if they were being forged between her teeth. “She’s free with the slaps, she doesn’t care if her children run about with holes in their knickers, she’ll take Lucy out of school and send her to work as soon as she can. That’s what she did with all her children. She’s not a bad woman, just worn out and impatient. But I can’t really harangue her. Because she agreed to raise my—” Mab stopped for nearly an entire minute. She had never said the two words out loud before, had hardly ever said them in her head. From the day she’d given birth in an anonymous charity hospital and seen the baby carried out in a blanket, she’d told herself over and over, That’s my sister. That’s my sister Lucy.
“—she agreed to raise my daughter for me,” Mab whispered, and felt the tears begin to slide. “Mum didn’t have to do that. She could have tossed me out on my ear. She could have given me a few quid and told me to get rid of it. She could have told the whole neighborhood I was a slut. She called me that plenty of times, and she slapped me black and blue, but she said she wasn’t going to see her youngest dying in some back alley with a coat hanger and a bottle of gin. And then she said she guessed I wasn’t going to be her youngest after all, and by the end of the week there was a story about how she and my dad had had a weekend when he was last in town, before she kicked him out for good, and there were plans to go visit him up north with me and see if things worked out. No one really looked surprised when she was back six months later with a baby . . . Some people knew, of course, but it had all been properly explained.” Mab scrubbed at her cheeks. “So I don’t really have the right to say my mum’s not doing such a good job raising Lucy. She didn’t have to raise her at all.”
“But you want more for Lucy.” Francis was listening with every drop of concentration in him, leaning against the rock, his shoulder pressing Mab’s.
“Everything I made myself into, I had to fight to do. The books, th
e clothes, the secretarial course, all of it. With Mum and everyone else saying I was an uppity bitch. I don’t want that for Luce. I want her to go to school, a proper school where she gets to play hockey in a clean gym slip and learn maths. I want her to have the kind of vowels I had to teach myself by eavesdropping on university students. I want her to have little shiny riding boots and a pony.”
Francis put his arms around her. Mab sagged against him, raw to the core. “Please,” she heard herself beg—tough-shelled Mabel from Shoreditch, who never begged anyone for anything, suddenly needing reassurance more than she needed air. “Please tell me what you’re thinking.” Please tell me I won’t lose you over this.
“I’m thinking”—he pulled back, tugged a strand of wet hair off her cheek—“that my blasted office is sending me to Scotland for a few months, but that when I get back, you should bring Lucy to Coventry so we can show her her future home. Including where the pony will live.”
Then he held Mab quietly as she clung to him. Blinking over his shoulder, she saw the rain clouds had rolled back from Derwentwater. The lake had turned a sudden, spectacular blue and the fields around it exploded like green and gold velvet under a sudden drenching of sunshine. “You’re right,” she choked. “It’s a lovely view.”
Chapter 41
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JUNE 1942
* * *
This fine summer weather means romance, judging from the number of BP engagements rumored! What the huts and night shifts hath joined together, let no one put asunder . . .
* * *
Two weeks after the conversation with Sheila Zarb, Beth became a thief.
“Beth Finch.” Giles’s voice hovered somewhere between amused and offended. “Are you actually rummaging in my wallet?”
“No. Yes.” Beth could feel the things she’d taken, nearly burning a hole in her pocket. She’d just managed to ease Giles’s wallet back into his jacket where it hung over his chair—a much easier job in the large, crowded new-built canteen than it would have been in the old mansion dining room—but he’d ambled back with his tray faster than anticipated. “I needed something . . . I didn’t steal! I left you two shillings in place.”
“I don’t really fancy anyone taking a poke in my wallet who isn’t me.” He dumped his tray on the table. “What did you need so badly?”
“I—” Beth couldn’t say another word. It was four in the morning and the canteen was full of tired people jostling for plates of corned beef and prunes. Beth ducked her head, avoiding his eyes. “I—can’t say.”
Giles went through his wallet. His brows rose. “Well. I’m plus two shillings and minus two—”
“Pleasedon’tsayit.” Beth squeezed her eyes shut in agony. “Please, Giles.”
He sat back in his chair with a grin. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She fled before he could make any more jokes.
“Beth?” Harry stopped in surprise, coming out of Hut 8 five hours later. Beth had been wondering what to do if he worked a double, but here he was, rumpled and tired looking, shrugging into his jacket.
“You’re off shift?” Of course he was, it was nine sharp and people were streaming into the bright summer morning toward the gates, but so much of ordinary conversation seemed to be about stating the obvious. How did anyone stand it? “Where are you off to?”
She’d been expecting him to say “home” and she had an answer for that, but he surprised her. “Hopping the train to Cambridge for the day. Sheila’s already there, visiting her parents with Christopher—it’s better if I don’t go with them, so I’ll loaf about until afternoon and then bring them home.”
“Why can’t you visit her parents?”
Someone jostled past Harry; he moved to one side near the brick half wall erected to shield the hut from bomb raids. “Once her dad is two pints in, he’ll start making digs at me, and her mum always frets about how dark Christopher turned out and argues about me teaching him Arabic.” Harry’s face was taut.
“I don’t see Sheila putting up with that.”
“She gives them hell. But Christopher cries, and—” Harry broke off. “How do you know what Sheila would or wouldn’t do?”
“We met again a few weeks back”—Beth looked down at her handbag—“and talked.”
“. . . About what?”
Beth couldn’t manage the answer. “You’re off to the train station then?”
“Yes.”
She took a breath. Let the breath out. “I’ve never been to Cambridge.”
He looked at her then, exhausted, direct. “D’you want to come?”
THEY DIDN’T SPEAK on the station platform, or on the train. Harry angled his big body in the crushing crowd so Beth had a bit of space, and then stood silent, expression abstracted. Beth knew the look, having seen it in the mirror often enough. She was still fighting off the code’s mesmeric hold herself, and she’d had a good shift’s work, hard concentration giving way to clean, decrypted script. She hadn’t spent hours banging her head against an impenetrable wall. In the cramped space between them she raised her hand, flashed five fingers rapidly like a cluster of Enigma traffic, and then swirled them like a whirlpool, letting her eyes cross. Harry nodded, lids lifted briefly as he grinned. As she dropped her hand back to her side, the backs of their fingers brushed together with the swaying of the train. Beth stood quietly, focusing on the haphazard touch.
They got off at Cambridge, Harry taking her hand quite naturally, pulling her through the crush on the platform. He didn’t drop it, and she didn’t tug away. She saw spires and golden-stoned buildings; a city half-medieval and utterly untouched by bombing—she couldn’t help turning her eyes everywhere, astounded.
“Cambridge is lovelier than Oxford,” Harry said. “Don’t let any of the Oxford blokes tell you different.”
Beth didn’t see how anything could be lovelier than this. They meandered, Harry pointing out his favorite spots: “There’s the Eagle, best pub in town; I used to work proofs over a pint in the evenings . . . the tower there marks Caius College—my cousin Maurice dared me to climb the roof at night and make the Senate House leap across the lane below. Maurice got recruited to BP too, you know—I had no idea, till I saw him flashing his pass at the gate . . .” Cambridge wasn’t as intimidating as London but was much bigger than Bletchley. And not a soul here knows me. All her life Beth had lived in a glass bowl where she couldn’t cross the road without meeting five people who called out her name.
Harry bought a packet of ersatz meat-paste sandwiches, and they ate on the grass in a loop of the river. He sat with his knees up, shoulders giving an irregular hitch now and then, and a lingering fear flashed in Beth—breakdown. Like poor Peggy, who had returned from bed rest pale faced and elusive about her time away. “You’re not going crazy, Harry.” Beth said it blunt and direct.
“It feels like it.” He looked at her, speaking equally bluntly. “What did Sheila tell you?”
Beth had hoped she could get through this without blushing, but she might as well have wished for the moon. “About someone she sees . . . Someone you don’t mind about.”
“I’ve never met him.” Harry tossed a crust into the river. “But I hope he’s head over heels for her.”
“You—really don’t mind?”
“She should be happy while she can.” Harry shook his head. “She fell for a flier . . . if he lives through the war it’ll be a miracle.”
“So . . .” Beth couldn’t finish the sentence or her sandwich.
He looked at her straight. “This is all I’ve got to offer you: the occasional afternoon. Because I’m not leaving Sheila or my son. Wouldn’t you rather be off with some fellow who can take you to meet his parents, give you a ring someday?”
“No.” Mab seemed to love being married, and clearly Osla wanted to be, but Beth didn’t feel that tug. She’d just got out of a household that felt like a prison; the thought of starting things up with a man who might trap her in anothe
r household someday made her want to scratch and howl. Beth wanted the life she already had, only—
“Why are you here?” Harry asked, low voiced.
Because I don’t know if you’re the only friend I have who does what I do and loves what I love—or if you’re something more, Beth thought. And I want to know. Because you make me dizzy.
She didn’t know how to say that. “Why did you ask me to come along today?” she asked instead.
“Because you’ve got a great, big, beautiful brain all teeming with lobsters and wheels and roses,” Harry said, “and I could get tangled up in it all night.”
You said it better, Beth thought dizzily. She spoke before she could stop and think, before she could find an excuse to dive back into the shadows.
“Can we go somewhere?”
Harry smiled. He still looked exhausted, but the smile lightened him all over, as if he were hovering over the grass and not sunk into it like a boulder. He reached out, linking his fingers through Beth’s. “D’you like music?”
THE SIGN OVER the door read Scopelli’s Music Shop. The premises were closed and shuttered—it was Sunday morning, Beth realized; everyone was at church or at home. She could have been in chapel right now, ignoring her mother’s reproachful stares—instead she was hand-in-hand with a married man, thinking . . .
Well, things that weren’t suitable for chapel.
“I had a job here my last year at King’s College.” Harry let them into the shop and began turning on lights. “Old Mr. Scopelli let me keep a key so I can come on my afternoons off and listen to music.”
Most of the shop was in shadow, but Beth saw booths with chairs and headphones. “What do you listen to?” She’d heard so little music, only what was on the radio that Mrs. Finch thought appropriate. At Aspley Guise, they didn’t have a radio at all.
Harry went to the wall of records, running his fingers along the top shelf. “Since the U-boat blackout, Bach.”