by Kate Quinn
“You said once it was splendidly foursquare,” Beth remembered. “Patterns for days.”
“Maybe that’s why I’ve been burying myself in it. Trying to find U-boat keys in The Well-Tempered Clavier—at least it’s something we haven’t tried at work.” His face darkened briefly, then he gave his head a fierce shake as if to shove Hut 8 and everything about it back into the hole it came from. He pulled a record down. “There . . .” Nodding to the booth at the back. Beth took a seat and Harry dropped into the chair beside her, putting the record on and fiddling with various dials. He shrugged out of his jacket and pushed back his sleeves. “We’ll both hear it this way,” he said, picking up two pairs of headphones and slipping one over Beth’s ears. The world sealed away with a suddenness that surprised her, and she wished she had a pair of these at ISK—then she’d really be able to focus, no distractions of Phyllida’s throat-clearing or Jean’s slight humming . . .
In the artificial silence she looked at Harry, then looped her fingers round his wrist and tugged. His big hand rose to the nape of her neck, then his other hand moved to her hair, tangling slowly through it, and the silence filled up as he kissed her. Not with sound, Beth thought, gripping his loosened collar and pulling him closer, with color. Honey yellow, sunshine yellow, flooded her to the bone in the utter stillness.
He pulled back, hand still warm at the side of her throat. He looked a question at her. She smiled.
He lowered his head, kissed the space between her collarbones, then drew back and pulled the record from its sleeve. Beth saw the label: Bach’s Partita Number 2 in C Minor. He dropped the needle, and a piano began.
Patterns—Beth could hear them unspooling, golden horizontal lines, more melodies adding in, undergirding the first. Patterns mingling, left hand and right. Patterns she didn’t have to solve, just admire. Harry kissed her again. Beth closed her eyes, following the left-hand pattern as it surged, following the pulse in Harry’s neck as it surged under her fingertips. She followed the strong lines of his throat down into his collar, listening, moving her lips to his neck. She felt him swallow, felt his hand make a fist in her hair, and it hurt wonderfully. She had never liked to be touched, but now she couldn’t get close enough. Normally Harry hunkered down in chairs as if to keep his vast size from intimidating anyone, but now she had the feeling of being pulled into the unyielding granite loom of a mountain. He could have broken her between his huge hands like a toothpick and it didn’t frighten her at all—if anything Beth had a fierce thrum of pleasure, because he was nearly shaking with the effort to hold all that strength back, let her be the one to move first.
The world jolted as he tugged her earphones away. “—should stop,” he was saying.
“Why?” Everything was too loud. Beth was curled in his lap, her blouse and brassiere on the floor, Harry’s shirt unbuttoned; they were both breathing hard. Music came tinnily from the discarded earphones.
“I’m not going to get you in trouble.” Harry went through his pockets with a muttered curse. “I didn’t bring anything—didn’t think the day had anything like this in store.”
Beth reached over to her handbag and showed him what she’d swiped from Giles. “I did.”
Harry burst out laughing. “Don’t tell me you marched into a shop and asked for—”
“As if anyone would sell them to me!” She felt the blush come. “Nicked from Giles.”
“Christ, Beth.” Harry put his forehead against hers and laughed in huge, gusting waves. He sounded like he hadn’t laughed in months.
“Does this make me a . . .” Beth hesitated. “I thought I should be prepared. Just in case.”
“You’re a bloody genius.” He swiped the two small packets from her hand. “Mr. Scopelli turned his back room into a bomb shelter—there’s a camp cot and blankets . . .” Harry paused, giving her a look up and down that scoured like coal fire. “Christ, even your nipples blush.”
“Shut up.” Beth reached for the earphones. “I want to hear the end of the partita—”
He swung her off his lap, holding her off the ground close against him, eyes black and ravenous. “Bugger. The partita.”
Chapter 42
Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan, posted to his London landlady
I don’t know why I’m writing you—my first letter after our meeting at the Café de Paris had no reply. Are you still overseas? Are you even still alive? I hope you are. You provided comfort in one of the worst moments of my life, and somehow you’ve become important to me. Perhaps that’s silly . . . I suppose I’m also writing you because I can’t write to my boyfriend anymore (let’s not get into why) and sometimes I need a page to scream into. This is such a bloody awful war, and I’m so tired of making everyone laugh . . .
“Nothing missing.” Miss Senyard lowered the lid on the last box file. “Will you give it a rest now, Osla?”
Osla nibbled a nail. Months and months it had taken to go through those boxes she thought might have been rifled. She’d told Miss Senyard she was worried about possible missing files, and the older woman had been dubious, but no one could say she wasn’t careful: she and her girls (and Osla, too, pitching in at least an hour after every shift) had gone through every single box and cupboard where signals, reports, and copies were stored. The stacks took up whole walls now that German naval section was consolidated. “Goddamn,” a visiting American colonel had whistled last week. “If this were the Pentagon, there would be rows and rows of shiny filing cabinets with nothing in them, and you do it all in goddamn shoeboxes.”
Well, Osla had seen every one checked and cross-correlated, and she was floored at all points: nothing appeared to be missing. Maybe whoever rifled through just copied down what they wanted before scarpering, she thought. But if there was a way to check for that, she didn’t know what it was.
“Thanks awfully, ma’am,” she told Miss Senyard. “I know you’re glad to call this project a dead end.” She’d made inquiries about the missing Hut 3 files too (the ones Travis wouldn’t admit to) and met a wall of You dinnae need to know. There was no uproar or further investigation from the mansion, and no one had been sacked from BP for carelessness—that sort of news made itself known all over the Park—so perhaps the missing files had turned up without fuss. Perhaps they’d simply been mislaid. With thousands of reports flowing through BP, surely the odd stack of paper ended up in the wrong drawer from time to time.
So let it go, her common sense advised as she headed back to Aspley Guise, but Osla didn’t entirely want to let it go. At least the mystery had kept her occupied, and there hadn’t been much in the way of bright spots lately. No more Hut 4 now that they’d moved to the big, anonymous new block; fewer jokes and more strange faces all around. No Philip to bring a jolt of sunshine into her veins; he was out at sea. No escape from tragedy when Osla translated gleeful Nazi reports in July about tracking Convoy PQ17 and sinking twenty-four of thirty ships . . .
And certainly no cessation of nightmares when she closed her eyes at night. Osla wrote her Good Samaritan about that, mainly because she couldn’t think who else to tell, wrapped up in his old overcoat, which still smelled like heather and smoke. Sometimes she slept in it. It smelled like a man, even if it wasn’t Philip, and then she could pretend she had her head on his shoulder and wasn’t just lying in the dark in her narrow bed, dying of loneliness.
“Come up to the roof,” Mab proposed when she got back to Aspley Guise. “We won’t get another warm day like this until spring, and you look peaky.”
“It’s the new block.” Still the new block, even though the naval section had moved over in August. “I never thought I’d miss that creaky old hut, but these big blocks have all the boundless charm of a TB sanitarium. Conveyor belts cranking away, pneumatic tubes, Park messengers whizzing in and out . . .” Osla shook off her blue funk, shimmied into her bathing suit (midriff-baring white dotted with red cherries), and followed Mab up the attic stairs to the rooftop, which was flat, rem
ote, and perfect for sunbathing. Osla laid out her towel as Mab stripped down to her unmentionables; no one was going to see them up here. The day was summer-warm, more like June than October—Osla watched a Hurricane drone overhead from the nearest training base and began working through a comic weather report for Bletchley Bletherings: Warm and hazy, with a thirty percent chance of Messerschmitts! Writing BB was about the only thing that gave Osla’s days any fizz now.
“I got your Vigenère message.” Beth’s voice floated behind them. Even without the Dread Mrs. Finch snooping, the three of them had never dropped the habit of leaving notes for each other in code. Up on the roof, bring your bathing suit! Osla had ciphered before dashing upstairs after Mab.
“Letter came for each of you,” Beth continued, wind stirring her blond hair as she came up onto the roof. Osla had marveled before at the change in her quietest billet-mate—something had shifted in Beth, beyond the hair and lipstick. She hardly seemed to be present now unless she was on her way to BP, straining like an eager greyhound to get to work. If she wasn’t working, Beth didn’t even seem to be there. Not in the please don’t look at me way of the silent, henpecked girl Osla had first met—more in the sense that she wasn’t really interested in anything that took place outside Knox’s section. That, or heading to Cambridge every day off to listen to records; something else the old Beth would never have done, so Osla supposed it was progress . . . Still, there was something Osla found unsettling in her billet-mate’s preoccupied stare lately.
“For you, and you—posted here, not through the London PO Box.” Beth handed over the letters, sitting down on the slates and tilting her face upward. “That plane’s doing another loop.”
“A Hurricane. I used to make them.”
“Did you?” Beth asked vaguely.
“Yes.” Osla heard her voice grow tart. “And you’ve heard that story several times. Can’t you at least pretend not to utterly ignore anything that isn’t in bally code?”
Beth looked puzzled. Osla sighed and tore open her letter, getting a familiar jolt of joy as she recognized Philip’s writing.
Darling Os—I haven’t had a letter in ages. Did I do something to offend? Don’t tell me you’ve met someone else, because if you have, I’ll paste him.
On the heels of joy: pain. Because she couldn’t tell Philip why she’d stopped writing.
You might hurt for a while, Osla told Philip silently, but I’m keeping you safe. Her commander had been clear—if she failed to keep Philip at arm’s length and there was another security breach, Osla wouldn’t be the only one called to account. Philip could be too, and he had more to lose. His shining new lieutenancy, his pride in serving at sea, his acceptance from the royal family when he hardly had family of his own left . . . all that could go if there was talk of treason.
He would never recover from a blow like that. Even a brave man like Philip had his Achilles’ heel.
I’m protecting yours, Osla thought, folding up the letter. Even if you never know it.
Her ears rang suddenly as Mab let out a whoop. “He’s coming home! Francis is coming home!”
“From Inverness?” Osla asked as Beth said, “From where?”
“I thought they were going to keep him there till he sprouted heather.” Mab shuffled a ream of pages, still reading—her husband was always writing her thick packets, and all summer long she’d been scribbling thick packets back.
Osla took her involuntary tendril of envy, squashed it flat, and stamped on it repeatedly. “How long has it been now?”
“Four months, ages longer than he originally thought . . .” Mab hugged her knees. “He’ll have three days, the eighth through the tenth of November. How am I going to wait another month? He wants me to take the train to Coventry, and bring Lucy.” A dizzy smile. “He’s going to show us his house—the house we’ll all live in after the war.”
Osla’s envy raised its head again, and she gave it another vicious stamp. “Absolutely topping!”
“Come with me,” Mab said promptly. “I’ll need someone to help look after Lucy.”
“So you can boff your husband senseless each night?” Beth said.
Osla and Mab turned to stare at her. “Where did you learn an expression like that, Miss Finch?” Mab laughed. “Clearly you have been falling into bad company.”
“Beth, are you sloping off to meet some fellow?” Osla exclaimed in mock horror. “All these Cambridge Sundays . . .”
She meant it as a joke but Beth looked upward, avoiding eye contact. “That Hurricane’s back.”
Osla’s senses pricked. Maybe if Beth seemed distant lately there was a better explanation than overwork. “Don’t get in a flap, tell me—”
“Look, Coventry—can one of you come?” Mab pleaded.
The pink in her cheeks made Osla forget about Beth. Mab was positively shining, not with the cool, hard confidence she’d radiated from the day they met, but with pure joy. She’s in love, Osla thought. She may have married Francis for hardheaded reasons, but now she’s head over heels.
“Well, I’d better come along so you get your idyll,” Osla said lightly. Three days alongside a husband and wife fizzing with mutual adoration—this was going to require a lot of mental stamping. But Osla couldn’t say no, not when Mab sat there visibly clutching her own happiness like it was the most fragile of vases. “If you brought Beth, she’d get the swithers, disappear down the center of a rose for an hour, and next thing you knew Lucy would turn up in Timbuktu.”
The Hurricane circled round again, even lower. Mab grinned, eyes sparkling. “Let’s give him something to look at, ladies.”
She stripped off her brassiere and whirled it over her head as the plane droned overhead. Osla pulled off the top of her bathing suit and did the same, laughing. “No, thank you,” said Beth, keeping her blouse buttoned, but she waved. The Hurricane waggled its wings in return, and Mab blew a kiss. “Guess what, flyboy!” she shouted upward. “My husband’s coming home!”
Chapter 43
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, NOVEMBER 1942
* * *
What on earth is the local RAF squadron to do now that it’s too cold for the BP ladies of Woburn Abbey and Aspley Guise to go rooftop sunbathing in their skivvies? Go buzz the Fräuleins in Berlin, boys, and drop a few bombs while you’re at it . . .
* * *
One hour’s break for every eight-hour shift. Sometimes Beth and Harry were too exhausted to do anything but bolt sandwiches side by side in the canteen before heading back to their respective blocks, but more often than not they’d trade a wordless glance, make separately for the Park’s abandoned air-raid shelter, and fall on each other. It wasn’t lovemaking in there, when they were inside BP’s clock; it was fast, urgent relief. In Cambridge on days off, they could stretch out on the cot in Scopelli’s, talk, laugh—but coming together in the middle of a shift, they were both too far inside Enigma’s pathways to pull entirely free.
Beth’s mind had been knotted up for weeks in the Spy Enigma; by the time she fell into Harry’s arms on break, all she wanted was a few minutes to stop thinking. Harry was nine months into the U-boat traffic lockout; after four hours of fruitless work he’d slam into the air-raid cellar with every muscle drawn stone-hard, balanced on such a knife edge of frustration and rage that all he wanted was an outlet—an urge Beth understood perfectly. They’d take a few silent minutes to claw it all out on each other’s flesh and then trade soft, wordless kisses and go back to the code.
The code and Harry—Beth didn’t know what she’d do without either. When we win the war, people were beginning to say with increasing optimism, because the war was starting to look winnable: American troops and supplies were coming across the Atlantic despite the U-boat lockout, Hitler’s eastern advance had bogged down in the Soviet Union’s implacable ice, and something unspeakably secret was taking shape to tackle Rommel in the desert. Most people were cautiously jubilant—but when Beth heard the words When we win
the war, she had to push down a surge of panic. Without a war she didn’t have this work. Without a war there was no excuse to see Harry. Without a war, would she be an unemployed spinster with a dog, forced back home because she no longer had a billet and a salary?
I feel myself cracking round the edges, Harry sometimes said quietly into her hair when they were alone. But the only thing that made Beth’s mind bend at the edges was the thought of losing all this. She could take the hours, she could take the secrecy, she could take the grueling pace, but she couldn’t take the thought that it would all someday disappear.
“Where’s Jumbo?” someone called out as she let herself back into her section after shift break—they’d moved from the Cottage into a gothic redbrick school building adjacent to BP. Beth missed the whitewashed cottage off the stable yard, but it was too small now with so many new additions to Illicit Services Knox. Not just more new women but men (“Men in my harem,” Dilly sighed on one of his rare visits to the section). It didn’t matter where ISK was housed or how many new people joined; the women who had broken Matapan together were still the heart of the operation. “Where’s Jumbo?” Jean repeated, sounding agitated.
“Here.” Beth plucked a stuffed plush elephant off her seat and handed it over for a ceremonial ear-rub. The elephant had come from Dilly, living in the cupboard until they were in the middle of a jumbo rush, and the rush had been overwhelming all through October and the start of November. Scads of Abwehr traffic about something called Operation Torch (whatever that was) drawing to a head.
“I’ll wager it’s confirmations,” Giles speculated. He’d been moved over to ISK some weeks ago; Beth still found it strange to see him working at the desk next to hers. “If it’s really true we’ve got all the German double agents under our thumbs, we’ll be using them to feed false information back as cover-up for Torch. No good planning a big push without misdirection. Convince the Krauts the Allied convoys are heading one way, when they’re headed another . . . all this Abwehr stuff is just checking to confirm if they’re buying what we’re selling.”