by Kate Quinn
People were coming out even before the all-clear sounded, cautiously putting noses round doors, trailing up cellar steps. Mab rushed up to every face she saw. “Have you seen a little girl, six, dark haired?” People stopped, no longer pushing past in panic; they stopped to listen.
No one had seen her.
“Mab,” Osla began, voice quivering, but Mab pushed her away and lurched down the street toward Francis’s house.
She got lost in the dark tangle of unfamiliar streets, straightened herself out as the all-clear sounded at last. The sky had lightened to gray, Mab realized dully—how long had the attack lasted? It felt like a century.
She let out a choked gasp. The house beside Francis’s had been sheared nearly in half, the front façade collapsed into rubble, the inside open to the elements. A sink hung over the garden below, sagging in midair, and the outer wall snugged up nearly to Francis’s chimney was listing outward as though about to topple. But the tawny-stoned house where Mab had led Lucy yesterday afternoon—where they had eaten sponge with jam and Mab had fantasized about peacetime Christmas dinners; where Lucy had picked out her bedroom and Francis had made slow, sleepy love to Mab at midnight in their own—was untouched.
And the front door was opening with an ordinary, everyday creak.
Mab clung to the garden gate as Francis came out of the house and down the steps, Lucy riding comfortably in his arms. He was in his shirtsleeves, russet hair glinting in the dawn; his coat was wrapped around Lucy, who had linked an elbow around his neck. With the other arm she hugged her new riding boots against her little chest.
“She went back for her boots,” Francis called, perfectly calm, and Mab’s throat closed in a half sob, half laugh. Lucy was giving Mab a sunny wave, as if the city had not been stirred to ash and terror all around her.
Mab heard Osla crying with relief behind her. “It’s all right, Os,” she managed to say, reaching back to give her friend’s hand a squeeze. “They’re all right.”
Francis looked up at the house beside his with its sheared-off front face. The clawfoot bathtub had been blown from the first-floor loo and landed on his own front walk. “Let’s get out over the side fence instead, Lucy-girl,” he remarked with one of his rare grins, skirting the mess of ceramic shards. “Since there’s a bathtub in our front yard.”
Lucy was gurgling with laughter, Mab smiling as Francis swung her daughter over the side fence—and it happened.
It happened so fast.
Just as a relieved Mab was reaching out her arms to Lucy, the leaning outer wall of the bombed-out house toppled outward in a sudden three-story roar of bricks and beams, collapsing directly into the fenced garden.
Francis had time to look up.
Lucy had time for a thin, terrified wail.
Then they disappeared, buried in a torrent of stone.
—I WOULDN’T DIG if I were you, ma’am—
—My daughter’s in there, she can’t breathe—
—Ma’am, your daughter is—
—MAB, COME AWAY. Please come away—
—Get off me, Os—
—CHRIST, LOOK AT her hands—ma’am, stop tearing at those stones—
—Mab, stop. Stop, they’re dead—
—Go to hell, Osla Kendall—
—DON’T LOOK, MA’AM. You don’t want to remember them like that—
—Will someone get the damned woman out of here—
—Mrs. Gray—
—I TOLD YOU not to look, ma’am . . .
—I told you not to look.
SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING—
Someone was scraping blood and wood splinters from under her nails—
Someone was wiping at a wet gray slurry on her sleeve, stone dust and flecks of brain—
Mab realized it was her.
Chapter 47
* * *
FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, DECEMBER 1942
* * *
The final couplet of “Spark,” sonnet from Mired: Battlefield Verses by Francis Gray:
The spark is snuffed—and then another, too—
Too fragile-fine to flame above the rue.
Two sparks have gone out, and Bletchley Park mourns alongside one of its own.
* * *
There were more people present at the funeral than Osla expected—a group of Francis’s colleagues from the Foreign Office, some Coventry friends, his London publisher, a handful of literary admirers . . . and Mab. The widowed Mrs. Gray in the front pew of the Keswick church, red lipstick perfectly applied, black dress contrasting against a curiously frivolous straw hat with a blue ribbon.
“Why did Mab decide to bury him here?” Giles whispered when the service ended and the mourners filed toward the graveyard.
“Because she and Francis were happy here.” Osla hadn’t wept during the service, but she nearly wept now, thinking of Mab’s happy face after her Lake District weekends.
“But you’d think she’d do it in Coventry where he died,” said Beth.
“Why would she ever want to go back there? For God’s sake . . .”
Beth flushed dully over her ugly black dress. “It’s not the town’s fault. They didn’t know the raid was coming. Even if they had, they couldn’t have evacuated in time.”
Osla choked down the urge to scream. You’ve said that about eight times, Beth. What did it matter if the town couldn’t have evacuated if they’d known? No one had known that one of the bigger raids of the year was coming to hit poor little Coventry all over again.
“Even if they’d had word, the town couldn’t have emptied in time,” Beth insisted, as if she had to convince someone.
“It doesn’t matter. Mab doesn’t want to bury Francis in Coventry, and he has no family to say otherwise, so why shouldn’t she please herself?”
Mab hadn’t spoken to either of her billet-mates since the Coventry raid. She’d gone straight to London and refused to come to the telephone when they rang. Mrs. Churt had been the one to tell Osla, hoarse voiced, that Lucy had been buried already. Here, where our family could attend. Mabel’s gone to Keswick now, to put her man in the ground.
The mourners clustered around the grave as the coffin was lowered in, and Osla wished the Mad Hatters could have come. But Mab hadn’t spoken to any of them, either, and only Osla, Beth, and Giles were able to get last-minute leave.
They watched Mab drop the first clod of earth into the grave. Her face was a pale mask, the same mask Osla had seen when she was wrenched away from the terrible heap in the Coventry garden. Her rending shrieks had stopped as if a switch had been flipped. Oh, Mab, come back, Osla pleaded silently, looking at her friend’s empty face.
Would Mab come back—not just to herself, but to Buckinghamshire? What would Bletchley Park be like without Mab?
Somehow the graveside service was over. The mourners broke up, shepherded by a middle-aged woman in black crepe. “There’s a bit of luncheon laid out in my parlor,” she told Osla. “Do come get a bite, dear. How did you know Mr. Gray? Such a fine man . . .”
Osla watched Mab walk out of the churchyard in her pale hat. “Yes, he was.”
Beth was still looking at the grave. “Coventry couldn’t have been evacuated,” she whispered when the middle-aged woman hurried off.
“Shut up!” Osla exploded.
Beth started as if she’d been slapped. Giles put a consoling arm around her, and Osla looked away, strangling her black-bordered handkerchief. She knew she should apologize, but she couldn’t. All she could see was her own fingers letting go of Lucy’s tiny wrist—the silent, terrible heap of stones and beams—Mab on her knees in the rubble, cradling a tiny riding boot and giving those terrible choked screams . . .
In the hotel parlor, Mab managed to accept a tight hug from Giles before being walled off by suits and condolences. Osla and Beth stood with untouched plates of prune pudding, waiting for a chance to speak with her, but there wasn’t one. At some point the crowd cleared, and she was simply gone.
“She
went walking,” the hotel landlady said, clearing plates. “Around Derwentwater, up to the lookout. A lovely view up there.”
Osla and Beth exchanged glances with Giles, and Osla knew they were all sharing the same thought.
Mab wouldn’t throw herself off . . . would she?
No, Osla thought. Not Mab.
But her stomach rolled in sudden terror, and her mind flashed with a horrifically clear image of Lucy’s tiny body, pulled from the rubble. It was your fault, the thought whispered. You let go of Lucy. And if something happens to Mab, that will be your fault, too.
“Go,” Giles said, moving to head off some incoming gossipers. “She needs you both right now.”
Chapter 48
Last time Mab had taken this walk, it had been with Francis. We’ll bring Lucy, she’d thought at the time, head against his shoulder as they looked out at the lake. She let herself sink into that dream now: Francis pointing out the flowers she couldn’t identify; Lucy running after butterflies; Mab following in a summer straw hat. Francis would have carried Lucy over the steep bits of the climb—Lucy would have allowed that. At the very end in Coventry, she’d let him pick her up. She’d been learning to trust him. She would have let him carry her all the way to the top of the lookout here.
Only now she never would.
Why. The word had been echoing through Mab’s brain for three weeks now, about everything. Why. Why. WHY.
Why didn’t you marry him at once, instead of waiting until you were sure he was a good prospect?
Why didn’t you quit working at Bletchley Park and make a home right away for him and Lucy?
Why were you so careful not to conceive a child?
Why and if. The two most painful words in existence. If she’d married Francis Gray the week he proposed, they’d have had three more months of married life. If she’d resigned from BP, she would have had her family together every night when Lucy came home from school and Francis came home from work, not spread out and waiting because war work had somehow seemed more important. If she hadn’t been so careful to avoid conception, she might have had something of Francis besides a packet of love letters.
You have more than that, she reminded herself bitterly. You have everything you ever dreamed of, Mab Gray. She’d wanted to ditch the name Churt and remake herself as a lady of means, with no whiff of scandal that she’d ever been a cheap East End slut who gave birth out of wedlock. Well, she was Mrs. Gray now, and she was certainly a lady of means: Francis’s will named her sole inheritor of his modest royalties and not-so-modest accounts. She could afford all the fine hats and leather-bound books she wanted, and no one would ever know she’d given birth out of wedlock because her child was dead.
She realized that she was ripping her blue-ribboned hat to pieces and flinging them off the lookout. The ribbon went drifting down the hillside, as blue as the surface of Derwentwater, then the straw brim, then the wafty netting. In Francis’s wallet, returned to her with his effects, she had found a folded sheet of paper with a few scribbled lines in his writing:
But there were more lines, reworked and crossed out and reworked again, and at the very bottom he’d squeezed in a note: Work Lucy into the metaphor? Titania’s sprite Peaseblossom? Or is Luce more of a Mustardseed . . .
The pain clawed Mab like some hungry beast, doubling her over. It never hit when she expected it to—she’d stood entirely numb through Lucy’s funeral in London, through Francis’s here. Sometimes it crept up on her at night, leaving her sobbing, or it overcame her when she was pouring a brandy and wondering if she’d sleep if she drank an entire bottle. She never knew when it was coming, only that it would never stop. She was twenty-four years old; she’d been a mother for six years and a wife for less than one, and the pain was never going to stop.
Then she turned and saw Osla and Beth coming up the path onto the lookout.
Mab didn’t wait for either of them to speak. She pulled her head back and spat at Osla, hitting Osla’s black cashmere coat hem. “How dare you show up at his funeral, Osla Kendall. How dare you.”
“I came for you,” Osla whispered. “I’m your friend.”
“You killed them,” Mab rasped. “You let go of Lucy—you let her go, and Francis went tearing off after her—”
“Yes.” Osla stood chalk white and shaking, but she didn’t flinch from the accusation. “It’s my fault.”
“All you had to do was hold on to her, and you let her go.” Mab heard her voice scaling up and choked it off. She would kill Osla and Beth right here and now if she cried in front of them. “We—if we’d got to a damned air-raid shelter—”
“You can’t blame Osla,” Beth whispered.
“Yes, I can.” Mab felt herself smiling mirthlessly. The smile hurt. She welcomed the pain, dug into it, ate it raw and sopping red. “I can blame everyone.” The Luftwaffe, for bombing Coventry. Herself, for insisting Francis take them there. Francis, for stepping left instead of right to get out of the garden. “But all Osla had to do was hang on to Lucy’s hand, and she fucking let her go.”
“I did.” Osla’s eyes overflowed, tears streaking sooty and black down her cheeks.
“She was my daughter,” Mab whispered. “You killed my daughter.”
“She was your sis—” Beth began automatically, literal as ever, and then even Beth stopped dead, her eyes huge and horrified.
Osla trembled. “Oh, Mab—”
“Shut up.” Mab was shaking, too, now. “Don’t you say a goddamned word to me ever again, Osla Kendall. Don’t you dare.”
Chapter 49
The tiny lake at Bletchley Park sometimes froze thick enough in wintertime for skating. Some off-duty codebreakers were playing hockey today, bashing sticks around the ice, but Beth ignored them. She stood on the bank, looking at the beaten-steel sky, thinking of Coventry. Francis and Lucy—Mab’s daughter. Osla and Mab . . .
I can’t tell them, Beth thought, breathing raggedly. Not ever.
Couldn’t tell them how all hell had broken loose in ISK, tearing Beth away from the message she’d been decrypting about the Coventry raid . . . someone shouting about Allied forces and North Africa. Suddenly everyone had been gathering round the radio, breathless with excitement. It was the kind of turnaround that made all the double shifts worthwhile, Beth thought—the moment you finally understood what you’d been working on for so many months. “So that’s what Operation Torch was,” she’d marveled, hearing of Allied landings in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, and Dilly’s women had all cheered because now they could look back at the October rush and realize what they’d done. Because they’d cracked the Spy Enigma, the German agents had been turned and forced to feed false information about where Operation Torch’s convoys were headed. Because of ISK, Operation Torch had hit like a bolt from the blue and Rommel in his desert headquarters was having a very, very bad time of it.
Beth hadn’t come back to the message about the Coventry raid for hours, and when she did, her duty had seemed quite clear. She’d just witnessed the importance of secrecy firsthand—even the slightest leak outside Park walls could have turned Operation Torch into a slaughter. You can’t tell Osla or Mab, she’d thought, filing the Coventry message. You swore an oath. So when she bid them goodbye in the canteen later that morning, knowing they were off to catch the Coventry train, she’d done it with barely a hitch. What were the odds, after all, in a city well accustomed to bolting for air-raid shelters at the first blare of a siren, that her friends would be hurt?
You were wrong, Beth thought now, breath catching painfully.
But it didn’t matter. What was the point of telling now, when the damage was done?
So she gulped a breath, took the secret, and mentally filed it away as she stood beside the frozen lake. She had begun to find it quite easy, dividing life into compartments. There was the code and everything that came with it. And there was everything else—her friends, her family, Harry, everyone—who had to come second.
The code came first.
When Coventry and all its losses were neatly boxed up, Beth waved to the hockey players and picked her way across the icy lake path, pausing midway as she saw a mass of Hut 8 cryptanalysts spilling across the lawn, cheering at the top of their lungs. Brilliant Joan Clarke, whom Dilly wished he’d poached for his section; Rolf Noskwith drinking directly out of a wine bottle—and Harry, veering away from the pack and picking Beth up, swinging her over the frosty grass.
“We did it, we bloody did it! A pinch off U-559—we’re back in. We’re back in the bloody U-boat traffic!”
“Harry!” She kissed him jubilantly, every worry that had been consuming her falling away. “I knew you’d get in.”
People were spilling out of huts and blocks, letting out cheers as the news spread. The U-boat blackout had gone on too long not to be common knowledge at BP, even if no one outside Hut 8 knew details. “Christ, Beth,” Harry was whispering into her hair, still holding on to her like a lifeline. “I wish I could tell you how we got in. I wish you’d been there.”
“You can’t tell me anything, it’s all right, I don’t care—”
He kissed her again, hands pulling through her hair, and Beth heard ripples from the people around them. It would be all over Bletchley Park in hours: little Beth Finch and Harry Zarb who had a wife and child at home. She didn’t care what people thought. It wasn’t an important secret.
Not like the one she’d just buried.
Ten Days Until the Royal Wedding
November 10, 1947
Chapter 50
Inside the Clock
Beth wasn’t released from the straitjacket until after supper. Chafing her numbed hands, fighting the hangover of the injections, she wandered into the common room looking for a game of Go and her partner. But the board sat abandoned, the sharp-eyed woman nowhere in sight. “Didn’t you know?” another of the women said. “She was taken off this afternoon. Surgery.”