by Kate Quinn
In the doorway, kit bag in hand, was her husband.
“HUT 6,” MAB said. “Then Hut 11 and 11A, then the mansion.”
“I worked Eastcote, Wavendon, the outstations,” Mike said. “After I was shot down, they heard I was an engineer, slapped the Official Secrets Act in front of me, and set me to fixing bombes.” He shook his head. “And you were one of the operators? I thought they were all Wrens.”
“I was a fill-in because I was tall. Then I became a regular.”
The two of them were working alone by the bombe. Osla had taken Valerie, the tweezers, and a heap of drums to the other side of the room, tactfully giving Mab and her husband some privacy. Mab sat tweezing wires apart and Mike was up to his elbows in the cabinet’s back wiring, stripped down to shirtsleeves and braces. Mab could hardly look her husband in the eye.
Mike had worked for Bletchley Park? Her own husband?
“How did we not run into each other?” He smiled, doing a delicate bit of work with narrow pliers. “I was called to BP now and then. It’s how I got to know Cohen, one of those three-in-the-morning canteen friendships. If I’d seen you, I’d have noticed.”
“When did you come, ’Forty-Four? Thousands at BP by then. We didn’t cross paths, that’s all.” It was perfectly possible—likely, even.
“So this is what had you flying south in such a hurry.” Mike swiped his forehead on his elbow. “A lot just straightened out in my mind.”
“I don’t like the lying,” Mab said, just to be clear. “But I don’t have a choice.”
He nodded. “It’s what you do.”
“When you’re us,” she agreed.
“Did he know?” Mike looked at her. “Francis.”
“Yes.” She focused on the drum, prising two crumpled wires apart. “He wasn’t BP, but he was in the same world.”
“Did that make it easier?”
“We—didn’t really have enough time to figure it out.”
“While we’re telling truth . . .” Mike wore that guarded expression he had whenever the name Francis Gray came up. “When I look at you, I think how lucky I am. When you look at me, you think how I’m not him.”
Mab looked down at the drum in her lap.
Her husband’s voice was steady. “Am I wrong?”
“Yes.” She tweezed two wires apart. “I don’t think of him when I look at you—because I’ve tried to block him out altogether. It hurts less.”
“I think you blocked us both in the same go.”
Francis: stocky and endlessly calm; holding her against him; rarely laughing. Mike: tall and exuberant; holding their babies; rarely without a grin. “Maybe I did,” Mab said, eyes filling until she could barely see the drum’s wires.
“I liked his poetry.” Mike reached for a spanner. “Read his book when I was in the RAF. Maybe we didn’t have the same war, and he wasn’t a flier, but I could tell he got it. War.”
“Yes, he did.” Her tears spilled over. Not a flood, just a trickle of pure pain for the man with the little girl in his arms, standing in the wreckage of Coventry with both their lives stretching before them.
“I don’t mind hearing about him . . .” Mike’s voice upturned at the end, the rest hanging unspoken: I just want you to talk to me.
“I’ll tell you more about him someday.” Mab wiped her eyes. “Right now, I’d rather hear about you. What was the work like, fixing bombes?”
Her husband took the diversion, turned it over with his laconic Australian smile. “Forty-eight hours sometimes trying to run down a fault, some Wren at your shoulder going into spasms. How was your work?”
“Tedious. Exciting. Stressful. Dull. A bit of everything.” Mab managed a smile. “Shall I tell you about the night all the Wrens and I stripped down and worked in our underwear?”
“Crikey, yes . . .”
Hours later, Mab and her husband rose, looked around the maintenance bay, and realized everyone but Beth had left.
It was midnight, the day before the royal wedding, and the bombe machine stood ready.
Chapter 81
Tomorrow,” Mab said, eyes gleaming, “or rather, later today, we’ll be seeing what happens when we plug her up.”
She and her husband left arm in arm, grubby from machine oil. The last to go, Beth realized. One by one the exhausted Mad Hatters had gone home to their unsuspecting families, crawled off to neglected flats for a few hours’ sleep, or gone with Osla, who was putting the rest up in her Knightsbridge digs.
“You’re sleeping here?” Harry had asked Beth, pulling on his jacket. He’d been first to leave this evening, just after Mike Sharpe had arrived.
“I made a nest of blankets in the supply closet. Peggy doesn’t want the machines left alone.” Besides, Beth had no desire to head outside, even on London’s outskirts, while Giles was in this city. “Are you going back to Cambridge?”
“I’ll stay and see it through. Christopher knows his dad has important work right now.” Harry smiled. “Sheila sends her love.”
Beth remembered something she hadn’t thought of until now. “Did Sheila’s flier survive the war?”
“He did, actually. Nice chap; I’ve met him. Sheila spends every Tuesday and Thursday with him at his flat in Romford.” Harry had nodded good night and headed out . . . and now everyone had gone and Beth was alone in the echoing space, looking up at the impassive bronze face of the bombe. “You’d better be useful,” she said aloud.
Feed me something useful first, it answered.
She wandered back to Boffin Island and leafed through the stack of messages again. “Come on, Rose. Open up.” Beth remembered why she’d called this cipher Rose to begin with: the way it furled in on itself, overlapping and secretive. It had taken her months to break Abwehr, and they didn’t have months for Rose. Or even days.
A knock came at the outer door hours later as Beth dozed over the decrypts. She roused with a start. Harry’s voice drifted: “It’s me.”
“What are you doing back already?” Letting him in.
“Bringing you a friend.” Harry set a covered basket on the floor, raising the lid. Boots popped his square gray head over the rim.
“Oh . . .” Beth crashed to her knees and swept up her dog. He wriggled and snuffled, trying to caper on his short legs, and her shoulders heaved. She wasn’t sure how much time passed, as she held her dog and told him she loved him, before she could look up at Harry through swimming eyes. “You brought him for me.”
“Your landlady’s glad to hear you’re well. I swore her to secrecy, of course.” Harry picked up the basket. “Good night again, Beth.”
“Stay.” The word fell out of her mouth before she could think about it.
He stopped, a vast shadowy shape against the door.
“Or maybe you don’t want to,” Beth rushed on. “All this week, you won’t really—look at me.”
Harry dropped the basket, returned in one long stride, and sank down to the floor beside her, reaching out slowly. His big hand warmed the side of her throat. “I didn’t know if you could bear to look at me,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“Because I left you there.” His voice was even, but his hand slid into her hair and tightened. “When your mother threw me out of her kitchen, I stumbled home and wept for you, when I should have been hunting up Commander Travis or Mab or Osla. I believed your gorgon of a mother, and you stayed there rotting—”
“Stop talking.” Beth linked her hands around his neck, heart drumming. “Do you want me? Do you love me? If the answer to either—I don’t even need both!—is yes, then please do something about it.”
Harry buried his face in her collarbone, shoulders shaking. For a moment she thought he might be crying, but he was laughing. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, slipping the first button of her dress loose, then the next. She helped him with the rest, wanting to climb inside him and never come out. He rose, picked her up, tripped over Boots, then walked into the little supply closet without taking his mout
h away from hers. He kicked the door shut, opened it a moment later, pushed Boots out with a “Sorry, chap,” and they pitched over onto the makeshift nest of blankets.
Three and a half years, Beth thought—but it was like they’d never been apart. Harry’s weight over hers; his hand catching her wrists and pinning them over her head; her toes locking around his knees as her back arched. Lying in the dark afterward, breast to breast, palm to palm, just breathing.
“You’ve got that look.” Harry rose to let Boots in. The schnauzer stamped around their twined feet, chuffing, then curled up on the floor with an outraged expression. “What are you thinking about?”
“Rods and lobsters,” Beth said sleepily.
“Thought so.” Harry’s chest vibrated with laughter as he tugged a blanket around them both. “Christ, but I love you.”
“PUT ON A scarf,” Osla told Beth at dawn when the rest of the Mad Hatters returned. “I can practically count the kisses, you hussy!” Beth, leaning over the stack of Rose, hair skewered back above her kiss-blotched neck with a pencil, barely heard a word. She’d been back at work since three in the morning, Boots was snoring on her feet, and she was deep down the spiral.
All through the day and into the winter twilight, Beth had the feeling that she’d wedged a fingernail round the edge of Wonderland’s gate. Rose was fighting, but she had it firmly in her grip, spiraling down toward its calyx. I beat the Italian naval Enigma, Beth told it. I beat the Spy Enigma. You’re no match for me, Rose. It wasn’t a match for Harry, either—Harry, who had gone to work right alongside her at three, periodically leaning over to drop a kiss on the nape of her neck. Or the Prof, or Peggy, or the Hut 6 fellow named Asa who’d rejoined them from Oxford when Cohen and Maurice had to return to their own offices.
We’re going to pry you open tonight, Beth thought calmly.
“We’ve got enough,” Harry said eventually, long past suppertime. No one had departed for meals or sleep—they were too close, and they were almost out of time. “The bombe can make a start with this.” It has to, he didn’t have to say. The hours were slipping away like grains of sand in an hourglass.
Mab peered at the mess of tables and letter pairs, rod squares and diagrams. “Can anyone make a bombe menu?” Beth looked at her blankly. “For God’s sake, the way they compartmentalized our jobs is just massively unhelpful.”
“Too, too frightfully shortsighted of them, darling,” Osla drawled. “Not to realize our pressing need for operational understanding if a treason case ever popped up.”
“I did menus at BP . . .” Asa was already turning Beth’s work into a tidy diagram. Mab took it with a nod, and everyone gathered round. Mab’s Australian husband watched with an enormous grin as his wife handled the complicated mass of plugs and wires like a snake charmer funneling vipers into baskets. Valerie Middleton was wide-eyed. “So that’s how it works . . .”
“Stand clear,” Mab ordered, and threw the machine into life.
The drums began to whir and rotate, their mechanical thrum filling the room and sending a bolt of excitement down Beth’s spine. “Looks so primitive now,” the Prof said, standing beside Harry. “Compared to the machines I’ve worked on since . . .”
The drums kept rotating and the mechanical whir kept rising. Mab’s eyebrows rose along with it. “Well, get back to the other messages,” she said, shooing the others. “Average time to a complete job is about three hours with a three-wheel army key like this and I’ll be doing multiple runs. Even when and if it breaks, we’ve no guarantees this message has what we need.”
Beth wrenched her eyes away from the hypnotic whirl, reaching for one of the other messages.
She couldn’t say how many hours passed, how many runs Mab did on the bombe machine as the others paced. At some point Beth looked up to see that the machine was still, drums frozen in a silence that left her ears ringing, and that Mab was running some sort of complex check on the Enigma machine, which until now had sat neglected. “Got to test the stops,” she muttered. “Find the Ringstellung . . . the Hut 6 Machine Room did this part, but I wasn’t there very long . . .” Everyone stood poised in suspense.
At last Mab looked up, swiped her dark hair out of her eyes. Grinned. “Job up, strip down.”
They were all cheering, voices echoing through the maintenance bay. Valerie pushed her way behind the Enigma machine, setting the wheels as Mab read off the positions. It was long past midnight, Beth realized as she rubbed one foot along Boots’s back—in fact, it might be near dawn. Harry wrapped his arms around her from behind; she could feel his heart banging away in his chest. Asa stood polishing his spectacles, Peggy jabbed a pin into the pale knot of her hair, Osla bounced on her toes. The Prof shifted from foot to foot. Mab leaned against one side of the bombe and her husband against the other, both muttering encouragement as Val laboriously hammered out the encrypted Rose message.
“Give it here!” Osla snatched the cipher text almost before it emerged from the machine. It came out in English, Beth could see at a glance, but the BP translator in Osla had snapped on duty anyway: she’d taken her place in the chain, separating the five-letter clusters into words with a few pencil strokes. Beth couldn’t stay back any longer; she rushed to look over Osla’s left shoulder, vaguely aware Mab had rushed to Osla’s right, and everyone else crowded behind.
Everyone’s lips moved silently as they read the broken Rose.
Beth spoke with quiet satisfaction, seeing Giles Talbot’s face under his red hair. “We’ve got him.”
Chapter 82
Giles, darling.” Osla kept her trill of greeting through the telephone perfectly natural. She was in a telephone box outside the repair lab; jammed into the box beside her, Mab gave a terse nod of approval. “Did I wake you?”
“Of course you did.” Giles’s sleepy voice came down the line. At the sound, Beth’s eyes got that unsettling feral glitter that prickled every nerve Osla had. No one was ever going to look at Beth Finch, since the madhouse, and think she was just a little mouse of a thing. “It’s six in the morning.”
Osla made a shoo gesture at the Mad Hatters, clustered around the telephone box. They gave her some room and she launched into it. “Don’t you dare get in a flap, Giles. I’m still furious with you for talking to the papers.”
“I said I was sorry.” His tone was wheedling. “You aren’t giving me the old heave-ho, are you?”
“I should, you know.” Osla made sure to sound pettish. “But I refuse to go to the wedding today without an escort, so consider yourself forgiven. I’ll swing by your flat in a few hours—”
“Nonsense, I’ll pick you up.”
“You don’t need to—”
“Darling, it’s the least I can do.”
Osla let it go. Push too hard to come to his door, he might get suspicious. “Bright and early,” she said, naming the hour.
“I’m your man, kitten.”
That’s the last time you’ll ever call me kitten, you rat bastard. Osla rang off, looking at the Mad Hatters. “Step two accomplished.”
Step one, of course, had been to ring MI-5 regardless of the hour—but lines were busy, phones rang unanswered, or harried-sounding voices insisted on taking messages rather than listening to a word. Peggy had no luck with her GCHQ connections either: “My superior’s out, and I’m not bringing this to anyone but him.” Osla hadn’t been surprised. No one in all of Britain—intelligence services, law enforcement, or constabulary forces combined—was going to have an ear free, not with the wedding of the century barreling down. “We go to London and sit on Giles ourselves until the wedding’s over and we can present him to MI-5 with our evidence,” Beth stated.
“Why sit on him? As long as he’s not suspicious, he’s not going anywhere.”
“What if he decides to ring the asylum a day early and finds out I’m gone? If we can’t get him arrested till after the wedding, I want him locked down.”
They swept the maintenance bay one last time and piled out aft
er giving the sheeted bombe a final pat. “I wonder when they’ll notice it’s suddenly in much better condition,” Mike remarked. Some of the Mad Hatters were returning home now that their part was done—the Prof ambling back to Cambridge, Asa to Oxford, Valerie muttering, “I have no idea what I’m going to tell my husband, absolutely none.” Peggy was packing the Enigma machine straight back to GCHQ, swearing she’d keep the lines ringing there until she had someone at MI-5 listening.
Five of them crammed into Mab’s Bentley and turned toward London: Mike driving (and wasn’t he scrummy, Osla thought—he and Mab were going to have the tallest children in the world), Mab beside him with Boots, Harry squashed in the back with Beth, Osla, and the file of decrypted Rose.
“Reminds me of hitching rides to London with half-sauced RAF pilots,” Osla said, trying to extract her elbow from Harry’s ear. “Squished together like sardines, barreling round blind turns absolutely pipped. Amazing we survived the war at all.”
“I was supposed to be hosting a royal wedding listening party today,” Mab observed. “I learned how to fold napkins into swans.”
For some reason that struck Osla as funny. Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or perhaps it was euphoria because today Giles Talbot was going down. Soon everyone was howling with laughter as the Bentley barreled toward the heart of London.
Where it hit the traffic that had come in for the wedding, and stopped dead.
“TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE Giles nips round!” Osla hurled the door of her flat open, sprinting straight through to the bedroom. It had taken literally hours to crawl through the city toward Knightsbridge; they’d abandoned the Bentley and run the last six blocks. Beth now collapsed with Boots under her arm, scarlet as a telephone box, and Mab was doubled over wheezing. “Now will you cut down on the bloody cigarettes?” Mike demanded, limping in last due to his old knee wound.
Osla had already hurled off her crumpled skirt and was shimmying into the tube of silver satin she’d set aside for the royal wedding. Giles would knock; Osla would answer the door looking abbey-ready; she’d ask him in for a cigarette—My nerves are all a-jangle, darling—and as soon as the door was shut, Harry and Mike would pin him. Giles Talbot was going to spend the rest of the day and night here, the Mad Hatters sitting on him until they could escort him and the Rose file to MI-5.