by Kate Quinn
Osla waved a hand. “He’s last year’s news, darling.”
“Good. You sounded very low for a while there.”
“I’m really quite a fizzing sort, normally. You’re just always running into me when I’m in a blue funk. Heartbroken, or recently bombed, or incarcerated . . .”
“Yes, why are you in jail, exactly?”
“’Fraid I can’t say. Official Secrets Act.”
Major John Cornwell rubbed a hand through his dark hair, looking bemused again, but the sergeant’s voice interrupted. “You’re free to go, sir. Sorry for the inconvenience. And you, Miss Kendall, have been cleared to make your telephone call.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” Osla told J. P. E. C. Cornwell with a sparkling smile, breezing past him for the front desk. Where her trump card hit the table as she rang a number by heart:
“A message for Prince Philip, please—yes, the Duke of Edinburgh. I’m aware he’s at his wedding breakfast.” She lowered her voice and murmured for a long moment, as every policeman within earshot gaped. “No, I can’t give any further details. But he gave me this number for any moment of dire need, and that need is now.”
Chapter 85
*****SECRET: INTENDED RECIPIENT EYES ONLY*****
AS PER PENALTY OF PROSECUTION UNDER OFFICIAL SECRETS ACTS 1911 AND 1920
21 December 1947
* * *
Our red-haired chap has been very talkative. After we’ve finished picking his brain, I recommend our Kiloran Bay facility in Scotland—significantly more secure, if more bleak, than the sanitarium which failed to hold Miss Finch.
One final thought . . . there are hints that our red-haired chap is not the only compromised individual in our circles. Once the current matter is finished, I suggest we divert our efforts toward this new information. Time to settle accounts.
It looks dead,” Mab said.
“Deader than Manderley after the fire,” Osla agreed.
Beth gazed across the weed-choked lake at Bletchley Park’s mansion. The green copper dome and elaborate brickwork thrust against the gray winter sky, and a few people came in and out—but BP had changed. The long block buildings and old green huts were shuttered for Christmas, the grounds all but empty, but it was more than that. Beth shivered in her smart new tartan coat and scarlet scarf, bending down to rub Boots’s head. She was suddenly glad she hadn’t come alone.
“It’s not usually this empty. The space is rented out now, for training courses and so forth.” Osla’s breath puffed in the cold; in her full-skirted ivory coat edged in silvery mink, complete with mink hood sitting on her dark hair, she looked like a Christmas tree fairy. “If it weren’t two days before Christmas, this place would be bustling.”
“Not with our kind of bustle.” Mab looked at the mansion. “Remember the day we arrived, and you called it Lavatory Gothic?”
Beth still couldn’t say a word. The mansion’s double doors, which she’d pushed open in the dead of a rainy night with Matapan’s decrypted battle plans in her fist . . . the lakeshore where the Mad Hatters had discussed so many books . . . the Cottage, out of sight from here, whitewashed and homely. Mentally she opened the door to see Dilly Knox at his desk. Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes . . .
Tears blurred her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Neither Osla nor Mab argued. They turned, meandering back toward the gates, which were no longer manned by stern guards. A faint sprinkling of snow frosted the ground.
“So we’re all done with our debriefings.” Mab stalked along in forest-green trousers and a long jade-green coat, a fedora like a man’s slanted across her brow. “MI-5 isn’t going to call us in again, surely.”
“Doubtful, darling,” Osla said. “Did either of you find out just why the Russians were discussing Giles via Enigma traffic in the first place? I asked during my interview, but the chap got dreadfully snippy.”
“Peggy told me after her debriefing,” Beth said. “My guess was right. The Reds captured a German Enigma machine during one of those back-and-forths across Soviet territory. They passed a few messages through Giles’s contact in London, trying it out—Giles was hoping they’d adopt it for their own coded traffic. Our Y-stations were monitoring Soviet radio chatter, so it was flagged and Dilly saw it.”
“What do you think happened to Giles?” Mab stared at the lake, and Beth knew she was remembering when she and Osla first clapped eyes on him: wading out in his drawers, grinning and friendly.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to know,” Beth said, indifferent.
“What’s more, I don’t give a toss,” Osla pronounced. “As long as he’s gone.”
They wandered clear of BP, not looking back. “Are we all going to the station?” Osla asked at last. “I’m nipping back to London, Mab’s off to York. Don’t tell me you’re going to the village to see your family, Beth.”
“No.” The Finch family was in an uproar: first Beth’s escape from Clockwell, then her official release, then the news that her father had left Mrs. Finch out of the blue. He’d moved to a tiny flat and was refusing to come home; the house would apparently have to be sold; Mother had taken shrieking to her bed; none of Beth’s siblings wanted her to live with them . . . Beth had already decided the entire matter could be worked out without her. “I’m waiting here. Harry’s driving over from Cambridge.”
Osla cocked her head. “You and Harry . . . is that still on? Don’t you want something more, I don’t know, usual?”
Marriage, Beth supposed she meant. Children, a house, a man’s shoes to line up with hers. Beth shook her head but smiled. “It’s what I want, and it’s very much still on.”
“Well, where are you going to live? You can bunk with me in Knightsbridge as long as you like, you know.”
Bless Osla, Beth thought, but no. Three and a half years in the asylum; what she craved now was space to herself. Space to process what had happened to her, let the bad dreams come, get through it and out the other side. Harry understood that without a word needing to be said—he’d wangled her a clerk’s job at Scopelli’s Music Shop in Cambridge, and a room too: Mr. Scopelli says you can use the old bomb-shelter bedroom in the back, until you get digs of your own. Beth imagined mornings alone with Boots and a cup of tea, listening to Bach partitas; afternoons quietly working the counter; Sunday mornings in chapel, thinking of codes as hymns soared. Harry bringing lunch from his college every day, staying the night when his family could spare him . . . She smiled again. For now, that sounded fine.
“I still think MI-5 owes you compensation,” Mab said tartly. “Locked up unfairly and still managing to bring a traitor to their door? A little cash to rent you a flat is the least they could do.”
“There might be something, eventually.” Beth knew she wasn’t going to work at the music shop forever. If you want the sort of job that uses our skills, come to GCHQ with me, Peggy had said after their final debrief. Even without a war, Britain needs people like us. They’d leap for joy to get you.
Yes, Beth thought. Her work was a drug she had no desire to ever purge from her blood; she wanted to go back to it . . . just not quite yet. She was no longer trapped inside the clock, but she didn’t feel like she’d entirely caught up with time outside it, either.
“To tide you over until those chintzy MI-5 snakes cough up”—Osla took out her cigarette case and extracted a flash of green from among the Gauloises—“here. Pawn it.”
Beth looked at the ring with its emerald the size of a halfpenny. “You’re sure?”
“I thought about throwing it in Giles’s face when we were arrested,” Osla mused. “But really, why should he get it back? And outside novels, who really tosses emerald rings around like seashells, anyway? I’d far rather it went to rent you a flat.”
Or maybe, Beth thought, it could pay for treatment for her Go-playing friend still locked in Clockwell. To see if anything might be done for her. “Thank you, Os.”
“Give me one of those cigarettes?” Mab asked b
efore Osla put away the case. “And a light . . . ooh, what’s that?” Examining Osla’s silver lighter. “JPECC?”
“The Honorable John Percival Edwin Charles Cornwell,” Osla said, lighting two Gauloises.
“How the hell do you walk into jail with a traitor and walk out again with a lord?”
“He’s not a lord, yet. His father’s the seventh Baron Cornwell, that’s all. They have an absolutely topping place in Hampshire. I’m visiting over New Year’s, once I’ve negotiated my new post with my Tatler editor.” Osla passed Mab’s cigarette over. “Christmas in York for you, my queen?”
“I’ll be back in time to bundle Lucy and Eddie up for their first snowball fight. You wouldn’t believe how excited Mike gets about snow. It’s an Australian thing.” Mab turned her wedding ring around her finger. “It’ll be good to be home.”
“Funny thing about homes.” Osla looked thoughtful, taking a deep draw off her cigarette. “I was always thinking I didn’t have one, not really. Houses, hotels, places to stay, but no home. No real family. Not really belonging anywhere.” She looked back at Bletchley Park. “But there’s this place.”
“This place is dead,” Beth pointed out.
“We still belong here. All of us. Look how everyone answered the call, even people we barely knew like Asa and the Prof, Cohen and Harry’s cousin Maurice. All hurrying out to Courns Wood without a question asked. That’s a kind of family.” Osla smiled, a few snowflakes catching in her dark lashes. “Not exactly the sort of family I was always dreaming about, but it still counts.”
They stood in the softly falling snow, putting off the moment of departure. Osla returning to London, Beth thought, me to Cambridge, Mab all the way back to York. Despite Osla’s talk of family, what were the chances they’d ever meet up again without the work of Bletchley Park to draw them together? The three of them had nothing in common besides BP. In the normal course of life, they would never have crossed paths at all.
“Thank you,” Beth blurted. “Both of you. Breaking me out of the asylum, hiding me . . .” It had to be said, they had to be thanked. What if she never got the chance after today?
“I don’t need thanks.” Mab took a last drag on her cigarette. “Duty, honor, oaths—they are not just for soldiers. Not just for men.”
“I want to thank you anyway.” Beth took a deep breath, eyes blurring. “And—and I’m sorry. Coventry. Not warning you . . .”
She couldn’t hold their eyes. She looked away, back toward Bletchley Park.
“Bloody hell, Beth.” Mab dropped her cigarette, grinding it out under one high-heeled boot. “There are things I don’t want to forgive you for, you or Os, and maybe I won’t ever be able to completely. But that doesn’t mean we don’t—” She stopped. Looked up, brows slanted at their most ferocious angle.
The rushed three-way hug was fierce, spiky, awkward. Beth felt the silkiness of Osla’s mink against her cheek, inhaled Mab’s familiar perfume.
“Look—” Mab scowled as they pulled apart. “Trains run all the way to York. Don’t be strangers, you two.”
“We could pick a book, start up the Mad Hatters again.” Osla swiped at her eyes. “Meet at Bettys, have a Tea Party with actual scones and jam . . .”
Beth pushed her wave of hair behind one ear. “I’ve been reading the Principia Mathematica.” She found Isaac Newton flat going, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of intriguing spirals round the edges of the complicated exercises Harry showed her. Spirals of numbers rather than letters.
“Oh, darling, don’t make us do maths,” Osla groaned. “What about The Road to Oz? I’ve been devouring Baum.”
“Too fantastical,” Mab complained. “There’s a new Hercule Poirot coming out—”
“We never did agree about books,” Osla said.
“We never agreed about anything,” Mab snorted, and checked her watch. “I’m going to miss my train.”
A final nod, and then Beth stood before the gates with Boots whuffling about the frozen ground, watching the ivory coat and the jade-green coat swing up the road.
“Osla!” she called suddenly, almost shouting. “Mab!”
They turned in unison, those two smart brunettes who had stalked with such style into the Finch kitchen and Beth’s life in 1940. Beth filled her lungs: “‘These have knelled your fall and ruin . . .’”
Osla caught on first. “‘. . . but your ears were far away . . .’”
Mab picked it up. “‘. . . English lassies rustling papers . . .’”
They finished in a triumphant shout: “‘. . . through the sodden Bletchley day!’”
And for the last time in decades, Bletchley Park resounded with the laughter of codebreakers.
Epilogue
* * *
Duchess of Cambridge Reopens Bletchley Park
June 2014
* * *
Job’s up, strip down!” The replicated bombe machine stops, and the Duchess of Cambridge smiles at its demonstrator during her tour of Bletchley Park, Britain’s now-famous codebreaking center. During the Second World War, this stately home thrummed with top-secret activity as thousands of men and women worked to crack the unbreakable Axis military codes—a feat that according to many historians shortened the war by at least two years.
The former Kate Middleton, stunning in military-style navy-and-white skirt and blouse by Alexander McQueen, officially reopens Bletchley Park after a yearlong restoration project that has restored the mansion and its surrounding huts to their wartime appearance. The site deteriorated into near-dereliction after the war but now hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. The duchess has a personal reason for visiting BP: her grandmother Valerie Middleton, née Glassborow, was employed in Hut 16. Retracing her grandmother’s footsteps, the duchess met with veteran codebreakers such as Mrs. Mab Sharpe, who works part-time at BP as a bombe machine demonstrator. Mrs. Sharpe—a gray-haired, unbent five foot eleven at age ninety-six—instructed her old colleague’s granddaughter in the art of intercepting and decoding a Morse code message.
“What an incredible story,” the duchess said. “I was aware of it when I was a young girl, and often asked Granny about it, but she was very quiet and never said anything.”
“We didn’t talk in those days, ma’am. We still don’t.” Asked if women like herself were ever called to put their talents to use after the war, Mrs. Sharpe gave a noncommittal smile. “Oh, no . . . it’s enough to see the work appreciated today.”
It’s not a view shared by all Bletchley Park veterans, even now that the term of secrecy has officially expired. Mrs. Sharpe, surrounded by six-foot children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, appears happy to reminisce with Bletchley Park visitors. Other veterans have refused to release their stories until after their deaths—view the spate of posthumous memoirs, such as Bletchley Bletherings by Lady Cornwell, née Osla Kendall, the award-winning satirist and Tatler columnist whose droll, touching account of her time as a Hut 4 translator was not published until after her death in 1974. And other veterans consider the oath of secrecy binding in perpetuity. Miss Beth Finch, retired GCHQ, is known to have served as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts, but the white-haired ninety-eight-year-old in her rose-pink cardigan politely refuses to discuss her war work: “That would be a violation of my oath.”
The code of secrecy upheld by Bletchley Park’s workers is fully as remarkable as their codebreaking achievements. In an age of instantaneous social media, jaws drop at the idea that thousands of men and women were simply handed the most incendiary secret of the war and kept it, to a man (or a woman). Churchill famously referred to them as “the geese who laid the golden eggs, but never cackled.”
Despite the bustle of Bletchley Park today—the camera flashes of the royal visit, the millions of visitors come to marvel at the bombe machines—something of that golden silence still holds over these grounds in a hush of honored and unspoken secrets. There are stories here still untold, without a doubt: stories loc
ked in steel-trap codebreaker minds, behind steel-trap codebreaker lips.
Bletchley Park’s walls have been renovated. If only they could speak . . .
But some codes will never be broken.
* * *
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Meet Kate Quinn
About the Book
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Author’s Note
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About the Author
Meet Kate Quinn
KATE QUINN is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the twentieth century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, and The Rose Code. All have been translated into multiple languages. She and her husband now live in California with three black rescue dogs.
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About the Book
Author’s Note
“The biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain.”
A gate guard described Bletchley Park in those words—and to the bemused eyes of many, wartime BP more resembled a madhouse or a wacky university campus than a top-secret decryption facility. Codebreakers pitching tea mugs into the lake after fits of rumination; codebreakers cycling to work in gas masks to avoid hay fever; codebreakers playing rounders among the trees, sunbathing nude on the side lawn, and prank-riding laundry bins into unlocked loos—BP’s reputation for eccentricity was inevitable, given its tendency to recruit nerds and oddballs. The staff had an extraordinarily relaxed attitude toward weird personalities; square pegs weren’t required to fit into round holes, and in consequence worked spectacularly well at their nearly impossible job. Without the achievements of the people who so thoroughly cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma codes used by the Axis powers, the war might very well have have been lost. At the very least, it would have dragged on much longer and cost many, many more lives.