by Kim Izzo
The girl hugged her load and reached out her hand. “I’m Dorothy.” She gestured to the other two girls. “That’s Joan typing and Violet’s the one filing her nails. She shouldn’t do that in here. Anyway, welcome aboard.”
Henry returned to her side as Dorothy scuttled away. “I’m to take you to Commander Hope,” he said.
Isabel followed Henry to an isolated desk that was set up on the far side of the room. Seated on a simple wooden chair was Commander Hope. He looked up as she was introduced and without a smile said, “Miss Nelson, welcome to Room 40. We perform a vital job for the Admiralty and for the war effort.” Isabel nodded, too nervous to speak. She felt Henry touch her arm. She looked at him and he winked. Then he was gone and she was left alone with Commander Hope. “How much have you been told about our work?” he asked with no hint of his own friendly wink being forthcoming.
“Not a thing, Commander, sir,” she said. It was true. Mrs. Burns had been incredibly vague about her assignment. The other new girls had been told in front of the others whom they would work for and in what department, and were free to ask questions. When it was her turn Mrs. Burns had handed her an assignment sheet that only listed the room number. When Isabel asked for more information Mrs. Burn had replied sternly, “You will know soon enough.”
“Glad to hear it,” Commander Hope said, and seemed to relax his posture somewhat. He reminded Isabel of a professor. “What goes on inside these walls is a secret. I trust you can keep a secret?”
“Yes—yes, sir,” she stammered, unsure why he’d ask such a thing of her.
“When we’re through here, I’ve asked Alastair Denniston, he’s my second-in-command, to instruct you in the details of your job. In the meantime you’re required to sign this . . .” He handed her a government document. Isabel quickly scanned it.
“The Official Secrets Act, sir?” she asked, as if she needed confirmation.
Hope raised an eyebrow. “Is it going to be a problem for you, Miss Nelson?”
Isabel shook her head furiously and, grabbing a pen off the man’s desk, she scrawled her name in the space given and proffered the paper to him. He studied her closely, her sudden eagerness no doubt off-putting to a man accustomed to well-trained sailors and naval officers. “Thank you,” he said. “I cannot overemphasize how seriously we take discretion, Miss Nelson. Nothing that happens within these walls must ever be spoken of outside of them. Now please go find Denniston. Good luck.”
“You’re welcome, Commander Hope,” she declared, and with a surge of optimistic energy saluted him. The inappropriate gesture made him smile, but only slightly.
She found Alastair Denniston waiting for her. He wasn’t a tall man, but was rather good-looking. Judging by his heavy eyelids he hadn’t slept in days, though his suit appeared freshly ironed. Beside him was an ashtray overflowing with discarded cigarettes. A few empty whisky tumblers dotted the table but there was no evidence of whisky.
“Are you any good at math?” he asked her.
“Math, sir?”
“Do you speak German?”
Isabel felt flustered. “I can do basic arithmetic. But I don’t speak German.” Her answer seemed to disappoint him.
“Very well” he said. “I always like to ask new recruits.”
“I do know some Morse code, sir,” she said, grasping at anything that might impress him. It worked.
“Well, then. If you have a knack for that sort of thing we may have to train you beyond secretarial duties,” he said.
“What is it you gentlemen do here exactly?” she asked, and looked around the room at the men, pencils in hand, scrawling madly. “Are you writing a book?”
“What makes you ask that?” He laughed.
“All the paper, sir,” she said. “Though it doesn’t seem very organized.” As soon as the words had left her mouth she regretted them. Who was she to critique the Admiralty? Fortunately, Denniston smiled. “That’s why we need you and the other ladies,” he answered, and lit another cigarette. “But if you would like to be in on the great mystery, the holy of holies, I can tell you.”
Isabel’s eyes narrowed. Was he teasing or mocking her with such an odd expression? “Yes, I would.”
Denniston exhaled a ring of silver smoke. “Cryptography,” he said with a sly grin.
She had never heard the word before. “We decipher code,” he said as though that explained everything.
“Throughout the country there are amateur ham radio enthusiasts whom we’ve enlisted to intercept wireless transmissions from the enemy via our Hunstanton Coast Guard Station in Norfolk. These men are supplementing the work being done elsewhere by the Post Office and Marconi operators.”
Isabel knew this only too well. Her employer in Oxford, George Chambers, was one such man. She had worked for him as a housemaid and he had written her a letter of reference and sent it personally to the Admiralty. Isabel and another girl named Mildred Fox had been let go at the same time for very different reasons. She didn’t know what had become of Mildred. But she felt certain now was not the time to mention Chambers or the letter of reference. What had happened to her in Oxford was as secret as anything in Room 40.
Denniston continued. “All of these various groups send the intercepted German messages to the Admiralty. We have men here who take down the messages, which were encrypted and encoded by the Germans, and send them to us through the pneumatic tube system. Then we find the key to the code, decipher the messages and translate them. As you’ll soon learn that’s why so many of us are linguists, we knew nothing of code breaking when we began last autumn. But Fleet Paymaster Rotter was able to find the key and decipher the encrypted messages. From what is intercepted we can track every movement of the German High Seas Fleet. Are you following me?”
Isabel nodded and he went on. “Most messages are fairly routine, dull you might say. But we’ve found that when organized and compared they often reveal information of vital importance. Indeed we’ve grown so accustomed to the routine messages that when ones arrive that are not routine we pay close attention. This has proven to be useful.”
“Yes, sir,” was all she could manage to say. Her mind was whirring with all this startling information.
“Now where you come in is that each message is typed up and copied and logged. It’s soul-destroying work, I grant you. But it’s our orders from the First Lord of the Admiralty himself. Then Commander Hope interprets the messages from the naval standpoint and passes them along to the Director of Intelligence, Captain Hall, then up the chain of command. Our work is so secret only nine men know of our existence in the whole of the British Empire.”
It was a lot to take in. She looked at Denniston expectantly, but he seemed content to wait for her to ask questions.
“Oh,” was all she could manage. He seemed disappointed and she couldn’t take that so she quickly added, “How do you break the codes?”
Denniston grinned, satisfied by her curiosity. “Follow me.” He crossed the room to where three great books lay; one was more massive than the others and had covers made of lead. There, Fleet Paymaster Rotter and another man, a Mr. Curtis, were introduced to her. They were hard at work on something and after a swift how-do-you-do their heads were bowed over the papers in front of them. Denniston seemed to look at the books as though they were religious artifacts. He ran his hand across the lead cover of the largest.
“This is the Signal Book of the Imperial Navy, Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine, or the SKM,” he told her. “It was captured by the Russians and given to the Admiralty in October. It took us a while to understand how it worked.”
At this Rotter lifted his head from his work. “It was easy.” He grinned in such a way that made it obvious it was anything but.
“Don’t let him fool you, Miss Nelson,” Denniston continued. “Rotter was a real hero. He broke the cipher last November.”
Rotter appeared self-conscious. “Don’t listen to a word he says,” he said modestly. “We’re a team
here. I got lucky.”
“By guess and by God,” Curtis added.
Denniston explained at length the difference between codes and ciphers. To send messages in code the codebook was required by both the sender and recipient. To send a message in cipher no book was needed but instead the plain language, or en clair, was enciphered by substituting letters from a key that both parties had access to. Another method was transposition or scrambling of letters; again a key was needed to descramble. Sometimes both methods were used. He explained how the SKM was no use on its own because messages weren’t just coded but were also enciphered. “But we were fortunate to intercept enough numbered messages to realize how they were doing it and now we can be quite accurate.”
She took shorthand notes but most of it was too confusing to grasp in one afternoon. By four p.m. another man, by the name of Norton, arrived to begin his shift. Denniston nodded in his direction. “I’m going to have Mr. Norton finish with you. He’s a naval instructor by trade so he’ll be able to explain the rest.”
Norton seemed perplexed by his new order. “Should we waste our time teaching the girls?”
Isabel flinched. Denniston glared. “Yes, Mr. Norton. Teach Miss Nelson to know as much as the others do so she can properly understand her role and how to perform her tasks.”
Norton threw his coat on a chair. “It’s not like they’re going to be breaking codes.”
“Mr. Norton, one day you may find women doing the same job as you and more. They work as hard as any of the men and complain half as much, if at all.”
“If you insist,” Norton said.
“I do.” Denniston turned back to Isabel. “I’m going home to get some rest.”
She watched him move slowly, a mark of his exhaustion, to the closet, where he grabbed his overcoat. He didn’t say goodbye. She looked to Norton. There was no point in trying to make friends after his outburst. If he wanted no-nonsense then she would oblige.
“Shall we continue?” she asked him bluntly.
Norton grabbed another of the enormous codebooks and gave it to her. It was heavy and well-used, its cover ragged and dirty. “This is the Handelsverkehrsbuch, or HVB. It fell into our hands along with the SKM. The Germans use it to communicate with merchant ships but we’ve discovered that U-boat commanders use it as well, though they’ve come up with more complex ciphers to try and prevent us from knowing where they’re going.”
“Do the Germans know we have these books?”
“Indeed they do. So far they haven’t issued new codebooks. But look at these monsters, that is a massive undertaking.” He then picked up the third book. “And finally this is the Verkehrsbuch or VB, the Transport Book. They use it to communicate with their naval and military attachés, embassies, you know, diplomatic Intelligence.”
“So that’s the most important codebook?” she asked.
“They all have their purpose,” he said. He crossed to a bureau on one side of the room and picked up a folder full of handwritten transcripts. He handed it to Isabel. “See to it these get typed up by the end of your shift.”
He might be done with her but she wasn’t finished yet. She noticed a large tin on the table that had the letters N.S.L. printed on it in black letters. “What goes in there?”
Norton snorted. “That’s for all the codes and messages we can’t break. The letters mean ‘neither sent nor logged.’”
“I see.”
“Let me show you another riveting item,” he said, and took her to an enormous closet. He opened it and she saw that inside were shelves loaded with paper.
“What a mess,” she said, panicked that its organization might fall to her.
“Stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yes. Messages that were intercepted and translated but have nothing to do with the navy. Though I did hear that some Jerry sent a very good strudel recipe over the wireless to his brother who’s stationed on a destroyer. And I think Mr. Anstie uncovered that one of the kaiser’s top admirals is having an affair with his secretary. Those types of transcripts we call stuff and we stuff them in here.”
“Understood,” she said.
“Now be a good girl and type those up,” Norton said, and tapped the pile of transcripts in her arms.
“Excuse me, Mr. Norton. I have one question,” she said.
Norton looked at her, his patience wearing thin. “Yes?”
“I understand that Room 40 is run by Commander Hope and Captain Hall. Mr. Denniston mentioned a First Lord of the Admiralty. What is his name?”
Norton straightened up like his head was attached to a pulley. “That’s none of your concern.”
She swallowed. “I didn’t mean any disrespect, sir. I thought it would be good to know the names of those in charge is all. I want to do a good job and Mr. Denniston made mention of there being only nine people in the Admiralty who know of Room 40.”
“I won’t tell you all nine. But those who matter most are Chief of Staff Admiral Henry Oliver, who presides over Captain Hall, director of the Intelligence division, and you’ve met Commander Hope already, he runs the day-to-day of Room 40. They all report to Jacky Fisher, the First Sea Lord. But the First Lord of the Admiralty runs the show. He’s a civilian and a dandy in every sense of the word. I mean that with all due respect, of course.”
“Of course,” she repeated. “And his name?” It was her turn to be impatient.
Norton picked up his jacket from the back of his chair and removed a package of cigarettes. It seemed to take an eternity for him to light the damn thing. He took a drag and blew smoke into the air, waving at it casually so it didn’t drift into her face. He grinned slyly.
“Winston Churchill.”
Sydney
Your sister will be the ruin of the both of you.” Mr. Garrett’s pronouncement of impending doom was spoken with unwavering confidence. “Not that you’ll fare much better, Sydney. Making me wait until half past four. No doubt you were at another of those godforsaken rallies for the women’s vote.”
Sydney looked out the window of the second-floor sitting room, the one with the peony chintz drapes, to the bustling street below. She smiled when she answered him. “We are both difficult in our own way. But wouldn’t it be dull if Brooke and I felt the same about everything? And I was not at a rally this afternoon.”
Mr. Garrett smiled, relieved. Then . . .
“I was at an abortion clinic,” Sydney said. “I’m giving them a large donation.”
Mr. Garrett sputtered but composed himself quickly, fully aware which side his bread was buttered on. “Politics aside, you are a grounded, albeit headstrong, girl. Your sister, however, lives in a world that seems to be governed by plots from romantic novels. And given that it is my responsibility to manage both your inheritances, I must go on the record as saying I do not advise this scheme of hers.”
Sydney turned away from the window of her family home, which stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-Fourth Street. It was a Georgian brownstone that might have co-existed elegantly with its neighbour’s façade had it not the added distinction of fire-engine-red shutters on its top-floor windows and an equally vibrant red door. Its number—828—was emblazoned in gold (what else) and set inside a bronze rectangular plaque that had turned verdigris since being affixed, in 1883, onto the wall facing Sixty-Fourth Street. Three stone-arched windows imparted a gothic air. Within the walls of number 828 were five floors of living space designed to impress even the most discerning Gilded Age millionaire. There was a vast parlour on the main floor, what the family preferred to call a “salon,” and it was painted a slightly less garish red than the shutters and door. On the second floor were two additional sitting rooms, smaller than the salon, both with fireplaces and one more feminine than the next. The kitchen and staff rooms were in the basement. The other floors were the family’s bedrooms. One floor per daughter, the younger on the third, the elder on the fourth, and the fifth, with its uncompromised view of Central Park, was the d
omain of Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Sinclair. The top floor had sat empty for some time. Mr. Sinclair, who had accumulated a vast fortune in California oil during the 1880s (thus building on the already extensive fortune his own father had amassed during the California gold rush of 1848), had passed away at the ripe age of sixty-seven, during a snowstorm in the winter of 1914. His wife’s death had predated his by sixteen years.
Sydney crossed the room and took a seat on the lavender silk divan beside Mr. Garrett. He was normally stern, practically despotic, now he acted like a nervous grandmother. She reached over and placed her hand on his arm.
“We agree on that much,” she said. “She’s read too much Jane Austen. But she is the eldest and perhaps is even more headstrong than I.” At this she removed her hand and sat upright, smoothing the creases in her forest-green dress before folding her hands in her lap.
“It was a mistake not sending you to England last fall,” Mr. Garrett said darkly. “Perhaps things wouldn’t have happened so quickly, so carelessly. You could have talked some sense into her.”
“I’m not my sister’s chaperone,” Sydney answered sharply. “Brooke wanted to secure a title and she has done so. Well, at least once the wedding takes place. She will be Lady of the Manor and that suits her sensibilities. Besides she’d scarcely have listened to me; you know she and I aren’t as close as some sisters are. We lead different lives. Now she will move to England and lead an even more different life.”
“But neither of us have met this man!”
“Gentleman,” Sydney teased. The situation required levity. “He will one day be Sir Edward Thorpe-Tracey, a lord, the third earl of Northbrook, making my sister Lady Northbrook.” With that said, Sydney laughed. It was so absurd to her.
“I can’t abide the thought of handing over every last penny of Brooke’s money to some—some—Englishman. I don’t care if he’s the Lord Almighty himself. What would your father say?”
“Our father is dead,” Sydney answered solemnly. How she missed him. “You can imagine, as I can, he wouldn’t like the idea one bit. He was American, through and through, and the thought of his money leaving the country would not please him. Perhaps we can be thankful he’s not here to see it. But in the end he would want Brooke to be happy.”