The Number of Love

by Roseanna M. White

  “Excellent. I knew you could do it.” He took her hand, squeezed it, and tucked it into the crook of his arm as they turned. “This will be good for you, Dot. I bet you’ll soon be writing to tell me about all the new friends you’ve made.”

  “Oh . . .” Her fingers dug into his arm. “I’ll just pray for one friend, for now.”

  Drake bit back a sigh. Her prayer was not because she hadn’t the faith that the Lord would send her more, but because she lacked the faith that she could cope with more. “I’m sure the Lord will provide.” He always did. First a friend in their neighbor, Ada, when they were small. And then even an honorable young man who wanted to protect and cherish her in adulthood, in Ada’s brother. Blasted war, taking that chance from her.

  “And I should write to Ada when we get home. Tell her I found a position.” She angled a teasing smile up at him. “Have you any message you’d like to include for her, brother dear?”

  “Certainly. Ask her if the chauffeur at Ralin Castle ever got to drive a Renault.”

  “Drake.”

  “What?” He grinned down at her. “No telling the next time I’ll make it to the Cotswolds, but if she’s to be there for the duration of the war, she could well run into the chauffeur.”

  “You’re hopeless.”

  “I believe the word you’re looking for is sane. Glad as I am that you and Ada have always had each other”—at least until Ada and her parents had fled London soon after Nelson was killed—“you know very well I can’t tolerate her for more than an hour at a clip.”

  “Well, you could if you just tried.”

  Exactly what he was looking for in a wife—someone he had to try to like. Rolling his eyes, Drake led his sister toward the lift. “Let’s not ruin a perfectly good day with talk of Ada. What would you like to do in my remaining hours of leave? Catch a show? A moving picture? Perhaps take a turn through the museum?”

  “I think . . .” Dot pursed her lips as she considered, sending her eyes up to the ceiling. Drake braced himself, fully expecting her to say she’d prefer something at her flat: for him to read to her, or make a meal for themselves at home, or do a crossword puzzle. But instead she grinned. “A moving picture. I haven’t been to one for ages.”

  Perhaps Drake’s smile was as much relief as actual pleasure, but if so, his sister didn’t point it out.

  Maybe she would be all right in this new position. Maybe it would stretch her just enough. Maybe the firm but fair authority of Hall and Hambro would be just what she needed.

  Maybe he’d have only simple things to worry about while he was away . . . like the German agents out to identify and eliminate him. Far more easily managed than a sister who was afraid to leave her flat.

  Water. It closed in around him. Rushing, thundering, filling his vision and his lungs and his every sense. Black and turbulent and overpowering. He thrashed against it, trying to find his way to the surface. But the depths sucked at him as the ship went down. They reached greedy fingers toward him.

  He could hear only the roar of the water, but he could imagine the rest. The screams of the other passengers. The shrill whistles. The hundreds of feet pounding toward the lifeboats.

  He sucked in a breath and coughed. Coughed until the blackness cleared and blinding white replaced it and he convulsed his way off the pillow. His hands found not the wood of the lifeboat’s sides, nor the life vest he’d snatched, but rather the cot of the hospital bed he’d been in . . . how long now? A day? A week?

  Boynton. He coughed again and cursed the very name in his mind. Cursed the blasted U-boat that had fired its torpedoes at it. Cursed the order that had told him to be on it.

  Another cough came from the bed beside his. He peeled his eyes open to see his neighbor wiping at his mouth. Their eyes caught. The other fellow jerked his head toward the game board he’d set up on the rickety table between their beds and lifted his brows in question.

  They hadn’t told each other their names. What did it matter? They’d play a few rounds while they were both in hospital, then they’d go their separate ways. The end.

  Anonymity. His best friend.

  He nodded and, after convincing his diaphragm to relax, swung his legs over the side of the cot.

  How long before he could get out of this place? He had to get back to his flat. Check for messages. Get word to the Continent that he would be delayed.

  Try to determine if the High Command had purposefully tried to kill him.

  “You take black today.”

  He nodded and accepted the little velvet bag of game pieces. He’d always preferred black. Something about making the first move made the whole game seem more conquerable.

  “I usually prefer black,” his neighbor said. With what might pass for a smile on his lips, he shoved a handful of disheveled hair out of his eyes. “But you seem a good bloke.”

  “Do I?” His voice sounded scratchy and hoarse to his own ears. And his lungs still burned.

  The other chap laughed, until he too lapsed into coughing again for a moment. Pneumonia—that’s why he was there. Pneumonia. The same word the doctor had muttered to him as the primary fear after his ordeal.

  “You’re right. Hard to say, isn’t it? We’re all good. We’re all bad. The hero in our own stories. The villain in someone else’s.”

  It sounded like something Heinrich would say—but his brother had always wanted to be the hero in every story, his own and every other. “I never pretend to be the hero.”

  The bloke lifted his water glass in salute. “Smart. Why bother? Sometimes . . .” His gaze went distant, cloudy. As troubled as the waters that sucked down the Boynton. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m even still alive. Maybe I drowned. Maybe I’m just a ghost. Yūrei. Le fantôme. El fantasma. Das Gespenst.”

  His lips turned up. Heinrich could keep his heroic tales. “I always liked the ghost stories best.”

  His companion took a sip of the water. “They’re the only stories based in reality these days. More men are dead than alive, it seems. Everyone is gone. I’m gone.”

  He wasn’t. And yet he had been for years. He reached a shaky hand for his own water glass and lifted it. “The wisest way to be. Already dead. Just a ghost.” He took a sip and then eased the cup back down. “I’ll call you Yūrei.”

  Yūrei chuckled. “Suits me well enough. And you? The French or Spanish or German?”

  He spoke them all fluently. “Your choice.”

  “Hmm.” Yūrei shook the white stones from his own velvet bag into his hand and placed them on the intersections of the lines on his side of the game board. “Das Gespenst. In honor of the U-boats that landed us here.”

  Das Gespenst. “That’ll do.” He slipped the last of his game pieces onto the board and made his first move. And tried not to curse the U-boat again. Or the High Command that had first ordered him on the Boynton and then ordered it sunk. Why? Had he lost their trust? Or were they simply incompetent, one department not communicating with another?

  His fingers tightened around his black stone. He would have to assume the worst. And then prove to them that he was still useful.

  They’d made no more than four moves each when the nurse came in, a clipboard in hand and a smile on her face. “Good news for Mr. Walsh and Mr. Williams. You both get to go home today.”

  So much for anonymity. But . . . no. He preferred Das Gespenst, really. He’d do well to remember that a ghost was all he could afford to be. He coughed again into his handkerchief and let all the tasks awaiting him fill his mind.

  First and foremost, get in touch with Berlin.

  His lungs burned. His chest ached. And his spine had no interest in straightening. He’d served them well all these years, hadn’t he? Why would they have decided to take him out?

  He nodded at Yūrei. “After the game?”

  3

  Margot put down her pen and stretched out her lower back, knowing well it wouldn’t be so sore if she would listen to her mother and mind her posture. And she tr
ied. But over the course of the day, she always ended up hunched over her desk.

  The walk home would loosen all her tight muscles though. Not that it was time to go home yet. She checked the dainty little watch on a pendant that her brother had given her for Christmas last year and saw that it was only noon. She’d made good progress today.

  Noon. Blast. She’d been planning on pausing to eat, but if she did so now, she’d find herself surrounded by all the secretaries on their lunch breaks.

  “Ah, what good timing today, oui?” Maman slid Margot’s latest decrypt off her desk and gave her a far-too-knowing smile. “You can eat with us.”

  She stifled a groan. Barely. “But I really ought to get through one more telegram—”

  “Nonsense.” Obviously not trusting her to do anything other than pick up her next assignment and get to work, her mother tugged Margot away from her desk. “Come.”

  “But Maman—”

  “Do not make me say it again, Margot. No matter how brilliant, you are still a young lady. You need to associate with other young ladies now and then.”

  Margot made no reply to that. There would be no point, and she wasn’t one to waste breath that could be better spent on other words.

  “Here.” Maman bustled to her own desk, slid Margot’s decrypt into the In basket, and handed her the neatly typed stack of papers from the Out basket. “Hold these a moment, will you? I need to deliver them to the commander on our way out.” She reached for the bags that contained what little food they’d been able to find on their last trip to the shops. Grains were getting far too scarce. And sugar . . . sugar was a luxury Margot missed like nothing else.

  Margot jostled the stack of typed decrypts until their edges all aligned. “I can run them over now.” There’d be little hope of slipping away at this point, and no real purpose to it. And it wouldn’t be too bad, if she could just sit with her mother and perhaps Lady Hambro. It was only the younger women, the secretaries, she’d rather avoid.

  Maman made no objections as Margot slipped out of Room 40 and into the room across the hall, where Commander Willie James was bent over his desk. Up until a few months ago, it had been Herbert Hope at this desk, and Margot hadn’t yet grown accustomed to the style of their new head of day-to-day operations. But then, he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to them either.

  Now, for instance, he was staring rather blankly at Frank Adcock. “I haven’t the foggiest notion what you just said, old boy.”

  Adcock huffed. “Well, I say, Bubbles, if you’d but pay attention, you’d have puzzled it out. It’s a poem, I tell you.” Adcock shook the telegram. “Not one of the standard codes at all, but a key of some sort.”

  Margot pressed her lips against a grin when the man scowled at the name Bubbles. The teasing had been merciless in the office ever since someone had realized that a painting of him as a child staring up at a bubble he’d just blown had been used in a soap advertisement years ago.

  But despite the mutual bafflement between their new leader and the staff, Commander James had managed to organize them far more effectively over the course of the summer. Margot needn’t ask which basket she was to put her decrypts in; she had only to slide the stack into the one marked Intelligence and slip back out.

  Maman stood in the hallway waiting for her, their lunches in hand. “Outside, perhaps? The sun is shining again.”

  And they’d better enjoy it while it lasted because all too soon autumn’s rains would be upon them. Margot nodded and accepted one of the brown paper bags. She tried not to ponder how little was in it. One would think that after three years at war—including a few months in Belgium, where food had been so scarce they’d been waiting in bread lines within the first several weeks—that she’d be used to the lack.

  But one never really got used to it. Especially not with the newspapers full of images of newly arrived American troops. Doughboys indeed. To European eyes, all the Americans looked pudgy.

  “I think I had better begin knitting that cardigan for little Zurie tonight. How big do you think she will be by Christmas?” Maman asked as they started down the stairs.

  Margot sent her mother an amused look. “Well, in my considerable experience with small children, I think they probably grow at a rate of—”

  “Never mind.” Maman laughed and bumped their shoulders together. “I forgot with whom I was speaking. Perhaps instead I should ask what you decided to make for your niece.”

  Margot shook her head. “I have decided that I love my niece enough that I will not make her anything.”

  Maman turned wide eyes on her. “Margot!”

  As if she’d neglect Zurie altogether. “I bought her something instead. I found a beautiful collection of children’s stories by a lady named Beatrix Potter. Far lovelier than anything I could create.”

  Maman faced forward and pressed her lips together. Whether in rebuke or to hold in a smile, Margot couldn’t tell from this angle. “Those fingerless gloves you knit last year were not entirely horrible. You are getting better.”

  Margot laughed at the obvious lie. “No I’m not. One of these days you’re going to stop trying to turn me into a knitter.”

  “It is an invaluable skill for a woman. Think how cold we would have been last winter without the clothing I made for us.”

  “Indeed, it’s a wonderful skill for you to have. But I don’t share it. If left to my own devices, I would simply have had to purchase a scarf.”

  “And then we would not have been able to put so much back in our savings.” As they stepped outside, Maman drew in a long breath of the autumn air. “The war will surely be over soon. We will go home, and who knows how much money we will need to repair our house—if it is even still there in Brussels? Who knows if our accounts will be returned to us, or if the Germans will have somehow drained all the funds from our banks? We need every pence we can save, Margot.”

  Margot’s fingers crinkled the paper bag. She opened her mouth, ready to defend the sum she’d spent on Zurie’s gift as being for the purpose of education and therefore worthwhile, but before she could speak, movement caught her eye. And more, numbers filled her head.

  The Pythagorean theorem. Then Euclid’s proof of infinitely many prime numbers.

  It was the Lord, calling her attention to something.

  To what? She let her gaze shift over the scads of people milling around, trying to identify what had demanded her attention. She frowned when she spotted a feminine figure slinking around a corner.

  Maman must have followed her gaze. She stopped in front of Margot, facing said corner, with her brows drawn. “I believe that is the newest secretary. Miss . . . Felton?”

  “Elton.” Miss Dorothea Elton. Margot hadn’t seen her since she delivered her to the admiral a week ago, but she recalled the name easily enough.

  “That is right, oui.” Maman nudged her arm. “You ought to go and introduce yourself, Margot. That young lady could use a friend, I think. She does not seem to fit in well with the other secretaries.”

  A mark in her favor. And the thought of following her around that corner made well-ordered numbers skip through her head, which was all the confirmation she needed. With a nod, she left her mother’s side and hurried after the secretary.

  Miss Elton didn’t seem to be aiming anywhere in particular. She moved at an amble, not a stride, letting her fisted hand bump into the white blocks along the wall at her side with every other step. The rhythm of it spoke to something in Margot.

  It took her only twelve steps to catch up. “Hello. Miss Elton, isn’t it?”

  Miss Elton startled and splayed a hand over her chest. “Oh! I beg your pardon. I didn’t hear you come up. Yes.” She held out that hand in greeting, but it was shaking. “Dorothea Elton. Dot, if you like.”

  Was the shaking from the surprise? Margot couldn’t think so. Not given the suspiciously red rims to her eyes. She clasped her hand and offered a smile that she could only hope was friendly. “I’m called Margot. Margot
De Wilde.”

  “How do you do?” Dot’s smile was a bit faded, a bit strained.

  Most people would expect such things to be politely ignored. Margot instead tilted her head. “Rough morning?”

  The sigh Dot let out trembled. “The work isn’t too hard. I’ve taken to typing rather well—Lady Hambro called me a natural at it this morning.”

  Dot’s response didn’t even pretend to answer Margot’s question. She started forward at the same pace Dot had been going a moment earlier. Within a step, their gaits matched. “If only work were all we dealt with in a new position.”

  Dot’s shoulders sagged. She wore rather typical attire for a secretary—a simple blouse, a simple skirt, a simple jacket. Her hair was pulled up into a simple bun. But there was something not so simple about the way the muscles in her face moved, as if she were trying to force them into an expression they refused to take. “How long have you worked here, Margot? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Three years.” At the girl’s quick glance, Margot renewed her smile. “I was among the first people hired, as was my mother. Before Lady Hambro, even.”

  Dot clasped her own elbows, creating a barrier across her middle. “I can’t imagine.”

  “I love it here. You’ll find the team to be an exceptional group of people. All so very different, all working in unique ways, but all toward a common goal. I do realize that we take a bit of getting used to, but—”

  “It isn’t that.”

  It wasn’t? After Margot made such a valiant attempt to be personable? Apparently her skill at getting to the heart of a person came far short of Dot’s brother’s. She still couldn’t quite fathom how he’d managed to plant her so firmly back in her childhood with one well-placed question.

  Her lips twitched. No, she was no Drake Elton. So she would be herself, instead. After a moment, when Dot didn’t volunteer what it was, Margot nodded toward the building across the street at which Dot now stared. “Eight thousand seventy-eight.”