“I beg your pardon?”
“Bricks. In that building.”
A few of Dot’s facial muscles smoothed out. “You counted?”
“Of course not. I calculated.”
A bit of a smile snuck into the corners of her mouth. “What of that one?” She motioned to the next building down, which, much like the OB, was a combination of white blocks and red bricks—though much smaller.
“Two thousand bricks. Nine hundred twenty-two blocks. Thirty-four windows.”
Now the smile even reached the young woman’s blue-grey eyes. “What about . . . stitches in my blouse?”
“Hmm.” Margot leaned close enough to see how small they were, approximated the length of seams and hems and cuffs. “Ten thousand, three hundred sixty.”
“Really?” Dot lifted her sleeve and studied the cuff. “That many?”
“Give or take twenty, depending on how the seams are joined.”
A droning sound filled the air. They both stopped and tilted their heads back. Margot’s every muscle went stiff until the aircraft zoomed overhead.
Dot visibly relaxed. “Sopwith.”
“One of the new Camels, I think.” Hand up to shield the sun from her eyes, Margot watched it as far as she could. Definitely not a German Gotha, which was the important thing. Only a few of them had made it all the way to London, but when they did, hundreds died.
Not today though. Not here. Thank you, Father. Eight, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-six . . .
“Would you like to sit and eat with me? I’ve been finding a bench facing the arch.”
“That sounds lovely.” She was a bit surprised at how true her statement felt. But thus far, Dot was certainly the least objectionable of all the young women around. Margot could even come up with what she assumed Maman would deem reasonable, friendly questions to ask. “Are you from London?”
“All my life, yes. Well, mostly.” Wincing, Dot led the way around the corner. “I’m not much of one for travel. There was one time when I went to visit my mother’s family in Spain. And another time when I went on holiday with my friend, Ada, to the Cotswolds. Perfectly pleasant journeys by all accounts, but . . . I prefer to stick close to home.”
“Spain! How interesting.” To look at the Elton siblings, she wouldn’t have thought they were Spanish. But that was no doubt silly of her, to expect them to fit some sort of mold when it came to their coloring. “Given your surname though, I’m assuming your father is English?”
“Was.” A few clouds shadowed her voice as she said it. Dot motioned to a bench. “He passed away just before the war began. Some sort of cancer. My mother—she died in a boating accident when I was only nine.”
“I’m very sorry.” Margot slid to a seat on the bench. “My father died not long before the war began as well. I still miss him. Every day.” She missed him every time that she picked up pen or pencil, let the numbers flood her mind, and used it to turn an encoded message into plain script. Every time she drew out a notebook in their flat and set to work on a theorem. Every time she read a newspaper and looked for secrets hidden within, though she well knew there was no one to plant them for her now.
He’d be proud of her. Proud of what she did. Perhaps he was looking down on her from heaven and smiling . . . but it wasn’t the same. She hated that she’d never get to show him all the discoveries she’d helped make, the codes she’d helped break. She didn’t get to come to him in joy whenever a codebook was recovered from a sunken U-boat or German agent. He was so much a part of who she was. And yet he was gone.
She shook herself. “But I have Maman still. Sophie De Wilde—I think you’ve met her? And my brother, Lukas.”
“Oh, yes, she’s been very kind.” Dot opened up her lunch sack. Then paused. “Wait. Lukas De Wilde? The violinist? I’ve a recording of him!”
Margot smiled and reached into her own bag. “Yes. He came to Wales with the orchestra in the first days of the war, to help raise money for the Belgian Relief Fund. Now he stays here in London to be close to us, rather than touring with the others. Well, and because his wife’s family is here.”
“He’s so very talented. And how lovely that you’re all together.” Dot pinched a bit of crust from her sandwich and tossed it to a flock of pigeons.
A waste of precious grain, Maman would say.
But the pigeons needed to eat too. Margot tore off a small piece and sent it to them as well. “Does your Spanish family ever visit you here?”
The young woman’s laugh didn’t sound very amused. “Oh no. Never. Abuelo never leaves his house in Bilbao, and he is all the family my mother had. I have an aunt though, on my father’s side. Aunt Millie. We lived together until just recently. That bombing in Poplar shook her far too much, and she finally fled for the countryside. So it’s just me here now. Except for when Drake is on leave, of course.”
His image sprang to mind—amused eyes, ready smile, knotted nose. The evidence suggested he hadn’t discovered her name before he left, but he’d certainly have no difficulty now that she’d volunteered it to his sister. Margot tore off a bite of bread and cheese and grinned. “Your brother? The one who brought you here last week?” She popped the food into her mouth.
Dot nodded as she chewed a bite of her own. “It seems I’ve scarcely seen him since the war began. And before that, he was attending university in Spain. But he’s always been attentive, as brothers go.”
“I know just what you mean.” Lukas, too, had spent much of Margot’s childhood traveling on tour with the orchestra. Of course, he was quite a bit older than her too, already practically grown by the time she came along. Still. He was her brother. He had always been one of the dearest people in the world to her, and she was glad they lived so near to each other now.
Silence fell for a moment as they both took another bite, interrupted only by the sounds of the busy street before them and the coo of the pigeons feasting on their crusts.
Then Dot drew in a long breath. “It isn’t the work. It isn’t even all the strangers I’m expected to remember. It’s . . . I hate leaving the house. It hurts. No one understands that, no one can grasp how my chest gets so tight at the very thought of needing to go out. I can manage it one day a week without too much stress. Twice, if someone is with me. But every day? Every day.” Her hands shook again as she lowered her sandwich to her lap. “I don’t expect you want to be burdened with such a friend, so I won’t take it personally if you keep your distance. I’m a wreck. Aunt Millie declared it completely irrational of me to prefer to stay here in the flat I’ve made my home rather than flee to safety. I couldn’t explain to her that it feels safer than somewhere new.”
Margot kept her attention on a car sputtering its way along the street. “I get itchy. So itchy it hurts—not when I need to leave the house, but when something doesn’t make sense, including people and their faulty reasoning, which means I’m itchy more often than not. Wanting to stay at home is a rather reasonable inclination, in my opinion. I’ll never judge you for it.” Now she looked over and found Dot looking at her. “I’m not a secretary—I’m one of the cryptographers. I hate fashion, I hate gossip, and I absolutely cannot stand girls who giggle over every man who sends a smile their way. So if you want to walk the other way, I won’t begrudge it.”
Peace in her eyes, Dot shook her head.
“Well then.” Margot smiled and reached into her bag for the handful of almonds Maman had tucked in there after Margot had made both their sandwiches. She handed a few to Dot and popped the others into her mouth. “It looks as though we might as well be friends.”
Dot munched on her nuts and didn’t say a word. Just smiled a little and relaxed against the bench.
Margot did the same. This could work. Which she had pretty much known the moment the Pythagorean theorem spun through her head upon spotting her.
Mathematics never led her astray.
4
Margot.”
She looked up, numbers still clouding her eyes unt
il she blinked. Admiral Hall came into focus. He stood at her side, irritation on his face and a paper in his hand, which he slid onto her desk. “Would you? It’s from Thoroton. I’ve been called in to a meeting with the First Sea Lord.”
He looked none too happy about it, that was for sure. But then, she knew he had not been pleased with how Jellicoe had been running things of late.
Her gaze dropped to the paper. With a glance, she saw that it was one of their own telegrams, not an intercepted one, encrypted in the code Hall used with his agents and operatives in the field. All it would take to decode it would be to pull out the book he’d slipped her a year ago for occasions such as this and perhaps twenty minutes of deciphering. “Of course. Shall I just put it on your desk when I’m finished?”
“Yes, that will do.” He patted her shoulder. “How is the latest German codebook working for us?”
“Quite well.” The cryptographers in Room 40 could break the new variations day by day—that was simply a matter of finding a new starting place in an existing pattern. But to unravel the pattern itself was a different story, and the Germans were constantly changing their codebooks. Oh, they could crack the codes by sheer mathematics—eventually. They’d done it with Code 13040. And while that might be more sporting, it also took more time. Months, years more time. And they hadn’t that leisure.
Hence why DID offered prizes to divers who could recover German codebooks from U-boat wreckage. That was where this latest one had come from, which she was now using to render a message sent last night to UC-44, a German minelayer. Putting Thoroton’s telegram aside for now, she tapped the page on which she was writing the translation. “I could be wrong, sir, but . . . but so far this reads rather knowledgeably. ‘Sweeper to be in harbor at midnight on Tuesday. Postpone operations until Wednesday and then proceed. . . .’”
Hall grunted. “You’re right. Our minelaying code must have been compromised—that’s the only way they’d know when our sweepers would be out clearing the waters. Well.” A mischievous twinkle entered his eyes—the very sort that had always been in Papa’s whenever he had an idea for a new puzzle to hide for her. “If they have our minelaying code, let’s use it against them. Would you mind encrypting something for me too?”
In answer, she pulled out a blank sheet of paper and handed him her pen. If it was something to be put into the minelaying code, which she suspected it was, she’d have to fetch the codebook from downstairs. But for the pleasure of getting to encrypt and not just decrypt, it would be well worth the exercise.
Hall leaned over and scratched a message onto the page. In minelaying code. Harbor clear. He drew a horizontal line under that quick message and then wrote In personal code. To harbor master. Close harbor to all traffic. Do not—I repeat, do not—clear mines already laid.
The light of mischief traveled from his eyes to the corner of his mouth, which turned up in a smile. “There we are. We’ll send the all clear tomorrow, which the huns will intercept, letting them think all their mines are gone. Then, when they come to lay more, they’ll come across the ones still there. How is that for turnabout?”
Margot chuckled and accepted the pen back from him. “Perfect, DID.”
He patted her shoulder again and then turned away. “Just leave the encrypted telegram with the decrypt of the other on my desk, if you would. Thank you, Margot.”
“Of course.” She picked up her pen again and went back to the original U-boat message. It only took her a few minutes to work through the rest of it, given that she’d almost been finished already. There. She set the completed decrypt into the basket for a secretary to type up and deliver to Commander James. And then she turned to the work from Hall.
First, the fun bit. She rarely had the opportunity to encode anything, so she took the five minutes necessary to fetch the British minelaying codebook from downstairs, then pulled out Hall’s personal code from her own desk drawer and got down to the pleasurable task of encrypting. Given the brevity of the messages, it didn’t take long.
But it made the numbers hum in her mind. It made her shoulder warm where Hall had patted it—where Papa always had too, when she’d managed a task he’d thought would challenge her. Where sometimes she imagined God resting His hand.
She turned then to the message from Thoroton. With Hall’s codebook still before her, she got down to work on the considerably longer message from their head of intelligence in the Med.
Briefing from Spain. Twenty-two agents currently in the field. From Madrid . . .
Hall often asked her to work out the messages sent to him. Just a month ago she had decoded a briefing from Thoroton in Gibraltar, but this was the first she’d done from Spain. Perhaps she would have ciphered it with less interest had she not a new friend who was half Spanish. But with Dot in mind, she tackled each line rather eagerly. She knew Spain was officially neutral, but she also knew both England and Germany had been working behind the scenes ever since the war began to win favor with the Spaniards—both the officials and those in positions that could prove useful.
From Corunna . . .
Her pen kept working as the numbers flipped along inside her mind. With the codebook before her, it was a simple task. Easy enough that her mind wandered as she wrote, and she remembered one of Hall’s early bids for Spain’s favor. He’d sent an agent into Spain on a private yacht to wine and dine whatever harbor officials he could find. The Germans had done the same at nearly the same time . . . but they had only brought beer. Hall’s agent had requisitioned the best champagne to be found, and the officials had been friends ever since.
Not that Hall’s superiors approved of the use of navy funds for champagne and private yachts, but they in Room 40 had thought it hilarious and had cheered on their intrepid leader.
From Bilbao . . .
Margot’s pen stilled. Not because the name was familiar, thanks to the stories Dot had been telling her of her family that resided there, but because of the sudden silence of the numbers in her mind.
And then there was a quick succession of them that had nothing to do with the code before her. The Lord, all but shouting at her. Pay attention!
Her breath knotted up in her throat. There had been plenty of times over the years when those numbers instructed her to pray for someone. But never while at work, when she was decoding something.
Interesting.
Agent Eighteen has been searching diligently for any stores of wolfram within the city. If we can find them here, we can track anyone else showing interest in it. Thus far nothing, but he has a lead he intends to pursue on Tuesday. Will update on outcome.
Tuesday—today. Margot’s pen stilled. Was this what God wanted her to pray about? Twelve, one hundred forty-four, one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight, twenty thousand seven hundred thirty-six . . .
She would take that as a yes. Eternal Father, whatever this Agent Eighteen is doing now, I ask that you protect him. Make a way for him, clear the path, ensure his safety. Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four . . .
Not until the numbers tapered off did she breathe out again. Pick up her pen again. And focus again on the telegram.
From Cartagena . . .
Drake kept his gait smooth and casual as he walked along the street, even whistling a popular tune that anyone listening would recognize and dismiss. Just a normal Spanish man, out for a stroll before he retired to his home for an afternoon out of the heat.
The glance he sent upward took in the tall, narrow windows in the building. A warehouse, without question. But was it the warehouse? The one he’d been searching for this past fortnight? He couldn’t be sure until he looked inside.
That, though, was proving a challenge. The windows were too high up for him to see into from the street and too dusty to give him a clear view from the building across the way—he’d tried that yesterday.
He was running out of time. If he loitered around this neighborhood much longer, people would begin to notice him and wonder who he was, why he’d s
uddenly appeared. They’d start asking questions.
No one knew better than he that questions could lead to answers—and he didn’t much fancy anyone finding answers about him.
He had to get inside. There was no other option.
At the corner, he paused. A lorry was rattling by, giving him a good excuse not to cross the road. He leaned against the building instead. Into his pocket he reached for a slender cigar, a cutter, and a match. He didn’t much care for them, to be perfectly honest, but they did provide handy cover when he wanted to stand in one place for minutes on end and not look suspicious while doing it. He sliced off the end of the cigar, slid the cutter back into his pocket, and struck the match.
How could he verify the contents of the warehouse? He’d asked that question days ago and had made a list of the possibilities. He could look through the windows—failed. He could engage and weasel information out of a worker—attempted but not successful. He could try that tactic again. Go back to that dingy little bar and buy another glass of wine for the sweaty bloke he’d tried to strike up a conversation with last night. But the chap was more interested in his sangria than in talking and had only grunted his replies.
He could get inside. The trickiest but surest option. Drake drew on the cigar to get it to light, careful to keep his distaste from showing on his face. Abuelo loved these things, but for the life of him, Drake couldn’t determine why.
Once the cigar was smoldering, he leaned against the building as if it were there solely to hold him up on a lazy afternoon.
Dark eyes filtered into his mind, full of intelligence that begged many a question. What was she called? No doubt he could discover that easily when next he went to London. His sister would be able to tell him. But more to the point—would she perhaps have dinner with him? Give him another taste of that wit of hers?
He sighed around the cigar. Even if she did, what then? Unless the war was over by the time he reached London, he’d just be sent away again in a week. Hardly enough time to get to know someone.
The Number of Love Page 4