Princess Elizabeth's Spy

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  From below, the knocking had turned into insistent banging. Alistair wrapped his flannel dressing gown around himself and made his way down the narrow, steep staircase.

  “All right, all right!” he called as he made his way to the door. When he opened it, he was blinded by the bright flashlights shining in his face.

  One man, older, with bushy gray eyebrows and thick lips, stepped forward with an air of importance. He was wearing the uniform of the British Home Guard. “We’ve come for Marta Kunst!” he bellowed. “Where is she?”

  “My wife is Marta Tooke. We’ve been married for over thirty years.”

  The man pushed past Tooke, into the hallway, and the rest, a group of four, followed. “Marta Kunst Tooke is charged with being an Enemy Alien under the Defense Act, B Registration.”

  Alistair felt a prickle of fear run down his spine, but he wasn’t going to give the man the satisfaction of knowing it. “Yes, yes—we know that,” he said, running his hands through his thick white hair. “But her papers are all in order. And we work for the Royal Family!”

  He could hear Marta making her way down the creaky narrow staircase. “I’m taking care of it,” he called to her. Still, she came, fully dressed in a heavy wool skirt and cabled cardigan.

  “Marta Kunst,” the man said to the tiny older woman, “you have relatives in Germany. You’ve sent them chess moves, which our censors suspect to be code. You’ll be sent to a British prison camp until the authorities get to the bottom of it.”

  “What?” Marta put a blue-veined hand to her throat. “I write to my Cousin Albie—we play chess! It’s perfectly innocent!”

  “We’ll see about that,” the man said. He gestured to his comrades. “Take her.” Without preamble, they clamped a pair of handcuffs on her and began to lead her out of the house.

  “Marta!” Alistair called in anguish.

  “It’s all right,” his wife said, trying to reassure him. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  They hustled her out the door and into the waiting van.

  “I’ll do everything I can!” Alistair called after her. “I’ll go to the King!”

  The London police identified the woman who checked into Claridge’s under a false name and was shot in the bathtub as Victoria Keeley, missing from Bletchley Park. An autopsy had revealed that from the angle of the gunshot wound, suicide was an impossibility.

  As soon as the word Bletchley was introduced, MI-5 took over the case.

  Peter Frain, head of MI-5, immediately called in Edmund Hope, his Bletchley undercover operative. Edmund was a former London School of Economics professor, until he’d been in a car accident that killed his young wife and severely injured him. He’d been recruited as a spy and been at Bletchley since its inception, posing as a brilliant but mentally unstable code breaker. But his real job was working for MI-5, tracking a suspected traitor in their midst, one that could ruin everything everyone at Bletchley was trying so hard to achieve. Victoria Keeley’s death could possibly be linked to the spy.

  The two men met late at night in a small conference room in Bletchley’s main building, the former manor house. It was the first time the two had seen each other since the events of the summer, where, among other things, Maggie discovered her presumed-to-be-dead father alive and well—and working for MI-5 at Bletchley Park. But Edmund and Frain had known each other for years and enjoyed an easy camaraderie.

  “Victoria Keeley worked as a teleprinter,” Edmund explained. “She wouldn’t have access to the decrypts themselves. Bletchley’s extremely careful not to let anyone know anything they don’t need to—each hut knows very little about the other parts of the operation. However, Miss Keeley was beautiful,” he said. “She had a lot of beaux. Specifically, some of the code breakers.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  Edmund shrugged. “Lately a young code breaker named Benjamin Batey—I saw them together a few times. He would have had access to that sort of decrypt too. Miss Keeley may have gotten her hands on it somehow and passed it on to someone.”

  “There was no decrypt found in the room. Worst-case scenario is that whoever killed her took the decrypt as well.” Frain stood up. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s bring young Mr. Batey in for a chat, shall we?”

  “One more thing,” Edmund told him. “I hear you’re going to have Maggie working with an agent named Hugh Thompson.”

  “Yes, Thompson’s good,” Frain replied. “Young but promising. I think they’ll make an excellent team.”

  “Considering his family history, do you think that’s wise?”

  “They’ll never find out,” Frain said. “Never. I promise you, Edmund.” He held up his hand. “I give you my word.”

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, Maggie picked her way through the rubble outside David’s flat to get to the Sloane Square Tube station, her Rayne pumps crunching on shards of broken glass. A sullen sun tried to shine through an overcast sky. The cold air rang with the wails of sirens from emergency vehicles and stank of smoke, ash, and petrol. Fires still smoldered here and there. A charwoman poured a bucket of dirty water over a dark bloodstain on the pavement, as a body, wrapped in a white bedsheet, was being loaded into a rusty Black Maria.

  Maggie saw that an entire town house had been flattened the night before. As she passed, she noticed a woman in a Jaeger suit, hat, and gloves stumble and nearly fall over as she took in the wreckage. “This—was—my house,” she said to one of the volunteer firefighters still hosing down the charred remains.

  “Get her a seat,” one fireman in a tin helmet called to another. They found a chair that must have been blown out of the window from the force of the explosion. It was silk, singed and covered in soot but still functional. The woman sat down and crossed her ankles primly in the middle of the street. “I went to the country—that’s where my children are—I was only gone one night.…”

  The fireman motioned to the ARP warden. “Mug o’ tea for the lady here? She’s had a bit of a shock.” Then he went back to hosing down a smoldering fire.

  Maggie gritted her teeth and walked on. Some of the bombed-out shops had put up signs: “Back as soon as we beat Hitler,” “Keep Smiling,” and, at a street fruit seller’s cart, “Hitler’s Bombs Can’t Beat Us—Our Oranges Came Through Musso’s Lake.” On the remains of a wall and floor that had the appearance of a gallows was a rope with a noose tied in it and a sign: “Reserved for Hitler.”

  Inside the Tube station, Maggie walked down the stopped escalator steps, careful not to disturb those people who were still sleeping, slumped against the wall with only thin wool blankets for warmth. Since they’d lost their homes, a vast number of people had taken shelter down in the Tube stations. They slept on the steps or in makeshift bunks against the walls on subway platforms. The air was rank with the smell of unwashed bodies and human excrement from the covered buckets lining one wall.

  A group of old women in dirt-stained clothes were huddled around a coal brazier, making what Maggie guessed was a pot of tea. She made her way through the sea of humanity and finally caught her train.

  She was headed to the offices of the Imperial Security Intelligence Service, which everyone called MI-5. Headquartered in a sandbagged building at 58 Saint James Street, MI-5’s mission was national security.

  After showing her ID to one of the guards in the lobby, she was permitted access. The building was massive and her steps echoed along the well-polished hallways. “I’m here to see Mr. Frain, please,” Maggie said to the receptionist, an older woman with thick glasses named Mrs. Pipps.

  She hung up her gas mask and coat on the hooks by the door and removed her gloves and placed them in her handbag. Then, straightening her hat, she sat down to wait.

  Peter Frain, a spy during the Great War and a former professor of Egyptology at Cambridge after that, became head of MI-5 when Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister in May 1940. Maggie had met him over the summer, after she’d discovered hidden Nazi c
ode pointing to three specific attacks, including the assassination of the Prime Minister. When Frain had seen her in action, plus learned of her fluency in both French and German, he’d asked Maggie to leave her job as secretary for the P.M. and come work for him at MI-5, which she’d done, intrigued by the possibility of working undercover. She’d had high hopes of being dropped behind enemy lines on a clandestine mission.

  And despite her wretched showing in the physical tasks at Camp Spook, she was still determined to do it.

  Finally, she was ushered into the room to find Peter Frain behind a large oak desk, a reproduction of Goya’s Lord Nelson hanging on the wall behind him, next to an official photograph of King George VI.

  Frain had the same black, slick-backed hair and cold gray eyes Maggie remembered, and, despite the privations of wartime, yet another impeccably tailored suit. In front of him was a manila folder, thick with papers. Maggie could see her name on a label and then, over it, the heavy red-inked stamp, TOP SECRET.

  “Ah, Maggie,” Frain said, rising to his feet. They shook hands. “Please, take a seat.” They’d been on a first-name basis since their exploits of the summer. Still, the informality sounded a bit out of place in the austere offices of MI-5.

  Maggie had the distinct and uncomfortable sensation of being called to the dean’s office. Still, she refused to let that show. “Good morning, Peter. A pleasure to see you again,” she said, sitting in the chair opposite his desk.

  “And under more agreeable circumstances than last time,” Frain replied, his wintry features momentarily warmed by a smile.

  “Indeed.”

  “I’ve had a chance to look over your file.” He folded his long, tapered fingers. “You scored well on the Intelligence test. In fact, your answer to the first question on the maths section could be the basis of an article for a mathematics journal, if we had the time for such things. Perhaps after the war.”

  Maggie’s stomach lurched a bit. “Perhaps.”

  “However …”

  Oh, here it comes.

  “In regard to your physical skills—”

  “Peter, I can assure you—”

  “Not a bit of it, young lady,” Frain interrupted. “The job I have in mind for you won’t have any wall scaling or puddle jumping, I promise you.”

  Maggie cocked an eyebrow. “Really?”

  A job? Was he talking about a real spy job, or a desk job in some subbasement, reading the personal letters and private communications of senior officials and officers and flagging anything that looked suspicious? Was he, perhaps, talking about working at Bletchley? After all, her newly found father was there, acting the role of a mad cryptographer while ferreting out a spy.…

  “As you undoubtedly know, the Royal Family has decided not to send the Princesses to Canada or Australia for safety’s sake but to keep them here, in England.”

  “At an ‘undisclosed location in the country,’ ” Maggie said, having read newspaper reports of the Princesses’ whereabouts.

  “Yes.” Frain nodded. “And since you’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, I can tell you the young Princesses have been sequestered in Windsor Castle. It’s close enough to London that the King and Queen can work at Buckingham Palace during the week but then return to Windsor to be with their daughters on the weekends. Windsor’s not on any particular bombing path, so attacks there have been infrequent. And there’s ample shelter in the castle’s dungeons.”

  Who would have thought the dungeons of Windsor would be found useful once again? “Yes,” Maggie repeated, growing impatient. What does this have to do with me?

  Frain picked up the heavy green telephone receiver. “Mrs. Pipps, please have Mr. Thompson come to my office.”

  He turned back to Maggie. “Mr. Thompson will be your handler while you’re at Windsor. Your cover story is to tutor the Princess Elizabeth in maths. Of course, the King and Queen know why you’re really there, but as far as anyone else in the castle knows, you’re just a tutor. You’ll report to the Princesses’ governess,” he said, turning through pages until he found the name. “A Miss Marion Crawford.”

  A tutor? To a child? Was the man serious? “Surely you’re joking, Peter,” she said, struggling to make sense of what he was telling her.

  “No, Maggie. There’s a strong probability Princess Elizabeth may be in danger. She’s second in line to the throne, after all. We need someone at Windsor to keep an eye on things.”

  “You want me to be her—her babysitter?” Maggie was shocked and not a little disappointed.

  “I wouldn’t have chosen that specific word. Nanny is more commonly used here. Or the more archaic governess.”

  “There must be a platoon of guards in place at Windsor to protect the princess. I’m much too important an asset to waste taking care of a child, Peter, and you know it.” To go from being a typist to being a nanny? What’s wrong with these men in charge?

  “I’m quite familiar with your talents, Maggie, and I would never waste them. Why don’t you think of yourself more as a … a sponge.”

  “A sponge?”

  “Soak up any and all information. Observe everything you can at the castle—and then report anything and everything through Mr. Thompson back to me.”

  “An undercover ‘sponge,’ ” Maggie snapped. “Just fantastic.”

  The door opened and a figure appeared. “Ah, there you are,” Frain said. “Maggie, meet Hugh Thompson, your handler. Mr. Thompson, Miss Hope.” Hugh was about her age, in his mid-twenties, with a high forehead, hazel eyes, and fine lines hinting at a life of unremitting anxiety. He was astute, motivated, and efficient, different from many other men of his age and class, who tended to take more for granted. When war had broken out, he’d begun to work at the office around the clock, stopping only rarely for a pint with friends or to practice his beloved cello. His efficiency flat in Bloomsbury was unfurnished, except for a bed and a bookshelf and a pile of newspapers. His one indulgence was attending the occasional Chelsea Blues game.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Miss Hope,” he said.

  “And what, exactly, have you heard?”

  “Mr. Thompson’s one of the agents who helped track Michael Murphy and his plan for bombing Saint Paul’s Cathedral this past summer.”

  “Glad you got him, Miss Hope,” Hugh said.

  It seemed a lifetime ago. “Thank you, Mr. Thompson, for your part in it,” Frain explained.

  But there was no time for pleasantries. Now she needed to make her stand, to draw a line in the sand. It was time.

  Maggie rose to her feet and addressed both men. “Mr. Frain, Mr. Thompson,” she said. “I’m through allowing myself to be confined to so-called ‘women’s work.’ I’m also through with patronizing men giving me half-truths and withholding information. That will end here and now.

  “I will consider—consider—going to Windsor Castle to be your ‘sponge.’ But only if you tell me everything—and I mean everything—you know. I’m not going into another situation blind. Not only is it unsafe, but I can’t do my best work.”

  Frain cleared his throat. “I can’t do that.”

  “Well,” Maggie pronounced, “then I can’t go to Windsor.” Her heart was beating wildly, but she was determined not to let them know. She walked briskly to the door. “Cheers!” she called back over her shoulder.

  Frain and Thompson exchanged a look.

  “All right, all right, Miss Hope!” Frain called after her. Maggie paused, her hand on the knob. “You’re right. You do deserve more information.”

  “Thank you,” Maggie said, sitting down once again. Score one for the ex-typist!

  “As you know,” Frain said, “although we’ve made it through the summer and fall attacks, we’re still getting pounded by German aircraft. Their plan, of course, is to invade and conquer England. First by taking out the RAF. And then invading the coasts, moving inward, finally reaching London and establishing their supremacy.

  “In the countries they’ve already i
nvaded, such as the Netherlands and France, the Nazis have made a point of working within already existing structures. So, Churchill would be assassinated—if he could even be taken alive—and it’s probable someone like Lord Halifax would be put in charge of the country. He’d reassure people, you know, ‘I know this Hitler and he’s really not such a bad chap—let’s all keep it together for the sake of Britain and cooperate with the Nazis.’ Et cetera.”

  Hugh cut in: “A familiar figure like the Duke of Windsor, who only abdicated a few years ago, after all, might help people rally together under Nazi rule. The Duke’s been a longtime admirer of the Nazis—he and Mrs. Simpson have made numerous trips to Germany, meeting with high-ranking officials and even Hitler himself. Last time he was there, Goebbels allegedly said it was a shame the Duke wasn’t King anymore. Because, of course, if the Duke were still on the throne as Edward VIII, it would be so much easier for the Nazis’ invasion—they’d already have their own king in place.”

  “King George VI has no such alliances?” Maggie asked.

  “No, he and the Queen don’t,” Frain answered. “Which is why the Nazis need the Duke of Windsor. He and the Duchess are in Bermuda now—sent off recently on Churchill’s orders. But our intelligence tells us that when they were in Portugal they’d been approached by Walther Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler’s aide. Schellenberg offered them fifty million Reichsmarks to return to the throne.”

  “I see,” Maggie said, processing what he was telling her.

  “So, the King’s life is in danger. But if they killed him, many people would want Elizabeth to rule—not the Duke of Windsor. And so she’s in danger too. Serious danger. The most likely scenario is kidnapping. I doubt they would try to assassinate her outright—not that they’d blink, of course, but then the tide of public opinion might turn against them if they killed a young girl.”

  “What specifically do you know about threats to the princess?” Maggie asked.