Prologue

November 8, 1947

London

The enigma arrived in the afternoon post, sealed, smudged, and devastating.

Osla Kendall stood, twenty-six years old, dark haired, dimpled, and scowling, in the middle of a tiny Knightsbridge flat that looked as if it had been bombed by Junkers, wearing nothing but a French lace slip and a foul mood as she looked at the piles of silk and satin exploding over every surface. Twelve Days Until the Wedding of the Century! this morning’s Tatler had gushed. Osla worked for the Tatler; she’d had to write the whole ghastly column. What are YOU going to wear?

Osla picked up a rose satin gown whorled with crystal beading. “What about you?” she asked it. “Do you say ‘I look simply smashing and I couldn’t care less that he’s marrying someone else’?” Etiquette lessons at finishing school never touched that one. Whatever the dress, everyone in the congregation would know that before the bride came along, Osla and the bridegroom were—

A knock sounded. Osla flung on a robe to answer it. Her flat was tiny, all she could afford on her Tatler salary if she wanted to live alone and be close to the center of things. “Darling, no maid? No doorman?” Her mother had been appalled. “Move in with me until you find a husband. You don’t need a job.” But after sharing bedrooms with billet-mates all through the war, Osla would have lived in a boot cupboard as long as she could call it her own.

“Post’s come, Miss Kendall.” The landlady’s spotty daughter greeted her at the door, eyes going at once to the rose gown slung over Osla’s arm. “Oooh, are you wearing that to the royal wedding? You look scrummy in pink!”

It’s not enough to look scrummy, Osla thought, taking her bundle of letters. I want to outshine a princess, an actual born-to-the-tiara princess, and the fact is, I can’t.

“Stop that,” she told herself as soon as she’d shut the door on the landlady’s daughter. “Do not fall in the dismals, Osla Kendall.” All over Britain, women were planning what they’d wear for the most festive occasion since V-E Day. Londoners would queue for hours to see the flower-decked wedding carriages roll past—and Osla had an invitation to Westminster Abbey itself. If she wasn’t grateful for that, she’d be just like those ghastly Mayfair moaners blithering on about how tiresome it was attending the social event of the century; what a bother getting the diamonds out of the bank, oh, woe is me to be so tediously privileged.

“It’ll be topping,” Osla said through gritted teeth, coming back to her bedroom and chucking the rose dress over a lamp. “Simply topping.” Seeing London swanning about in banners and confetti, wedding fever whisking away November chill and postwar gloom . . . the fairy-tale union of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary and her handsome Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (formerly Prince Philip of Greece) would mark the dawn of a new age, hopefully one where ration laws were finally swatted down and you could slather all the butter you wanted on your scones. Osla was all in favor of ushering this new era in with a slap-up celebration—after all, she’d achieved her own fairy-tale ending by any woman’s standards. An honorable term of service during the war, even if she could never, ever talk about it; a flat in Knightsbridge paid for by her own salary; a wardrobe crammed with gowns all in the latest go; a job writing entertaining fluff for the Tatler. And a fiancé who had put a sparkling emerald on her finger; don’t forget him. No, Osla Kendall had no excuse to get in a blue funk. All the business with Philip had been years ago, after all.

But if she could have cooked up an excuse to get out of London—found some way to be geographically elsewhere (the Sahara desert, the wastes of the North Pole, anywhere)—during the moment Philip bent his golden head and made his vows to England’s future queen, Osla would have taken it in a jiff.

Ruffling a hand through disordered dark curls, she flipped through the post. Invitations, bills . . . and one square, smudged envelope. No letter inside, just a torn sheet of paper with a block of scribbled nonsense letters.

The world tilted for a moment, and Osla was back: the smell of coke stoves and wet wool jumpers instead of furniture polish and tissue paper; the scratch of pencils rather than the hoot of London traffic. What does Klappenschrank mean, Os? Who’s got their German dictionary?

Osla didn’t stop to wonder who’d sent the paper—the old pathways in her mind fired up without a hitch, the ones that said, Don’t ask questions, just get on with it. She was already running her fingers along the square of scribbled letters. Vigenère cipher, a woman’s soft voice said in her memory. Here’s how to crack it using a key. Though it can be done without . . .

“Not by me,” Osla muttered. She hadn’t been one of the boffins who could crack ciphers with a pencil stub and a little sideways thinking.

The envelope bore a postmark she didn’t recognize. No signature. No address. The letters of the cipher message were so hastily slashed, it could have been anyone’s handwriting. But Osla turned the paper scrap over and saw a letterhead block, as though the page had been torn from an official pad.

CLOCKWELL SANITARIUM

“No,” Osla whispered, “no—” But she was already fishing a pencil stub from the nearest drawer. Another memory, a laughing voice intoning, These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away—English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day!

Osla knew what the message’s key would be: LASSIES.

She bent over the paper, pencil scratching, and slowly the cryptogram gave up its secrets.

“STONEGROVE 7602.”

Osla drew a breath in as the words crackled along the telephone wires all the way from Yorkshire. Astounding how you could recognize a voice in two words, even when you hadn’t heard it in years. “It’s me,” Osla finally said. “Did you get it?”

Pause. “Goodbye, Osla,” her old friend said coolly. No who is this—she knew, too.

“Do not hang up on me, Mrs.—well, whatever your name is now.”

“Temper, Os. Feeling out of sorts because you’re not the one marrying a prince in two weeks?”

Osla caught her lip in her teeth before she could snap back. “I’m not faffing about here. Did you get the letter or not?”

“The what?”

“The Vigenère. Mine mentions you.”

“I’m just home from a seaside weekend. I haven’t looked through the post yet.” There was a distant rustle of paper. “Look, why are you ringing me? I don’t—”

“It’s from her, you understand me? From the asylum.”

A flat, stunned silence.

“It can’t be,” the reply came at last. Osla knew they were both thinking of their former friend. The third point in their shining wartime trio.

More rustling, a tearing sound, then Osla heard a breath and knew that far away in Yorkshire, another block of code had come out of its envelope. “Break it, the way she showed us. The key is lassies.”

“‘English lassies rustling papers through the sodden—’” Breaking off before the next word. Secrecy was too much a habit with them both to say anything significant over a telephone line. Live seven years with the Official Secrets Act round your neck like a noose, and you got used to curbing every word and thought. Osla heard a pencil working on the other end and found herself pacing, three steps across the room, three steps back. The heaps of gowns across the bedroom looked like cheap pirate’s loot, gaudy and half-submerged in the wreckage of tissue and cardboard, memories and time. Three girls laughing, doing up each other’s buttons in a cramped spare bedroom: Did you hear there’s a dance in Bedford? An American band, they’ve got all the new Glenn Miller tunes . . .

The voice came at last from Yorkshire, uneasy and mulish. “We don’t know it’s her.”

“Don’t be daft, of course it’s her. The stationery, it’s from where she—” Osla chose her words carefully. “Who else would demand our help?”

Pure fury in the words that came spitting back. “I don’t owe her one bloody thing.”

“She clearly thinks differently.”

“Who knows what she thinks? She’s insane, remember?”

“She had a breakdown. That doesn’t mean she went loony.”