“We could pick a book, start up the Mad Hatters again.” Osla swiped at her eyes. “Meet at Bettys, have a Tea Party with actual scones and jam . . .”

Beth pushed her wave of hair behind one ear. “I’ve been reading the Principia Mathematica.” She found Isaac Newton flat going, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of intriguing spirals round the edges of the complicated exercises Harry showed her. Spirals of numbers rather than letters.

“Oh, darling, don’t make us do maths,” Osla groaned. “What about The Road to Oz? I’ve been devouring Baum.”

“Too fantastical,” Mab complained. “There’s a new Hercule Poirot coming out—”

“We never did agree about books,” Osla said.

“We never agreed about anything,” Mab snorted, and checked her watch. “I’m going to miss my train.”

A final nod, and then Beth stood before the gates with Boots whuffling about the frozen ground, watching the ivory coat and the jade-green coat swing up the road.

“Osla!” she called suddenly, almost shouting. “Mab!”

They turned in unison, those two smart brunettes who had stalked with such style into the Finch kitchen and Beth’s life in 1940. Beth filled her lungs: “‘These have knelled your fall and ruin . . .’”

Osla caught on first. “‘. . . but your ears were far away . . .’”

Mab picked it up. “‘. . . English lassies rustling papers . . .’”

They finished in a triumphant shout: “‘. . . through the sodden Bletchley day!’”

And for the last time in decades, Bletchley Park resounded with the laughter of codebreakers.

Epilogue

* * *

Duchess of Cambridge Reopens Bletchley Park

June 2014

* * *

Job’s up, strip down!” The replicated bombe machine stops, and the Duchess of Cambridge smiles at its demonstrator during her tour of Bletchley Park, Britain’s now-famous codebreaking center. During the Second World War, this stately home thrummed with top-secret activity as thousands of men and women worked to crack the unbreakable Axis military codes—a feat that according to many historians shortened the war by at least two years.

The former Kate Middleton, stunning in military-style navy-and-white skirt and blouse by Alexander McQueen, officially reopens Bletchley Park after a yearlong restoration project that has restored the mansion and its surrounding huts to their wartime appearance. The site deteriorated into near-dereliction after the war but now hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. The duchess has a personal reason for visiting BP: her grandmother Valerie Middleton, née Glassborow, was employed in Hut 16. Retracing her grandmother’s footsteps, the duchess met with veteran codebreakers such as Mrs. Mab Sharpe, who works part-time at BP as a bombe machine demonstrator. Mrs. Sharpe—a gray-haired, unbent five foot eleven at age ninety-six—instructed her old colleague’s granddaughter in the art of intercepting and decoding a Morse code message.

“What an incredible story,” the duchess said. “I was aware of it when I was a young girl, and often asked Granny about it, but she was very quiet and never said anything.”

“We didn’t talk in those days, ma’am. We still don’t.” Asked if women like herself were ever called to put their talents to use after the war, Mrs. Sharpe gave a noncommittal smile. “Oh, no . . . it’s enough to see the work appreciated today.”

It’s not a view shared by all Bletchley Park veterans, even now that the term of secrecy has officially expired. Mrs. Sharpe, surrounded by six-foot children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, appears happy to reminisce with Bletchley Park visitors. Other veterans have refused to release their stories until after their deaths—view the spate of posthumous memoirs, such as Bletchley Bletherings by Lady Cornwell, née Osla Kendall, the award-winning satirist and Tatler columnist whose droll, touching account of her time as a Hut 4 translator was not published until after her death in 1974. And other veterans consider the oath of secrecy binding in perpetuity. Miss Beth Finch, retired GCHQ, is known to have served as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts, but the white-haired ninety-eight-year-old in her rose-pink cardigan politely refuses to discuss her war work: “That would be a violation of my oath.”

The code of secrecy upheld by Bletchley Park’s workers is fully as remarkable as their codebreaking achievements. In an age of instantaneous social media, jaws drop at the idea that thousands of men and women were simply handed the most incendiary secret of the war and kept it, to a man (or a woman). Churchill famously referred to them as “the geese who laid the golden eggs, but never cackled.”

Despite the bustle of Bletchley Park today—the camera flashes of the royal visit, the millions of visitors come to marvel at the bombe machines—something of that golden silence still holds over these grounds in a hush of honored and unspoken secrets. There are stories here still untold, without a doubt: stories locked in steel-trap codebreaker minds, behind steel-trap codebreaker lips.

Bletchley Park’s walls have been renovated. If only they could speak . . .

But some codes will never be broken.

* * *