“Partly our fault,” Osla said, getting her breath back. “Mab—”

Stiffly, her friend picked herself up. Osla winced. Even in the indirect glare of the masked headlights, she could see that Mab’s crisp cotton print was mud from collar to hem. Reaching down, Mab slipped her left shoe off and examined the snapped heel, and Osla saw her face crumple in the shadows. Every night she watched Mab polish those cheap shoes before bed, no matter how tired she was, to give them a Bond Street shine.

“I’m sure we can fix it,” Osla began, but Mab’s crumpled expression vanished. She drew back and hurled the broken shoe straight into the chest of the man who’d nearly run them off the road.

“What are you doing taking a turn at that speed, you bloody bastard!” she bellowed. “Are you blind, you stupid bugger?”

“Clearly,” the man said, barely catching the shoe. He stood half a head shorter than Mab, a shock of russet hair falling over his forehead as he shaded his eyes to look at her. “My apologies.”

“We were walking in the middle of the road,” Osla pointed out, but Mab stood on her one shod foot in the mud and let the stranger have it. He let it rain down, expression more admiring than horrified.

“Blew your tire,” Mab finished with a withering look. “Guess you’ll have to get down in the mud and change it out.”

“Would if I could,” he replied. “I’ll just leave the car and head for the station. Are there any trains this late?”

Mab folded her arms, cheeks still scarlet with indignation. “Easier to put the spare on, if you’ve got a kit.”

“Haven’t a clue how.”

Mab slipped out of her other shoe, whizzed it into his hands, marched in her stocking feet through the mud to the car’s boot, and hurled it open. “Have my shoes properly mended, and I’ll change your ruddy tire.”

“Deal.” He looked on, grinning, as Mab began yanking out tools.

“How do you know how to change a blinking tire?” Osla wondered. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

“A brother who works in a garage.” Mab rolled up her skirt at the waist to keep it out of the mud. Her flat stare promised the stranger slow, painful death if he ogled her legs. “Have you got a torch? Shine it over so I can see what I’m doing.”

He deposited Mab’s ruined shoes on the bonnet and switched on his torch, still grinning. “You two are BP workers?”

Osla smiled politely, not answering that question on an open road. “Are you, Mr. . . . ?”

“Gray. And no. I’m in one of the London offices.” Intelligence, Osla thought, approving of his vagueness. Or Foreign Office. “I was running some information to Commander Denniston personally, from my own boss. He was late getting me a reply, hence the midnight drive.”

Osla offered a hand; he shook it over the beam of the torch. “Osla Kendall. That’s Mab Churt, cursing at your tire.”

“I’ll need help winching up the car.” Mab’s irate voice floated up. “Not you, Os—no sense both of us ruining our stockings.” Osla watched as Mr. Gray lent a hand. He stayed to lug the spare through the dark and pass a few more tools, until Mab snapped, “You’re in my way, now; just hold the torch.”

“Pity you don’t work at BP instead of London, Mr. Gray,” Osla said as he straightened. Hard to tell in the dark, but he looked thirty-six or thirty-seven, his face broad and calm and creased with smile lines. “We need more fellows in our literary society.”

“Literary society?” He had a country voice, soft midland vowels. He spoke to Osla, but he was watching Mab do something incredibly capable to the spare tire. “I thought you BP girls were all maths-and-crosswords types.”

Something niggled at the back of Osla’s mind. Something about crosswords . . .

“There.” Mab straightened, pushing her hair off her muddy cheek. “That should get you to London, Mr. Gray, then you can get the other patched.” Her eyebrows lifted. “I’ll expect my shoes back good as new.”

“You have my word, Miss Churt.” He shouldered his blown tire so he could sling it into the boot. “I don’t want to be found dead in a gutter.”

Mab nodded grudgingly, turning to look at Osla. “Coming, Os?”

“You go,” Osla said as Mr. Gray nodded farewell in the dark and slipped back into his car. The bit about crosswords had dropped in her head with a click. “I’ve had an absolutely topping idea.”

She hadn’t been back inside the mansion since her first day; even at midnight, it hummed like a beehive with exhausted men in their shirtsleeves. Osla couldn’t get in to see Commander Denniston, but red-haired Giles was in the conservatory flirting with a typist, and Osla nipped her hand through his arm. “Giles, d’you know if Denniston’s still recruiting?”

“Crikey, yes. The rate traffic’s mounting, they can’t vet people fast enough.”

“I remember hearing something about crosswords . . .”

“There’s a theory that crossword types, maths types, and chess-playing types are good at our sort of work. Personally I think it’s bollocks. I certainly can’t tell a rook from a bishop—”

Osla cut him off. “My landlady’s daughter is an absolute whiz at crosswords.”

“That mousy little thing you brought to the Shoulder of Mutton? Are you mad, you dim-witted deb?”

“Her name is Beth Finch. And don’t call me that.” Osla remembered how fast Beth had finished the newspaper crossword at the pub. Osla Kendall, not only are you not a dim-witted deb, you are a genius. Because maybe what Beth needed was a peroxide rinse, a new dress in the latest go, and a date with an airman or two, but she wasn’t going to get any of those things if she never got out of the house. Even sitting behind a typewriter or binding signals on night shift had to be better than toiling for the Dread Mrs. Finch until the Nazis came goose-stepping into Bletchley. “Take a puck, Giles, and put in a word with Denniston. Beth’s going to fit right in at Bletchley Park.”

Chapter 10

August 1940

You’ll do.”

Beth stared in utter horror.

“Were you worried, Miss Finch?” The tired-looking man—Paymaster Commander Bradshaw, as he’d introduced himself at the start of Beth’s interview—stamped something on the file in front of her. “It’s not all Oxford graduates here, you know. Your background came in clean as a Sunday wash, and being a local girl, we won’t have to billet you. Start tomorrow; you’ll be on the day shift. You’ll need to sign this . . .”

Beth didn’t even hear the dire imprecations of the Official Secrets Act as they were rattled off. They weren’t supposed to take me, she thought in a blur of panic. It had never occurred to her that Bletchley Park would hire her, even when the summons came a week ago. “It only says to present myself for an interview,” Beth had reassured her mother, who had slit Beth’s letter open when it arrived and demanded explanations. She’d present herself as called, but the Park wouldn’t have any use for her. Far too stupid, she thought, wondering how they’d got her name at all. And the interview, conducted in a muggy back room behind the redbrick mansion’s staircase, had seemed utterly routine: questions about typing and filing, which Beth couldn’t do; education, which Beth didn’t have; and foreign languages, which Beth didn’t speak. She whispered one-word answers, mind half on the strange things she’d seen while trudging up to the mansion: a man cycling through the gates wearing a gas mask as though he expected an attack any moment; four men and two women playing rounders on the lawn . . . Even as she walked up the drive, Beth had already been relieved at the thought of going home and telling her mother it was all over.

Then, suddenly: You’ll do.

“Ssurely there’s a mistake,” she managed to stammer.

But Mr. Bradshaw was shoving a pen at her. “Sign the Act, please.”

Dazed, Beth signed.

“Excellent, Miss Finch. Now for your permanent pass—” Mr. Bradshaw broke off as a commotion resonated outside. “Good Lord, these codebreakers are worse than quarreling cats.”

Out the door he went. Beth blinked. “Codebreakers?!”

Following him out toward the entrance, she saw a weary-looking gentleman in shirtsleeves addressing a grizzled professorial type who was limping up and down the oak-paneled hall—“Dilly, old thing, do stop roaring.”

“No, I will not,” roared the man with the limp. To Beth he looked like the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, which Osla and Mab were reading for the first literary society book pick: long, gangling, faintly comical, eyes snapping behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Denniston, I won’t have my work passed off half-done—”

“Dilly, you haven’t got the personnel, and you keep turning down the new ones I send you.”

“I don’t want a yard of Wrens all looking the same—”

“We haven’t even got any Wrens—”

“—and I don’t want any debutantes in pearls whose daddies got them into BP because they knew someone at the Admiralty—”