“We were just as lost the first few weeks,” Mab reassured. “You’ll get the hang of it. We were just trying to—”

“You want me to grow a spine.” Beth’s imitation of Mab’s voice was savage. “But maybe you two should have thought that somebody like me—someone perfectly, hopelessly Fanny Price—would have been happy to stay home where she belongs.”

She whirled out of the room. Her bedroom door banged a moment later. Mab and Osla looked at each other, stunned.

“I should have asked before I put her name up.” Osla sank down on the bed. “I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in.”

“You didn’t mean to—”

“—boss her about like her mother does?”

Mab sighed.

Dear Philip, Osla thought. I have, if you will pardon the phrase, made a royal muff of things.

Chapter 12

September 1940

Hallo, can we sit here?”

Two weeks ago, Beth would have jumped out of her skin. Now she felt so weary and low, all she did was nod at the two young men who joined her table in the mansion dining hall.

“I know you.” The massively built fellow with the black hair paused as he set down his tray. “You were at the first meeting of the Mad Hatters.”

“. . . What?”

“The literary society. We did Through the Looking-Glass, and at the second meet-up, Giles brought bread and margarine, moaning how Alice at least got butter when she had tea with the Mad Hatter. We’ve been the Mad Hatters Tea Party ever since. Less pompous than the BP Literary Society.” The black-haired fellow snapped his fingers. “You were only at the first meet-up, weren’t you? Don’t tell me . . . Beth Finch.” A grin. “I’m good with names.”

Beth managed some kind of smile, pushing her food around her plate. It was two thirty in the morning, middle of night shift, and the converted dining room smelled of Brylcreem, stale fat, and kidneys on toast. All around, night-shift workers were grabbing seats, some half-asleep, some bright eyed and joking as if this were midday break at any ordinary job. Beth’s stomach still wasn’t used to cafeteria-style cooking, and after nearly a month her skin should have stopped prickling when she was surrounded by strangers, but it just wouldn’t. “Mr.—Zarb?” she managed to say as he and his friend slung in opposite.

“Call me Harry. This is Alan,” he added, indicating the young man beside him, who stared at the ceiling as he munched. “Alan Turing. We all call him the Prof, because he’s such a clever bugger . . .”

Everyone here seemed to go by nicknames or first names. Everyone here seemed eccentric, too—look at Mr. Turing (Beth couldn’t bring herself to think of a man she’d just met as either Alan or the Prof), with an ancient tie holding up his flannel trousers instead of a belt.

“These kidneys are abysmal,” Harry Zarb went on cheerfully. “Not fit for a dog. If my son were here, he’d say we need to get a dog, so the kidneys wouldn’t go to waste. All conversational roads lead to requests for a puppy, at least in my house—”

Beth had always wanted a dog, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. Fleas . . .

“I saw you headed into the Cottage yesterday,” Harry went on, addressing Beth. “Knox’s section? You must be a clever one. Dilly only takes the brainy girls for his harem—”

Beth burst into tears.

“Steady on—” Harry fumbled for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said harem. No one means anything off-color by it. Dilly’s a good chap—”

“Excuse me,” Beth sobbed, and ran out of the room.

Bletchley Park at night might have been the dark side of the moon: every hut window blacked out to block the smallest chink of light. Beth fumbled her way across the lawn, tripped over a wooden bat left over from someone’s afternoon rounders game, and finally just stopped, worn out to the bone.

It was exhausting, spending your day being stupid. Over three weeks she’d been working at the Cottage: staring at blocks of Enigma code, trying to manipulate her cardboard rods the way she’d been shown, trying to make sense of the nonsense. Hour after hour, day after day. Beth knew she was a dolt, but you’d think with three weeks of solid concentration she might achieve something. There was something on the other side of the curtain of code, she could feel it, but she couldn’t get there. She was stymied. Thoroughly dished, darling, as Osla would have drawled. Utterly nobbled. Completely graveled.

“You’re obsessing too much,” Peggy Rock had said. “Think of it as a word game.”

“I don’t understand it—”

“You don’t really have to. Doing this work is a bit like driving a car without having a clue what’s under the bonnet. Just have at it.”

Peggy had been very encouraging; so were all the other girls. But they had their own mountain of work; none of them could stand looking over Beth’s shoulder all day. They sat with their crib charts and Italian dictionaries, flipping lettered rods about, and periodically someone would say something inexplicable like “Got a beetle here . . . ,” and someone else would say, “I’ve got a starfish,” and send Beth even deeper into despair.

“It’s all Greek to me,” she burst out her first week, and Dilly Knox had chortled, “M’dear, I wish it were!”

“He’s a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek,” Peggy whispered, also laughing, and Beth shriveled in her chair. Dilly was very kind, but he got so wrapped up in his own work that he barely seemed to know where he was, much less anyone else. The only reason Beth could think why she hadn’t been sacked by now was because everyone was too busy to realize what a dismal flop she was.

And then to go home every single day and face her mother, so hurt she wouldn’t even speak to Beth, even when Beth turned over her entire Bletchley Park salary as Mother insisted . . . “You have no idea what you’re doing to her,” Dad had said yesterday, shaking his head. Osla and Mab were giving Beth a wide berth; Beth flinched when she remembered how she’d hissed at them, but she wasn’t sorry. Osla shouldn’t have meddled. Beth Finch didn’t belong here, and that was a fact.

I’m packing it in, she thought. Tomorrow. Three weeks ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of marching up to the imposing Christmas-cake fa?ade of the mansion and resigning, but now she knew she could screw up the courage.

Only a few girls were inside the Cottage when Beth slipped back inside—most worked days alongside Dilly. Sliding out of her cardigan, Beth sank behind her desk looking at the mess of paper slips.

“The thing about the Enigma machine,” Peggy had said (though Beth hadn’t even seen an Enigma machine), “is that it’s got a great big gap we can exploit. You press the A key on the keyboard, an electrical current passes through the three wheels and a reflector, which sends the current back through the wheels and lights up the bulb of a different alphabet letter on the lampboard—A scrambles out as, say, F. Press the A key again, and another current goes through, and this time it scrambles out as Y. There’s no direct equivalent, A won’t always equal F—A always comes out different; that’s why Enigma’s so hard to crack. Except for one thing, thank goodness. The machine won’t let A ever come out as A. No letter can ever be encrypted as itself.”

“That’s a gap?” Beth had said, utterly adrift.

“About as wide as the English Channel, duckie. Look at any block of encrypted letters: ADIPQ. Well, you know A is any letter but A, D is any letter but D . . .” Peggy had paused to light a cigarette. “Most messages that are encrypted have common phrases or words—cribs, we call them. For Italian Enigma, most messages start out with the officer the message is intended for: Per Comandante. So, slide through each block of letters looking for a string where not one letter matches up with P-E-R-X-C-O-M-A-N-D-A-N-T-E—the X for the space between the words—and there you are; it’s a match. I’m not saying it’s easy,” she added. “We’ve been banging our heads on Italian Enigma for months, trying to figure out if it’s the same machine they used in Spain in the thirties when Dilly broke their codes before. But this is how it’s done—this is how you find your way in.” Peggy saw Beth’s despairing look. “Look, it’s a bit like playing Hangman in a foreign language. You have a phrase that’s all blank spaces, you guess a letter that’s common in most words, and maybe it fills one or two slots in the phrase. Then you guess another letter, and the more you get, the more of the phrase you can see.” She smiled. “What I’m saying is, stop focusing and let your mind play.”