“Mind-reader, are you?” Mab snapped.

“Lucky guess.” Harry was standing just outside the mansion, gazing over the lawn, cigarette smoldering between his big fingers. “I’ve been here a while smoking most of a pack, and people keep going in looking hopeful and coming out swearing.”

Mab’s temper subsided. She liked Harry, after all—a wry, funny regular at the Mad Hatters Tea Party. “Can I have one?” Nodding at his cigarettes.

He passed her a fag. Mab remembered being sixteen, going to films to study how the American stars smoked—how to let your hand linger around a man’s as he struck a match for you. Another bit of methodical self-improvement like her reading list, like polishing her vowels. How ridiculous it all seemed. Mab didn’t bother cupping Harry’s hand as he lit her cigarette, just sucked down the smoke as fast as she could, like any man recently off a hard shift of war work.

“You’re lucky,” Harry said at last.

Her anger flared again. “I’ve a sister and mother in the East End, which is getting flattened by Heinkels. You have a wife, you said—is she in London? Have you got family in any of the zones being pounded?”

“No, I got a billet close by when I came to BP. Sheila’s in Stony Stratford with Christopher.” A flash of quiet pride in his voice. “That’s our little boy.”

“They’re safe in the country, and I’m glad. But my family’s not. So no, I don’t think I’m lucky.”

A tense pause. “I was trying to see if I could get released from here to enlist,” Harry said at last. “I got the brush-off from Denniston; it was Giles who told me why. None of us fellows will ever be allowed to enlist. Not one, no matter how great the need. Because what if we get captured, knowing about all this?” A gesture at the lake, so peaceful with its paddling ducks; the ugly huts buzzing with secrets. “So I’m here for the duration.” Harry looked at her over a vast shoulder. “You know what people think when they see a young strapping fellow like me not in uniform? At least no one thinks worse of you for being here.”

Mab was used to the size of him by now, but reassessing the long limbs and broad chest, the massive frame that could fill a doorway, she could well imagine the glares: Harry Zarb was exactly the physical specimen made for a uniform. “It’s not like this work’s less important,” she said, lightening her tone. “And your little Christopher would rather have his dad at home, not at the front.”

“I’ll tell him that, next time some grandmother spits on me at the park when I take him to spot planes.” Harry dropped the butt of his cigarette, trying for a smile. “Listen to me whinge—I’d better get back to my hut. See you at the next Tea Party, Mab. Hold firm, eh?”

“Hold firm,” Mab quoted back. Bloody Churchill. She finished her cigarette in the dusk, fingering Lucy’s latest drawing in her pocket. The horse with the purple mane. Hold firm.

She managed almost an entire week.

It was near ten o’clock; Osla stood before the mirror yanking a comb through her hair, and Mab lay paging through Osla’s copy of Through the Looking-Glass. The Mad Hatters were reading The Hound of the Baskervilles now, but Mab hadn’t managed to finish the Carroll. “I hate this book,” she heard herself saying, suddenly and viciously. “Everything upside down and nightmarish, who writes a book like that? The whole bloody world is already like that!” Her voice cracked. She’d had such a terrible fight with her mother over the telephone yesterday, first begging, then shouting at Mum to put Lucy on the next evacuee train out of London, anywhere out of London. Mrs. Churt wouldn’t hear of it; she maintained that the Jerries weren’t making her move one foot out of her home, nor Lucy neither. All very well and good for morale, that kind of attitude, but Lucy was a child. People were saying over a hundred London children had been killed in that terrible first raid alone—

She fired Through the Looking-Glass across the room into the hall. “Bugger you, Mr. Carroll. Bugger you and your Jabberwocky—”

Her voice broke. Mab hadn’t wept since that one terrible night when she was seventeen, the night very thoroughly buried in her memory, but now she curled up on her counterpane, shuddering with sobs.

Osla sank down beside her, arms folding around Mab’s shoulders. Through tear-choked eyes Mab saw Beth in a hideous flannel nightdress, standing awkwardly in the open doorway. “Your book,” she said, holding out Through the Looking-Glass. She didn’t seem to know whether to leave or to come embrace Mab too, so she shut the door and stood by Mab’s bed.

Mab couldn’t stop sobbing. All the tension and dread that had wound her tighter than a clock since war had been announced unspooled in one violent fit of weeping. She looked up, tears falling, as Osla squeezed her shoulders and Beth shifted from foot to foot. “How long?” She said it brutally, not caring if it was defeatist. “How long before we have Panzers rolling down Piccadilly?” Because even if the bombs missed Mum and Lucy in Shoreditch, the imminent invasion wouldn’t.

“It might not happen,” Osla said hopelessly. “The invasion can’t go if the tides aren’t—”

“The invasion was postponed.”

The words flew out of Beth as if fired from a rifle. Mab and Osla both stared at her, plain prim Beth in her nightdress buttoned to the throat, flushing so crimson she nearly glowed.

“Beth—” Mab’s mind flashed with all the things she was and wasn’t allowed to ask, knowing they’d already transgressed those bounds. “How do you know . . .” She couldn’t make herself finish, but she couldn’t make herself take the question back either. Her heart pounded, and the room was so quiet she almost thought she could hear Beth and Osla’s hearts thudding too.

The lights went out all at once—Mrs. Finch turning everything off at the main below, determined no one would keep a light on past her curfew. Mab nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden blackness. An instant later, Beth’s small cold hand found her wrist, presumably Osla’s too, because in the pitch darkness she pulled the three of them together, so close their foreheads touched.

“The invasion has been postponed,” Beth repeated in a nearly soundless whisper. “At least, I think it has. Some of my section were sent to help Hut 6 work on overflow German air force traffic. The message was broken at the desk next to mine—it was about airlifting equipment on Dutch airfields being dismantled. There was more, I don’t know what, but the way the hut head reacted . . .”

“If the loading equipment was dismantled, the invasion is being pushed back.” The words burst out of Osla as though Beth’s confession had shattered a dam. “That could explain the messages I saw in German naval section, going out to all naval networks—”

“But in my section we’re still getting messages on the buildup of forces,” Mab contributed, feeling her own dam break. “So surely it’s just a deferment, not a cancellation—”

“But it probably means next spring at the earliest,” Osla finished. “No one would want to launch invasion barges in winter tides.”

They all took that in, still frozen together with their foreheads touching in the blackness. “Who else knows about this?” Mab whispered at last.

“A few hut heads. Mr. Churchill, surely—he can’t make it public; he probably won’t rule out invasion this year until he’s utterly certain. But he and the people at the very top—they know.” Osla gulped. “And us.”

This is why they don’t want us talking to each other, Mab thought, remembering Commander Denniston’s strictures. We all just see one piece of the puzzle, but when we start talking and put them together . . .

“You can’t tell.” Beth’s words rushed. “You can’t tell anyone we’re safe until spring, no matter how scared they are. I shouldn’t have told you. I—” Her breath hitched. “Denniston could sack us, put us in prison—”

“He won’t find out. And we can’t be the first to compare notes, no matter what they threaten—”

“You know how many girls ask me to look for whatever ship their boyfriend or brother’s on, because I’m in German naval section?” Osla said softly. “They aren’t supposed to, but they do.”

The invasion postponed. It didn’t mean safety from bombing; it didn’t mean safety next spring . . . but it had been so long since they had heard any good news at all, it felt like a much bigger weight lifted than it really was. Yes, there would still be air raids. Yes, the Germans might cross the channel next year. But who knew where they’d all be next year? All you could think about in wartime was today, this week. There wouldn’t be any German barges rolling into Dover this week, and knowing that, Mab thought she could go back to work and hold firm. “I swear right now,” Mab whispered, “I won’t say a word to my mum or anyone outside this bedroom. No one here will get in trouble with Denniston because of me.”