“Is that your boyfriend, Ozma?” The man was examining the back of her head now, sorting through her champagne-soaked curls. “It doesn’t look like this is your blood. Keep still, there’s aid workers on the way—”

“Philip,” Osla wept. She meant poor Charlie, but her tongue wouldn’t produce the right name. She tried to stand—she should be helping, finding bandages for the others, doing something—but her legs still would not move.

“Keep still, sweetheart. You’re in shock.” The dark-haired man shrugged out of his coat and draped it around her shoulders. “I’ll try to find Philip.”

He’s not here, Osla thought. He’s in the Mediterranean, being shot at by Italians. But her Good Samaritan disappeared before she could tell him, moving to bend over an RAF captain who lay against the wall. The dark-haired man yanked a tablecloth off the nearest table to wad against the other man’s wounds, then a line of chorus girls in feathers and sequins hid him from sight as they stumbled past weeping—they must have been shielded in the wings when the bombs went off . . .

Time slipped sideways for Osla. She was on a stretcher suddenly, still huddled in the greatcoat, and aid workers were lifting her up the stairs to the street above, where someone made another examination.

“We can take you to the doctor, miss, but you’ll wait hours while they see the bad cases first. My advice is go home, clean up, see your doctor in the morning. Is there someone at home waiting for you?”

What do you mean, “home”? Philip had said that at the Café de Paris on New Year’s Eve. Home is where there’s an invitation or a cousin. Osla, standing in her bloodied dancing slippers on the rubble-strewn street, had no idea where her own home was. She was a Canadian living in Britain; she had a father under a gravestone and a mother at a house party in Kent; she had a billet in Bletchley and a thousand friends who would offer her a spare bed, but home? No. None.

“Claridge’s,” she managed to say, because at least she could have a hot bath in her mother’s empty suite. She’d have to catch the dawn milk train to get back to Bletchley in time for her shift.

Once at the hotel, it was a long time before she could get undressed. She couldn’t bear to touch the bloodied fastenings of her favorite, utterly ruined gown, couldn’t bear to shed the overcoat, which was soft and worn and held her in its warm arms. She didn’t even know her Good Samaritan’s name, and he didn’t know hers either. Sit down, Ozma . . . we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain . . .

“Who does this belong to, Miss Kendall?” Mrs. Finch asked the following day. Beth was usually the one she pounced on post-shift, saying reproachfully that if she was finally done with her very important work, there were spoons to be polished—but today it was Osla she was waiting for, holding out the greatcoat Osla had worn home and hung on the peg. Mrs. Finch squinted at the name tape inside the collar. “J. P. E. C. Cornwell—who is he?”

“I have no idea,” said Osla, taking the coat and hobbling upstairs like an eighty-year-old woman. Every joint in her body hurt; she had not slept at all and gone straight from London into her day shift. The scent of blood and champagne lingered in her nostrils.

“What’s wrong?” Mab said, following her in and slipping out of her shoes. “The way you’re moving—”

Osla couldn’t bear to explain. She muttered an excuse and crawled into her narrow bed, trembling somewhere deep inside, hugging the coat, which smelled like heather and smoke. I want home, she thought nonsensically. It wasn’t enough anymore just to fight, to do her part for this country she loved and take her fun where she could. Osla Kendall was exhausted and scared, aching for a door to walk through—a door with welcoming arms inside.

She wanted to go home, and she had no idea where to find it.

Chapter 16

* * *

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MARCH 1941

* * *

BP fellows, if you’ve got two girls on a string and are trying to keep them from finding out about each other, exercise caution. In other words, don’t take your secretarial-pool blonde to the Bletchley Odeon, where you also take that brunette amazon you met by the lake on your tea break, or the amazon in question will rumble your game . . .

* * *

Lousy—little—toad,” Mab muttered, striking each key on her Typex with special venom. Months she’d been going to films and dinners with Andrew Kempton, nailing a fascinated expression on her face as he went on about the lining of his stomach and his chilblains. Maybe he was a little dull, but she’d thought he was kind, sensible, honest. Someone to offer contentment as well as stability. He’d said he wasn’t seeing anyone else; he’d hinted about introducing her to his parents. And all the time, a mansion typist on the side!

Well, so much for honesty. He’d clearly seen Mab as nothing but a girl to play with.

Men all think that about you, a poisonous whisper said at the back of her mind. Cheap stupid slut.

For a moment she could feel his breath in her ear, the man who’d said that. Then she shoved him back in the dark corner where he belonged and bent over her Typex again, setting her wheels in today’s configuration for Red. Mab still had plenty of candidates in the marriage pool, men who would be kind and sensible and honest, not just making a show of it.

She finished her message and taped it up, pausing to blow on her hands. The in-hut temperature was arctic; every woman in the Decoding Room was huddled over her Typex in coat and muffler—and there were several more machines now, from the days it had just been two. Thank goodness they no longer had to run outside to get their decrypted messages out for translation and analysis; that work had moved to the hut right next door, and the boffins had been quick to rig a shortcut for passing information between the two. Mab took up the broom leaning against the desk, banged it briskly against the wooden hatch now seated in the wall, then slid the hatch open and called, “Wake up over there!” into the tunnel. Someone at the other end in Hut 3 shouted, “Bugger off,” and then with a series of clanks, a wooden tray was yanked into the room. Mab dumped her stack of papers in, tugged the wire to send it back, then returned to her Typex.

The next report came out with a gap of gibberish in the middle, but Mab was long past the days of having to give the dud reports over to someone more experienced. “Machine error, or radio signal fading out during interception . . .” She put a request through to the Registration Room, asking them to check the traffic registers—if the message had been intercepted and recorded twice, you could often get the missing code groups from the second version . . .

A harried-looking man in a Fair Isle sweater blew into the Decoding Room. “I need the tallest girl you’ve got,” he said without preamble. “The new operation in Hut 11—we’ve been sent seven Wrens for operators, but we need an eighth, and she’s got to be five eight at least. Who’s the tallest here?”

Eyes went to Mab, who straightened to her full five eleven.

“Splendid. Grab your kit.”

“Is this a temporary reassignment, or—”

“Who knows in this madhouse? Quick, now.”

Mab gathered her things, frowning. She wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the Hut 6 Decoding Room. The pace was killing, but after nearly nine months she was good at her job. They were more than just typing-pool girls here, she’d come to realize—it took imagination and skill to take a corrupted message and juggle wheel settings until it came clear, or to work through potential Morse errors and find the one that had thrown a message off course. She’d come to feel a certain thrum of satisfaction watching a block of five-letter gibberish sort itself under her fingers into tidy blocks of German.

Well, it didn’t matter what she found satisfying; she’d work wherever she was told. Mab hurried across the gravel path toward Hut 11, squinting in the pale spring sunshine. It was Lucy’s birthday soon; she’d arranged for the day off and was planning to take a cake to Sheffield, where Lucy was now thankfully living with their aunt, at least while London continued to be pounded by the Luftwaffe. Poor Luce didn’t like Sheffield or their aunt, who had four children and hadn’t wanted to take on a fifth (at least until Mab promised to send a weekly chunk of her BP wage). But even if Lucy was lonely, she was safe. Mum refused to move from Shoreditch, and Mab woke every day with the knowledge that this might be the morning she learned a bomb had flattened her mother’s building.

“Good, the replacement.” Mab found herself yanked into Hut 11 by a fellow she recognized from standing in line for tea at the kiosk set up by the Naval Army and Air Force Institutes—Harold Something. Hut 11 was airless and cold, smaller than Hut 6, and not subdivided, one big room that managed to be both cavernous and claustrophobic. Along one wall stood a row of Wrens, all staring at the monstrosities in the middle of the room.