“Pardon?”

“He was sixteen. Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy going for a curry your next day off? I know a very decent Indian restaurant in London.”

“I like curry as much as the next girl.” She’d never tasted it.

He stood looking up at her with that faint smile, apparently unfazed by the fact she was half a head taller. Wasn’t that unusual for short fellows. “When’s your next day off, Miss Churt?”

“Monday next. And I’m ashamed to admit I don't remember your name.” Mab really did feel embarrassed about that.

“Francis Gray.” He tipped his hat. “Foreign Office official and mediocre poet, at your service.”

Chapter 17

* * *

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MARCH 1941

* * *

BB doesn’t dare say a word about recent rumblings of upcoming action in the Mediterranean, therefore the biggest news of the week is the roach found in the night-shift pudding served at the dining hall . . .

* * *

Mother, I’m going to be late—”

“If you could wring out another cloth for my forehead . . . It feels like a spike is going through my temples.” Mrs. Finch’s eyes were shut tight in the darkened bedroom.

Beth flew for a cloth. “I really do have to go now—”

“You do your best, Bethan.” Feebly. “I understand you don’t have time for your mother—it’s just so hard being left all alone . . .”

Beth was nearly crying in frustration by the time she managed to get free. Her father shook his head as she struggled into her cardigan. “Who is going to make your mother a nice cuppa, with you off at work?”

You could put a teakettle on yourself, Dad, Beth couldn’t help thinking, even as she slipped out. But by the time she burst into the Cottage with a “Sorry I’m late, sorry—” the frustration and anger were gone, her brain wiped clean as a slate. It happened so fast now: in the time it took to run out her own front door and through the Cottage door, Beth’s mind shut an entirely different door on everything at home and simply locked it away for later.

“We’re shorthanded till midnight,” Peggy said from the next desk. “Jean’s home with ’flu, Dilly’s having another row with Denniston, so have at it.”

Beth pulled out her crib chart and her pocket Italian dictionary, fiddling with the end of her plait. Something going on in the Mediterranean, maybe something big. If only the Italian naval stuff weren’t so quirky—and there was so little of it; hardly enough to work with . . . Lining up her rods, Beth got a set of easy breaks, then groaned when the next message came out of the basket. A short one—the short ones were always nasty. Ten in the evening before it clicked into place. Normally the messages meant nothing, just Italian she couldn’t read, but she could make this one out. “Peggy,” Beth whispered, suddenly cold.

Peggy came over. She froze when she read the words in Beth’s pencil scrawl, translating the Italian.

“‘Today 25 March 1941 is the day minus three.’” The words stung Beth’s lips. She looked up at Peggy. “What’s happening in three days?”

“WE’RE SWAMPED WITH urgent traffic.” Beth forced herself to look the head of Hut 8 in the eye. “We need anyone you can spare.” Peggy was on the Cottage telephone ringing Dilly, calling in Jean ’flu or no ’flu, summoning the whole team, and she’d sent Beth across to Hut 8 to beg reinforcements. They borrow our people; now it’s time to return the favor. Normally Beth would have stood hunched in an agony of shyness getting the words out, but the code still had her in its spiral grip, the one that took her outside her own awkward self. “Please?”

“Oh, for—” The hut head strangled some impolite words. “You can have Harry Zarb. I can’t spare more.”

Beth nodded, arms wrapped around herself in the chilly spring night, waiting until Harry came shouldering out in his shirtsleeves. “Hallo,” he said cheerfully. “Need a hand with the dago traffic? I can say dago,” he said, noticing Beth’s wince. “I get called a dago often enough, if not a wog. It’s your inevitable fate if you’re any darker than paste in Merry Olde England. Here—” He’d been about to shrug into his disreputable jacket but dropped it over Beth’s shoulders instead. She started to demur, but he brushed that aside. “What’s the rush in Dilly’s section?”

Beth filled him in as they crossed the dark grounds. She was used to seeing Harry among the Mad Hatters, where he was wry and relaxed, leaning on his elbows in damp grass by the lake or scattering toast crumbs on his book, but he was a different man on the BP shift clock, alert and focused, brows mobile as he listened. He let out a low whistle at Today is the day minus three, stride lengthening until Beth had to trot to keep up. As Harry ducked into the Cottage, Peggy was on the telephone snapping, “—don’t care if your nose is running like the Thames, get back here . . .”

“So this is the famous harem?” Harry glanced around, looking enormous and disheveled in the cramped clutter of desks. “Hugh Alexander owes me tuppence; he made a bet you’d have mirrors and powder rooms. Where can I work? It sounds like it’ll be a full house.”

“Share my desk.” Thank goodness Hut 8 had given her someone familiar, Beth thought, not a stranger who would take over her space and freeze her solid with nerves.

He pulled up a stool on the other side of Beth’s desk, black hair flopping, reaching for pencils that looked like twigs in his huge hands. “Cribs?”

Beth pushed a crib chart over. “Italian for English, cruiser, submarine. Here are the rods—”

“Inglese, incrociatore, sommergibili,” he read off the slip. “Christ, listen to us butcher the poor Italian . . .”

They reached simultaneously for the stack of messages and fell headlong into the spiral.

“TODAY IS THE day minus three.” Every time someone got up from their desk, they chanted it aloud. And then it became “Today is the day minus two” because none of Dilly’s team left the Cottage, not for so much as a cup of Ovaltine.

“I brought you some clothes.” Osla passed Beth a package at the door, peering over at Peggy, who was coming downstairs from the attic yawning. “Are you all sleeping here?”

We take turns on the attic cot, when we sleep at all. Beth had done ten hours straight in her chair, fifteen hours, eighteen—she could barely even see Osla, pretty and worried looking. Beth muttered her thanks, going to the loo to tug on a new blouse and underclothes, then staggered right back to her desk, where Harry passed her a cup of chicory coffee and her rods.

Something big. They all knew it, and nine of the Cottage’s eighteen women had been seconded to it, working like madwomen. Dilly had disappeared so far down into his rods he was barely even present—Beth saw him try to stuff half a cheese sandwich into his pipe instead of his tobacco as he muttered his way through a new message. She merely removed the pipe from his hand, pulled the mangled sandwich out, placed the tobacco in his palm instead, and returned to her desk. Jean was running a fever by now, honking through pile after pile of handkerchiefs as she rodded and rodded and rodded. Sometimes someone would doze off at her desk, and then someone else would chuck a blanket over her shoulders and let her doze ten minutes, before giving a nudge and a reminder of “Today’s the day minus one.”

“Who’s our CIC in the Mediterranean?” one of the girls asked.

“Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham,” Peggy said. “Dilly said he’s been notified something will be coming down.”

If we can find out what. Beth reached for her next stack, only to touch the bottom of the wire basket. Dilly’s Fillies paced like racehorses in their stalls then, waiting for the sound of wheels in the stable yard, which meant the dispatch riders had arrived with saddlebags full of new Morse code messages to decrypt.

“Beth?” Harry touched her arm, and she blinked—she’d got so used to his taking up the other side of her desk, she barely noticed he was there. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go—my son’s peaky and I’ve got to help my wife. Just a few hours—”

Beth nodded, chewing a thumbnail, her mind still tumbling among the blocks of Enigma. Was there ever anything more aptly named . . .

“You’re good at this.” Harry shrugged into his jacket. “Very good. I’m working at a gallop, keeping up with you.”

She blinked again. Ever since realizing she wasn’t so terrible she was going to be sacked, she hadn’t stopped to wonder if she was good. She’d never been good at anything in her life. “I like it,” she heard herself saying, voice hoarse from going hours without saying a word. “I—I understand it.”