She rested her chin in her hand. “All right, then.”

They talked about his childhood home in Coventry, a small lovely city now half leveled by German bombs. Mab spun a few anecdotes about her billet-mates: “A human mouse who doesn’t have two words for anybody but works with the brainiest people we have, and a Canadian deb who will short-sheet your bed and freeze your knickers outside the window in winter . . .” They talked about whether America would join the war and if the Italians were finished in the Mediterranean. Mab still found herself doing most of the talking, but at least he did his part asking questions and listening to the answers. When silence fell again, Mab was content to let it stretch, watching cigarette smoke wind between his blunt fingers. “Would you mind if I asked why you invited me to dinner, Mr. Gray? It’s been a lovely time, but . . . well, you clearly aren’t wooing, and if you were looking for a bit of something else, you’d have had your hand on my knee before the soup was ordered.”

“I have no expectations, if that’s what you’re fearing.” He gave a half smile. “You’re a bit young and vibrant for a crumbling stone on a heath like me.”

“You aren’t old, if that’s what you mean. Men my age are callow and boring.” Older men liked to hear that, and quite often it was true. Of course, plenty of older men were also callow and boring, not that they liked to hear that quite so much. “Why invite me out, if you didn’t expect either entertainment or romance?” She was genuinely curious.

“A reminder of civilization . . .” He trailed off. “Miss Churt, I’ve seen two wars. If I can sit in a lovely restaurant, eat a good curry, look at a lovely woman—that’s a respite. A nice little illusion.”

“Civilization isn’t an illusion.”

“Oh, it is. The horrors are real. This”—waving a hand—“is all gossamer.”

Mab was taken aback. “What a horrible thought.”

“Why? Illusion makes for a nice show, while it lasts.” He offered her a cigarette. “Why don’t we order coffee, and you can tell me more about your day-to-day?”

He was diverting her, but Mab decided to take the diversion. “My landlady is carrying on like something out of Dickens, or maybe Bram Stoker, because her mousy daughter took in a stray dog. Oh, the tears. I can’t say it’s a nice dog; it has fleas and it bites. But I’m on the dog’s side if just to see the pinched old cow pitch a screamer every time it trundles into the room threatening to shed on her horrible Methodist furniture.” Mab pressed a trembling hand to her temples in her best parody of Mrs. Finch.

The smile lines about his eyes deepened.

“I told you I can imitate Churchill, too, didn’t I?” Mab flashed a V sign, deepened her voice. “‘Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty . . .’”

“Uncanny,” Francis Gray said.

“And this is my little sister, Lucy, begging for a pony . . .”

Chapter 20

To Mr. J. P. E. C. Cornwell,

Forgive me for not knowing how to address you—you washed my hair in champagne when the Café de Paris was bombed, after knocking out the man who tried to rob me, and then you lent me your coat. My wits were sufficiently rattled that I never asked your name. Your coat has a label of J. P. E. C. Cornwell, and I managed to find an address attached to a J. Cornwell in London—but when I attempted to post it, the package was returned to me with a covering note. Apparently you shipped overseas shortly after our brief meeting. If this follow-up note finds you—I’m forwarding it to who I presume is your landlady—I wish you the very best of luck in the fight to come.

If you would like to call on Osla Kendall when you are next in England—

Osla hesitated then, not entirely sure how to finish. She didn’t want to give her Good Samaritan the idea she was angling for a date—she could hardly remember anything about him except for his greatcoat, his uniform, his calm voice—but she really did want to shake his hand for the service he’d rendered her.

—I would be delighted to deliver your coat, and my thanks, in person.

“I’D LIKE A transfer, Miss Senyard.” Osla met the older woman’s eyes square. “My language skills are going to pot, binding reports and sticking cards in boxes.”

Miss Senyard clicked her tongue. “The work we do might seem unrewarding, but it’s very important.”

“I have excellent command of plain and technical German. There must be other jobs here in German naval section that could use me.” Osla gave her most winning smile. Since practically her first day here she’d found the work dull, but since surviving the bombing she’d become abruptly, violently fed up. She’d nearly died at the Café de Paris; she was not going to stagger back to BP and waste her hard-won skills on a job any schoolgirl with a little filing experience could handle. She was still alive, and she was going to do more with that life—for one, fight harder against the utter monsters dropping those bombs. “Do you know some of the chaps call our section the Debutantes’ Den?” she asked Miss Senyard. “Let me prove I’m more than a silly socialite, Miss S.”

“I’ll hate to lose you, Osla.” Miss Senyard sighed. “But with technical German, I suppose you could join the German translating section. I’ll speak to Mr. Birch.”

“Thank you, ma’am! You should put Sally Norton on translating too; her German’s as good as mine.” Sally had been recruited to Bletchley Park just this spring and landed under Miss Senyard too, to Osla’s delight.

“Any other personnel changes you’d like to make?” Amused.

“No, ma’am.” Osla was transferred in no time, still part of Hut 4 but to a different section where a gaggle of tweedy men who’d read German at university and a cluster of twinset-wearing women who’d been “finished” in Munich and Vienna sat at a long table translating cipher messages. They made room with cheery waves, shoving over a stack of decrypts. “Decoded fresh out of the Typex machines; turn it into plain English.”

Osla pulled her pink wool jacket more tightly around herself in the hut’s chill—these green clapboard walls were slow to warm in the watery spring sunshine—and started translating the first cipher message. Details on a U-boat wolf pack, picked up by Morse code listeners in a Y-station in Scarborough, according to the labels. “What do we do if there are bits missing?” Whole chunks of the paragraph in front of her trailed off into blanks.

“Fill it in, given context. We don’t always get all of it, and that’s all there is to it.”

What if that’s the part that’s crucial? Osla thought, staring at the blank in the message. What if that’s the part that will save lives? Well, she’d wanted harder work, more important work—here it was. She picked up her pencil, flipping her German dictionary open. Die Klappenschrank, what did that mean . . .

“You should have hopped jobs at the end of March,” a girl across the table said as she finished her first message. “Thrilling reading, let me tell you—all the traffic from Matapan coming through!”

My boyfriend was at Matapan, Osla wanted to say. Because he got transferred to the Valiant. It wasn’t till I saw the information coming through my hands in Miss Senyard’s section that I realized the Valiant was at the battle . . . and I haven’t heard from him since.

She cut that fear off before it could grow out of proportion. Philip hadn’t written because he was busy, for God’s sake. Or maybe he’d forgot all about her, given her the old heave-ho. Fine—at this point she just wanted to know he was safe. Then she’d care about whether she’d been ditched or not.

And surely he was safe. She’d heard the newsreel in the little Bletchley Odeon, turned to stone in her seat, listening to the announcer over the tinny, triumphant music: “These are some of the ships that destroyed at least three Italian cruisers and three destroyers, and crippled and possibly sank a battleship, without casualties or damage to themselves!” “Without casualties” . . . yet, Osla knew how idiotically optimistic newsreels could be. Even in an overwhelming victory, men died. Victory came at a cost. Osla had filed the cost of victory away every day in shoeboxes.

“These are the fifteen-inch shells that shattered a brand-new cruiser with one salvo . . . ,” the newsreel had blithered on, and she had fought down a surge of nausea, imagining what a shell like that could do to a man’s taut strength and golden skin, his clever brain inside its fragile skull. This wasn’t a fairy tale; princes died as easily as any other men.

But if he was dead, surely it would have been reported. A prince’s death on the front lines would be news. Unless the report wasn’t in yet . . .