Ladies, you’ve been reassigned.”

Beth was down the rabbit hole on a new message and didn’t look up at Dilly until Peggy reached over and took the pencil out of her hand. “Italian naval traffic is being rerouted to another section,” Dilly went on, tugging the bathrobe sash holding up his trousers, “since there’s now so little of it—”

“Not much naval traffic when you don’t have a navy anymore,” Peggy smirked. Beth smirked back, though the thought of their Matapan triumph gave her an odd feeling now that she knew Osla’s princely beau had been involved in that battle. Beth usually forgot that the puzzle work she loved meant something concrete for the troops—meant life or death for men far away on a dazzling blue sea. She’d been very glad she couldn’t say as much to Osla. It was my work that flung your boyfriend’s ship into the thick of the biggest naval battle since Trafalgar. Does that make it my fault, at least a little bit, that you have no idea if he’s alive or dead?

“We’ve been given a new puzzle,” Dilly continued, passing out messages and rods. “It’s a proper jabberwock, I warn you.”

Beth flipped through the stack, frowning. Something looked different . . .

“The Abwehr Enigma.” Dilly saw the blank looks between the girls like Beth who could work German cribs but not speak the language. “The Enigma used by German military intelligence. Just call it the Spy Enigma. Our intelligence chaps can find the German agents on our soil and feed them false information, but we haven’t a clue if it’s being believed by the Abwehr officers running the show in Berlin.”

“What’s different about their Enigma?” Peggy frowned.

“They use a four-wheel machine, not a three-wheel. Four wheel settings to find instead of three, and they turn over a deal more frequently. It’s a beast,” Dilly concluded, running a hand over his hair, which was already thinner than it had been when Beth first laid eyes on him. “Welchman thinks if the boys in his hut can’t break it, it can’t be done. Let’s prove him wrong.”

Beth had a go for six hours, and all she got was a headache. It felt like her first weeks in the Cottage, flailing in the dark, and she could see matching discouragement from all the others. But Dilly was sanguine. “Come back fresh tomorrow and go at it again. We’ll get there—blast it, where’s my pipe?” Beth found the pipe under a German dictionary, handed it to him, and trailed dejectedly home.

She was still wandering mentally among four-letter indicators as she leashed up Boots and set out on her mother’s list of errands—fetching the post, a stop by the chemist. Mother’s little helper . . . only Mother’s little helper wasn’t quite so content anymore. Mother’s little helper now spent her time counting the hours until she could go back on shift.

Beth sighed, tugging Boots toward the chemist, where she had to step around a pair of huge booted feet. “Harry?” She blinked.

His head jerked up. Clearly he’d dozed off sitting on the shop bench, leaning against the wall. “Sorry. I’m waiting for the chemist to mix something up, and a week on the night shift got the better of me.” He had circles like tar under his eyes and his collar was a wrinkled mess. Beth knew Hut 8 was working round the clock on the U-boat traffic—it wasn’t any secret that the wolf packs had been bringing down close to a hundred Allied ships a month between March and June. Harry gave a hard blink, squinting up at Beth. “I haven’t seen you since the dance, have I?”

Where we danced and talked codebreaking techniques, and people apparently thought we were . . . Beth felt her cheeks color. She’d been appalled when Osla and Mab thought something romantic might have been going on. Embarrassed, wondering if she’d given Harry the wrong idea. And ashamed—because yes, maybe Beth had developed a harmless crush on her favorite BP colleague and only just realized it.

Either way, she’d resolved to steer clear of Harry in future. “Picking up a toothbrush for my dad,” she murmured, edging past, but Boots had stopped to sniff at Harry’s outstretched hand.

“I’m getting a tincture for Christopher.” Scratching Boots’s jaw. “I don’t know if it does any good, but the doctor has faith in it.”

Beth hesitated despite herself. “How long—I mean, when did he contract polio?”

“He was eighteen months old.” Harry’s voice went flat. “Careening around the lawn one moment, the next moment screaming. By morning he couldn’t stand . . . by evening he was in hospital, in an iron lung.” Harry looked up. “Have you ever seen one of those damned torture chambers? Just an enormous metal cylinder, with his tiny head sticking out . . . even when he was moved to the next ward, he’d lie there in a sterile crib, crying and crying, and we’d stand at the door on the other side of the chicken wire, not able to come close because of quarantine. Five more months before we got him back for good.” Harry’s big hand lay still across Boots’s head. “We’re lucky he has use of his arms. We’re lucky. I keep telling myself that. But he’s in and out of hospital all the time. He’ll need to have his ankle fused at some point, to stabilize the foot. And he’s such an active little sprat, he cries out of pure rage whenever he’s put into a cast . . .”

The chemist poked his head outside. “Your tincture’s made up, Mr. Zarb.”

Harry gave Boots a final scratch, rising. Beth followed him inside and took a toothbrush from the rack, arriving at the counter as Harry was putting down coins. The chemist’s wife was eyeing him with distaste, gaze traveling over his vast height, his shabby tweed jacket with the button missing.

“I don’t know if I should be serving you.” She pushed his change across the counter with a fingertip. “A strong young fellow not in uniform, shame on you. There’s a war on, you know!”

Harry paused, looking at her. “I know,” he said evenly. “I know.” He leaned forward until his nose nearly touched the woman’s, even as she pressed backward with eyes growing round. “I KNOW.”

He shoved the coins back across the counter so hard they flew up, some hitting her, some falling to the floor. He grabbed his tincture bottle and banged out, shop door rebounding against the wall. Beth pushed her own exact change for the toothbrush at the wide-eyed chemist’s wife and went after him.

“Harry,” she called, then hesitated. She had no idea what to say when people were angry or upset. He stood struggling with his old bicycle leaned up against the lamppost, hands moving too roughly to disengage the chain, not looking up.

“I could use some help with a problem,” Beth said at last. Not much in the way of comfort, but work was a comfort in its way. Or maybe not a comfort, but a drug. It certainly felt that way to her. A drug that could make you forget anything—even, for a tiny space of time, the horror of seeing a child in pain.

“What problem?” He looked up, blinking as if his eyes were prickling, and Beth’s embarrassed determination to steer clear of him dissolved. He hadn’t been feeding her lines at the dance, for all Mab’s cynicism about married men looking for fun. He wasn’t going to try anything, and Beth didn’t want him to, crush or not. First and foremost, Harry had always been a friend.

“What can you tell me about working a system with four-letter indicators?” Beth asked, making sure there was no one in earshot.

His gaze went from angry to speculative in a blink. “Four wheels?” She nodded. He unchained his bicycle and began to walk it along rather than mounting up, and Beth fell into step on the other side. “K Enigma uses a four-wheel machine,” Harry said when they were clear of the village. The country road was empty, elms arching overhead, robins twittering. “I did a bit with that. A four-letter indicator means there’s a settable Umkehrwalze . . .”

“It’s difficult.” Beth could feel both their minds ranging ahead in unison, like a pair of greyhounds bounding down this path into a gallop. “We haven’t got much in the way of textual cribs.”

“I might be able to help there. Have you got a bit of paper?”

Chapter 26

Hullo, princess—I’m back in England. Did my letter after Matapan go astray? Everything’s been chaos. I’ve come to take my sublieutenant’s courses and exams; for the moment I’m bunking with the Mountbattens. Tell me you can get to London Saturday next. —Philip

You’ll miss the next Tea Party.” Beth looked up from the rug, where she was brushing Boots. “We’re discussing Carry On, Jeeves.”

“Bugger Jeeves. Philip’s not dead!” Now that Osla had the proof in his handwriting, she could laugh at her own fears. But like a child terrified of a monster in the closet, you could only laugh at the fear when the light was switched on.