“This one?” Osla pulled out a dress. “It’s the very latest go—how do I look?”

“Jumpy,” said Mab from the bed. “Like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner gong due any minute.” Osla gave her a look. Mab held up Carry On, Jeeves. “Unlike you, I did the reading.”

“Oh, go boil your head, Queen Mab. Wait, do my hair? You set the most topping waves . . .”

Euston station on Saturday night was thronged with harried women and jostling servicemen, but the whole crowd might as well have been shadows to Osla as she ran for the Great Hall.

As a little girl forever shuttling back and forth between London and her latest boarding school, Osla had hurried countless times under this hall’s coffered ceiling, always outstripping her luggage in her haste to get aboveground for sunshine and the start of summer hols—but today she stopped dead in the middle of the throng, not caring if she ever saw sunshine again. Because there he stood at the foot of the sweeping double flight of stairs, a man in naval uniform and greatcoat, hat over blond hair, shoulders wide and feet braced, profile bent over a letter. The sight of him nearly stopped Osla’s heart.

Philip looked up as if he’d felt her gaze. He looked more like a Viking than ever: golden, hard, tanned dark by the Mediterranean sun. His gaze hunted over her a little uncertainly, as if trying to merge the irreverent Osla he’d met at Claridge’s in a boiler suit with this Osla: her serious face, her blush-pink crepe dress, her little fuchsia hat tilted over one eye. An Osla who, unbeknownst to him, had spent her day translating German naval secrets.

“Os . . . ,” he began, and trailed off.

“Philip.” She too was suddenly floundering. “I’m on shift tomorrow morning—I only have this evening, then I have to catch the train back.” Desperate for distraction, she gestured at the Great Hall around them. “Euston’s a bit of an eyesore, isn’t it? I always preferred coming into Paddington when I was little, because it had the statue of the Unknown Soldier—you know the one, standing there in his bronze greatcoat, reading a letter from home? I always wanted to ask him who wrote the letter. Was she beautiful, did he come back to her, did she love him . . .”

“Did he ever answer you?” Philip’s eyes drifted over her face as if he hadn’t quite remembered her right. They hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, Osla thought. She hadn’t remembered him quite right either—his eyes weren’t blue-gray, they were just blue. So very blue.

She took a step closer. “No, he never answered. Being bronze, and all.”

“I suppose I could answer for him.” Philip held up the letter in his hand, and she saw her own writing. “The girl who wrote this letter is definitely beautiful. And he definitely survived and came back to her . . .”

Philip trailed off before the third question. Did she love him? Did he even want an answer?

Osla knew it would be very easy to guide this train onto safer tracks. They hadn’t spent very much time together, after all, and it had been more than a year. She could play the flirtatious chum, trill, “Darling Phil, how long it’s been!” and then they’d splash out at the Savoy and part with no more heartache than any other set of friends who met for a fizzing night on the town. That would probably be the wiser course, Osla thought, remembering Mab’s nighttime warning about princes and the girls they wouldn’t consider marrying.

But: the third question.

Did she love him?

Osla took two steps forward, flung her arms around Philip’s neck, and pressed her lips to his. He pulled her against him with a yank, lifting her up onto her toes. She was too busy drowning in his kisses to notice when the lights of Euston station went out.

“I THINK WE’RE stuck here, princess.”

“Such a tragedy, sailor.”

The air-raid siren still sounded somewhere in the distance, but Osla could not hear the drone of planes—if bombs were falling, they were on the other side of London. The station lights had come on again, but only partly; their side was enveloped in shadow. Philip sat with his back against the station wall with Osla curled on his lap, his greatcoat draped about her shoulders so he could wrap his arms round her inside it. His hat lay on the ground with Osla’s fuchsia toque on top of it beside her handbag. None of the others caught in the station paid any attention to the midshipman and his code girl hidden in the shadow of the hall, clinging so tight they nearly fused.

A sound clattered outside, and Philip’s face lifted from Osla’s neck, his every muscle tensing beneath her. “Just the ack-ack guns,” she murmured, tugging his head back to hers. “Our side. You get used to the sound.” She was drunk on him, every nerve in her body singing. They’d kissed before, but with care, standing on doorsteps where they couldn’t be tempted too far. Not like this, openmouthed and yearning, hands sliding under sleeves and inside collars, the whole surface of her skin aching.

“You’re so calm about the air raids,” Philip muttered against her lips.

“Londoners have become terribly blasé about the Blitz.” The travelers caught in the station had settled down to wait it out, unwrapping sandwiches and chatting to their neighbors. “Euston took some hits last year, but she’s still standing.”

“Thank God you’re buried in Bucks away from the worst of it.” He kissed her jaw, fingertips sliding along her skin inside her neckline—she could feel his grin against her cheek as he touched the hard little lump of his naval insignia, pinned to her brassiere between her breasts. “You kept it.”

“I nearly had it stolen once.” Osla pushed her face into the hollow of his neck and rested there, tasting the salt of his skin. “I came to the Café de Paris on my night off. The boy I was dancing with, he . . .” She shut her eyes, seeing poor Charlie’s lungs exploded out onto the front of his uniform. “The club was bombed, and a looter tried to get my jewelry. A stranger ran him off, took care of me.” J. P. E. C. Cornwell, whoever he was . . . Osla hadn’t received any response to her letter. “I kept calling him Philip.”

I’m not Philip, sweetheart. What’s your name?

Philip was here now, arms tightening around her, one hand rubbing her bare shoulder where her sleeve had slipped down, the other stroking her silk-stockinged calf. Osla couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt the world could be borne simply because someone was holding her. It dizzied her, this mixture of simple comfort and raw desire. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Philip said quietly.

“You were headed to fight at Cape Matapan.” And I think one of my billet-mates knows something about what orders sent you there.

“I wasn’t in any danger, Os. We were on them that night like foxes in a henhouse.” His lips touched her hair, his body suddenly still against hers. “I was on the Valiant’s searchlights. I’d flip the midship light and pick out the enemy cruiser until our guns set it ablaze. Then the gunnery officer would shout train left or train right, and as soon as I lit the next one up, she’d be blotted out stem to stern. Two eight-inch-gun Italian cruisers sunk in five minutes. It was as near murder as anything could be in wartime. The cruisers just—burst into tremendous sheets of flame.” He exhaled into her hair. “I dream about them.”

“I dream about the Café de Paris. I wake up smelling the fire, and for a moment I think I’ve gone mad.”

“Don’t say that, Os.” He was already tense; now he went rigid. “Not ever.”

She pulled back, looked at him through the shadows.

“Bit of a sore point with me.” He made himself shrug. “My—my mother went mad.”

Alice of Battenberg, from one of the German noble houses. “You’ve hardly ever mentioned her.”

“She had a breakdown when I was eight or nine. So many doctors—they couldn’t decide if she was neurotic or paranoid schizophrenic or . . .” A long pause; his eyes fixed past Osla’s shoulder. “I wasn’t there when they took her away. They sent the children out for the day. But I heard later how she tried to run. They had to put her in restraints and inject her before they could bundle her into a car and take her to Bellevue in Switzerland.”

Osla felt him breathing against her, unevenly. “You were so young.”

“It was the last time our family lived together. She was released eventually but by then my father was in France, my sisters were married, I was in England . . .”

Osla’s arms tightened around his neck.

“It’s just what happened,” he said roughly. “She went mad. The family broke up. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does. Besides, she got better. She came out of the asylum, returned to Athens . . . she’s still there. Living quietly.”

And you’ve still had no real home since she was taken away, Osla thought. “How did she do it? Recover from that?”