The compartment was cold, jammed with soldiers who kept pestering her to get a drink with them. Outside, icy gray rain slashed down the train windows, and Mab wondered if the Lake District was always this wet. She’d proposed meeting in Coventry, but her new husband was politely firm. “I’d rather not take you to our house until we can live there for good,” he’d said over the telephone last week, when they realized they’d have a whole thirty-six hours together at the end of the month. “What about Keswick? It’s a postage stamp of a place in the Lake District.”

Mab rotated the gold band around her ring finger, still wishing it was Coventry she was traveling to. If she could walk through the house that was going to be their home someday, maybe she’d feel more . . . married.

It was so strange, this limbo they were living in. That madcap London wedding, and the following day a hasty goodbye at Euston station as Mab caught the train back to Bletchley with Osla and Beth, and Francis headed out on another journey for the Foreign Office. They’d agreed it would be best for her not to relocate to his single boardinghouse room in London—after all, he was at his office or traveling nearly round the clock, and Mab too had important work to do. “I’d rather have you safe in Bucks than in London anyway,” Francis said. “The bombings have tailed off, but there’s no guarantee the Luftwaffe won’t come crashing in again.”

Since the wedding night at Claridge’s, they hadn’t had a single night together—only the occasional meet-up for tea or an early supper in a London suburb or railway café. Mab had never anticipated life after marriage proceeding more or less exactly as it had before.

It’s hardly a unique situation, she reminded herself. Husbands and wives all over Britain were in the same pickle: the men off fighting, the women up to their necks in war work; weekends snatched whenever someone had leave. At least Francis wasn’t on the front lines as a younger man would have been; he spent his days in an office and Mab didn’t have to worry like Osla had when her prince was out to sea being targeted by U-boats. We just have to wait out the war, then married life can start. When they would live under the same roof, when Mab would butter her husband’s toast in the morning, make his house welcoming, and ensure she was a wife to be proud of.

How did you do that at long distance?

Write letters, Mab had told herself. Cheerful letters, not too long—men didn’t want to be inundated, just know that they were missed. And she did miss him, so she put the first letter together like a dress pattern, meticulous, affectionate, wifely, not expecting any kind of lengthy answer. Everyone knew men hated writing letters, and Francis barely had two words to say in person. So Mab was startled by the thick packets that started arriving from London.

Darling girl—a quick line on my tea break. The tea here is disgusting: viscid, gelatinous, mouse-colored dishwater through which a tea leaf has perhaps in the last generation or so briefly passed. You would arch your regal eyebrows at it and it would slink wetly out of the cup, never to return. I lack your courage to challenge this gelid mess in my saucer, and drink it down with little more than a mutinous whimper. I miss your regal eyebrows . . .

Or: My dear Faerie Queene—what a day. Can you keep me from dreaming of it? I’m sure you can. Queen Mab is the mistress of dreams if we can believe Shakespeare (and whom else in this world can we believe, if not him?). Come galloping through my sleeping brain tonight in your squirrel-made chariot, and make me dream of love. Though Shakespeare does call his Mab a hag, which doesn’t seem gallant for a husbandly metaphor. Maybe you are Y Mab Darogan of Welsh legend rather than a faerie Mab—the Destined One who will drive the English from the island. I can certainly see you leading armies, sword lifted high, face streaked blue and fierce . . .

Mab didn’t know what to make of such letters. How could a man who talked like his vocabulary was as rationed as his meat be so verbose in print? Not just verbose, but funny, wry, moody, tender . . . yet she wasn’t sure she understood him any better. Nothing he wrote ever touched on himself, but an envelope still winged from London nearly every other day. What was she supposed to write back? That the new billet was very nice, that the new landlady was very nice, that the weather was very nice? She couldn’t say anything about her work and didn’t have her husband’s knack for spinning pages about daily trifles. Trying to carry on a conversation with Francis seemed destined to be one-sided—but whereas he was the silent one in person, by letter, she felt like the mute.

It will be different, she told herself, after the war. When they weren’t trying to conduct a marriage almost entirely by post.

He was waiting on the platform when Mab stepped down, hatless under an umbrella streaming rain off its edge. “Not the weather I hoped for,” he said, kissing her gloved knuckles.

“No walks around the lake, no picnics by the water? Whatever shall we do?” He smiled, eyes going over her with slow care. Mab laughed, touching her hair. “Do I look a fright?”

“No.” He picked up her overnight case. “I forget you a little, every time, and then the sight of you shocks me all over again.”

“It’s—lovely to see you too,” Mab said inadequately. “I, um. I got your letters.”

“I blather. It’s a bad habit.”

“No, I like them . . . mine are very dull.”

The hotel was narrow, Edwardian, looking out over the rain-lashed expanse of Derwentwater. Their room would have been cheerful in sunlight but it looked gray and rippled, as though it were all underwater. “We can take tea downstairs if you’re hungry,” Francis began as the door shut, but the words disappeared half-spoken as the overnight case clattered to the floor and they gripped at each other, pulling together like magnets.

On the night of their wedding in the borrowed suite in Claridge’s, Mab’s oh-so-new husband had been opening a half bottle of champagne when she came out in her negligee, and he’d gone so still he could have been a waxwork. Something flickered across his features, an expression too fast to catch, but something about it made his broad, calm, unremarkable face almost handsome. “Come here . . . ,” he’d whispered as the champagne crashed over unopened. Mab had fallen into him wholeheartedly, focused on being warm and welcoming under the rumpled sheets. Let me make you happy.

“I take it you realize—I’ve done that before?” she ventured hesitantly afterward. She’d devoted many sleepless nights planning exactly how to broach the fact that she wasn’t any schoolgirl innocent. She felt guilty for not saying it before the wedding, but she’d been too afraid it would ruin everything. Maybe it still would—if he rounded on her now and said anything about spoiled goods, she was going to shrivel up and die. “I’m no tart, Francis. It was only one—”

“Oh, darling girl. Not important,” he said drowsily, and Mab fell asleep nearly limp with relief. The last hurdle cleared . . . only later that same night, Mab had wakened to see Francis sitting at the window in his half-buttoned shirt, sash hauled open to the icy winter night, cigarette drifting smoke between his still fingers. His face as he gazed out over the dark London streets had looked so shuttered Mab sat up in bed, half asleep and half alarmed.

“Francis?”

Slowly his eyes turned to her; he half smiled in that opaque, polite way. “Go back to sleep, lovely Mab.”

Her drowsy ears listened for air-raid sirens, even as she slid back toward dreamland. “Nothing’s wrong?”

“Only the world,” she thought she heard him say.

Did you say that? Mab wondered now, even as her arms twined about his neck. Do I know you at all?

Well, this was surely a way to know him better. She began drawing him toward the bed, as she had in Claridge’s, but Francis stopped her this time, taking her hands and turning them over in his as if he’d never seen anything so lovely before. He lifted them upward, lowering his head to press his lips against each palm, and then he took her face in his hands and gave her one of those long looks that nearly scarred her bones. Mab couldn’t hold that gaze; she shied away from it, pressing her mouth to his so he’d have to close his eyes. He kissed her with his hands in her hair and at her shoulders, fingers sliding to feather her spine in unhurried strokes, not just using her mouth as a place to rest his while they pushed clothes out of the way. Not self-conscious at all that she was the one to bend her head to kiss him.