Mrs. Churt couldn’t keep a slightly adversarial awe out of her voice whenever she addressed Mab now. Being chauffeured to a fancy London hotel by a Greek prince, getting kitted out in a borrowed silk dress, and watching her Hartnell-clad daughter recite her vows to a gentleman in a Savile Row suit had knocked Mrs. Churt for a loop. “Why couldn’t my other girls turn out like Mabel?” Mab had heard her mother saying to one of the neighbors. “They settle for dockworkers and factory men, when she nabs herself a dyed-in-the-wool gentleman easy as taking candy from a baby!”

“Don’t suppose you could spare a few quid?” she asked now as Mab handed over all her extra clothing coupons for Lucy.

“That’s near a week’s wages, Mum—”

“What, that husband of yours doesn’t give you pin money?”

Francis had offered, but it seemed greedy when her billet and meals were covered. Mab didn’t want him thinking she was the kind of woman who always had her hand out. “I don’t keep house for him yet, so it’s not necessary.” Mab pushed a couple of pound notes across the table, then bundled Lucy into her clothes and took her to the park. “Do you want to live in Coventry after the war, Luce? It’s in the very middle of England, and there’s a house there that will be mine, and you could learn to ride.”

“I don’t want to learn to ride later. I want to learn now.”

“I don’t blame you.” Mab took her hand as they crossed Rotten Row. “There are a lot of things I want now, too. But there’s a war on.”

“Why does everyone say that?” Lucy said crossly. She probably didn’t remember when there hadn’t been a war on.

Mab headed back to Francis’s digs at twilight, hoping . . . but the landlady shook her head. “He’s not back yet, dearie. Would you like to wait in his room? Normally I’d insist on seeing a marriage certificate before letting any young lady into a gentleman’s quarters under my roof, but Mr. Francis is such a perfect gentleman . . .”

Not so perfect as that, Mab thought with a certain grin, mounting the carpeted stairs. Francis could, in his quiet way, pen an absolutely indecent letter. Something else she’d learned about him, since the Lake District.

I’m sitting at my desk in my shirtsleeves under a hideous gaslight, smudged in pencil, dreaming of the long map of your body unscrolled across my unmade bed. A map I’ve nowhere near finished charting, though I know a few landmarks well enough to dream on. Your hills and vales, your valleys and mounds, your wicked eyes. You’re an endless serpentine ladder to paradise, and I wish I could coil your hair in my hands and climb you like that great mountain in Nepal where countless explorers have died in ecstasy searching for the peak. I am mixing my metaphors horribly, but longing does that to a man, and you already knew I was a terrible poet. I’d fall back on a better one and pass his work off as my own, except you read far too widely for that to work. “License my roving hands, and let them go, before, behind, between, above, below . . .” O my Mab, my newfound land! Is John Donne on your list of classic literature? He is probably considered too indecent for females. Certainly he’s no help to a gentleman’s peace of mind either, especially when dreaming of you, my lovely map, my unclimbed ladder . . .

Francis’s room was at the top of the house. Mab let herself in, realizing she had no idea how he lived—for all his letters, he had never once described this place. She looked around the neat, anonymous bedroom, not seeing Francis at all; it was cluttered with the Victorian landlady’s crocheted antimacassars and silk flowers. Nothing here smelled like him, his hair tonic or his shirts or his soap.

Make yourself at home, his note had said. She didn’t want to pry, but she was desperately curious. His bedcovers were pulled taut enough to bounce a shilling—clearly he’d never lost the army habits from the last war. The desk was bare except for pen and blotter and stationery. One photograph in a much-handled frame, facedown on the desk . . . turning it over, Mab saw four young men in uniform. With a stab to her gut like a bayonet thrust, she realized the shortest was Francis, his uniform so big it puddled at his ankles. He stood clutching his weapon with a huge grin, as if he had joined the greatest adventure in the world. The three men around him looked grimmer, their smiles more cynical, or was she reading too much into those blurred, unknown faces? The scribbled date in the corner read April 1918.

“You poor bugger,” she said softly, touching her husband’s young face. She’d never once seen Francis smile that wide—she wondered if he ever had, since April 1918. There were no names written under any of the men around him. They didn’t live, Mab thought, replacing the picture where she’d found it. I’d stake my life on it.

No other photographs, not of his parents, not of Mab. She didn’t have a single picture of herself to send him—she’d have to do something about that—and they hadn’t snapped any wedding photographs. Osla hadn’t been able to find a camera on short notice. Mab went to the bookshelf—no poets, mostly treatises on distant history, long-ago Chinese dynasties and Roman emperors. He seemed to like his reading to take him as far from the twentieth century as possible. At the very back of the shelf, wedged almost out of sight, she found a copy of Mired: Battlefield Verses by Francis Gray, with a copyright page from 1919—it must have been from the first printing run. The spine cracked as if it hadn’t been opened in years, but there were angry scribbles all over the pages, almost every poem marked up. From “Altar,” his most well-known poem:

Mab laid the book aside, feeling stripped to the core. All the letters he’d written and never a word about any of this. But why would he? No one talked about their war when it was over. If the day ever came that Hitler was defeated and Bletchley Park closed for good, Mab suddenly knew down to her bones that she and everyone else wouldn’t need the Official Secrets Act to tell them to scorch it from their minds. They’d do it anyway. That was what Francis and his surviving friends had done after the last war; it was probably what the Roman and Chinese soldiers in his history books had done after their wars long ago.

In the top drawer of his desk, she found a packet of her letters. She leafed through them, every one clearly much handled, all the way back to the very first note she’d written him after they became engaged—just a few lines suggesting a date he could meet her family. Underneath her signature, he’d scribbled in pencil:

The girl with the hat!

A knock sounded, and Mab jumped out of her skin. Still holding the bunch of letters, she rose to answer.

“Mr. Gray telephoned, dearie. He won’t be able to get away at all tonight—possibly by tomorrow morning. He’s very sorry—some line of questioning he can’t get free of.”

Mab’s heart sank.

“Would you like some supper? Just mock duck and turnip-top salad, but no one goes away from my table hungry, even with a war on.”

Mab demurred politely, then shut the door and looked around the little room. It might not have looked like Francis, smelled like him, or carried the shape of him in its shadows, but at that moment she swore she could almost feel him breathing at her shoulder. Before she could lose the feeling, she sat down at his chair and helped herself to his pen and paper.

Dear Francis—sitting in your room without you in it fills me with questions. I know the direction you slant your hat when you cram it over your hair with one hand. I know you take your tea without sugar, even when sugar isn’t rationed. I know you have a ticklish spot at your waist, and I know the song you hum while shaving (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). But sometimes I don’t feel I know you at all . . . and you seem to know me so well.

I wish I had known the boy I saw in the photograph on your desk, the one with a smile that nearly runs round the back of his head. I wish I knew who his friends were. I wish I knew why you called me “the girl in the hat.”

I wish you were here. —M

Darling Mab—I missed you by eight bloody minutes this morning. I ran all the way home, shamelessly shoving small children into ditches and old ladies into oncoming traffic. Your scent was still lingering when I wrenched the door open. I said a good many words then of which my landlady did not approve. Damn my job, damn the Foreign Office, damn the war.

Don’t regret never getting to know the boy in that photograph. He was an idiot. He’d have been utterly tongue-tied in your presence, and you’d have spent all night talking to his three friends, who would have charmed you. They were all far better men than Private F. C. Gray. (C stands for Charles. Did you know that? It’s entirely possible I never told you.)

As for the girl in the hat, she’s you. Or rather, she’s become you.