“Bethan—”

“Don’t call me that,” she said without turning. “It’s not who I am anymore.”

She made sure the folder of Dilly’s work was properly registered, then took it to ISK (now moved over to one of the new blocks) when no one seemed sure where it should be filed. “What’s this?” said Peggy as Beth opened the file. “And what’s that?” Looking at Boots.

“That’s a schnauzer. This is something Dilly was working on.”

“Why does ISK need a schnauzer? The Yanks already think we’re potty because of Jumbo.”

Beth arranged her coat into a nest under her desk for Boots. “He’ll be quiet as a mouse. I couldn’t go all the way back to my billet to drop him off, not when I was carrying those. Do you recognize the cipher? Dilly was working on it.”

“It’s an odd one . . .” Peggy frowned. “He told me he was working on Soviet ciphers.”

“But the Russians don’t use Enigma machines, and this is definitely Enigma traffic.”

“That doesn’t mean they haven’t captured the odd machine or two from the Germans, in the back-and-forth on the eastern front.” Peggy flipped through the stack. “Perhaps they’re experimenting with a machine.”

“Even if they are, why are we flagging it? The Russians are our allies. We aren’t reading their post.”

“Goodness, whatever gave you that idea?” Peggy handed the folder back. “Put it in the stack of duds, and anyone with a free hour can have a crack at it.”

Beth put it aside, reached for the day’s Abwehr traffic, and immediately forgot about Dilly’s Russian project.

Later she looked back at that moment, screaming in the ear of her past self. Don’t forget about that file. Pick it up right now, Beth Finch. Pick it up!

Chapter 53

* * *

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, NOVEMBER 1943

* * *

Addressing the lovers who left a set of frilly knickers on the lakeshore after what one presumes was a tryst—for heaven’s sake, fake a marriage certificate and go to a hotel!

* * *

Again,” Mab coached Beth.

“My fiancé is an airman stationed in Kent,” Beth recited, standing in the icy street before the narrow front of the gynecologist’s office. All around them people pushed and hurried. “He has forty-eight hours’ leave to get married before Christmas. I’m not looking to have children until after the war—”

“Say it’s your fiancé who wants that,” Mab corrected. Most doctors would only fit married women for a contraceptive device, but given the war, some would fit affianced women. Mab had come here herself almost exactly two years ago, before her wedding. Don’t think about that. “If you say you’re the one who doesn’t want babies yet, you’ll get a lecture.”

“Right.” Beth looked determined. She’d barely even blushed when Mab collared her, shortly after leaving sick bay, and said bluntly, I know what you and Harry are up to. I think you’re an idiot, but please tell me you’re taking precautions. Beth had mumbled something about using French letters, and Mab had sighed, There are safer options. Whoever would have guessed shy Beth would end up part of BP’s fast set, the ones who unabashedly worked off codebreaking stress in dark corners with any partner they could find? Though Beth didn’t seem to be sneaking off to dark corners with anyone but Harry. Mab had Beth go through her story again, then pulled off her left glove. “You’d—better borrow this. The doctor won’t believe you without a ring.”

It hurt, taking Francis’s ruby off. Beth slipped it on, seeming to know what it cost Mab. “Thank you. I know you don’t approve—”

“It’s not my business,” Mab said shortly. “You want to get mixed up with a married man, well, you already know what I think about that.”

“I’m not ashamed.” Beth’s chin went up. “And I’m not hurting anyone.”

“Just yourself, if you think it’s going to end in wedding bells.”

“I don’t want wedding bells.”

Beth really had to be the oddest duck Mab had ever befriended. And now she’s about the only female friend I’ve got left. No Osla, no Wrens . . . most of the other women at BP didn’t seem to know how to talk to Mab anymore. Those like herself who had lost husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, were so raw in their own grief that Mab avoided them, and the women who hadn’t suffered such a loss either were awkward in the face of the pain Mab couldn’t conceal, or flinched from her mourning black because they were afraid for their own loved ones. Whether they thought Mab was bad luck or bad company, they tended to avoid her now. All except Beth, who was looking up at the doors of the doctor’s office.

“Does it really work, this cap thing? Better than, you know.” She blushed.

“It works.” Mab bit the words off. Lately she’d been having dreams about children—never girls, all little girls were Lucy, but boys. Baby boys with Francis’s russet hair; boys of ten with Francis’s stocky build, running about with cricket bats . . . boys so real she could almost reach out and touch them before they dissolved into the dream’s mist. She’d wake up retching with longing.

Beth disappeared into the office, and Mab went on to her own meeting in Trafalgar Square. Even on a cold winter’s day it was thronged: lovers meeting under Nelson’s Column, children throwing crumbs to the pigeons.

“Tell me about your husband, Mrs. Gray.” The journalist met her beside the great bronze lion on the south side of Nelson’s Column, as arranged. An exchange of names and pleasantries, and he was already pulling out his notepad. He’s rather a well-known correspondent, Francis’s publisher had said when he telephoned Mab. Doing a piece on Francis. Perhaps you might answer a few questions when you’re next in London? Mab would rather have chewed glass than rake over her memories for a stranger, but since she hadn’t given Francis a russet-haired son for a legacy, she’d force herself to talk about his poetry.

“What do you want to know, Mr. . . .” His name had already slipped her memory. She couldn’t seem to keep anything fixed in her mind nowadays.

“Graham. Ian Graham.” He had a beautiful baritone and public school vowels: a tall man, wire-lean in rumpled overcoat and battered fedora. “I’m writing a series on the role of art in wartime. First a piece on Dame Myra Hess and the National Gallery lunchtime concerts—what?”

“My husband took me to one of those concerts.” Mab huddled deeper into her black coat. “Our second date.” She’d spent the performance scrutinizing the clothes of the women in the audience, while Francis sat transfixed by the music. Such a marvelous thing, he’d said afterward. You know how these concerts came about? The art was taken out of the gallery for safekeeping, then Dame Myra organized the most famous musicians in Britain to come play for the public among all the empty picture frames, just so blacked-out London has something beautiful to listen to.

Marvelous, Mab had said, eyeing an ivy-print silk frock in the next row.

“It won’t be a puff piece, Mrs. Gray.” Ian Graham evidently took her silence for mistrust. “Francis Gray’s poetry helped define trench warfare to an oblivious generation. In war, art is a balm.”

“Then ask what you’d like,” Mab said brusquely.

“More about you first . . . I understand you’re billeted up in Buckinghamshire, doing war work.”

“Yes, office work. Too boring for words.” It really was, no fibbing required. Giles had got her a post filing and typing in the mansion; it was quiet and monotonous and Mab thought she could do it forever.

“Where in Buckinghamshire exactly?” The pencil jotted.

“A little town hardly more than a railway depot.”

“Really . . . You’re not the first person I’ve met who does something terribly boring and vague up in Bucks, in a little town with nothing but a railway depot.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. Most of the others were—how shall I put it? Whitehall sorts, Foreign Office sorts. They’ll talk about their own work readily enough, especially with a scotch or two down the hatch, but they all clammed when it came to anything about Buckinghamshire.”

Mab gave him a blank look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ian Graham grinned, a quick sunlight shaft of a smile. “Right,” he said, and changed the subject. Routine questions: how long she and Francis had been married, where they had met. Mab’s nails bit into her palms as she made herself recount their dates, the hasty wedding . . .

“Your husband enjoyed music—what about art? Paintings, sculpture?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Did he ever say anything about his war, Mrs. Gray?”

“No.”

“He took a rather well-known tour in 1919, collecting earth from battlefields for the families who hadn’t been able to bury their boys. His letter about it was published in the Times. Did he—”