“Oh, hullo,” he called cheerfully. “New recruits? About bally time. You go on back, David,” he called up to the waiting guard. “I’ll take ’em up to the mansion.”

Mab saw with some relief that the man wasn’t entirely naked, just stripped down to his drawers. Above them he had a freckled, concave chest; a face like an amiable gargoyle’s; and hair that even soaking wet was clearly as red as a telephone box. “I’m Talbot, Giles Talbot,” he explained in an Oxbridge drawl, wandering over to a heap of clothes on the bank as Osla and Mab murmured their introductions and tried not to stare. “Took a jump in the lake after Josh Cooper’s tea mug. He chucked it into the reeds, working through some problem or other. Trousers,” Giles Talbot muttered, shaking out his clothes. “If those buggers in Hut 4 hid them again—”

“Can you tell us where we’re supposed to go?” Mab interrupted, irritated. “There has to be someone in charge of this madhouse.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Giles Talbot buttoned his shirt, then shrugged into an old checked jacket. “Commander Denniston is the closest we’ve got to a warden. Right-ho, follow me.”

Hopping first on one foot and then on the other to pull his shoes over bare feet, he set off toward the mansion, shirttails flapping over wet drawers and bare white legs. Mab and Osla looked at each other. “It’s all a front,” Osla whispered. “We’re going to be drugged as soon as we set foot into that hideous house and then sold into durance vile, just you wait.”

“If they were trying to lure us into durance vile, they’d send someone more appetizing than a half-naked stork,” Mab said. “What is durance vile, anyway . . .”

The mansion’s entrance hall was oak-paneled and spacious, with rooms branching off each side. There was a pegboard with a copy of the London Times pinned up, a Gothic-looking lounge, a grand staircase visible through a pink marble arcade . . . Giles whisked them upstairs into what looked like a bay-windowed bedroom turned private office, bed replaced by cabinets, everything reeking of cigarette smoke. A small harassed-looking man with a professorial forehead looked up from the desk. He didn’t sputter at the sight of Giles’s naked legs, just remarked, “You found Cooper’s tea mug?”

“And some new recruits, fresh off the London train. Aren’t they getting prettier? Miss Kendall here could whistle a chap off a branch any day of the week.” Giles beamed at Osla, then looked up at Mab, who topped him by half a head. “Lord, I love a tall woman. You’re not pining for some RAF pilot, are you? Don’t break my heart!”

Mab pondered getting out the icy stare but put it away unworn. This entire atmosphere was simply too strange to offend.

“You’re a fine one to talk about looks, Talbot. I’ve never seen anything as unappetizing as you lot of skinny Cambridge boffins.” Commander Denniston—at least, that’s who Mab presumed it was—shook his head at Giles’s bare white legs, then looked at Osla and Mab’s identification and letters. “Kendall . . . Churt . . .”

“My godfather might have been the one who put my name forward,” Osla prompted. “Lord Mountbatten.”

He brightened. “Then Miss Churt will be the one from the London secretarial pool.” He gave back their papers, rising. “Right. You have both been recruited to Bletchley Park, the headquarters of GC & CS.”

What’s that? Mab wondered.

As if reading her mind, Giles volunteered, “Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society.”

Commander Denniston looked pained but plowed on. “You’ll be assigned a hut, and your head of hut will fill you in on your duties. Before that happens, my job is to impress upon you that you will be working in the most secret place in Britain, and all activities here are crucial to the outcome of the war.”

He paused. Mab stood frozen, and she could feel Osla at her side equally motionless. Bloody hell, Mab thought. What is this place?

He continued. “The work here is so secret that you will be told only what it is necessary for you to know, and you will never seek to find out more. Besides respecting internal security, you will be mindful of external security. You will never mention the name of this place, not to your family or friends. You will find that your colleagues refer to it as BP, and you will do the same. Above all, you will never disclose to anyone the nature of the work that you do here. To reveal the least hint might jeopardize the whole progress of the war.”

Another pause. Are they training us to be spies? Mab wondered, astonished.

“Should anyone ask, you are doing ordinary clerical work. Make it sound dull, the duller the better.”

Osla piped up, “What work will we be doing, sir?”

“Good God, girl, have you listened to a single word I’ve said?” Impatience crept into Denniston’s voice. “I don’t know what you will be doing, in any specific way, and I don’t want to know.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two sheets of yellowish paper, laying one in front of each of them. “This is the Official Secrets Act. It clearly states that if you do any of the things I have warned you against, if you disclose the slightest information which could be of use to the enemy, you will be guilty of treason.”

The silence was absolute.

“And treason,” Commander Denniston finished mildly, “makes you liable to the most extreme penalties of the law. I’m not sure at the moment whether that’s hanging or firing squad.”

It couldn’t get any quieter, but Mab felt the silence congeal. She took a deep breath. “Sir, are we allowed to—refuse this post?”

He looked startled. “There’s no pistol to your head; this isn’t Berlin. Refuse, and you will simply be ushered off the premises with strict instructions never to mention this place again.”

. . . And I’ll never know what really goes on here, Mab thought.

He laid two pens before them. “Sign, please. Or not.”

Mab took another breath and signed across the bottom. She saw Osla doing the same.

“Welcome to BP,” Commander Denniston said with the first smile of the exchange. Just like that, the interview was over. Giles Talbot, still with his damp shirttails flapping, steered them out into the hall. Osla gripped Mab’s hand once the door shut behind them, and Mab wasn’t too proud to grip back.

“Wouldn’t take it too seriously if I were you.” Incredibly, Giles was chuckling. “That speech is a knee-weakener the first time you hear it—Denniston was out when it was my turn, and I got the whole harangue from a wing commander who pulled a pistol out of his drawer and said he’d shoot me if I broke the sacred secrecy of et cetera, et cetera. But you get used to it. Come along, let’s get your billets sorted—”

Mab halted at the staircase, folding her arms. “Look here, can’t we get a hint now about what this place actually does?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He looked surprised. “GC & CS—we call it Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society because the place is packed with Oxford dons and Cambridge chess champions, but it stands for Government Code & Cypher School.”

Mab and Osla must have looked baffled, because he grinned.

“We’re breaking German codes.”

Chapter 4

The day the Bletchley Park boarders were due to arrive, Beth Finch lost half an hour down the center of a rose.

“Really, Bethan, I’ve been calling and calling. How long have you been sniffing that flower?”

I wasn’t sniffing it, Beth thought, but didn’t correct her mother. Sniffing a rose was at least normal—roses smelled nice; everybody agreed on that. Not everybody looked at a rose and got entranced not by the scent but by the pattern of it, the way the petals overlapped like stairs winding inward . . . inward . . . she’d run her finger gently along the spiral, moving toward the center, only in her mind there wasn’t a center with stamens. There was just the spiral, going on and on toward infinity. It sounded very poetic—“What lies at the center of a rose?”—but it wasn’t the poetry that entranced Beth, or the scent. It was the pattern.

And before she knew it she’d lost half an hour, and her mother was standing there looking cross.

“They’ll be here soon, and look at this room!” Mrs. Finch took the bud vase from Beth, placing it on the mantel. “Wipe down the mirror, now. Whoever these girls are, they won’t have anything to complain about in this house. Though who knows what kind of girls are boarding away from home, anyway? Leaving their families for a job—”

“There’s a war on,” Beth murmured, but Mrs. Finch had been on a tear since learning that, being in possession of a spare bedroom with two narrow beds, they would be required to billet two females working at nearby Bletchley Park.