“I—he didn’t tell me about that,” Mab jerked.

Mr. Graham changed tack. “I don’t mean to pry, Mrs. Gray. It’s merely that you were Francis Gray’s wife—his publishers and readers can tell me about the poetry, but you can tell me about the man. A personal anecdote, perhaps?”

Personal. Suddenly Mab couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t like the hysteria that had gripped her during her bombe demonstration. This was rage and despair, two emotions flaming up in red and black. Turning, she seized the surprised journalist by the sleeve. “I need a drink.”

He bought her a gin at the nearest pub, not batting an eye as she slammed it back. The perfect place, dark and grimy, full of drinkers who didn’t want to be bothered. No one glanced over as the choked words began pouring out of Mab.

“You want a personal anecdote, Mr. Graham?” She took her second drink, turning to the journalist. “The truth is, I don’t have any. Francis Gray was the best man I have ever known, and I was his wife less than one year. You know how many times we saw each other? Fourteen. He was always traveling, and I had a job we agreed was important, so we did our best. We had a forty-eight-hour wedding-and-honeymoon. We had two weekends in the Lake District. We had the odd meal in a railway café. We made love a total of fifteen times.” She didn’t care if she was being indecent. She didn’t care she was saying it to a journalist. She had to say it to someone, after thinking it for so many nights, or she would burst. Ian Graham listened without interrupting, and that was all that mattered. “We loved each other by proxy, Mr. Graham. He loved me through a girl he saw once in Paris in 1918, and I loved him through his letters, but we hardly spent any time together. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about my husband. We didn’t have time to create any.”

Her voice cracked. She bolted half the gin.

“I know he liked curry and dawn walks. I know he hated his own poetry and never slept the night through, because of the things he saw in the trenches. But I didn’t know him. You have to live with someone to know them. I’ve lived with my billet-mates for three and a half years; I know them inside and out. I loved Francis Gray, and to me he was perfect, and that’s proof I didn’t know him very well at all. I never got to realize all the ways he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get to reach the point where the song he whistled while shaving drove me mad or learn how rainy days made him short tempered. He never got to realize that I’m not some great wartime love, just a shallow cow who lives for pretty shoes and library novels. We never got to quarrel over the milk bill or whether to buy strawberry jam or marmalade . . .”

It was the thing that killed Mab every night. When she grieved Lucy, she grieved for the woman her daughter would never become—the young girl taking her exams, the coltish student heading off to university—but at least she had known the six-year-old Lucy of November 1942 to her very bones. So much of Francis had still been an unmapped continent, a man she was only beginning to truly know.

And he didn’t know me, she thought, or he wouldn’t have loved me the way he did. He would have realized I was a social-climbing tart who would marry a good man like him as a ticket up the ladder. He would have realized he deserved better than me.

“I don’t have one single photograph of the two of us together.” Mab stared into her glass. “Not one. We couldn’t get a camera on our wedding day, it was short notice, and after that we were too busy cramming in time together to pose for a flash. An entire marriage gone, without one picture to commemorate it.”

She looked up at the journalist’s grave face. “There’s something titillating for your story,” she said, mocking. “Francis Gray’s drunken Shoreditch widow, slopping gin all over you in a pub. I don’t care if you print it. I don’t care what you say about me—”

“I’m a journalist, not a monster,” said Ian Graham.

“—but I do care what you say about Francis. Do justice to him. He was a good poet and a great man.” She finished her gin in a gulp.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” the journalist asked, his voice quiet.

Mab turned sharply, nearly sliding off her stool. He caught her hand, steadying her, and Mab’s skin prickled. Oh, God, how she missed Francis’s hands. His fingers through hers, his palm on her waist. So much of her numbness had burned away in sick bay—at night, she now lay awake holding herself in her own arms, trying to pretend they were Francis’s arms, longing to be held again.

Stay with me, she started to say. The impulse went through her in a bolt of desperation: take this man she didn’t know up to some rented room and let him do anything he wanted, as long as she could keep her eyes shut and pretend he was Francis.

Then she shoved that away, so sick with shame she almost vomited.

Ian Graham got a glass of water and lemon from the barman and pushed it toward her. “Drink that down.” He waited while she drank, then rose. “I have what I need. May I take you to catch your train, Mrs. Gray?”

“I’m meeting a friend—we’re returning to Bucks together.”

He hesitated, clearly not wanting to leave her alone, but Mab put out her hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham. I look forward to reading your piece.”

He tipped his hat and departed. She wondered where he’d be sent next, what blood-laced beach or bombed-out town he’d report on, then she ordered another gin and thought only about Francis and Lucy.

Three drinks later, she was staggering. She nearly missed the doctor’s office when she went back to find it, and Beth almost had to carry her home.

Chapter 54

Letter from Osla to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan

I wonder why I keep writing you in such a void. Posting all these letters (five now? Six?) into limbo, or at least to your landlady . . . it feels a bit like sealing a message in a bottle and hurling it out to sea: you never know who will read it, or if anyone will. Maybe it’s better if no one ever does, the way I’ve talked my soul out.

Happy Christmas, Mr. Cornwell, wherever you are. —Ozma of Oz

Osla was in a good mood for once when she sauntered through the ivy-hung doors of Claridge’s. The last decrypt she’d translated on shift before running to catch her train was a radio message to a German destroyer off Norway: “Please inform Oberleutnant W. Breisbach that his wife has been delivered of a son.”

Congratulations, Oberleutnant, Osla thought, smiling. I hope you survive to see your son grow up. Surely at Christmastime it was allowable to wish an enemy well as a fellow human being. Osla wanted Lieutenant Breisbach to raise his son in a world where that son wouldn’t have to join the Hitler Youth, and assuredly that wasn’t too much to hope for. It was the cusp of 1944—surely now they could hope for the beginning of the end.

“I understand felicitations are in order, Miss Kendall,” the porter Mr. Gibbs greeted her. “I heard your mother’s happy news.”

Stepfather number four, what a rum thought. “Is she home tonight?”

“I’m afraid not. The Windsor pantomime—”

Osla sighed. “I don’t suppose you could rustle me up a suitable escort for her wedding next month, could you, Mr. Gibbs?” Once upon a time, Osla would have brought Mab. Mab would have been a capital friend for a chichi London wedding, analyzing every dress, making fun of every horrendous hat . . . but for an entire year now, she’d barely caught sight of Mab except across the canteen. Osla’s smile slipped as the memory rose of another wedding: Mab and Francis in this very hotel, looking so happy they stopped people in their tracks.

I miss my friend.

“Prince Philip will not be escorting you, Miss Kendall?”

“I don’t think so.” Philip had given up writing some time ago, after all . . . Trying to recover her holiday cheer, Osla bid Mr. Gibbs good night and swanned upstairs. If Mamma wasn’t here, at least Osla could stay the night in her suite and work up the next BB. Ever since Coventry, she’d been having trouble keeping BB’s tone light. The jokes still came, but they came with more bite. Still, maybe that was all right; humor could cut at the same time as it made people laugh. Maybe Osla Kendall would take a puck at becoming the next great satirist, once the war was over.

Oh, who was she fooling? If you were a man and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it satire. If you were a woman and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it fluff.

Scowling now, Osla came out of the elevator, rounded the corner—and crashed straight into Philip.

“Oh! Um—”

“Sorry—Os, is that—”

They stopped. My God, it’s been so long, Osla thought, trying not to stare and also trying not to laugh. Philip loomed impossibly tall and tanned, more like a Viking than ever . . . but he was also in a bathrobe and slippers, and no Viking ever looked at ease caught out in a bathrobe and slippers. He stuck his hands in his pockets, clearly mortified. “You look well, princess.”