She rummaged in her handbag for a cigarette, squinting when she found the ring of keys for the cabinets where she’d finished today’s filing in the mansion—she’d forgot to turn them in to the watchman in the main hall. He already had another set, thank goodness, so she’d just pop back in and hand hers over when she left here. All was well as long as the keys stayed on Park ground and were never left unattended.

“Queen Mab, you gorgeous thing. May I get you a drink?” Giles asked, his face agreeably out of focus. “Any good gossip?” Dropping his voice to a near whisper under the cheerful noise of off-duty codebreakers drinking, playing table tennis, and dealing bridge in the background. “Has Travis hit the bottle yet from the stress of the coming invasion?”

“I’m not saying a thing about work, Giles.” Even three drinks in, half-drowning in grief, and ensconced here at the heart of BP, the knee-jerk was reflexive.

“Darling girl, I want gossip, not work secrets. Bletchley Bletherings isn’t very funny these days—letting down the side. So tell me whose nerves are in a lather picking the invasion date; tell me if the PM really is screaming down the line every other day about Montgomery. We can’t talk secrets, but we can talk people. Nothing? Well, I’ve got plenty for you. The Glassborow twins have joined the Mad Hatters—you know, the brunettes in Hut 16? My God, but they’re irritating. They never stop giggling. If that’s what youth is coming to, we should throw in the towel and let Hitler have the empire. We’re reading Bleak House, by the way, for the monthly pick. I’ll save you five hundred pages: it’s bleak.”

Mab remembered plowing through most of Dickens on “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady.” Had she ever finished the list? Not that it mattered now.

“—You’re missed at the Tea Parties, Mab. The Mad Hatters aren’t the same without you. Osla’s too gloomy lately to provide much sparkle—have you heard the whispers about that prince of hers?—and sweet Beth may be brilliant but she’s never been one for banter. Though I confess there’s a certain amusement value in watching her and Harry sit across from each other, pretending they haven’t just been at it like rabbits in the air-raid cellar. Who those two think they’re fooling, I have no idea . . .”

Mab swallowed the rest of her drink, ordered another. The sides of her head felt soft. She looked past Giles, and sat bolt upright. Francis was sitting in the far corner of the Recreation Hut—his back was to her, but those were unmistakably his stocky shoulders, his hair with its tracing of gray . . . she slid off the stool so quickly she almost fell, pushing past a quartet of bridge players. “Excuse me—” It was Francis, he was alive, and he was going to turn round smiling and tell her Lucy was asleep in the nursery.

Her hand fell on his shoulder. The man turned his head and it wasn’t Francis. Of course it wasn’t. Just a stocky fellow with a red face, nothing like Francis. Mab nearly wept. She turned and blundered back toward her stool, missing it as she tried to slide back on.

“Careful.” Giles put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t look too steady on your pins.”

Mab had been cursed like this since Christmas—seeing Francis and Lucy everywhere. But not really seeing them at all. Every skinny-legged girl playing with a ball turned into Lucy; every man with a chestnut gleam in his hair was Francis. Mab knew her mind was playing tricks, but she couldn’t stop running up to strangers, hoping against all reason. Cruel, mad mind. Crueler, madder world. Turn it off . . .

She swallowed the dregs of her beer and looked at Giles, stretching her lips into a smile. “You were saying . . .” She didn’t listen to his answer, just kept nodding and sipping until the world transformed into fizzing and sparks. Mab woke with sunlight in her eyes.

She sat up, looked around a strange room with a sheet sliding down her naked body, pain splitting her skull, and realized Giles lay stretched out in the bed beside her.

“NO NEED TO blitz out of here like you’re making for the last lifeboat off the Titanic.”

Mab straightened, a wave of nausea rolling through her stomach, snatching up her clothes, which had apparently been dropped on the floor wherever they fell. This had to be Giles’s bedroom—he’d been one of the lucky ones billeted in the Shoulder of Mutton. He was sitting up in bed, red hair standing on end, coverlet drawn to his waist. Mab’s stomach rolled again. “Am I late for shift?” Perhaps it was a pathetic point of pride, but all the times she’d stumbled home to bed half-drunk, she had never once allowed it to make her late the following day. She’d failed all her promises to Lucy, she’d failed all her promises to Francis, but she hadn’t failed the oath to her country. “Giles—”

“It’s not even six.” He reached for the pack of Gitanes on his night table.

She would have sagged in relief, but that was only the first of the worries making her stomach clench. “Did—” she began, still clutching the clothes against her own nakedness. Giles appeared to be wearing his drawers still, but she could hardly bear to look. “Did we—” She didn’t remember a single thing past being helped through BP’s main gates.

“We did not.” He struck a match. “Try not to look quite so surprised, will you? You were keen enough last night, and I admit I was fairly keen, too, but you were out cold the moment your back hit the mattress. I don’t require protestations of eternal love from the women I take to bed, but I do require consciousness. So I put the covers over you and climbed in myself for some shut-eye. I’d have taken the couch like a gentleman, but as you see”—he gestured around the tiny room—“there isn’t one.”

“Th—thank you. I’m sorry to impose, I—” Mab managed to pull her slip over herself. Her stomach churned again. What else did I do? What spectacle did I make of myself? This had never happened before, in all her hours drinking at the Recreation Hut. How had she got drunk and thrown herself at Giles, of all people?

An entirely different panic seized her as she remembered her ring of keys from the mansion. She grabbed her handbag. “Giles, my keys—”

“Relax, darling. You insisted on dropping them with the main hall watchman before we came here. You might have been plastered, but irresponsible? Never.”

Mab exhaled relief. “Can I use your washstand?”

Giles exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Be my guest.”

The water was freezing cold, just enough to gulp down a half glass, then splash the rest over her face and neck. Straightening, she looked at herself in the mirror and recoiled. The soot with which she meticulously blackened her lashes in place of mascara now ran down her cheeks like black tears, and her hair was a rat’s nest. She didn’t look like Francis Gray’s elegant wife in her chic hats and perfectly shined shoes. She didn’t even look like Mab Churt, the pugnacious Shoreditch girl in rayon frocks who was going to tow Lucy out of the hole they’d both been born in.

“You cry in your sleep.” Giles’s voice came quietly behind her.

Mab began crying now, hunched over the basin.

“You’ve had a rotten time, haven’t you?” Giles stretched out a pale, freckled arm. “Don’t be ashamed. You were drowning your sorrows last night, and frankly so was I.”

Somehow Mab found herself crawling onto the bed and under his arm. She shook, racked by sobbing, as Giles passed her a handkerchief and talked lightly in a way that required no reply.

“I used to have a dreadful pash for you, you know. I got over it when you married the war poet, though I can’t say my luck got any better, because I promptly lost my head for another woman I can’t have. Which is why I thought last night it might be a good idea to forget about her in your arms, but you’re the one who needs arms right now. Poor Mab . . .” Squeezing her shoulders. Mab’s sobs were subsiding, even as her head continued to throb. “Part of me envies you,” Giles continued. “At least your Francis loved you back. I can’t even get Beth to look my bloody direction.”

He wasn’t really equating his unrequited crush with Francis’s death, she knew. He was trying to distract her, and she was grateful. “Giles, don’t tell me you’ve lost your head over Beth.” Mab pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

“Ever since getting transferred to ISK. You can’t really know someone at BP till you see them work. I never knew what Beth did until I came there.” Giles whistled. “When she’s really working, she practically shimmers. I used to think I was fairly bright, but here everyone has a First from Oxford or translates Egyptian papyri. Brains like mine are plain tuppence pieces to Beth’s golden guinea. Harry, now, he’s a solid pound sterling. No wonder she looked past me and snapped him up.”

“I’m sorry,” Mab managed to say.