She supposed she’d better choke down some tea, then make up a new post-invasion Bletchley Bletherings and head back on shift. She might be a silly socialite without friends, lover, or home, but she still had work to do: making people laugh, and translating horrors. Plenty of that would be needed, surely, in the months to come.

Another long, slogging year and more, as it turned out. There were some bright points—billeting with the effervescent Glassborow twins after Mab moved out; going to hear Glenn Miller with Giles; getting the news that Hut 6 had broken the message for Germany’s unconditional surrender; sitting on the back of one of the Trafalgar Square lions on V-E Day getting sauced on Bollinger with a couple of American GIs. Writing message-in-the-bottle letters to J. P. E. C. Cornwell, wherever he might be; finally telling the Mad Hatters she’d been writing Bletchley Bletherings all along and relishing their groans and laughter. And oh, the day Valerie Glassborow was on duty to hear the word come in that Japan surrendered, and the news spread—Osla found herself on the lawn flinging rolls of loo paper into the trees with mad abandon, watching the white loops unroll against the sky and crying for happiness.

But that was the epilogue, she thought later. The real Bletchley Park ended for Osla on D-Day. The day three friends last spoke to each other; the day Mab Gray received a transfer to London; the day Beth Finch disappeared into the blue.

Nine Days Until the Royal Wedding

November 11, 1947

Chapter 68

Inside the Clock

Even the inmates of Clockwell had celebrated V-E Day and V-J Day. Hitler’s suicide, the German surrender . . . happy tears had been shed among staff and inmates alike. And then a few short months later, news came of the great bombs that brought Japan to her knees, and cheap wine was doled out in paper cups so everyone could toast to victory and peace.

To Bletchley Park, Beth had toasted silently. Without BP, there would be no victory or peace.

She had wondered then—and she wondered now, wandering the rose garden looking to see if her Go partner was back yet from surgery—what became of Bletchley Park after the war was finally over. She imagined the Typex machines falling silent, the huts emptying. No more rounders played on the lawn, no more canteen kidneys on toast at three in the morning, no more Mad Hatter Tea Parties of bread and marg and library books by the lake. Where would they all go, that collection of strange and remarkable people assembled by wartime desperation? Go back to your old lives, Beth imagined everyone being told. Go back to your old lives, and never speak of this to anyone.

Had Bletchley Park fallen into ruin, once the gates closed behind the last codebreaker? Would anyone ever know what had happened there?

I’ll know, Beth thought, fighting off a fit of coughing, brass key to Dilly’s safe nestled in its customary hiding place in her shoe. If I’m locked here until I’m a hundred and three, I’ll remember what happened at BP. They can take everything else, but never that.

She thought she knew who the traitor was, too. Something else that couldn’t be taken away.

She’d had three and a half years, after all, to ponder the question. Three and a half years to hide her key and sift her memory. Over the last few days, in the agony of waiting for Osla and Mab to respond to her cipher message, she’d kept herself occupied by weighing every possibility over again, even the names that hurt. And her conclusion was the same.

It came down to one very simple question: who had told Mab that Beth cracked the report about the Coventry raid?

Because the timing had been too neat, too pat. The one piece of information that would turn her billet-mates against her, delay her, and strip her of supporters who might defend her against accusations of instability—who had dropped that perfectly timed nugget?

Beth remembered herself whispering, How did you find out? Mab spitting, Your friend Peggy.

Peggy, who had been on shift in ISK the afternoon Beth cracked Rose. What’s that? as Beth hammered at the Typex. Let me see.

Peggy, go away.

Heels clicking off into the distance . . .

“It was you,” Beth whispered. Sometimes she had doubts, but most of the time she was certain.

The traitor was Margaret Rock.

Chapter 69

Mab nearly didn’t make it to the Grand Hotel in time to catch Osla before she headed for Clockwell. She was packing her traveling case when the front door banged downstairs; there was the usual clamor from Eddie and Lucy, and then Mab’s husband came into the bedroom. He was smiling at the twins, who were hanging off him like monkeys, but his jaw tightened as he looked at Mab.

Not another quarrel, she thought. I do not have time!

His eyes stopped on her traveling case. “Going somewhere?” he asked in the Australian drawl that persisted even after five years in England.

“An impromptu hen weekend with old friends,” Mab said brightly. “Don’t look so downcast, Mike. You’ll have the nursemaid to help with the babies.”

His voice was level. “I was hoping we could finish last night’s conversation.”

“I don’t remember,” she lied. “I was very tired.”

“Not too tired to climb on me rather than finish the discussion. Which is usually how you get out of any conversation you don’t want to have with me.”

“I’d have thought you’d be happy to have a wife who doesn’t get headaches at bedtime.” Mab slammed her traveling case shut. “I’ve left a sausage and tomato pie for supper, and a syrup tart for pudding—”

“Stop, Mab.”

“There’s leftover casserole if—”

“I don’t care about supper. Talk to me.”

She looked at her husband, standing there in his shirtsleeves, capably juggling little Lucy in his arms as Eddie clung to his trouser leg. Mike was so good with babies—something she hadn’t anticipated when she chose him. It had been in the giddy week after V-E Day; all London was celebrating, and Mab had been sorting boxes of naval decrypts at the Admiralty when one of the secretaries came in with her baby on her hip, saying that her mum was sick, asking if she could keep him on shift this once. “Hold him, Mab . . .” And Mab had stretched out her arms in an utter trance. She was still sleepwalking through her days and enduring her nights filled with bad dreams, just as she had been since Coventry. But in the mad furor following Germany’s surrender, when all Britain was finally asking the question “What now?,” Mab asked it too as she looked at the little boy gurgling in her arms, and the answer came with a desire that bordered on violence: I want a baby.

So she had put away her black wool for wine-red silk that swished around her legs like sin incarnate and set out to net a second husband. A very different hunt than her first—as the widowed Mrs. Gray, she already had a bank account and a home; all she needed in a second husband was kindness, a wish for children, and as little resemblance to Francis Gray as possible. Enter Lieutenant Mike Sharpe, six and a half feet of suntanned former RAF pilot who had jostled her in the crush at the Savoy one night and said in an Australian lilt, “Hello, gorgeous.”

You’ll do, Mab had thought more or less on the spot.

“I want to hang up my wings somewhere foggy and cool, never go back to ruddy Canberra, and go back to engineering,” Mike had said when she asked what he was going to do now that the war was over. That was all the confirmation she needed; Mab fell into bed with him the same night and they were married within a week. The war was over and everyone was falling in love, and Mike had been no exception. He’d been in love, and Mab had been in love with the idea of satin-cheeked babies with those blue, blue eyes.

The eyes now looking back at her from both her children.

“You never talk to me unless it’s the weather or the kids or what’s for supper,” Mike said now. “I never have the faintest goddamned idea what’s going on in that head of yours. And if I dare to ask, you either start talking about Eddie and Lucy, or you climb in my lap and screw my brains out—”

“Don’t be obscene,” she said coldly.

“—to stop me from ever, even by accident, getting to know you better. And it’s a pretty good tactic, strategically speaking, but it’s wearing a little thin.” He paused, visibly holding on to his temper. Mike usually made for a very calm husband, not in an opaque way like Francis, who had been like a well to the center of the earth, but in what Mab had learned was a very Australian way: endlessly laconic, but once that relaxed ease gave way to anger, it came on like a shark moving through deep water. “I know you had a bad war, but you’re still frozen there. And I’m bloody tired of sitting back and hoping you’ll defrost.”

Mab averted her eyes, feeling like a coward. “You don’t understand—”