Beth flushed to the roots of her hair. “Don’t tell Mother.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” Osla plucked a scone off Mrs. Finch’s second-best china. “No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to. Curl up with us and have a chin-wag . . .”

Without knowing how it happened, Beth found herself perched on the end of Osla’s bed. It wasn’t much of a conversation; she hardly said two words as the other girls nipped back and forth about Thackeray and whether they should start a literary society. But they both smiled at her periodically, all encouraging glances.

Maybe they weren’t quite so intimidating after all.

Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?

Too soon to tell . . . but perhaps this was, in fact, going to be one of them.

Twelve Days Until the Royal Wedding

November 8, 1947

Chapter 5

Inside the Clock

Three girls and a book—that was how it all began. Or so it seemed to the woman in the asylum, lying in her cell, fighting the cocktail of lethargy that had been pumped into her veins.

“Our institution is very progressive,” a balding doctor had said when she first arrived, spitting and struggling, at Clockwell Sanitarium. Nearly three and a half years ago—6 June, the day of the Normandy invasions, the day that began Europe’s liberation, and her own imprisonment. “You may have heard horror stories about patients chained to walls, hosed with ice water, and so forth. We believe in gentle handling here, mild activity, sedatives to calm the nerves, Miss Liddell.”

“That is not my name,” she had snarled.

He ignored her. “Take your pills like a good girl.” Pills in the morning, pills at night, pills that filled her veins with smoke and her skull with cotton wool—who cared then about mild activity? There were blunted tools for working in the rose garden around the big gray stone house; there was basket-weaving in the common hall; there were novels with missing pages—but very few patients made use of these things. Clockwell’s inmates dozed in armchairs or sat outside blinking at the sun, eyes dulled and dreamy from the fog they swallowed every morning in tablet form.

Progressive treatment. This place didn’t need chains or electrical shocks; it didn’t need beatings or ice baths. It was still a killing bottle, an eater of souls.

Her first week here, she’d refused to swallow anything the doctors gave her. She got the syringe instead, orderlies holding her down for the needle prick. Afterward she stumbled back to her cell—they could call it a room, but any room with locks on only the outside was a cell: window barred with mesh, bed bolted to the floor, a high ceiling so she couldn’t reach the light fixture to hang herself.

She thought of hanging herself that first week. But that would have been giving in.

“Looking well today!” The doctor beamed, popping in on his daily rounds. “Still a bit of a cough from that springtime bout of pneumonia, eh, Miss Liddell?”

The woman registered under the name Alice Liddell no longer bothered to correct him. She swallowed her pills obediently, then as soon as he left went to the plastic basin that served as a chamber pot at night. Forcing her fingers down her throat, she threw the tablets up in a wash of bile, then reached an indifferent thumb into the mess and ground everything together so the nurses wouldn’t guess. She’d learned a few things in three and a half years. How to vomit up her medicine. How to fool the doctors. How to slide past the orderlies who were spiteful and cultivate the ones who were kind. How to keep her sanity in the midst of madness . . . because it would be easy, so easy, to go authentically mad here.

Not me, thought the woman from Bletchley Park. She might have been sitting gray-faced and coughing in a madhouse cell, but she had not always been this.

I will survive. I will get out.

Not that it would be easy. The walls circling Clockwell were high and barbed; she’d walked them a thousand times. Every entrance—the big gates at the front, the smaller access doors used by the grounds crew—was locked, the keys kept under guard. And even if she could get past that wall, the nearest town was miles away across barren Yorkshire moors. A slippered woman in an institutional smock stood no chance; she’d merely wander the gorse until she was recaptured.

She’d known from her second week here that if she was to get out, she would need help.

She’d smuggled her ciphered messages out last week. Two desperate missives launched into the void like messages in bottles, sent to two women who had no reason to help her.

They betrayed me, the thought whispered.

You betrayed them, the whisper said back.

Had they received the letters yet?

If they had, would they listen?

London

Osla stood in her lace slip and robe, looking at the message that had thrown such a spanner into her day. The echo of the telephone’s furious slam on the other end of the line in Yorkshire still reverberated, along with her former friend’s choked voice. Go to hell, Osla Kendall.

A clock ticked in the corner, and a blue satin dress slid off the heap on the bed. What she would wear to watch Princess Elizabeth marry her own former boyfriend now seemed the stupidest bit of bobbery in the world. Osla flung down the cipher message, and sunlight bounced green sparks across the lines of code, reflected off the big emerald ring her fiancé had put on her left hand four months ago.

Any other woman, Osla reflected, would have run to her husband-to-be if she got menacing letters from a madhouse inmate. It was the sort of thing fiancés liked to know, if the women they loved were being threatened by lunatics. But Osla knew she was not going to tell a soul. A few years at Bletchley Park turned any woman into a real clam.

Osla sometimes wondered how many women there were in Britain like her, lying to their families all day, every day, about what they’d done in the war. Never once saying the words I may just be a housewife now, but I used to break German ciphers in Hut 6 or I may look like a brainless socialite, but I translated naval orders in Hut 4. So many women . . . by the end of the war in Europe, Bletchley Park and its outstations had four women to every man, or so it seemed when you saw the swarm of Victory-rolled hair and Utility frocks come spilling out at shift change. Where were all those women now? How many men who had fought in the war now sat reading their morning newspapers without realizing the woman sitting across the jam-pots from them had fought, too? Maybe the ladies of BP hadn’t faced bullets or bombs, but they’d fought—oh, yes, they’d fought. And now they were labeled simply housewives, or schoolteachers, or silly debs, and they probably bit their tongues and hid their wounds, just like Osla. Because the ladies of BP had certainly taken their share of war wounds.

The woman who had sent Osla the Vigenère square wasn’t the only one to crock up and end in a madhouse, gibbering under the strain.

Get me out of here, the ciphered message read. You owe me.

The cipher message said a lot of other things, too . . .

The telephone shrieked, and Osla nearly jumped out of her skin. She snatched up the handset. “Did you change your mind about meeting?” It surprised her, the thrum of relief that went through her. No love lost between herself and her old friend, but if she had someone to face this problem with—

“Meeting whom, Miss Kendall?” The voice was male, insinuating, oilier than Brylcreem on a Cheapside shoe salesman. “Where are you off to? Private rendezvous with the royal fiancé, perhaps?”

Osla straightened, jangling nerves subsiding in a rush of straightforward loathing. “I don’t remember which scandal rag you write for, but stop talking slush and bugger off.” She banged down the handset. The sheet sniffers had been haunting her doorstep ever since the royal engagement had been announced. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t anything to find; they wanted dirt. One hour ago, she’d been looking for any excuse to get away from them, from the wedding hysteria, out of London altogether . . .

She heard the furious voice through the telephone again: Go to hell, Osla Kendall.

“Oh, plug it,” Osla said aloud, making a sudden decision. “I’m coming to talk to you whether you like it or not.”

Because nothing about the woman in the madhouse could be discussed by telephone, and the only person she could talk to about it lived in York now. A long, long way from London.

Two birds, one stone.

Seven Years Ago

June 1940

Chapter 6