“I don’t think you’re quite entitled to an opinion on my future husband,” she said evenly.

“That’s fair.”

“Don’t think I’m eating my heart out, Philip.” The twinges of regret could ache sometimes, even now, but Osla’s heart was no longer in smithereens. It wasn’t heartache now, it was . . . “What pains me,” she said slowly, finding her way, “is that I’ve never quite been allowed to leave you behind. When can I be Osla Kendall again, not Prince Philip’s old girlfriend?” She answered her own question. “I know it will happen eventually. You’ll become our future queen’s husband, there will be little blue-eyed princes and princesses, and I’ll have a husband and children of my own, and people will forget. I just wish it would come sooner—the day my name becomes mine again, not just something to remind people of someone more important.”

His mouth quirked. “I might know something about how that feels.”

He might, at that. He’d chosen a woman who outranked him, who always would. If you’d married me, Osla thought, you’d be a naval lieutenant—maybe a captain by now—free to sail the world, and I’d always be the prince’s wife. You’ll marry her, and you’ll probably never sail into battle again, and you’ll always be the queen’s husband.

“You can do it, you know,” Osla said. “What I said at the train station, that you could never play Albert to Princess Elizabeth’s Victoria—you can do it, Philip. I know you can. She’ll need someone like you, and so does England—someone who doesn’t take loyalty for granted.” Unlike Giles, who had been born into the nation Philip had chosen and fought for, yet had thrown his loyalty away.

“Thank you,” he said simply. “She . . . makes me happy.”

“I’m glad you found your place in the world, then.”

“What’s your place, Os?”

“I’m going to be the wittiest, most successful satirist at the Tatler,” Osla said. “With a syndicated column before I’m thirty.” She said it flippantly but realized it was exactly what she wanted. Maybe she hadn’t let herself realize that, because it seemed like wanting the moon . . . But Osla decided right now that she was getting a column, and it was going to be a ripping good column, too.

“Shall I ring someone at the Tatler?” Philip asked. “I could put in a word for you.”

“No, I’m going to get it for myself,” Osla decided. As soon as she’d wrapped up this business of catching a traitor, that is.

“I look forward to reading your work.” Philip hesitated. “Friends, Os? I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t.”

“Then take this.” Holding out a slip of paper. “My private line here at the palace.”

“Is a bit of Mayfair crumpet like me allowed to ring a duke at Buck Place?” Osla gibed.

“You’re no Mayfair crumpet, and you know it.” Philip hesitated. “Maybe you can’t tell me, but I know you did more during the war than type reports.”

That knocked Osla for a wicket. “What?”

“People who have been to war, suffered for it in some way . . . you see the marks. The damage. I knew fellows who couldn’t stand loud noises after Matapan, fellows who got the tremors after we were dive-bombed in the Mediterranean. I don’t know what you did, Os—I didn’t think about it much at the time—but afterward, when I looked back, I realized . . . well, from the pattern of your flinches, it can’t have just been typing.” Slanting a brow. “Though you were very good at selling it that way.”

Osla stared at him, nearly breathless.

“Tell me one thing,” Philip said. “Whatever it was, were you good at it?”

“I was blinking great at it,” she said.

“There you are. So no more ‘silly deb’ business, eh?”

She grinned. “As the royal consort, you might get permission to find out what I did. Possibly. Ask MI-5.”

“I will.” Philip checked the time. “I’ve got to go. Look, don’t be afraid to ring if you ever need anything. One of my people will answer it, day or night.”

“You have people now?” she teased. He grinned back, coming to kiss her cheek, and she smelled an unfamiliar cologne. “Good to see you, Philip.”

When Osla was escorted back to Giles, waiting between a mirror and a hideous mid-Victorian still-life, he was good humored. “You were gone an awfully long time for a pair of gloves, kitten. Should I be jealous?”

She beamed at Giles, disarming him before she dumped the goods on him. “You’re the one who’s been tipping off the scandal rags about me, aren’t you?” A shot in the dark, but a reasonable one.

He had the grace to looked chagrined. “Just once or twice. The things journos pay for tips . . .”

Excellent, Osla thought. She could row with him all the way back to Knightsbridge, and he’d be far too busy scrambling for apologies to even think about inviting her out to cocktails, or, God forbid, to bed. Far too busy to think about Beth, either. “You utter rotter, Giles Talbot!” Osla shouted, working up some tears as she stamped down the endless palace hall. That shiver of fear his presence gave her subsided in a wash of relief. She could get out of his sight and back to Beth, Mab, and Courns Wood by nightfall. Back to the people who mattered.

Chapter 79

I hear you need a boffin.”

Beth’s head jerked up. Harry stood leaning against the library door, old jacket thrown over one shoulder. His black hair was shorter—he would no longer be forgetting the barber for weeks at a time because of triple-shift binges breaking U-boat codes. She’d forgot how big he was. “You’re here,” she said, heart thudding.

His gaze went over her, and she winced at the horror that flashed briefly across his eyes. She was clean scrubbed now—a long soak in Mrs. Knox’s bathtub had washed away the asylum smell—but there wasn’t any hiding her skeletal thinness, her ragged hair and nails. “Harry,” she said, hearing the rasp in her own voice now, the perpetual hoarseness from years of daily vomiting.

“Mrs. Knox let me in.” He looked like he had a river of words begging to be released, but he kept his voice careful, quiet. Like a man trying not to spook a wild animal. “Mab and Osla, are they—”

“Mab’s making coffee, Osla was called to London.” Harry had a fellowship at his old college in Cambridge now. Mab had tracked him down yesterday. Beth felt her hand stealing up to worry at her hair and made it stop.

“My college owed me some days.” Harry took a step forward. “Beth—”

“How is Sheila?” Beth blurted out. She wanted to know why he’d never come to Clockwell. She also didn’t know if she could bear to hear the answer. “And Christopher?”

Harry pulled himself visibly back from some ledge. “Christopher’s—he’s well. My father’s come round a bit about us never darkening his doorstep; he sent Christopher to a specialist to have his ankle operated on. He walks quite a bit better now. Sheila’s over the moon.”

“That’s good.” Beth took a deep breath. “Did Mab tell you about Giles?”

“Yes.” Harry said something flat and filthy about Giles Talbot. “This cipher message you broke—how is it the Soviets were talking about Giles, in English, via an Enigma machine when they don’t use Enigma for their own traffic?”

Beth had thought about that. “Probably a captured German army machine. Maybe they were communicating with his handler in England, asking more about its uses and operation. Who knows?”

Harry pulled up a chair. “How can I help?”

She pushed the Rose messages across the desk.

He leafed through the sheets of Enigma traffic, a smile touching the corner of his mouth, and Beth’s heart plucked. “This takes me back.” He inhaled the smell of the decrypt paper. “I’m working theoretical mathematics now, the Poincaré conjecture—stuff I missed when I was at BP. Pure research, no lives at stake. But sometimes I look round my office and I miss the night shifts, the chicory coffee, the morning rush on the U-boat traffic . . .”

“Working elbow-to-elbow in Knox’s section, everybody climbing over each other when the dispatch riders came in . . .” Beth could have had another year of that, if she’d worked to the end of the war. Yet another thing Giles had taken from her. She shook the anger off; there was no time for it. “We don’t have much in the way of cribs . . .” She walked Harry through how she’d broken the first Rose message. He fell into the work without another word; she fell into it too with another steadying inhale.

“I looked for you as soon as I was demobbed.” He spoke perhaps an hour later, quiet words dropping into the stillness. “Your mother told me you’d died in an institution. She wouldn’t even tell me where you were buried.”

Beth squeezed her eyes shut. Ah, Mother.

“You never talked about her—I didn’t know enough to disbelieve her.” A ragged pause. “I loved you, and I left you in that place—”

“Harry,” Beth broke in desperately. “Let’s stay focused, shall we? I can’t . . .”

She trailed off. He blew out an uneven breath. “All right.”

Beth looked at the cipher message before her, not seeing it for a moment. I loved you. Past tense.