Chapter 3

June 1940

Mab was doing her best to disappear into her library copy of Vanity Fair, but even Becky Sharp flinging a dictionary out a coach window couldn’t hold her attention when the train leaving London was so crowded, and when the man in the seat opposite was fondling himself through his trouser pocket.

“What’s your name? ” he’d crooned when Mab dragged her brown cardboard suitcase aboard, and she’d shot him her iciest glare. He’d been forced off to one side when the compartment filled up with men in uniform, most of them trailing hopefully after a stunning brunette in a fur-trimmed coat. But as the train chugged north out of London, the compartment emptied of soldiers stop by stop, and when it was just Mab and the brunette, the fondler began crooning again. “Give us a smile, luv! ” Mab ignored him. There was a newspaper on the compartment floor, tracked with muddy boot prints, and she was trying to ignore that too—the headline screamed Dunkirk and disaster.

“We’re next, ” Mab’s mother had said as Denmark fell, Norway fell, Belgium fell, Holland fell, one after another like boulders rolling inexorably off a cliff. Then ruddy France fell, and Mrs. Churt gave even bleaker shakes of the head. “We’re next, ” she said to everyone who would listen, and Mab nearly bit her head off. Mum, would you mind not talking about murdering, raping Huns and what they’re going to do to us? It had been a terrible row, the first of many once Mab had tried to persuade Mum to leave London with Lucy. Just for a while, she said, and Mum retorted, I leave Shoreditch feetfirst, in a box.

And that row had been so bad, it was just as well that Mab had received this odd summons a week ago about a post in Buckinghamshire. Lucy didn’t really understand she was going away; when Mab had hugged her tight that morning before departing, she’d just put her head on one side and said “’Night! ” which meant See you tonight!

I won’t be seeing you tonight, Luce. Mab had never been away from Lucy overnight, not once.

Well, Mab would take the train back to London the first day she had off. Whatever this post was, there had to be days off, even in wartime. And maybe her living situation in—what was this town called again? —would be decent enough she could see about moving her family here to the country. Better the middle of nowhere among green fields than soon-to-be-bombed London. . . Mab shuddered and went back to Vanity Fair, where Becky Sharp was headed for a new job in the country too, not appearing to worry much about her homeland’s being invaded. But in Becky’s day it had been Napolé on, and Napolé on didn’t have bloody Messerschmitts, did he?

“What’s your name, lovely? ” The fondler had switched his attentions to the little brunette in the fur-trimmed coat, who was now the only other passenger in the compartment. His hand began to work away in his pocket. “Just one smile, gorgeous—”

The brunette looked up from her own book, flushing pink, and Mab wondered if she’d have to intervene. Normally she abided by a Londoner’s strict rule of keep your nose out of other folks’ business, but the brunette looked like an absolute lamb in the woods. Just the sort of female Mab both slightly resented and also envied—expensively dressed, pampered skin that a gushy novel would describe as alabaster, the sort of pocket-sized figure all women wanted and all men wanted to take a bite out of. The kind of silly overbred debutante, in short, who had grown up riding ponies and wouldn’t have to lift a finger to bag herself a husband of means and education, but was otherwise completely useless. Any Shoreditch girl could handle a train compartment lothario, but this little bit of crumpet was going to get munched right up.

Mab laid down Vanity Fair with a thump, irritated with the fondler and rather irritated with the brunette too for needing rescuing. But before she could even snap Look here, you. . . the brunette spoke up.

“My goodness, look at the tent in your trousers. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything quite so obvious. Most fellows do something incredibly creative with their hats at this stage. ”

The man’s hand froze. The brunette put her head to one side, eyes widening innocently. “Is something wrong? You aren’t in pain, are you? Chaps always act like they’re in such pain at this point, I’m nobbled if I know why. . . ”

The fondler, Mab observed, was red as a beet and had withdrawn his hand from his pocket.

“. . . Really, do you need a doctor? You’re looking absolutely in the basket—”

The man fled the compartment with a mutter. “Feel better soon! ” the little brunette called after him, then looked over at Mab, eyes sparkling. “That fixed him. ” She flung one silk-stockinged leg over the other with evident satisfaction.

“Nice work, ” Mab couldn’t help but say. Not such an easily munched bit of crumpet after all, even if the girl didn’t look a day over eighteen. “If I have to get rid of a fellow like that, I rely on a good icy stare or a kick in the shins. ”

“I can’t do an icy stare to save my life. This face simply won’t glower. If I try, fellows tell me I look adorable, and there’s nothing to make you flip your wicket like being told you’re adorable when you’re furious. Now, you’re clearly tall, and you’ve got eyebrows like an empress, so I’m sure you have a very impressive glare? ” Tilting her head in invitation.

Mab had been about to retreat into her book, but she couldn’t resist. Arching one brow, she looked down her nose and let her lip curl.

“Now that’s a slap-up stare to freeze the marrow! ” The brunette put out a hand. “Osla Kendall. ”

Mab shook it, surprised to feel calluses. “Mab Churt. ”

“Mab, that’s topping, ” Osla approved. “I was going to guess Boadicea or Scarlett O’Hara; someone who could drive a chariot with knives or shoot Yankees on staircases. I got stuck with Osla because my mother went to Oslo and said it was too too utterly divine. What she meant was that I was conceived there. So now I’m named after a city that is being crawled over by Germans, and I’m trying not to take it as a prediction. ”

“Could be worse. What if you’d been conceived in Birmingham? ” Mab was still trying to make sense of the girl’s work-roughened hands in contrast to her Mayfair drawl. “Surely those calluses didn’t come from finishing school. ”

“From building Hurricanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory in Colnbrook. ” Osla saluted. “Who knows what I’ll be doing now. I was called to interview in London, and then the strangest summons arrived telling me to go to Bletchley station—”

“But that’s where I’m going. ” Startled, Mab dug out the letter in her handbag, much puzzled over when it had arrived in Shoreditch. Turning, she saw an identical letter in Osla’s hand. They held the sheets side by side. Osla’s letter read:

Please report to Station X at Bletchley station, Buckinghamshire, in seven days’ time.

Your postal address is Box 111, c/o the Foreign Office. That is all you need to know.

Commander Denniston

Mab’s was more official—I am desired by the Chief Clerk to inform you that you have been selected for the appointment of Temporary Clerk. . . you should attend for duty in four days’ time, traveling by the 10: 40 a. m. train from London (Euston) to the third stop (Bletchley)—but the destination was clearly the same.

“Curiouser and curiouser. ” Osla looked thoughtful. “Well, I’m dished—never so much as heard of Bletchley or Station X. ”

“Me either, ” said Mab, and wished she’d said “Nor I. ” Osla’s polished voice and breezy slang were making her self-conscious. “I had an interview in London, too—they asked me about my typing and shorthand. They must’ve got my name from the secretarial course I took last year. ”

“They didn’t ask me about typing at all. This hatchet of a woman tested my German and my French, then told me to run along home. About two weeks later, this. ” Osla tapped the letter. “What can they want us for? ”

Mab shrugged. “I’ll put my hours in for the war doing whatever they want. What matters to me is earning a wage to send home, and being close enough to London to visit every day off. ”

“Don’t be so prosy! We could be walking right into our own Agatha Christie novel here, The Mystery of Station X. . . ”

Mab adored Agatha Christie. “Murder at Station X: A Hercule Poirot Mystery. . . ”

“I prefer Miss Marple, ” Osla said decidedly. “She’s exactly like every spinster governess I ever had. Just with arsenic instead of chalk. ”

“I like Poirot. ” Mab crossed her legs, aware that her shoes, no matter how carefully she’d shined them, looked cheap next to Osla’s hand-stitched pumps. At least my legs are just as good as hers, Mab couldn’t help thinking. Better. That felt rather petty and mean-spirited, but Osla Kendall was so clearly a girl who had everything. . . “Hercule Poirot would give a girl like me a fair hearing, ” she went on. “The Miss Marples of the world take one look and decide I’m a tart. ”

When the train drew to the third stop at last, Osla whooped “Tallyho! ” but Mab’s hopes soon waned.

Half a mile of suitcase dragging from the dreary, crowded station led them to an eight-foot chained fence topped by rolls of barbed wire. The gates were manned by two bored-looking guardsmen. “Can’t come in here, ” one said as Mab rummaged for her papers. “Got no pass. ”

Mab brushed her hair out of her face. This morning she’d set it into perfect waves with kirby grips, and now she was sweaty and annoyed and her waves were falling out. “Look here, we don’t know what we’re supposed to—”

“Come to the right place, then, ” said the guard in a country accent she could barely understand. “Most of ’em here look as if they didn’t know where they was, and God knows what they’m doing. ”

Mab gave him the icy stare, but Osla stepped forward, all wide eyes and trembling lips, and the older guard took pity. “I’ll escort you up to the main house. If you want to know where you are, ” he added, “you’re at Bletchley Park. ”

“What is that? ” Mab demanded.

The younger guard sniggered. “It’s the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain. ”

THE MANSION LOOKED out over a rolling green expanse of lawn and a small lake—redbrick Victorian with a green copper dome, stuck all over with windows and gables like a Christmas pudding studded with glacé cherries. “Lavatory Gothic, ” Osla shuddered, but Mab stared enchanted, unable to keep herself from wandering off the path toward the lake. A proper country house and grounds like Thornfield Hall or Manderley, the kind of house that eligible bachelors were always renting in novels. But even here, war had placed its ugly mass-produced boot firmly on both mansion and personnel. Hideous prefabricated huts dotted the grounds, and people rushed haphazardly across the paths—fewer men in uniform than Mab was used to seeing in London, and certainly more women than she was expecting. They hurried between the huts and mansion in tweeds, knits, and abstracted expressions.

“They all look like they strayed into a labyrinth with no exit, ” Osla observed, following Mab toward the lake as the guard stood looking impatient on the path.

“Exactly. Where do you think we—”

They both halted. Crawling out of the lake, soaking wet, plastered with reeds, and clutching a tea mug, was a naked man.

“Oh, hullo, ” he called cheerfully. “New recruits? About bally time. You go on back, David, ” he called up to the waiting guard. “I’ll take ’em up to the mansion. ”

Mab saw with some relief that the man wasn’t entirely naked, just stripped down to his drawers. Above them he had a freckled, concave chest; a face like an amiable gargoyle’s; and hair that even soaking wet was clearly as red as a telephone box. “I’m Talbot, Giles Talbot, ” he explained in an Oxbridge drawl, wandering over to a heap of clothes on the bank as Osla and Mab murmured their introductions and tried not to stare. “Took a jump in the lake after Josh Cooper’s tea mug. He chucked it into the reeds, working through some problem or other. Trousers, ” Giles Talbot muttered, shaking out his clothes. “If those buggers in Hut 4 hid them again—”

“Can you tell us where we’re supposed to go? ” Mab interrupted, irritated. “There has to be someone in charge of this madhouse. ”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? ” Giles Talbot buttoned his shirt, then shrugged into an old checked jacket. “Commander Denniston is the closest we’ve got to a warden. Right-ho, follow me. ”

Hopping first on one foot and then on the other to pull his shoes over bare feet, he set off toward the mansion, shirttails flapping over wet drawers and bare white legs. Mab and Osla looked at each other. “It’s all a front, ” Osla whispered. “We’re going to be drugged as soon as we set foot into that hideous house and then sold into durance vile, just you wait. ”

“If they were trying to lure us into durance vile, they’d send someone more appetizing than a half-naked stork, ” Mab said. “What is durance vile, anyway. . . ”

The mansion’s entrance hall was oak-paneled and spacious, with rooms branching off each side. There was a pegboard with a copy of the London Times pinned up, a Gothic-looking lounge, a grand staircase visible through a pink marble arcade. . . Giles whisked them upstairs into what looked like a bay-windowed bedroom turned private office, bed replaced by cabinets, everything reeking of cigarette smoke. A small harassed-looking man with a professorial forehead looked up from the desk. He didn’t sputter at the sight of Giles’s naked legs, just remarked, “You found Cooper’s tea mug? ”

“And some new recruits, fresh off the London train. Aren’t they getting prettier? Miss Kendall here could whistle a chap off a branch any day of the week. ” Giles beamed at Osla, then looked up at Mab, who topped him by half a head. “Lord, I love a tall woman. You’re not pining for some RAF pilot, are you? Don’t break my heart! ”

Mab pondered getting out the icy stare but put it away unworn. This entire atmosphere was simply too strange to offend.

“You’re a fine one to talk about looks, Talbot. I’ve never seen anything as unappetizing as you lot of skinny Cambridge boffins. ” Commander Denniston—at least, that’s who Mab presumed it was—shook his head at Giles’s bare white legs, then looked at Osla and Mab’s identification and letters. “Kendall. . . Churt. . . ”

“My godfather might have been the one who put my name forward, ” Osla prompted. “Lord Mountbatten. ”

He brightened. “Then Miss Churt will be the one from the London secretarial pool. ” He gave back their papers, rising. “Right. You have both been recruited to Bletchley Park, the headquarters of GC & CS. ”

What’s that? Mab wondered.

As if reading her mind, Giles volunteered, “Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society. ”

Commander Denniston looked pained but plowed on. “You’ll be assigned a hut, and your head of hut will fill you in on your duties. Before that happens, my job is to impress upon you that you will be working in the most secret place in Britain, and all activities here are crucial to the outcome of the war. ”

He paused. Mab stood frozen, and she could feel Osla at her side equally motionless. Bloody hell, Mab thought. What is this place?

He continued. “The work here is so secret that you will be told only what it is necessary for you to know, and you will never seek to find out more. Besides respecting internal security, you will be mindful of external security. You will never mention the name of this place, not to your family or friends. You will find that your colleagues refer to it as BP, and you will do the same. Above all, you will never disclose to anyone the nature of the work that you do here. To reveal the least hint might jeopardize the whole progress of the war. ”

Another pause. Are they training us to be spies? Mab wondered, astonished.

“Should anyone ask, you are doing ordinary clerical work. Make it sound dull, the duller the better. ”

Osla piped up, “What work will we be doing, sir? ”

“Good God, girl, have you listened to a single word I’ve said? ” Impatience crept into Denniston’s voice. “I don’t know what you will be doing, in any specific way, and I don’t want to know. ” He opened a desk drawer and took out two sheets of yellowish paper, laying one in front of each of them. “This is the Official Secrets Act. It clearly states that if you do any of the things I have warned you against, if you disclose the slightest information which could be of use to the enemy, you will be guilty of treason. ”

The silence was absolute.

“And treason, ” Commander Denniston finished mildly, “makes you liable to the most extreme penalties of the law. I’m not sure at the moment whether that’s hanging or firing squad. ”

It couldn’t get any quieter, but Mab felt the silence congeal. She took a deep breath. “Sir, are we allowed to—refuse this post? ”

He looked startled. “There’s no pistol to your head; this isn’t Berlin. Refuse, and you will simply be ushered off the premises with strict instructions never to mention this place again. ”

. . . And I’ll never know what really goes on here, Mab thought.

He laid two pens before them. “Sign, please. Or not. ”

Mab took another breath and signed across the bottom. She saw Osla doing the same.

“Welcome to BP, ” Commander Denniston said with the first smile of the exchange. Just like that, the interview was over. Giles Talbot, still with his damp shirttails flapping, steered them out into the hall. Osla gripped Mab’s hand once the door shut behind them, and Mab wasn’t too proud to grip back.

“Wouldn’t take it too seriously if I were you. ” Incredibly, Giles was chuckling. “That speech is a knee-weakener the first time you hear it—Denniston was out when it was my turn, and I got the whole harangue from a wing commander who pulled a pistol out of his drawer and said he’d shoot me if I broke the sacred secrecy of et cetera, et cetera. But you get used to it. Come along, let’s get your billets sorted—”

Mab halted at the staircase, folding her arms. “Look here, can’t we get a hint now about what this place actually does? ”

“Isn’t it obvious? ” He looked surprised. “GC & CS—we call it Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society because the place is packed with Oxford dons and Cambridge chess champions, but it stands for Government Code & Cypher School. ”

Mab and Osla must have looked baffled, because he grinned.

“We’re breaking German codes. ”

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