Chapter 10

August 1940

You’ll do. ”

Beth stared in utter horror.

“Were you worried, Miss Finch? ” The tired-looking man—Paymaster Commander Bradshaw, as he’d introduced himself at the start of Beth’s interview—stamped something on the file in front of her. “It’s not all Oxford graduates here, you know. Your background came in clean as a Sunday wash, and being a local girl, we won’t have to billet you. Start tomorrow; you’ll be on the day shift. You’ll need to sign this. . . ”

Beth didn’t even hear the dire imprecations of the Official Secrets Act as they were rattled off. They weren’t supposed to take me, she thought in a blur of panic. It had never occurred to her that Bletchley Park would hire her, even when the summons came a week ago. “It only says to present myself for an interview, ” Beth had reassured her mother, who had slit Beth’s letter open when it arrived and demanded explanations. She’d present herself as called, but the Park wouldn’t have any use for her. Far too stupid, she thought, wondering how they’d got her name at all. And the interview, conducted in a muggy back room behind the redbrick mansion’s staircase, had seemed utterly routine: questions about typing and filing, which Beth couldn’t do; education, which Beth didn’t have; and foreign languages, which Beth didn’t speak. She whispered one-word answers, mind half on the strange things she’d seen while trudging up to the mansion: a man cycling through the gates wearing a gas mask as though he expected an attack any moment; four men and two women playing rounders on the lawn. . . Even as she walked up the drive, Beth had already been relieved at the thought of going home and telling her mother it was all over.

Then, suddenly: You’ll do.

“S-surely there’s a mistake, ” she managed to stammer.

But Mr. Bradshaw was shoving a pen at her. “Sign the Act, please. ”

Dazed, Beth signed.

“Excellent, Miss Finch. Now for your permanent pass—” Mr. Bradshaw broke off as a commotion resonated outside. “Good Lord, these codebreakers are worse than quarreling cats. ”

Out the door he went. Beth blinked. “Codebreakers?! ”

Following him out toward the entrance, she saw a weary-looking gentleman in shirtsleeves addressing a grizzled professorial type who was limping up and down the oak-paneled hall—“Dilly, old thing, do stop roaring. ”

“No, I will not, ” roared the man with the limp. To Beth he looked like the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, which Osla and Mab were reading for the first literary society book pick: long, gangling, faintly comical, eyes snapping behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Denniston, I won’t have my work passed off half-done—”

“Dilly, you haven’t got the personnel, and you keep turning down the new ones I send you. ”

“I don’t want a yard of Wrens all looking the same—”

“We haven’t even got any Wrens—”

“—and I don’t want any debutantes in pearls whose daddies got them into BP because they knew someone at the Admiralty—”

“This one might do, Dilly, ” Mr. Bradshaw interrupted, and Beth shrank as every eye in the hall turned to her. “I was going to put her into administration, but you might give her a trial first if you’re shorthanded. ”

“Eh? ” The White Knight turned with a glare. His eyes behind the glasses raked Beth, and she stood frozen. “You’re good with languages? ”

“No. ” Beth had never felt so shy, slow, stilted, and stuck in her life. From Commander Denniston’s grateful glance at Bradshaw, she knew perfectly well this was a diversion—chucking her into the line of fire to avert further shouting. Her face burned.

“What about linguistics? Literature? ” the White Knight fired off. “Even maths? ”

“No. ” Then for some reason, Beth whispered, “I—I’m good at crosswords. ”

“Crosswords, eh? Peculiar. ” He pushed his glasses further up his nose. “Come along. ”

“Miss Finch hasn’t got her official pass yet—”

“Has she signed the Act? Let her start. As long as you can shoot her if she blabs, who cares about the pass? ” Beth nearly fainted. “I’m Dilly Knox. Come with me, ” the White Knight said over his shoulder, and led her through the looking glass.

What is this place? Trailing after Mr. Knox as he limped out of the mansion toward what appeared to be a converted stable block, Beth couldn’t stop Lewis Carroll from chaining together in her whirling head. Her brain did that sometimes, went flashing down an association and kept linking others to it to make a pattern. Glancing up at the bronze-faced clock mounted on the half-timbered upper tower, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see the hands running backward. Why hadn’t Osla and Mab warned her? But they couldn’t say anything; they’d signed an oath. . . and now, so had Beth. Whatever happened here now, she wasn’t going to be able to tell her mother a thing.

Her stomach swooped. Mother is going to be furious.

Beyond the old stable yard was a compact single-storied block: three brick cottages joined together in a single whitewashed unit, with two doors. Mr. Knox struck open the rightmost. “We work here, ” he said, beckoning Beth through a corridor. “It’s like a great factory, the rest of BP. Here’s where we do proper cryptography. ”

Cryptography, Beth thought. I now do cryptography.

There was no Wonderland inside the desk-crammed, chalk-dusty room where he led her, just five or six women hard at work—short and tall, pretty and plain, looking as young as eighteen or as old as thirty-five in their jumpers and skirts. None looked up. “Were you shouting at Denniston again, Dilly? ” an older woman with straw-fair hair asked.

“I was sweet as a lamb. I told him just last week that he couldn’t—”

“Dilly darling, no. ” The woman was manipulating a set of cardboard strips in a pattern Beth couldn’t follow. “You didn’t tell Denniston anything last week. ”

“Didn’t I? ” He scratched his head, all his earlier rage seemingly dissipated. “I rather thought last week one had said the right thing. . . ”

“One hasn’t said anything before today. One hasn’t spoken to Denniston at all for two weeks. ” The straw-haired woman exchanged smiles with the younger girls.

“That would explain why he looked so puzzled. ” Mr. Knox shrugged, turning back to Beth. “Meet my ladies. ” He gestured to the room. “Dilly’s Fillies, they call ’em at the mansion. Utter rot, but around here, if it rhymes, it sticks. Ladies, meet—” He looked at Beth. “Did you tell me your name? ”

“Beth Finch—”

“Ladies, Beth Finch. She’s. . . ” He trailed off, patting his pockets. “Where are my glasses? ”

“On your head, ” at least three of the women said, without looking up.

He located his spectacles and draped them over his nose. “Take a desk, ” he said, waving at Beth. “Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes. ”

He flung himself down at a desk by a window, fumbling for a tin of tobacco and seemingly forgetting Beth’s existence. Most of the girls went right on working as though this were a perfectly normal state of affairs, but the small woman with the straw-fair hair rose, extending a hand.

“Peggy Rock. ” One of the older women, thirty-five or thirty-six, a plain face that sparkled with intelligence. “I’ll show you the ropes. That’s Dillwyn Alfred Knox, ” she said, pointing to the White Knight, “and he was breaking German codes back in the Fourteen–Eighteen War. Dilly’s team here researches the stuff that has to be lockpicked rather than brute-force assembly-lined through the other huts. Right now we’re working the Italian naval Enigma—”

“What’s Enigma? ” Beth said, utterly bewildered.

“The machine the enemy uses to encrypt most of their military traffic, ” Peggy said. “Italians and Germans, naval traffic and air traffic and army traffic, and every cipher has a different setting. The machine has, well, let’s just say a dizzying number of setting combinations, and the settings change every day, so that should make whatever they encrypt with Enigma unbreakable. ” She gave a small smile. “Not as unbreakable as they think. ”

Did Osla know all this? Beth wondered. Did Mab?

“We tend to get a bit more of the big picture here than the others at BP, ” Peggy added as if reading her mind. “They’re such fiends for compartmentalization here—most people just see the bit in front of them, and maybe they put a bit together from what they see going in and out of the other huts, but that’s all—”

“Utter rot. ” Dilly’s voice floated from his desk. “I want my girls to have a large, unhampered range. You benefit from seeing the whole picture, not bits and pieces of it. ”

“Why? ” Beth asked.

“Because we do the tricky part. ” Peggy Rock spread her hands. “The traffic gets registered and logged elsewhere, and once it’s broken it gets translated and analyzed—but we do the important bit in the middle. The prying-it-all-open bit, every message individually. We use a technique called rodding to identify the start position of the message as seen through the window indicator setting. Let me show you—”

“I won’t understand it, ” Beth blurted out. “I’m not clever, you understand? I can’t do—” Rodding. Cryptography. This. Her chest was tight; her breath heaved; the walls pulsed around her. It paralyzed her to stray even a few steps outside her usual routine, and here was a whole new world. Any moment now she was going to panic. “I’ll hold you back, ” she insisted, close to tears. “I’m too stupid. ”

“Really? ” Peggy Rock looked at her calmly, fanning out a handful of those curious cardboard strips like a winning hand of cards. “Who told you that? ”

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