Chapter 20

To Mr. J. P. E. C. Cornwell,

Forgive me for not knowing how to address you—you washed my hair in champagne when the Café de Paris was bombed, after knocking out the man who tried to rob me, and then you lent me your coat. My wits were sufficiently rattled that I never asked your name. Your coat has a label of J. P. E. C. Cornwell, and I managed to find an address attached to a J. Cornwell in London—but when I attempted to post it, the package was returned to me with a covering note. Apparently you shipped overseas shortly after our brief meeting. If this follow-up note finds you—I’m forwarding it to who I presume is your landlady—I wish you the very best of luck in the fight to come.

If you would like to call on Osla Kendall when you are next in England—

Osla hesitated then, not entirely sure how to finish. She didn’t want to give her Good Samaritan the idea she was angling for a date—she could hardly remember anything about him except for his greatcoat, his uniform, his calm voice—but she really did want to shake his hand for the service he’d rendered her.

—I would be delighted to deliver your coat, and my thanks, in person.

“I’D LIKE A transfer, Miss Senyard. ” Osla met the older woman’s eyes square. “My language skills are going to pot, binding reports and sticking cards in boxes. ”

Miss Senyard clicked her tongue. “The work we do might seem unrewarding, but it’s very important. ”

“I have excellent command of plain and technical German. There must be other jobs here in German naval section that could use me. ” Osla gave her most winning smile. Since practically her first day here she’d found the work dull, but since surviving the bombing she’d become abruptly, violently fed up. She’d nearly died at the Café de Paris; she was not going to stagger back to BP and waste her hard-won skills on a job any schoolgirl with a little filing experience could handle. She was still alive, and she was going to do more with that life—for one, fight harder against the utter monsters dropping those bombs. “Do you know some of the chaps call our section the Debutantes’ Den? ” she asked Miss Senyard. “Let me prove I’m more than a silly socialite, Miss S. ”

“I’ll hate to lose you, Osla. ” Miss Senyard sighed. “But with technical German, I suppose you could join the German translating section. I’ll speak to Mr. Birch. ”

“Thank you, ma’am! You should put Sally Norton on translating too; her German’s as good as mine. ” Sally had been recruited to Bletchley Park just this spring and landed under Miss Senyard too, to Osla’s delight.

“Any other personnel changes you’d like to make? ” Amused.

“No, ma’am. ” Osla was transferred in no time, still part of Hut 4 but to a different section where a gaggle of tweedy men who’d read German at university and a cluster of twinset-wearing women who’d been “finished” in Munich and Vienna sat at a long table translating cipher messages. They made room with cheery waves, shoving over a stack of decrypts. “Decoded fresh out of the Typex machines; turn it into plain English. ”

Osla pulled her pink wool jacket more tightly around herself in the hut’s chill—these green clapboard walls were slow to warm in the watery spring sunshine—and started translating the first cipher message. Details on a U-boat wolf pack, picked up by Morse code listeners in a Y-station in Scarborough, according to the labels. “What do we do if there are bits missing? ” Whole chunks of the paragraph in front of her trailed off into blanks.

“Fill it in, given context. We don’t always get all of it, and that’s all there is to it. ”

What if that’s the part that’s crucial? Osla thought, staring at the blank in the message. What if that’s the part that will save lives? Well, she’d wanted harder work, more important work—here it was. She picked up her pencil, flipping her German dictionary open. Die Klappenschrank, what did that mean. . .

“You should have hopped jobs at the end of March, ” a girl across the table said as she finished her first message. “Thrilling reading, let me tell you—all the traffic from Matapan coming through! ”

My boyfriend was at Matapan, Osla wanted to say. Because he got transferred to the Valiant. It wasn’t till I saw the information coming through my hands in Miss Senyard’s section that I realized the Valiant was at the battle. . . and I haven’t heard from him since.

She cut that fear off before it could grow out of proportion. Philip hadn’t written because he was busy, for God’s sake. Or maybe he’d forgot all about her, given her the old heave-ho. Fine—at this point she just wanted to know he was safe. Then she’d care about whether she’d been ditched or not.

And surely he was safe. She’d heard the newsreel in the little Bletchley Odeon, turned to stone in her seat, listening to the announcer over the tinny, triumphant music: “These are some of the ships that destroyed at least three Italian cruisers and three destroyers, and crippled and possibly sank a battleship, without casualties or damage to themselves! ” “Without casualties”. . . yet, Osla knew how idiotically optimistic newsreels could be. Even in an overwhelming victory, men died. Victory came at a cost. Osla had filed the cost of victory away every day in shoeboxes.

“These are the fifteen-inch shells that shattered a brand-new cruiser with one salvo. . . , ” the newsreel had blithered on, and she had fought down a surge of nausea, imagining what a shell like that could do to a man’s taut strength and golden skin, his clever brain inside its fragile skull. This wasn’t a fairy tale; princes died as easily as any other men.

But if he was dead, surely it would have been reported. A prince’s death on the front lines would be news. Unless the report wasn’t in yet. . .

That gnawing fear for Philip had been the final straw that tipped Osla into begging for more vital work than copying, binding, and filing. If she was going to hurt this much, be this afraid, she was damned well going to be doing something more important.

“Wasn’t it terrible seeing those Italian prisoners in the newsreel? ” she heard herself asking. “The ones our ships fished out of the sea. I keep wondering how many drowned. ”

The others looked at her, surprised. “They’re Eyeties, ” said a girl with a Veronica Lake wave. “If they didn’t want to get sunk by British destroyers, they shouldn’t have been cheering Mussolini. ”

“Maybe not, but. . . ” Osla trailed off, frustrated. The Café de Paris explosion seemed to have blasted a layer off her polished surface, left her easy prey not only to fear but to sympathy. Looking at the bleak-faced Italians in the newsreel had nearly brought her to weeping, knowing that for every one plucked from the sea, another two or three had surely burned or drowned. So many across the world dying every day. Osla couldn’t stop thinking of them: English, French, her own fellow Canadians, Australians, Poles. . . yes, even Germans and Italians. They were enemies, but they bled, too. They died. When was it bally well going to stop?

She’d probably know before the newsreels did, when it ran across the table in front of her for translating. There was small, cold comfort in that—that she’d clawed her way to a more vital place in BP’s ladder, and here she might know first that the war was over. Even if only by minutes.

“COME IN. ” A worried-looking woman in an old green cardigan answered Osla’s knock. “Sheila Zarb, delighted to meet you. . . ” Harry’s wife rushed off again before anyone could thank her for hosting tonight’s Tea Party. Osla smelled stewed tea as she moved into the shabby little house. A child was roaring in the next room.

“Ah, domestic life, ” mused Giles, ducking in after Osla. “Why wait for death? ”

“Don’t be beastly, ” Osla retorted, slightly disgusted with herself for noticing that Harry’s wife didn’t have nearly the educated vowels he did. You don’t be horrid either, Osla scolded herself as she and Giles crowded down the narrow passage. And then Osla really felt like a worm, because Sheila Zarb reappeared carrying her howling son, his sticklike legs hanging against his mother’s side encased in metal braces like torture contraptions. Polio, surely—Osla had gone to boarding school with a girl who had braces like that.

“Welcome to the madhouse. ” Harry emerged into the hall behind his wife, scooping the child out of her arms. “Come in, parlor’s that way. Christopher, chap, I know you hate your braces, but you’ve got to wear them. ”

Harry’s son narrowed his eyes mutinously, still bawling. “What a darling, ” Osla managed to say over the din. “How old? ”

“Turned three in January. ”

The boy looked far too small for three, thin and wasted when he should have been sturdy and bouncing. He had Harry’s jet-black hair and eyes but was sallow from ill health.

“I know what this sprat needs. ” Mab squeezed out of the parlor behind Harry, balancing a glass of sherry and the festooned top hat. She addressed Christopher, completely at ease. “Want to wear the Mad Hatter’s topper? It’s magic, you know. ”

Little Christopher stopped yelling to consider. Mab plunked the hat on his head, Harry gave her a grateful look, and they all maneuvered into the parlor, where more Mad Hatters were passing toast and discussing Mired: Battlefield Verses by Francis Gray. “I prefer Siegfried Sassoon, ” someone was complaining.

“‘Altar’ is my favorite sonnet of Gray’s, too eerie for words—”

“Who cares about his poetry? I want dirt on the poet. ” Giles turned his angelic smile on Mab. “Dish, faerie queene. You had dinner with the chap, and Bletchley Bletherings says he’s taking you out again next week—”

“To a concert, nosy—”

“Sorry! ” Beth slipped in, flushed and late. “I had to let the dog out. If he has an accident inside, Mum swears she’ll get rid of him. ”

“Beth! ” Harry maneuvered his huge frame onto the nearest chair, keeping Christopher and his braces deftly balanced on one knee. “Haven’t seen you since, well, you know. ” He grinned, and Beth flushed, looking into her teacup Harry was filling one-handed.

“Well, well, ” Giles murmured in Osla’s ear, alight with mischief. “Has our wallflower got a crush? ”

“Don’t talk slush, ” said Osla, who had been wondering exactly the same thing.

“Maybe he’s got one, too. ” Giles’s voice dropped even further, inaudible under the buzz of conversation to anyone but Osla. “Our Beth’s a clever girl, and something tells me Harry doesn’t get much brainy conversation from the missus. ”

“You infernal snob—”

Sheila reappeared, carrying an apron under one arm. “Sorry to leave you with bath and bedtime, ” she said low voiced to her husband as the Mad Hatters passed the teapot. “The canteen manager is insisting I cover—”

“Go on. ” Harry passed a hand over his son’s black hair. “I’ve got him. ”

Sheila leaned down and pressed her lips to Christopher’s cheek, and Osla found herself pushing back tears, looking at all the tenderness being poured on the scrawny child curled into his father’s arms with complete trust. She’d have given up both legs altogether for a childhood home where there were warm laps to be counted on and kisses on the cheek at night—for any kind of home now. Something else she’d learned, the night after Café de Paris’s destruction—how little of a home she really had.

Well, so what? Osla told herself fiercely. You have so much else. You even finally have a job that matters. In a world at war, surely it was greedy to want both—a job that mattered, and a home to welcome you afterward.

So Osla pinned a smile in place as the discussion got under way, and dug out a scrap of paper to jot ideas for the next Bletchley Bletherings, which she typed up every Wednesday. A lively discussion on Francis Gray’s battlefield verses, though BB wonders if war poetry is quite The Thing for morale. If you finished your shift translating, say, a U-boat casualty list, do you really want to discuss the crushed idealism of a lost generation drowned in Flanders mud as depicted in harrowing iambic pentameter? Or would you rather read some Jeeves & Wooster?

Copies of BB were invariably zinging through every hut in Bletchley Park by Friday, followed by snorts of laughter. Osla couldn’t make herself laugh these days, but by God she could dash off a weekly gossip sheet that had the whole Park fizzing.

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