Chapter 28

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, OCTOBER 1941

Preoccupied”—adjective, “engrossed in thought. ” Taken to an entirely new level by BP personnel, who are frequently too preoccupied to notice if they have put their knickers on backward, if the prime minister has dropped in for tea, or if everything except the pencil actually in their hand is on fire.

Beth missed everything that autumn. Churchill’s visit, Mab’s engagement—it all passed Beth in a blur. “Honestly, where do you Cottage girls go? ” Osla demanded. “The blinking moon? ”

Beth just stared, exhausted. She was sleeping very badly—at night her brain roiled so much with five-letter groups and quartets of wheels, she was lucky if she got more than a few hours of tossing and turning. Boots had given up sleeping on her feet and retired in disgust to the basket on the floor.

“MI-5 manages the controlled German agents, ” Dilly had mused aloud at the beginning, with his usual complete disregard for Bletchley Park’s paranoia about keeping its workers in the dark. “MI-5 makes them send out false information on their own wireless transmitters, as directed by our case officers, using their own hand cipher given to them by the Germans. Their controllers are usually in Lisbon, Madrid, or Paris; they analyze everything before transmitting to Berlin. We just need to crack the one they use to make sure Berlin is swallowing it. . . ”

But “just” hadn’t happened yet, even though Dilly’s entire section had been banging their brains against it for three months so far. This wasn’t like the three-day sprint they’d flung themselves into to break the Matapan battle orders—excruciating but finite. This was a desperate, endless slog of dead ends, going down one promising path until it petered out, then trying another. With no time for recovery or rest.

“If I analyze the hand-cipher traffic from the individual network, we should get some good cribs, ” Dilly muttered, but he’d been analyzing the traffic all this time and nothing consistent came up. With Italian naval Enigma, cribs gave you something to rod for. Here they had nothing. It was those damned four wheels used in the Abwehr Enigma, turning over much more frequently with no predictable pattern.

Have to crack it, have to crack it. Her entire body was tense as wire, and she was so far down the rabbit hole she felt like screaming. If she screamed, she’d probably scream in five-letter clumps. Have to crack it.

Beth wasn’t going anywhere except the Cottage, where she overstayed her shifts and barely came home in time to walk Boots before being hauled into the kitchen. Then she’d stand stirring rice pudding over the heat, watching boxing chains unspool in her head until her mother had her by the elbow, shaking her. “Bethan, you’ve burned it—”

Five minutes later Beth would realize she’d gone sideways in her thoughts all over again, not listening to a word of the lecture. Sometimes she managed to mumble, “I’m sorry, Mother, what were you saying? ”

And Mrs. Finch would walk away quivering with anger, saying, “I think you’re going mad, I really do! ”

I think so too, Beth sometimes thought.

Dilly burst into the Cottage one interminable night shift, waving his glasses. “Lobsters! ”

Beth traded looks with Phyllida at the next desk. “Lobsters? ” When Dilly was in one of his Catherine wheel moods and started firing ideas off like sparks, it was best to patiently ask questions until he started making sense. Peggy was better at it than Beth, who knew she wasn’t making much sense these days herself. Only yesterday she’d noticed the big ruby glinting on Mab’s hand, and said, “How long have you had that? ” Mab had looked at her a little strangely and said, “A month, Beth. Francis gave it to me before he went overseas. After I took him to meet Mum and Lucy. ”

“After there was that tempest in a teapot the high-ups made about the new Agatha Christie book? ” Osla had prompted when Beth looked blank. “Don’t tell me you forgot that, too! ”

Beth had, apparently. And now she was being asked to think about lobsters.

“The moment all four wheels in the machine turn over between the first two letters of the indicator and again in its repeat position—think of that as a crab. ” Dilly waved four fingers like crab legs all moving together.

“It’s not a way into the cipher. ” Beth poured cold coffee into a cup and pushed it into his hand.

“But if there are four-wheel turnovers on both sides of the throw-on indicator key-block, there could be more turnovers on one side of the key-block alone. Think of that as a lobster. . . ” He made lobster claw gestures, spilling coffee, jabbering as Beth listened. Nothing made sense, but she was used to Dilly’s Lewis Carroll logic by now and found her brain diving down the right angle he’d just proposed.

“If we could find your lobster, ” she said slowly, “and a long block of text after it, maybe we’d have better luck breaking key-blocks of indicators on the same setting. . . ” She didn’t really know where she was going with that yet, but the best way to find out was to have a go, as Dilly always said. Beth pulled out the pencil stub holding her knotted-up hair. “Let’s go lobster hunting. ”

It took four days to find a message with the right turnover, but as soon as Beth had it, numbers started spiraling and chaining madly. “Yes, ” she yelped in the middle of the day shift. “Give me a cipher letter pairing in position one, I can chain together some deductions about the other pairings. . . ” Her words tumbled madly. “Don’t you see? ” she finished in a rush, blood fizzing.

Phyllida rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Sort of. ”

Peggy peered closer. “Show me. ”

“Where’s Dilly? ” Beth looked around. “Did he go home? ”

“Yes, he did. ” Peggy’s face was drawn. “And we aren’t bothering him. Show me. . . ”

It had gone October, trees flaming yellow and orange around the lake, by the time Beth could crack one wheel setting. November frosts had hardened the ground before the Cottage girls could theorize how often the German technicians, when they picked four-letter wheel settings for the day’s traffic, fell back on particular words: NEIN, WEIN, NEUN. . . “Four-letter names, too, ” Peggy mused.

Then Beth broke a wheel setting on some Balkan-based traffic after she broke S-A for the two right-hand wheels, and made a grainy-eyed, dawn-hour guess that the Balkan operator had a girlfriend named ROSA. With R and O fixed in position, everything fell into place; generated alphabets of text and cipher could then be swiftly buttoned up, and lists of four-letter German names and words were soon pinned up on every Cottage wall.

“We’re getting there, ” Dilly encouraged, sprinkling tobacco all over Beth’s work. “It’s coming, ladies. ”

In early December, the moment came. Everyone clustered around Beth’s desk, barely breathing as she pulled blocks of German out of the chaos. There it was, a decrypted message—the German-speaking women confirmed it was legible. Beth didn’t ask or care what it said. She put her knuckles to her mouth and bit down savagely, little dying fragments of code spasming across her vision. She was suddenly hungry and didn’t know when she’d last eaten, didn’t know when she’d last been home or what day it was. She didn’t know anything except that she’d done it. They’d all done it. They’d broken the Spy Enigma.

Peggy swayed where she stood at Beth’s shoulder. She put her head in her hands, and suddenly the silence snapped. Phyllida threw herself into the arms of the puzzled tea lady, who had just trundled in with fresh chicory coffee. Several girls laughed as if they were drunk, several cried, all so finely balanced between elation and exhaustion they couldn’t speak a single coherent word.

At last Peggy lifted her head from her hands, looking like she was swimming up through deep water, and said, “I’ll telephone Dilly, then inform Commander Denniston. ” She reached for the message on Beth’s desk, giving Beth’s shoulder a fierce squeeze.

Someone else was looking at the schedule, calling out the girls who were on until midnight. “Beth, it’s your day off tomorrow. Go home before you drop. ”

Beth struggled into her coat and stumbled outside, winter chill striking her in the face. It was full dark, but whether it was six o’clock or midnight, she had no idea. Beth’s ears were roaring as she came out of the stable yard, and it took her a fuddled moment to realize the roar wasn’t in her head—it was coming from the mansion. Men and women were spilling out the front door, shouting, laughing, calling out to each other. “You heard—” “I heard! ” “About bloody time—”

“What? ” Beth called, buffeted by the stream of ecstatic codebreakers. “What happened? ” She caught sight of a familiar red-banded, slant-brimmed hat and caught Mab’s elbow. “What is it? ”

Mab threw her arms around Beth, all her usual cool poise gone. “They’re in, Beth! The Americans are in the war! The Japanese attacked one of their bases—”

“They did? ”

“Don’t tell me you missed that, too. Pearl Harbor? ” Mab took a gulping breath. “The announcement was coming, we all knew it. Everybody’s been cramming into the mansion round the radio. Not an hour ago President Roosevelt came on, and the Yanks are in it! ”

America in the war, and the Spy Enigma broken—after so many months of hoping and waiting for both, they’d come all at once. Beth took a shaky breath and began sobbing. She stood there with tears pouring down her face, utterly spent and utterly, utterly happy.

Mab put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed, a flash of light from the mansion sparking red fire off her ruby ring. “Cry all you want, I won’t tell. Have you got a day off tomorrow, like Os and me? We all need to sleep late. . . ”

By the time Beth had cried herself into hiccupping silence against Mab’s shoulder, she was limp as a dishrag and Osla had found them. “Darlings, isn’t it topping! ” She and Mab steered Beth between them as they headed for home, chattering excitedly. The world was coming back to Beth’s eyes in its usual shapes by the time they came through the Finch door, and as she unbuttoned her coat, she called eagerly, “Did you hear, Dad? Have you got the radio on? ”

“We heard. ” Beth’s father came into the corridor smiling. “Lovely news, lovely—the war will be over in no time! Mabel, your fiancé telephoned. He’s back from America earlier than expected. ”

Mab paled. “My God, did he sail in the middle of—”

“No, he was back day before yesterday. Said he was quite as surprised by Pearl Harbor as we were. He’s at his London digs if you want to ring. ” Beth’s father smiled indulgently as Mab flew for the telephone, but that smile shuttered as he looked back at Beth. “Your mother’s in the kitchen. She’s had a very difficult day—”

Beth kissed her father’s cheek, blew into the kitchen, and flung her arms around her mother’s waist where she stood at the stove. “Isn’t it wonderful news? Let me take over, I know I’ve been gone forever, you wouldn’t believe the workload. ” The exhaustion and frustration of the past months were fading like a dream. The first message had been broken; they’d break more. I can break anything, Beth thought, smiling. Give me a pencil and a crib, and I’ll crack the world.

She reached for an apron, looking around. “Where’s Boots? ” She was hours overdue to take him out.

“Do set the table. ” Her mother kept stirring. “Yes, it’s lovely news. Though when I think of those poor people in Pearl Harbor—”

“Let me take Boots out, then I’ll set the table. ” Beth whistled, but no woolly gray shape trundled crossly into the room.

“I told you, Bethan. ” Her mother looked up from the pot she was stirring, her smile serene. “I told you that dog was out if it ever made a mess in the house. You said you’d always be home to take it out. I told you—”

Beth took a step, suddenly numb. “What did you do? ”

“BOOTS! ”

Beth caught her foot on a stone, stumbling. Bletchley after sundown was a black pit, every chink of light battened down. She had a torch but it was pasted over with regulation paper so only a shadowy beam emerged. A village she’d walked her entire life suddenly became an alien landscape.

“Boots! ”

Her dog had made a puddle in the parlor when Beth was late coming home. And her mother had taken him by the collar, put him outside into the dark street, and shut the door.

“Now, Beth, ” her father had said, placating. “See it from your mother’s side—” But Beth had grabbed the torch and run straight out into the street, forgetting everything except that her dog was blundering through the winter night alone.

She stumbled again, filling her lungs in a hitching sob. “Boots! ”

A chink of light showed down the street as a door opened. The indistinct ripple of Osla’s voice: “Pardon me, have you seen. . . ” Mab had the other torch, looking in the opposite direction. They’d followed Beth without a moment’s hesitation, as Beth’s mother stood with arms folded, shaking her head more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you what would happen, Bethan. You can’t blame me. ”

Yes, I can, Beth thought. But she couldn’t focus on the flickering rage; despair welled up over it. How was she going to find one small dog in the middle of the night? He was gone, the longed-for dog she’d claimed in the most monumental act of will of her life. He was gone and she was never going to find him. Or if she did it would only be his body, half-eaten by foxes or crushed by a car careening through on the way to London. . .

She screamed into the dark, ripping the paper off the torch. “Boots! ”

“Beth! ” Mab’s voice. Beth reversed, stumbled toward the bouncing beam of Mab’s torch, heart suddenly cannoning inside her ribs. Mab’s tall shape formed up in the black, clutching a small, shivering bundle.

“Found him under a bush four houses down, ” Mab said. “He didn’t go far—stop snapping at me, you little bugger, I’m on your side. ”

Beth pulled her dog into her arms and for the second time that day sobbed all over Mab’s shoulder. The schnauzer was damp and smelly and quivering with cold, harrumphing like a cross old man when she hugged him too hard. Beth didn’t know if she’d ever be able to put him down.

“There’d better be a good reason you girls are making a ruckus, ” a disapproving voice sounded. One of the civilian ARP wardens, busybodies all. “Uncovered lights despite blackout regulations. . . ”

Mab switched her torch off and Osla caught up and began pouring verbal honey. They got rid of him and turned for home, steering Beth between them. With Boots safe, a hot spark of something diamond-hard had lodged itself in Beth’s throat, and with every step toward her house, it grew bigger.

“Is your mother going to let you—” Osla began, and then stopped.

Beth came through the door, tugged her mother’s jumper off the coatrack, and rubbed Boots dry right there in the entryway. She could see Mrs. Finch’s shoes on the hooked rug but refused to look up. Osla and Mab crowded in behind, making bright noises about how cold it was outside, but the silence under their exclamations stretched like a sheet of ice. Beth didn’t raise her eyes until Boots was dry and had stopped shivering. Then she straightened, meeting her mother’s gaze expressionlessly.

Mrs. Finch heaved a gentle, put-upon sigh. “It can stay one more night, Bethan. If tomorrow you find it somewhere else to—”

Beth didn’t plan it, didn’t think about it, didn’t even know it was happening until she saw her hand flash up and hit her mother across the face.

She’d never hit anyone before in her life. She’d probably hurt her hand more than she’d hurt its target. But Mrs. Finch fell back, fingertips flying to her own cheek in shock, and Beth fell back a step too in horror. I didn’t mean to, she almost said—but she had meant to. I’m sorry, she almost said—but she wasn’t sorry. The diamond spark of rage in her throat was still burning, larger and larger.

She couldn’t think what to say, so all she said was, “How dare you? ”

Red-faced, Mrs. Finch reached for her Bible. “‘He that smiteth his father or his mother shall surely—’”

Beth didn’t wait for her to finish Exodus 21: 15 or extend the book and tell her to hold it up until her arms burned. “No. ”

“What did you say to me? ”

Out of sheer habit, Beth almost dropped her eyes and fiddled with the end of her plait. But when her fingers reached for the wispy end of the long braid, which she’d spent her whole life hanging on to like a lifeline rather than meet anyone’s eyes, it wasn’t there. She had a smart shoulder-skimming wave now, and she had a dog and a circle of friends and a job breaking German ciphers.

So Beth said very quietly, “I’m not holding the Bible up for the next half hour while you harangue me. And you are not throwing my dog out. ”

“We’ll discuss it tomorrow. ” Beth’s father spoke loud enough to make everyone jump. “We’re all overwrought, this news about the Americans—”

But Mrs. Finch rode over him, eyes filled with tears. “Why are you behaving like this, Bethan? Why? You haven’t been the same since that job. ”

“Why is this about my job? ” Beth had to raise her own voice to be heard. “You threw my dog out! What kind of person would—”

“—you didn’t have to take that job. They don’t need you! ”

“Yes, they do. ” Beth threw her head back. “There isn’t anyone there who can do what I do. ”

“And what is it you do? ” Mrs. Finch’s voice rose. “If it’s so important, tell me. Tell me right now. ”

Beth refused to get sidetracked down that path. “I won’t apologize for taking the job at BP. ” Ever since she’d started working, all she’d done at home was apologize for it. No more.

“Your job is here! You’re my little helper. What am I supposed to do without extra hands at home? ”

“I help you every minute I’m home. I’m happy to help. And you still threw my dog out in the damned street—”

“You care more for a dog and a job than your own mother. ” Mrs. Finch pressed a hand against her temple. “Your own mother, who isn’t well—”

Mab’s voice sounded behind Beth, amused and contemptuous. “Here comes the headache. ”

“Right on schedule, ” Osla agreed.

“Don’t you talk back to me, you two tarts, ” Mrs. Finch snapped. “Encouraging my Bethan to behave like a common—”

“A common what? ” Suddenly Beth’s words were pouring out. “Mother, I work for the war effort. I meet with friends to talk about books. I have the occasional glass of sherry. Why does any of that make me a tart? ”

Mrs. Finch poked her Bible at Beth. “‘Do not profane your daughter by making her a harlot—’”

Beth swatted the book out of her hands to the floor. “I’m not doing anything wrong, and you bloody well know it. So why does it bother you? ”

“I didn’t give you permission to—”

“I am twenty-five years old! ”

“It’s my house, you’ll obey my rules—”

“BP pays me a salary of one hundred and fifty pounds a year, and I give it all to you! I’ve earned the right to—”

Mrs. Finch seized Beth’s arm. For the first time, Beth put her hands to her mother’s shoulders and shoved her back. The skin inside her elbow stung, and she realized how unerringly her mother’s strong fingers always found that spot where the flesh was the most tender. She couldn’t remember the last time her arms hadn’t been bruised blue.

“Please. ” Beth’s father stood wringing his hands. “Can we all have a cup of tea and—”

“Where were you when she put my dog out? ” Beth rounded on him. The spark of rage had grown to a cloud, billowing up inside her throat, choking her. “Why didn’t you stop her? Or why didn’t you get out of your armchair and take him out yourself when I was working late, so he didn’t make a mess in the first place? ”

“Well—” Mr. Finch shifted, uncomfortable. “She said I shouldn’t—”

“It’s your house, too! ” Beth cried. “But you never tell her no. Do it, Dad. Tell her I can keep my dog. Tell her to stop badgering me. Tell her to stop. ”

Mrs. Finch folded her arms tight, a spot of color burning high in each cheek. “I want that dog gone, and that is final. ”

Silence. Boots whined beside Beth’s feet. She could feel Osla and Mab behind her like sentinels. Mr. Finch cleared his throat, opened his mouth. Shut it again.

Mrs. Finch gave a sharp nod, eyes boring into Beth. “What do you have to say now, miss? ”

“If the dog goes, so do I, ” Beth said, drawing a long breath. “And the next time you get a headache you can wring out your own washcloth, you Sunday school bully. ”

This time it was Mrs. Finch’s hand that whipped out. Beth stepped back, and the blow missed. Mr. Finch seized his wife’s arm before she could swing again. “Muriel—Beth—let’s sit down—”

“No. ” Beth turned away and fumbled her coat on, numb and shaking. “I’m going. ”

“So are we. ” Mab brushed past Mrs. Finch, Osla marching straight after her. A moment later Beth heard their footsteps up the creaky stairs, heard the bedroom door open, heard the sound of traveling cases sliding out from under beds. Mrs. Finch turned a mottled red, lips pressing together in a tight line. Beth looked at her another long, dreadful moment, then turned away to fetch her handbag and a lead for Boots. She knew she should go upstairs and gather some things, but she couldn’t make herself retreat even one step further into the house. The dreadful stillness spread and spread.

In no time at all, Mab and Osla clattered back downstairs, carrying not just their own traveling cases but Beth’s, exploding with hastily stuffed slips and blouses. “The road you are walking leads to hell, ” Mrs. Finch said, white with fury.

“At least you won’t be there, ” said Beth.

The three of them walked out of the house where Beth had lived all her life, Boots trotting at their heels, and shut the door behind them.

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