Chapter 31

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, FEBRUARY 1942

The madhouse has a new warden! Commander Travis has taken over from Denniston, at least on the Service side. Good luck to him controlling the inmates. . .

Not you again, ” Commander Travis said ominously.

“Is that any way to greet your favorite naval section translator, sir? ” Osla grinned.

The other men in Travis’s office—suited types, probably London intelligence men—gave censorious frowns, but Travis just sighed. “What is it this time? Sneaking an electric cooker ring into the signals cupboard so you could make toast on the night watch? ”

“That was last week, ” Osla said.

“Sneaking into the new block the minute the walls were half-constructed, riding the wheeled laundry bin down the hall into the gentlemen’s loo? ”

“Two weeks ago. ”

Travis sighed again, looking out the window where, distantly, off-duty codebreakers were ice-skating on the frozen lake. “Then enlighten me. ”

“No pranks this time, sir. ” Though Osla didn’t see what was wrong with a few hijinks. BP needed a little laughter to keep up morale—after the jubilation of December, everyone rejoicing in the joy of the Americans’ entering the war, the New Year hadn’t really started with a bang. The Yanks might have been in the fight but weren’t here yet, and the fall of Singapore last week with more than sixty thousand British, Indian, and Australian soldiers heading into Japanese POW camps had plunged the entire Park into gloom. And something dire was happening in Hut 8 with the German naval codes—Osla had no clue what, but Harry and the rest of his section were going around looking like absolute death. “I’m actually here to make a point, Commander Travis, ” she said, bringing herself back to business.

Travis and the men behind him watched with bemusement, then embarrassment, then alarm as Osla fished discreetly among her clothes, removing a folded square of paper from her skirt waistband, another tucked inside her stocking top, and a third that had been wedged into a T-strap pump. She laid all three on Travis’s desk. “Nobody saw me smuggling these out of Hut 4, sir. ”

His voice went from weary to cold. “What do you mean by sneaking decrypted intelligence out of your workplace? ”

“Just blank scrap paper. ” Osla unfolded each square, demonstrating. She wasn’t dim enough to try to illustrate her point here with real cryptograms. “I am proving to you that it is too blinking easy to get bits of paper out of one’s hut. Ever since I went to work as a translator, I’ve been noticing how simple it would be to smuggle messages out of BP. I thought if I brought it to your attention—”

“There is no one here who would think to misappropriate intelligence, Miss Kendall. Our people are thoroughly vetted. ”

“I’m not saying it’s likely we’ve got a spy at BP, sir. But if the wrong person here was blackmailed or threatened into obtaining information, they could do it rather easily, depending on where they worked—it’s the simplest thing in the world to tuck a slip of paper in your brassiere when everyone’s yawning on night shift. ” The men shifted at the word brassiere, and Osla nearly rolled her eyes. Point out a security leak and they shrugged; mention a woman’s underclothes and everyone got in a wax. “Obviously I only know about naval section, but areas like mine would seem the obvious places to tighten up. Where the information goes through the translators and is legible—”

“I don’t think we need security advice from a silly deb, ” one of the intelligence men behind Travis said rather nastily.

“You clearly need it from someone, ” Osla shot back.

“Miss Kendall, I’m sure you meant well, but the matter has been considered. Stick to doing your job, ” Travis said sternly, “and writing your gossip-page fluff. ”

Osla refused to ask how he knew she wrote Bletchley Bletherings. This was an intelligence facility, after all. “Just because I write gossip-page fluff”—And what on earth is wrong with fluff if it makes people laugh during a war, for God’s sake—“it does not mean I have fluff between the ears. ”

“Your concern about our security is noted. But it was very foolish to smuggle anything out of your hut, even blank paper. Go back to your section, and do not pull a trick like this again. ”

Osla stamped out, fuming. “In hot water? ” Giles greeted her, leaning against one of the stone griffons flanking the mansion’s front doors.

“Yes, and this time I didn’t deserve it. ” What would it take to ever, ever be taken seriously? Osla knew she was the best translator in her section; she maintained a cracking pace of work and still found time to dash off a weekly chin-wag that had the entire Park in stitches; she had brought a legitimate potential security problem to the attention of her superiors—yet she was still just a bit of Mayfair crumpet. “Why aren’t you ever in trouble, Giles? You take so many cigarette breaks, I’m amazed you get anything done at all. ”

“I’m not on break this time. ” Giles exhaled a stream of fragrant smoke. He refused to smoke anything but Gitanes; who knew what he paid for them on the black market. “My hut head told me to take twenty before he knocked my block off. ”

Osla blinked. “What about? ”

“I was at the NAAFI kiosk getting some tea and listening to Harry express the rather mild opinion that the Russkies might be doing a touch better against Operation Barbarossa if we actually shared information with them. Uncle Joe being an ally, after all. ”

“How do you or Harry know we aren’t sharing it? ”

“If the Russians saw half the stuff that passes through my hut, they wouldn’t be getting stomped quite so thoroughly on the eastern front. ” Giles offered Osla a Gitane. “Harry got quite hot under the collar about it. ”

“Maybe they aren’t properly using the information we give. ”

“No, I suspect the PM is keeping his cards close. Doesn’t trust Uncle Joe. ”

“Nothing we can do about that, surely. ”

“That’s what I told Harry, but he was on a bit of a rant, and then my hut head said that was commie talk. Harry said you didn’t have to be a commie to want to help an ally, I said he had a point, and my hut head told me to take twenty or he’d pound me. ” Giles rolled his eyes. “It was Harry’s rant, not mine! ”

“Yes, but Harry’s enormous. No one’s going to threaten to pound him. ” If I were Harry’s size and a man, they’d have taken me seriously in that office. . . Osla took a long drag, still hacked off at that contemptuous silly deb from the intelligence fellow. “I really cannot stand those MI-5 types. ” She was going to absolutely roast them in the next BB.

“It’s mutual, I assure you, ” Giles said airily. “Intelligence chaps hate that the information they rely on comes from the kind of people they used to bully at school. Namely women, weedy fellows who were better at maths than games, and pansies. ”

“Who here’s a pansy? ” Osla asked, intrigued.

“Angus Wilson, for one. You hear things about Turing, too. ”

“Goodness, who knew? ”

“Me, because I’m all-knowing. ”

“You’re not all-knowing, you’re annoying, ” Osla informed him.

“Granted, but you love me anyway. ”

“Oh, do I? ”

“Because I don’t slaver over you, and girls like you are so used to being slavered over, you’ll adore any fellow who just wants to be chums. ”

Osla grinned. “Aren’t you perceptive? ”

“Perceptive enough to know no one else is going to beat Prince Charming. Don’t waste any time nailing him down, that’s my advice. I dithered about too much and lost the girl of my dreams. ”

“Giles, I never. Who is she? Maybe it’s not too late to take a puck at her. ”

“Oh, it’s too late. The ink’s barely dry on Queen Mab’s marriage certificate. ” Giles clapped a melodramatic hand to his heart. “I’m soft as a sponge about her. Daft as a basket. By the time I was ready to make my move, Mr. Sensitive Bloody War Poet swooped in. ”

“You don’t seem too heartbroken, Giles. If I know you, you’ll console yourself with a string of Wrens. ”

Giles snorted, Osla ground out her cigarette, and they parted ways. “I told you Travis would give you a set-down! ” Sally Norton called over when Osla came back into Hut 4.

“I’m already missing Denniston, ” Osla grumped, squeezing in at the crowded table of translators. The close quarters didn’t make it any warmer; they all sat shivering over their stacks of reports, wrapped in scarves and mittens against the hut’s arctic chill. Osla was snuggled inside the huge wool overcoat belonging to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan, Mr. J. P. E. C. Cornwell—who cared if it was like wearing a circus tent; it was warm. And it still smelled like him, some combination of smoke and heather. . . She might not know the man’s name, but just from wearing his coat she knew he had excellent taste in cologne and shoulders like Alps.

She blew on her hands, steeling herself to pick up the half-translated report waiting to be finished: a page of idle chatter between German radio operators who should have kept better discipline on air, but the Y-stations transcribed idle chatter as well as official traffic. . . and these men had been discussing the rumor that Jews were being murdered on the eastern front, lined up on the lips of ditches and shot as the German army advanced.

It’s not verified, Osla told herself. It’s vicious gossip between bored men. But even in a spotty transcript with missing words, she couldn’t miss the lightheartedness, the fact that those radio operators thought it all a great joke. Even if it wasn’t true, they thought it was a perfectly decent idea.

My God, but I wish I was Mab or Beth. Or at least, sometimes Osla did. She wasn’t begging off the job she’d worked so hard to get—it was too important—but neither Mab nor Beth spoke German, so they didn’t have the burden of understanding whatever information came through their hands on duty. Osla dreamed at night of the things she translated, dreams that inevitably got muddled with the explosion at the Café de Paris. Sometimes she could wake herself before she had to watch Snakehips Johnson’s head be blown off, but more often she was bound inside the memory until the bitter end. Only it didn’t end; she just shook and wept in the bloodied rubble, and no one wrapped her in a coat that smelled like smoke and heather, and called her Ozma of Oz.

Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt. . .

“Who’s Ozma of Oz? ” she mused aloud when she met up with Mab and Beth at shift’s end.

“What? ” Mab asked, buttoning her coat.

“Never mind. Is that another letter from Francis I see poking out of your pocket, Mrs. Gray? ” They climbed aboard the transport bus—the one disadvantage of their new billet was that it was eight miles away, no longer a five-minute stroll from the Park. Not that it wasn’t worth a daily bus ride just to avoid the Dread Mrs. Finch. “Are you finally getting a proper honeymoon? ”

“Francis is taking me to the Lake District. ”

“About bally time. Have you had a single night together, these last two months since you tied the knot? ”

“Not the way our schedules clash. It’s just been the odd café dinner or tea at a railway station between shifts. ” Mab’s face didn’t exactly soften at the mention of her husband—Queen Mab wasn’t the sort to go buttery around the edges—but she gave her wedding band a pleased twirl, and Osla felt a jab she couldn’t even pretend wasn’t envy.

As soon as she got home, she rang London. “Hullo, sailor. ”

“Hullo, princess. ”

Philip’s voice came warmly down the line. He was staying with Lord Mountbatten until the lieutenant’s exams—Osla could hear the rustle of paper. “Burning the midnight oil? ”

“Writing a letter, actually. ”

“Sending love notes to some tart? ” Osla teased. “I just know you fell into the arms of a hussy or two whenever your ship nipped into port. ”

“Darling, that’s not something a gentleman can talk about. ” Which meant, of course, that it had happened. Women had to be good, but not men out to sea halfway around the world. Unfair, but there it was.

“As long as those hussies are on the other side of the world, I can leave them be, ” Osla decided. “Who’s the letter for? ”

“Cousin Lilibet, and she’s still in the schoolroom, so don’t get a case of the green-eyed monster. ”

“Princess Elizabeth? That cousin? ”

His shrug was almost audible. “She began writing me when she was thirteen. I send her a line now and then. She’s a nice little thing. ”

Every so often, it struck Osla all over again that her Philip was, in fact, a prince. She knew he was descended from Queen Victoria; she knew he sometimes visited Windsor Castle—and apparently he was posting letters to the future queen of England, whom he was allowed to call Lilibet. Still, it was difficult to reconcile the prince with the irreverent, tousle-haired naval officer who drove too fast and kissed her senseless.

“What’s on your mind, Os? ”

So many things. The frustration of being tossed out of Travis’s office without a fair listen; the worry that someone really might smuggle decrypted reports out of BP. Nightmares of the Café de Paris; the horror of hearing that Jews were being murdered in eastern Europe. . . if only she could say it aloud. Philip told her so much: his mother, his dreams about Cape Matapan, his sadness at being cut off from his sisters in Germany. What could she tell him? Absolutely nothing.

How could you hope to build anything with a man, when so many of the things you had to tell him were lies?

“Nothing, ” she answered brightly. “Just bored to tears out here! ”

“Better bored than in danger. You’ve no idea how glad I am you’re safe in boring old Bucks. ” A pause. “I love you, you know. ”

Osla caught her breath. He’d never said that before, not aloud. She hadn’t, either. “I love you, ” she whispered back.

So let’s make it official, Philip. The words trembled on her tongue. Run off to the registry office like Mab and Francis, make a home in hotel rooms whenever you’re on leave. Why not?

“Because princes don’t marry commoners, ” Mab would have said. Sometimes Osla thought she was right—that surely there wasn’t much future for Philip and herself, even if they had been going together for more than two years. At other times she was inclined to set her jaw and challenge the odds. Philip didn’t have a kingdom to rule; he’d made his home in England like Osla; he fought for England like Osla. There was no reason he couldn’t please himself, marry whom he chose. It wasn’t as if Miss Osla Kendall were a chorus girl dancing on a bar in her garters—she’d been presented to the king and queen; she had funds from her dead father that she’d inherit when she was thirty or when she married, whichever came first. She had a job that mattered, helping save lives, and she was damned good at it. I’m good enough for Philip of Greece, Osla thought defiantly. I’m good enough for anyone.

“Are you sure nothing’s on your mind, princess? ”

“Flimflam and feathers, darling. You know me. ” If there was still a world left by the end of this war, there’d be time to work out what that world held for her and Philip. Today, there was only the now, and she wasn’t going to waste the now obsessing about what lay ahead. “Want to take this dizzy debutante out dancing? ”

“You’re far more than a dizzy deb. ”

“I’m glad someone thinks so. ”

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