Chapter 35

FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, APRIL 1942

Hut 8, what on earth is wrong? You all look like you haven’t slept since the Yanks were “those bloody colonials” rather than allies. BB has no idea what’s going on in there, obviously, but get some sunshine and some gin before you all keel over.

The Mad Hatters had been holding their monthly Tea Party for nearly two years, but it was the first time Beth could remember anyone coming to blows.

“Gone with the Wind is a lousy book, ” Harry snapped.

“How dare you, ” Osla laughed. “It is an absolutely topping book. ”

“It’s too long, ” Giles complained, lounging under the overadorned top hat. “Eight hundred pages. . . ”

April had come in silky and fresh, and they’d taken the meeting to the lawn outside the mansion, the women sitting on their coats, the men leaning on their elbows in the grass. Beth arrived late, coming from a visit to Dilly, and now she wished she hadn’t come—Harry was snappish, and his irritation was spreading.

“It’s rubbish. ” He tossed Gone with the Wind to the center of the circle. “All that guff about the slaves being happy and grateful—does anyone believe that? ”

“Scarlett does because it’s what she’s been taught, ” Mab pointed out. “It’s mostly her point of view; we can’t see things she doesn’t. ”

Harry yanked a slice of bread off the plate. He was thinner, Beth thought, and his big hands had a fine tremor. She was trying to be more observant of her friends since realizing how colossally she’d failed to notice Dilly’s deterioration. “Scarlett doesn’t deserve to be the heroine, ” Harry went on. “She’s a selfish cow. ”

“Agreed, ” Giles yawned. “She’s hard as a fistful of nails. ”

Mab rolled her eyes. “God forbid women in books be any harder than a powder puff—”

“God forbid women in life be harder than a powder puff. ” Osla’s dark curls ruffled in the breeze. “Living in a war zone isn’t all fizz and bobbery. All of us have harder edges than we did a few years ago, and we don’t have Germans actually setting fire to our homes like the Yankees with Tara. Why shouldn’t Scarlett be hard? ”

“She supposedly adores Mammy but never once calls her by name, or even seems to know if she has one, ” Harry began.

“Taking it a bit personally, aren’t you? ” Giles drawled.

“Maybe if your father-in-law asked you to your face if you had Negro blood, you’d take it a bit personally too, ” Harry said shortly.

“It’s a flawed book. ” Beth tried to steer a middle course. “But I like Scarlett. I can’t remember the last time the heroine of a book was good at maths or numbers—”

But Harry and Giles were still going at each other, ignoring the discussion. “. . . bit touchy, aren’t you? ” Giles said. “Learn to laugh, Harry. No need to be thin skinned as well as dark skinned. ”

In an eyeblink, Harry grabbed Giles by the collar and levered him halfway off the grass. Beth froze, seeing his fingers ball into a fist, but Mab grabbed his elbow before the blow could fly. “Not where Commander Travis can see you, ” she said sharply. “He’s cracking down on everything since those Hut 3 decrypts got misplaced. He sacked two Decoding Room women just for trading BP gossip at the station, and you’re going to start brawling within view of his office? ”

Harry’s arm dropped. His face was set and furious.

Giles looked contrite. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean anything by it. ” He proffered his pack of Gitanes. “Peace? ”

“Go fuck yourself, ” Harry said very clearly. He rose in a fluid, angry motion and stalked off down the bank.

“Clearly we need a less controversial book next month, ” Osla said, trying to lighten the mood. “How do we all feel about A Little Princess? ”

Mab spun on Giles and started giving him hell. A few of the others joined in, some defending, some arguing. Beth rose and followed Harry.

He’d gone down to the lake, sitting with his elbows resting on his drawn-up knees. He looked at Beth briefly as she sat beside him, then looked away.

“I wish I’d hit him, ” Harry said.

“I know this isn’t only about what Giles said, ” Beth answered. She wasn’t any good at comforting people, but she understood Harry a bit better than the others did, so she felt obligated to try. Share a desk for forty-eight hours decrypting battle plans, and you get to know someone. “Is it work? Or something at home? ”

“Sixty-four days, ” Harry said.

“What? ”

“Sixty-four fucking days we’ve been locked out of the U-boat traffic. ” Harry looked at her, eyes sunken. “Admiral Dö nitz set the submarine codes to a different key than the surface naval vessels, and”—he snapped his fingers—“we’re out. ”

“You can’t tell me that. . . , ” She couldn’t help flinching.

“You don’t know the name of the key, you don’t know the details. Besides, half of BP has probably guessed. One look at the bloody papers, and anyone could see the number of sunk ships in the last sixty-four days. ” Harry was ripping up grass by savage handfuls. “We’re locked out. And I have no idea how we’ll get back in. ”

“You’ll do it. ” She remembered banging her head on the Spy Enigma all those months. “It took me six months to get my most recent break. ”

“But we haven’t got any cribs. The key’s been changed on us, and we’ve got nothing. We all sit there, day after day, night after night, trying to wedge a foot in and getting nowhere. Sixty-four days of goddamned failing—I’m going mad with it, Beth. It’s driving me bloody mad. I see the traffic coming, those bloody five-letter clusters, night day night day night day. It never stops. Even when I’m asleep it just keeps spooling—”

His voice cracked. Breakdown, Beth thought sickly. She’d missed it happening to Peggy, but there wasn’t any missing it here. Harry was on the edge, and Beth had no idea how to make it better. Let me help, she wanted to say—maybe ISK could lend her out to Hut 8, as 8 had lent Harry to them during the Matapan crisis. But ISK couldn’t spare her, not with Dilly gone and Peggy still not back from her attack of pleurisy. No one else broke the Abwehr traffic as fast as Beth. “Keep it up, ” Dilly had told her this afternoon. “I’ve been informed that the information from our Spy Enigma decrypts has built up such a good picture of Abwehr operations, MI-5 is in control of every German agent operating in Britain. ” They wouldn’t keep up that level of success if Dilly’s section couldn’t turn over the Abwehr traffic at speed.

“I wish I could help, ” Beth told Harry at last. “I’m sorry. ”

“I’d give my liver to have you at my desk, but it wouldn’t make any difference. It’s not more brains we need, it’s information to get us in the door. One good look at a U-boat weather book to see how they’ve changed their methods. . . ” He gulped in a breath, and Beth realized his enormous shoulders were heaving. “We need a bloody miracle, Beth. Because convoys are going to be coming from America, bringing that aid we were so damned happy about getting when they joined the fight in December. As things stand, those ships are sitting ducks. Thousands and thousands of—”

His shoulders shook again. He turned away from her, roughly, and lay back in the grass, folding one elbow over his eyes, chest rising and falling like a bellows. Beth sat there, desperately looking for something to say.

“Did I ever tell you, ” she began at last, “about the funniest Enigma break I ever had? ”

“No. ” His voice was hoarse. “Please tell me. ”

“Italian naval Enigma. . . old news, so it’s nothing you can’t hear. ” Beth lay back in the grass, too, her shoulder firm against Harry’s. She looked up into the endless sky, not at him. “I picked up a message, and I knew right away there was something off. A second later, I had it—there wasn’t a single L in the entire page. All twenty-five other letters of the alphabet, no L. And the machine can’t encrypt any letter as itself, so. . . ”

She waited. He moved his elbow, dropped his arm back into the grass.

“Right, ” she said as if he’d answered. “The operator must have been told to send out a dummy message, the way they do after they change the wirings. Just gibberish. But he didn’t bother to make something up. He just pressed the letter L for an entire page, and the machine pushed out every other letter but L. So I had the longest, nicest crib anyone could ask for. A whole page of Ls. ”

“Christ. ” Harry’s voice was ragged, but that strangled heaving of his shoulders had stopped. “What an arse. Probably having a fag late at night, deciding ‘Hell with protocol. ’”

“Just hitting L over and over, thinking about his girlfriend, ” Beth agreed. “I get wheel settings off girlfriend names, too. There was a Balkan operator who kept setting a four-wheel machine to R-O-S-A. Another operator in the same district was also using R-O-S-A. We kept debating among ourselves if it was the same Rosa. ”

“Not very nice of her, keeping them in the dark. ”

“A woman whose only romantic options are fascist Balkan wireless operators has bigger problems than not being nice. ”

“True. ” Harry turned his head on the grass to look at Beth.

Beth looked back at him. “You’ll get your L, ” she said. “At some point. ”

“If we don’t, we’re sunk. ” He said it very quietly. “That traffic is everything. It’s not just that we can’t keep the Americans safe without it. We don’t get the convoys full of supplies without it. We don’t eat without it. We don’t win without it. And I can’t get in. I cannot get in. ”

“You’ll get in. ”

He raised himself on one elbow, dropped his head to Beth’s, and gave her one fast, ferocious kiss. He tasted like strong tea and utter desperation. He pulled back before she could react, rising and brushing the grass from his sleeves. Beth sat bolt upright, feeling her face heat like a forge. Her mouth burned.

“Don’t worry. ” He stood big and expressionless against the sun, hair disheveled, hands sunk in his pockets as though to stop them from reaching toward her. “Won’t do that again. I just—one time, that’s all. ”

Beth looked wildly up and down the bank. No one in view. She still found herself whispering as she blurted out, “You are married. ”

“I’m not—that is, my wife and I, we aren’t married in the way you think—” He shook his head, cutting himself off. “Never mind. I won’t make excuses. The heart of it is this: I want you, I can’t have you, and for a moment I forgot. I’m sorry. ”

“Are you just looking for a bit of fun? ” Beth flared. Maybe he’d sensed she had a bit of a crush, noticed the involuntary smile that came over her whenever she saw him. Beth, darling! The thought came in Osla’s slangy Mayfair drawl, except Osla was never cruel. You’re too, too utterly pathetic! Beth wanted to crawl into the lake.

“No, I—Christ. ” Harry looked at her squarely. “You’re so bloody brilliant you take my breath away. Ever since I watched you crack Italian Enigma, I can barely breathe around you. ”

Beth couldn’t think of a thing to say. She was twenty-six years old and she’d never come remotely close to being kissed before. No one thought of shy, backward Beth Finch that way in BP or the village. They would, Mab had said when she last gave Beth’s hair a trim to keep its Veronica Lake wave, if you didn’t try to melt into the background.

I like melting into the background, Beth had replied. The promise of a film or a few kisses wasn’t tempting enough to make it worth the agony of trying to converse with a stranger on a date. She already had everything she needed: a home away from her mother; work she loved more than life; Dilly Knox and wonderful friends and a dog who curled on her feet at night. It hadn’t occurred to Beth to want more.

It certainly hadn’t crossed her mind that someone wanted her.

Her mouth still burned. The kiss had been glorious, and that filled her with fury. A crush had been safe, a little private glow to enjoy. Now that was spoiled. “You shouldn’t tease, ” she said tightly, aware she was still blushing, mortified by it. “It’s hateful, teasing someone with something they can’t have. ”

“I’m not teasing you. I’m yours if you want me. ” Harry sounded deathly tired. “I just don’t know why you would. There’s not much of me left over, Beth. But all of it belongs to you. ” He stared across the lake at the huts, and she could see the five-letter blocks start to spiral into him, working through his shoulders until they looked like stone walls. “And all of it would rather die than hurt you. ”

He set off for his desk like he was walking toward a gallows.

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