Chapter 83

He will get away. The words slid through Beth’s blood like poison. She didn’t trust that MI-5 could find him if he disappeared from London. Who knew what Moscow connections might help him vanish overseas? Perhaps the fear was irrational, but she couldn’t shake the thought: if he got away now, he might get away for good.

“He could take the Chatham main line all the way to Dover. ” Mab’s eyes flew over the train schedule. “Disappear across the channel—”

“There’s a train leaving twenty minutes sooner than that for Brighton, he might grab the first ride out of London—”

“Check them both—”

Mike and Mab charged toward the Brighton line like a couple of long-legged greyhounds. Harry went for the Chatham line, Osla shoving behind in her silver satin and diamonds, Beth bringing up the rear. Victoria station was more of a madhouse than Clockwell during a full moon. Women in wedding-day best poured off trains with flowers and pennants, men passed flasks to toast the royal pair, children shrieked with excitement. The crowd heaved out toward the stairs like a boat wallowing in heavy seas, Beth and her friends seemingly the only ones fighting their way in and not out. Beth couldn’t breathe around the scream locked in her lungs. He won’t get away—he will not get away. . .

Osla halted, diamond roses coming loose from her hair as she craned her neck. She looked like a royal bridesmaid who had been cut out of the wedding party and run mad—mad, mad, mad; the word chimed through Beth’s mind. They fought their way through to the last platform, Harry checking every bench, Beth pushing into the gents’ loo, looking for that flash of red hair. “Hey there—” a startled man protested, dribbling piss over his shoes. Back out, toward the station’s entrance. The most recent train had emptied, passengers squeezing toward the surface; the crush thinned. Beth’s eyes hunted. Nothing.

“Too late. ” The words pushed out through her stone-stiff lips.

“That son of a bitch, ” Osla snarled.

The nearest ticket booth had the radio turned all the way up. Over the squeal of train wheels came the sound of the broadcast from the abbey: “Philip, wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife? ”

“We are not too late, ” Osla said fiercely, a tiny diamond-decked lioness yanking Beth along. Over the pushing throng, Beth saw Mab and Mike coming toward them, no sign of a red-haired man dragging between them. The sob built in Beth’s throat.

“Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, wilt though have this man. . . ”

Then the crowd eddied, and Beth saw him.

A split-second glimpse of a man in an impeccable overcoat and trilby, fingers drumming on the handle of his overnight case as he looked down the track, and then an excited family in Sunday best pushed across the platform and hid him from view.

But he was there.

“Giles, ” Beth whispered, and then she was making for him. “Giles. ” Shoving a man twice her size out of her path, knocking over a display of wedding-day pennants. “Giles. ”

He couldn’t have heard her, but his head jerked up, as though he felt her coming. Beth saw shock ripple across his face. For all his fear at seeing her escape in the paper, fear sufficient to send him running for the nearest train, he’d surely never thought she was so close: Beth Finch, the woman he’d wronged, no longer confined behind walls and straitjackets but mere feet away, aiming at him like a sword thrust. And behind her the others: Osla, Mab, Harry, Mike, catching sight of their enemy and closing in like hounds.

Be afraid, Beth thought, feeling her hair blow across her face from the whirling gust of another train as she advanced on him. Be afraid now, traitor.

Giles dropped his bag and ran.

Beth sprinted after him, and Osla was only half a step behind, silver satin billowing in her wake.

A party of schoolchildren cut off Mike and Harry, slowing them down, but Mab’s tall shape broke forward ahead of the crush. Beth saw the cry that escaped Giles the moment he registered Mab’s unmistakable Valkyrie head. He broke left; Mab made a grab for his elbow and tweaked his gabardine sleeve, but he stumbled and kept moving, sliding through the clumps of passengers disgorging from the newest train. He was making for the stairs leading aboveground.

Mab and Osla and Beth were all running together now, Harry and Mike somewhere behind, but the crowd was too thick and they’d all sprinted themselves breathless getting to the station. Mab’s breath was coming in cigarette rasps—Osla with her shorter stride was falling back—Beth tried to put on a burst of speed but her lungs were still weak from asylum pneumonia—and Giles was pulling ahead with a bound onto the first stairs. If he lost himself in the vast crowds outside—

Beth saw Osla swing toward a man leaning against the station wall, reading a heavy leather-bound book. Osla wrenched it out of his hands and hurled it like she was bowling a ball in a Bletchley Park rounders game.

The book hit Giles square on the shoulder, and he stumbled on the steps. That was all Mab needed, catching up in three leaping strides of her endless legs, seizing him by the elbow, and swinging him back round into the station with a snarl that bared every tooth in her head.

Giles ripped his arm free with a shout, but momentum sent him stumbling headlong toward Beth. Everything seemed to slow in that instant, enough for her to gather her limbs and launch herself into his chest. Beth bore him to the ground with a scream of fury that scraped her throat like a handful of knives and spun every head within fifty yards.

In the sudden stunned hush, Beth heard tinny voices from the ticket-booth radio: the Westminster Abbey choir, voices lifted in joyous clarion song. The royal couple were married.

Underneath her, Beth could feel Giles shuddering. She looked into his face inches under her own, and a wave of disgust and fury lashed her as she realized he was crying. “I’m sorry, ” he whispered.

“I don’t—want—your sorry, ” Beth spat, lungs still fighting for air. “You cut-price—second-rate—asinine little traitor. ”

“I’m not—”

“That’s exactly what you are. ” Osla limped up, panting, one shoe missing, and sat down in a billow of silver satin on Giles’s tangled legs. “Don’t even think about getting up. And by the way”—twisting off her emerald—“the engagement’s off. Never liked green stones, anyway. ”

“Shall I spike him? ” Mab placed one smart-heeled boot on Giles’s forehead, glaring down. He lay without struggling, tears slipping down his cheeks in tired gusts. Whispers were rising from the puzzled onlookers.

“Here now, what’s going on? ” A policeman, red faced, indignant, the most welcome sight on earth. “Brawling on Her Highness’s wedding day, now, I won’t stand for that, not in Victoria station. ”

Mab tried to explain, Harry’s voice sounded, and then people were shoving, voices rising. A railway conductor tried to haul Mab away from where she was still half standing on Giles, and Mike promptly clocked him. The man went down like a sack of turnips. Osla was gesticulating at the policeman, who shouted her down, and Beth was the only one to hear Giles’s terrified whisper.

“What’s going to happen to me? ”

Beth looked down into his eyes. The man who’d stolen years of her life. Betrayer of her friends; betrayer of the future queen who was even now signing her bridal registry; betrayer of the stalwart stammering king who had walked her down the aisle. Betrayer of Churchill, who beamed beside the new prime minister in the abbey—Churchill, who had limped into Bletchley Park and told them the war couldn’t be won without them.

Betrayer of Bletchley Park, all that it was, all that Beth loved.

She pushed herself unsteadily away from Giles, not wanting to touch him. “Whatever happens to you, ” she rasped, “it won’t be enough. ”

“You are all under arrest, ” the policeman trumpeted, and the world went right on sliding into madness.

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