Chapter 79

I hear you need a boffin. ”

Beth’s head jerked up. Harry stood leaning against the library door, old jacket thrown over one shoulder. His black hair was shorter—he would no longer be forgetting the barber for weeks at a time because of triple-shift binges breaking U-boat codes. She’d forgot how big he was. “You’re here, ” she said, heart thudding.

His gaze went over her, and she winced at the horror that flashed briefly across his eyes. She was clean scrubbed now—a long soak in Mrs. Knox’s bathtub had washed away the asylum smell—but there wasn’t any hiding her skeletal thinness, her ragged hair and nails. “Harry, ” she said, hearing the rasp in her own voice now, the perpetual hoarseness from years of daily vomiting.

“Mrs. Knox let me in. ” He looked like he had a river of words begging to be released, but he kept his voice careful, quiet. Like a man trying not to spook a wild animal. “Mab and Osla, are they—”

“Mab’s making coffee, Osla was called to London. ” Harry had a fellowship at his old college in Cambridge now. Mab had tracked him down yesterday. Beth felt her hand stealing up to worry at her hair and made it stop.

“My college owed me some days. ” Harry took a step forward. “Beth—”

“How is Sheila? ” Beth blurted out. She wanted to know why he’d never come to Clockwell. She also didn’t know if she could bear to hear the answer. “And Christopher? ”

Harry pulled himself visibly back from some ledge. “Christopher’s—he’s well. My father’s come round a bit about us never darkening his doorstep; he sent Christopher to a specialist to have his ankle operated on. He walks quite a bit better now. Sheila’s over the moon. ”

“That’s good. ” Beth took a deep breath. “Did Mab tell you about Giles? ”

“Yes. ” Harry said something flat and filthy about Giles Talbot. “This cipher message you broke—how is it the Soviets were talking about Giles, in English, via an Enigma machine when they don’t use Enigma for their own traffic? ”

Beth had thought about that. “Probably a captured German army machine. Maybe they were communicating with his handler in England, asking more about its uses and operation. Who knows? ”

Harry pulled up a chair. “How can I help? ”

She pushed the Rose messages across the desk.

He leafed through the sheets of Enigma traffic, a smile touching the corner of his mouth, and Beth’s heart plucked. “This takes me back. ” He inhaled the smell of the decrypt paper. “I’m working theoretical mathematics now, the Poincaré conjecture—stuff I missed when I was at BP. Pure research, no lives at stake. But sometimes I look round my office and I miss the night shifts, the chicory coffee, the morning rush on the U-boat traffic. . . ”

“Working elbow-to-elbow in Knox’s section, everybody climbing over each other when the dispatch riders came in. . . ” Beth could have had another year of that, if she’d worked to the end of the war. Yet another thing Giles had taken from her. She shook the anger off; there was no time for it. “We don’t have much in the way of cribs. . . ” She walked Harry through how she’d broken the first Rose message. He fell into the work without another word; she fell into it too with another steadying inhale.

“I looked for you as soon as I was demobbed. ” He spoke perhaps an hour later, quiet words dropping into the stillness. “Your mother told me you’d died in an institution. She wouldn’t even tell me where you were buried. ”

Beth squeezed her eyes shut. Ah, Mother.

“You never talked about her—I didn’t know enough to disbelieve her. ” A ragged pause. “I loved you, and I left you in that place—”

“Harry, ” Beth broke in desperately. “Let’s stay focused, shall we? I can’t. . . ”

She trailed off. He blew out an uneven breath. “All right. ”

Beth looked at the cipher message before her, not seeing it for a moment. I loved you. Past tense.

Well, three and a half years was a long time.

She went back into the spirals of Rose, with something of an effort. Another hour limped by, working a potential crib that went nowhere. Beth sat back, eyes burning. “Why can’t I do this? ” she heard herself whisper. “I’ve been going at it three days now, and there’s nothing. I can’t see it, the way I used to. ”

“You will. ”

“What if I don’t? ” The words came out more despairing than she’d intended. “What if I can’t do it anymore? ”

The thing that terrified her most—being locked out. That headlong rush of falling down the spiral into Wonderland, the world of letters and patterns that she’d walked in with such starry-eyed enchantment. Now she was banging on Wonderland’s gates until her fists bled, and everything remained locked. “How much of my mind did I leave inside those walls? ” In the asylum, she had felt like the sanest one there. Now she was out, and she felt like a caged lunatic on display at a circus.

Harry’s big hand extended across the desk. Beth hesitated, then slid her bitten-raw fingertips into his palm. “Beth, you didn’t leave any part of your mind in that place. ” His gaze was steady. “You can still do this. ”

Her eyes blurred. He was warm, he was sane, and he believed in her. “Just—don’t treat me like I’m made of glass, Harry. I don’t have time to be broken right now. ” Later, when Giles was caught, she’d let herself shiver and sob, feel all the damage the asylum had inflicted on her. Not now.

He squeezed her hand fiercely. “Then let’s get back to work. ”

ANOTHER HOUR LATER, Harry was reading through boxing chains as Beth tried to follow a Dilly-esque thought about crabs and turnovers—and they both looked up as heels clattered in the corridor. “We’re absolutely dished, ” Osla called, stamping into the library in her Buckingham Palace finery. “I’ve had no luck—Harry! ”

“Hullo, gorgeous. ” Harry rose, picking Osla up and out of her tiny patent-leather sling-backs. “I thought you’d be a duchess by now. ”

“Even worse, darling. I’m engaged to a traitor, hadn’t you heard? ” Osla turned to Beth as Harry set her back into her shoes, and Mab came into the room drying her hands on a tea towel. “I tapped all my godfather’s people in London, discreetly. No luck figuring out where we might turn up an Enigma machine. ”

“Forget the Enigma machine for now. We still need a good break before we’ve got anything to feed into one. ” Beth tugged at her frayed hair. “And we’re not getting there fast enough. ”

“We need more brains on this. ” Harry considered, fingers drumming. “I’ll ring the Prof; he’s in Cambridge on a sabbatical year. And my cousin Maurice, he worked on ciphers in Block F and he’s at the Cré dit Lyonnais in London now—if they could come and put a few days in—”

“We can’t tell anyone about this, ” Beth protested, panic beginning to lick through her veins. “We can’t trust—”

“We can. ” Harry’s voice was quiet but very sure. “Beth, not many people have friends with intelligence work clearance and the absolute ability to keep secrets, but we do. Christ, do we ever. And we have a traitor loose and only a matter of days to catch him. Let’s put out the call to the ones we can trust. ”

“We trusted Giles, ” Osla pointed out.

“We have to trust that he’s the only bad apple in our acquaintance. We were picked. We were vetted. Overall, we have to trust that the process worked. Or else BP would never have thrived. ”

A long pause. “What do we tell them? ” Beth said, gnawing her thumbnail.

“That it’s BP business, ” Mab said. “They’ll drop everything and come running, just like us. They spent an entire war doing that. It’s in their blood. ”

“I’ll make up some more beds, ” said Mrs. Knox, behind Mab. “Though I’ll wager there won’t be much sleeping. Goodness, how exciting. ” Off she went, waving off help, and the others looked at one another.

“Assemble the Mad Hatters. ” Osla headed for the telephone. “Invitations are being issued for one last absolutely topping Tea Party. ”

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