Chapter 80

Knock knock. “Mr. Turing, ” Mab greeted the dark-haired, round-shouldered man she’d seen ramble through BP followed by admiring whispers. “Thank you for coming at such short notice. Take this. . . ” Folding his hand instantly round a cup of coffee. She’d learned something these last few days about dealing with cryptanalysts: point them at the coffee, point them at the problem, then get out of the way. “Work’s over there, in Dilly’s library. ”

The Prof ambled to a seat opposite Beth and Harry, and Beth pushed over the stack of increasingly dog-eared messages. “Let’s see. . . ” He began humming tunelessly, and Mab had to stop herself from snapping Stop that! She wasn’t going to snap at Alan bloody Turing just because she was missing her family and felt like biting someone’s head off. Mab had rung home that morning to say she’d be away another few days; the conversation with Mike had contained a lot of thorny silences and questions she’d had no choice but to evade. Think about that later, she advised herself.

Knock knock. “One of Dilly’s team? ” Mab guessed, assessing the rosy-cheeked woman in the corridor.

“Phyllida Kent. Look, I’m happy to help, but I need some sort of authorization or proof that what you’re doing here is on the up—”

“We’re working on that. Come in, have a go. . . ”

Knock knock. A brisk blond broom handle of a woman in a home-knit jumper came straight in and kissed Mrs. Knox on the cheek. Mab barely knew her except that she’d been another of Dilly’s team. I thought she was the traitor, Beth had said. Thank God she’s not, because she’s as good a codebreaker as me. “Peggy Rock, came as soon as I could. What have you got, and why do I need to get us authorization to investigate it? ”

“We’re calling it Rose. ” Harry pulled out a chair for her at what Mab was already thinking of as Boffin Island—the desk and two tables all pushed together, covered in decrypts, pencils, and rods. Like Puffin Island off the coast of Wales, where Mike had taken Mab on their honeymoon, but covered in weird cryptanalysts instead of weird birds.

“Hullo, you, ” Peggy greeted Beth. “I thought you’d had a breakdown. ”

“Frame-up, ” Beth said succinctly.

“Bastard. ” Peggy surveyed everything, hearing the rest of Harry’s explanation. “All right, let me work up some official cover for all this through my office. Semi-sanctioned operation investigating remaindered code for purposes of research and security, maybe. ” That, Mab thought, ought to satisfy any of the BP volunteers who wanted something more concrete than Beth’s word that they were working for legitimate purposes. “I’ll talk to my superior at GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters, ” Peggy expanded when Beth looked blank. “Where I work now. The name’s changed from the GC & CS days, but it’s the same stuff. Codebreaking when we’re not at war. ”

“Is there any chance you could you get your hands on an Enigma machine through your office? ” Mab broke in. “Surely they can’t all have been destroyed after the war. ”

Peggy reversed for the telephone. “Let me ring a chap. . . ”

It really was the most extraordinary thing, Mab thought. BP men and women came and went from Courns Wood—some of them Mad Hatters she had known like family, some vague acquaintances from night shifts or the canteen, every one vouched for. Peggy got them some mysterious authorizations, worked forty-eight hours round the clock, then departed looking elusive. The Prof came and went with an absent expression, two hours here, four hours there, whenever he could make the journey from Cambridge. A bespectacled fellow of Worcester College dropped in from Oxford and had a pencil in hand before “Asa, absolutely ripping—does everyone know Asa from Hut 6? ” was fully out of Osla’s mouth. Harry’s cousin Maurice came, a cadaverous-looking man in the most expensive suit Mab had ever seen, then a fellow named Cohen with a Glasgow accent. . .

No one said Giles’s name. No one discussed his treachery. No one had to be warned to say nothing when they departed. “I’ve missed this, ” Phyllida sighed when she finally had to leave.

Yes, Mab thought. I’ve missed it, too.

Though the work still had its stresses. “Beth, ” Mab said, noticing her former billet-mate had snapped two pencils in the last half hour, “take five minutes. I’m going to trim your hair. ”

“Why? ” Beth blinked.

“Because you need a spot of tending if you’re going to get your focus back. ” Cryptanalysts, Mab had learned, needed a certain amount of care if they were to perform at their peak. Thinking of Mrs. Knox and her wry indulgence of Dilly’s quirks—and the way she kept supplying her sudden influx of visitors with coffee—Mab shooed Beth into the washroom, borrowed a pair of scissors, and began smartening up that butchered blond hair while Beth slowly blinked her way back into the world around her.

“Why are you bothering? ” Beth asked as Mab flicked a side part into place. “You hate me, even if you did break me out of the asylum. ”

“I don’t entirely hate you anymore, Beth. ” That surprised Mab, and she worked through it as she did her best to clip that Veronica Lake wave back into shape. After what Beth had endured at the asylum, it felt like only a heart of stone could condemn her to unrelenting hatred. “When I look at you, I prickle. And I don’t think I’ll ever understand you. But no woman should walk around looking like she backed into a threshing machine. ” And Beth went back to work, swinging her neatened hair in a pleased sort of way, and in another hour she’d broken out a wheel setting on one of the messages.

“We’re in luck. ” Peggy Rock blew back into the library with a wooden case in her arms. Mab felt her neck tingle. She’d never laid eyes on an Enigma machine before, only the much bulkier Typex. This had the same rows of keys, the same set of wheels on one side, but it was sleeker, more compact. . . more dangerous.

“How? ” Harry’s cousin Maurice breathed.

“Let’s just say not all the machines were destroyed after the war, ” Peggy said with GCHQ caginess. “There’s an underground bunker; never mind where. My superior pulled strings to get me a machine on loan from the bunker. He’s ex-BP, which helps. ”

“Is there any chance that bunker has a bombe machine as well? ” Harry asked as Peggy shut the wooden case into Dilly’s wall safe. “It could cut days off the process. ”

“You think I can magic up a bombe machine as easy as an Enigma? Something twice as big as a wardrobe? ”

“Yes, ” Beth, Osla, and Mab said in unison. Osla added, “I’ll eat my knickers if you haven’t already asked. ”

Peggy gave her closed-lipped smile. A bombe—Mab hated the beasts, but she wasn’t able to do much here at Courns Wood except refill the coffee. If they could get their hands on a machine. . .

“I may have made inquiries with my GCHQ superior. There may be a few surviving bombes in storage, and there may be one on loan to a computational research project based in London. ” Peggy dropped the hypothetical, seeing their impatient looks. “It’s in a repair lab at the moment, and there’s no way to get it out, but we just might be able to get to it. The lab’s closed up the last few days before the royal wedding. I could get us in, but we’d only have up until the wedding to work in privacy. ”

Mab could see Beth hunching into herself at the thought of leaving Dilly’s library. But she still nodded. “It would help. ”

“One more thing, ” Peggy added. “If it’s in a repair lab, there’s no guarantee what shape the machine will be in. ”

“RAF engineers did bombe maintenance during the war, ” the fellow named Cohen volunteered in his Glasgow burr. “I used to talk to them in the BP canteen. Let me see. . . ” Disappearing toward the telephone.

“We need more than a technician, ” Harry argued. “We’ll need someone to operate the ruddy thing. ”

Mab felt a grin hook itself nearly behind her ears. “I can. ”

Some muffled wrangling from the corridor, and eventually Cohen swung back in. “Alfred’s in Inverness now and David’s on a jaunt to Penzance, but there’s another laddie who can join us tomorrow night. ”

“Have him meet us in London, ” said Peggy. By morning they were all piling into assorted cars and waving goodbye to Mrs. Knox, Beth and the Enigma machine hidden under a blanket in the back of Mab’s Bentley. Their makeshift, miniature Bletchley Park was on the move.

KNOCK KNOCK.

Now the new arrivals had to come to a back door at the end of a complex of ugly warehouses clustered on the outskirts of London. The repair lab was echoingly empty, comprehensively locked; someone anonymous came to the rear entrance and spoke briefly with Peggy, and then they were setting up shop all over again in a big maintenance bay littered with tools and old tea mugs. “Let me guess, ” Mab asked Peggy as Beth and the others began dragging tables together, unpacking the Rose files. “We dinnae need to know what strings you pulled to make this happen. ”

Peggy looked bland, unpacking the Enigma machine. “We never leave the machines unattended, and no one comes in who isn’t vouched for. ”

Knock knock, came the rapping knuckles again, and Peggy let in Osla, staggering under a load of sandwiches, biscuits, and cigarettes. “Sustenance, darlings. ” She laid out food, placed a sandwich actually in Beth’s hand because otherwise she wouldn’t eat, and came to where Mab was working on their prize: the bombe on loan from its mysterious bunker, towering in one corner like a pagan altar. “How’s it coming? ”

“The drums are a mess. ” Mab shook out her fingers, sore and pinched from hours of teasing coiled wires apart with her eyebrow tweezers. “Where’s that bloody technician? ”

“Delayed, apparently. Let me see about getting some more hands to help with the wiring, in the meantime. . . ”

Knock knock. “Val Glassborow, ” Mab said gratefully as Peggy ushered in a familiar face a few hours later.

“Val Middleton now. You’re lucky I was in town for the royal wedding. ” She brushed back a lot of glossy brown hair, sliding past Beth and the boffins hunched over their cipher messages. “Peggy gave me the gist; where do you want me? ”

“Grab a drum, darling, ” Osla called from where she sat with a drum in her own lap. The Bletchley Park bubble had snapped into place around the drafty maintenance bay, and there was a ticking clock hanging over their heads as urgent as any they had slaved under at the Park.

Knock knock. Long after sundown, Peggy ushered in the last arrival. “. . . sorry I’m late, ” a man’s voice floated from the corridor. “Had to find a mate to take the kids. ” The Australian drawl penetrated Mab’s ears belatedly, she was concentrating so hard on the drum before her. She frowned, straightening, just as a man’s voice said, “Mab? ”

In the doorway, kit bag in hand, was her husband.

“HUT 6, ” MAB said. “Then Hut 11 and 11A, then the mansion. ”

“I worked Eastcote, Wavendon, the outstations, ” Mike said. “After I was shot down, they heard I was an engineer, slapped the Official Secrets Act in front of me, and set me to fixing bombes. ” He shook his head. “And you were one of the operators? I thought they were all Wrens. ”

“I was a fill-in because I was tall. Then I became a regular. ”

The two of them were working alone by the bombe. Osla had taken Valerie, the tweezers, and a heap of drums to the other side of the room, tactfully giving Mab and her husband some privacy. Mab sat tweezing wires apart and Mike was up to his elbows in the cabinet’s back wiring, stripped down to shirtsleeves and braces. Mab could hardly look her husband in the eye.

Mike had worked for Bletchley Park? Her own husband?

“How did we not run into each other? ” He smiled, doing a delicate bit of work with narrow pliers. “I was called to BP now and then. It’s how I got to know Cohen, one of those three-in-the-morning canteen friendships. If I’d seen you, I’d have noticed. ”

“When did you come, ’Forty-Four? Thousands at BP by then. We didn’t cross paths, that’s all. ” It was perfectly possible—likely, even.

“So this is what had you flying south in such a hurry. ” Mike swiped his forehead on his elbow. “A lot just straightened out in my mind. ”

“I don’t like the lying, ” Mab said, just to be clear. “But I don’t have a choice. ”

He nodded. “It’s what you do. ”

“When you’re us, ” she agreed.

“Did he know? ” Mike looked at her. “Francis. ”

“Yes. ” She focused on the drum, prising two crumpled wires apart. “He wasn’t BP, but he was in the same world. ”

“Did that make it easier? ”

“We—didn’t really have enough time to figure it out. ”

“While we’re telling truth. . . ” Mike wore that guarded expression he had whenever the name Francis Gray came up. “When I look at you, I think how lucky I am. When you look at me, you think how I’m not him. ”

Mab looked down at the drum in her lap.

Her husband’s voice was steady. “Am I wrong? ”

“Yes. ” She tweezed two wires apart. “I don’t think of him when I look at you—because I’ve tried to block him out altogether. It hurts less. ”

“I think you blocked us both in the same go. ”

Francis: stocky and endlessly calm; holding her against him; rarely laughing. Mike: tall and exuberant; holding their babies; rarely without a grin. “Maybe I did, ” Mab said, eyes filling until she could barely see the drum’s wires.

“I liked his poetry. ” Mike reached for a spanner. “Read his book when I was in the RAF. Maybe we didn’t have the same war, and he wasn’t a flier, but I could tell he got it. War. ”

“Yes, he did. ” Her tears spilled over. Not a flood, just a trickle of pure pain for the man with the little girl in his arms, standing in the wreckage of Coventry with both their lives stretching before them.

“I don’t mind hearing about him. . . ” Mike’s voice upturned at the end, the rest hanging unspoken: I just want you to talk to me.

“I’ll tell you more about him someday. ” Mab wiped her eyes. “Right now, I’d rather hear about you. What was the work like, fixing bombes? ”

Her husband took the diversion, turned it over with his laconic Australian smile. “Forty-eight hours sometimes trying to run down a fault, some Wren at your shoulder going into spasms. How was your work? ”

“Tedious. Exciting. Stressful. Dull. A bit of everything. ” Mab managed a smile. “Shall I tell you about the night all the Wrens and I stripped down and worked in our underwear? ”

“Crikey, yes. . . ”

Hours later, Mab and her husband rose, looked around the maintenance bay, and realized everyone but Beth had left.

It was midnight, the day before the royal wedding, and the bombe machine stood ready.

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