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Beth gazed across the weed-choked lake at Bletchley Park’s mansion. The green copper dome and elaborate brickwork thrust against the gray winter sky, and a few people came in and out—but BP had changed. The long block buildings and old green huts were shuttered for Christmas, the grounds all but empty, but it was more than that. Beth shivered in her smart new tartan coat and scarlet scarf, bending down to rub Boots’s head. She was suddenly glad she hadn’t come alone.

“It’s not usually this empty. The space is rented out now, for training courses and so forth.” Osla’s breath puffed in the cold; in her full-skirted ivory coat edged in silvery mink, complete with mink hood sitting on her dark hair, she looked like a Christmas tree fairy. “If it weren’t two days before Christmas, this place would be bustling.”

“Not with our kind of bustle.” Mab looked at the mansion. “Remember the day we arrived, and you called it Lavatory Gothic?”

Beth still couldn’t say a word. The mansion’s double doors, which she’d pushed open in the dead of a rainy night with Matapan’s decrypted battle plans in her fist . . . the lakeshore where the Mad Hatters had discussed so many books . . . the Cottage, out of sight from here, whitewashed and homely. Mentally she opened the door to see Dilly Knox at his desk. Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes . . .

Tears blurred her eyes. “Let’s go.”

Neither Osla nor Mab argued. They turned, meandering back toward the gates, which were no longer manned by stern guards. A faint sprinkling of snow frosted the ground.

“So we’re all done with our debriefings.” Mab stalked along in forest-green trousers and a long jade-green coat, a fedora like a man’s slanted across her brow. “MI-5 isn’t going to call us in again, surely.”

“Doubtful, darling,” Osla said. “Did either of you find out just why the Russians were discussing Giles via Enigma traffic in the first place? I asked during my interview, but the chap got dreadfully snippy.”

“Peggy told me after her debriefing,” Beth said. “My guess was right. The Reds captured a German Enigma machine during one of those back-and-forths across Soviet territory. They passed a few messages through Giles’s contact in London, trying it out—Giles was hoping they’d adopt it for their own coded traffic. Our Y-stations were monitoring Soviet radio chatter, so it was flagged and Dilly saw it.”

“What do you think happened to Giles?” Mab stared at the lake, and Beth knew she was remembering when she and Osla first clapped eyes on him: wading out in his drawers, grinning and friendly.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to know,” Beth said, indifferent.

“What’s more, I don’t give a toss,” Osla pronounced. “As long as he’s gone.”

They wandered clear of BP, not looking back. “Are we all going to the station?” Osla asked at last. “I’m nipping back to London, Mab’s off to York. Don’t tell me you’re going to the village to see your family, Beth.”

“No.” The Finch family was in an uproar: first Beth’s escape from Clockwell, then her official release, then the news that her father had left Mrs. Finch out of the blue. He’d moved to a tiny flat and was refusing to come home; the house would apparently have to be sold; Mother had taken shrieking to her bed; none of Beth’s siblings wanted her to live with them . . . Beth had already decided the entire matter could be worked out without her. “I’m waiting here. Harry’s driving over from Cambridge.”

Osla cocked her head. “You and Harry . . . is that still on? Don’t you want something more, I don’t know, usual?”

Marriage, Beth supposed she meant. Children, a house, a man’s shoes to line up with hers. Beth shook her head but smiled. “It’s what I want, and it’s very much still on.”

“Well, where are you going to live? You can bunk with me in Knightsbridge as long as you like, you know.”

Bless Osla, Beth thought, but no. Three and a half years in the asylum; what she craved now was space to herself. Space to process what had happened to her, let the bad dreams come, get through it and out the other side. Harry understood that without a word needing to be said—he’d wangled her a clerk’s job at Scopelli’s Music Shop in Cambridge, and a room too: Mr. Scopelli says you can use the old bomb-shelter bedroom in the back, until you get digs of your own. Beth imagined mornings alone with Boots and a cup of tea, listening to Bach partitas; afternoons quietly working the counter; Sunday mornings in chapel, thinking of codes as hymns soared. Harry bringing lunch from his college every day, staying the night when his family could spare him . . . She smiled again. For now, that sounded fine.

“I still think MI-5 owes you compensation,” Mab said tartly. “Locked up unfairly and still managing to bring a traitor to their door? A little cash to rent you a flat is the least they could do.”

“There might be something, eventually.” Beth knew she wasn’t going to work at the music shop forever. If you want the sort of job that uses our skills, come to GCHQ with me, Peggy had said after their final debrief. Even without a war, Britain needs people like us. They’d leap for joy to get you.

Yes, Beth thought. Her work was a drug she had no desire to ever purge from her blood; she wanted to go back to it . . . just not quite yet. She was no longer trapped inside the clock, but she didn’t feel like she’d entirely caught up with time outside it, either.

“To tide you over until those chintzy MI-5 snakes cough up”—Osla took out her cigarette case and extracted a flash of green from among the Gauloises—“here. Pawn it.”

Beth looked at the ring with its emerald the size of a halfpenny. “You’re sure?”

“I thought about throwing it in Giles’s face when we were arrested,” Osla mused. “But really, why should he get it back? And outside novels, who really tosses emerald rings around like seashells, anyway? I’d far rather it went to rent you a flat.”

Or maybe, Beth thought, it could pay for treatment for her Go-playing friend still locked in Clockwell. To see if anything might be done for her. “Thank you, Os.”

“Give me one of those cigarettes?” Mab asked before Osla put away the case. “And a light . . . ooh, what’s that?” Examining Osla’s silver lighter. “JPECC?”

“The Honorable John Percival Edwin Charles Cornwell,” Osla said, lighting two Gauloises.

“How the hell do you walk into jail with a traitor and walk out again with a lord?”

“He’s not a lord, yet. His father’s the seventh Baron Cornwell, that’s all. They have an absolutely topping place in Hampshire. I’m visiting over New Year’s, once I’ve negotiated my new post with my Tatler editor.” Osla passed Mab’s cigarette over. “Christmas in York for you, my queen?”

“I’ll be back in time to bundle Lucy and Eddie up for their first snowball fight. You wouldn’t believe how excited Mike gets about snow. It’s an Australian thing.” Mab turned her wedding ring around her finger. “It’ll be good to be home.”

“Funny thing about homes.” Osla looked thoughtful, taking a deep draw off her cigarette. “I was always thinking I didn’t have one, not really. Houses, hotels, places to stay, but no home. No real family. Not really belonging anywhere.” She looked back at Bletchley Park. “But there’s this place.”

“This place is dead,” Beth pointed out.

“We still belong here. All of us. Look how everyone answered the call, even people we barely knew like Asa and the Prof, Cohen and Harry’s cousin Maurice. All hurrying out to Courns Wood without a question asked. That’s a kind of family.” Osla smiled, a few snowflakes catching in her dark lashes. “Not exactly the sort of family I was always dreaming about, but it still counts.”

They stood in the softly falling snow, putting off the moment of departure. Osla returning to London, Beth thought, me to Cambridge, Mab all the way back to York. Despite Osla’s talk of family, what were the chances they’d ever meet up again without the work of Bletchley Park to draw them together? The three of them had nothing in common besides BP. In the normal course of life, they would never have crossed paths at all.

“Thank you,” Beth blurted. “Both of you. Breaking me out of the asylum, hiding me . . .” It had to be said, they had to be thanked. What if she never got the chance after today?

“I don’t need thanks.” Mab took a last drag on her cigarette. “Duty, honor, oaths—they are not just for soldiers. Not just for men.”

“I want to thank you anyway.” Beth took a deep breath, eyes blurring. “And—and I’m sorry. Coventry. Not warning you . . .”

She couldn’t hold their eyes. She looked away, back toward Bletchley Park.

“Bloody hell, Beth.” Mab dropped her cigarette, grinding it out under one high-heeled boot. “There are things I don’t want to forgive you for, you or Os, and maybe I won’t ever be able to completely. But that doesn’t mean we don’t—” She stopped. Looked up, brows slanted at their most ferocious angle.

The rushed three-way hug was fierce, spiky, awkward. Beth felt the silkiness of Osla’s mink against her cheek, inhaled Mab’s familiar perfume.

“Look—” Mab scowled as they pulled apart. “Trains run all the way to York. Don’t be strangers, you two.”