Page 77

A frozen, crystallized moment as they stood there in the cramped kitchen. Then Beth let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You aren’t allowed.”

“It is if you go for the Fleet Air Arm,” Harry said quietly. “The naval air service. Anyone shot down in the Fleet Air Arm goes down at sea—no risk of capture, no risk to BP.”

“Commander Travis wouldn’t—”

“Travis gave permission to Keith Batey in Hut 6, back in June ’Forty-Two. Now me. I was going to tell you after the Tea Party, but—” Harry took a breath. “It’s done, Beth.”

“No.” It came out reflexively, rushing through her throat in something very close to a whimper. She stood clutching the tea towel, suddenly terrified.

“I see you told her.” Sheila stalked into the kitchen, pushing a strand of hair back into its string snood. “You talk to him, Beth. I’ve already worn my voice out. Maybe if he won’t listen to his bloody wife, he’ll listen to his bloody mistress.” Glaring at Harry.

“Be fair,” he said, attempting levity. “Mistress implies a kept woman, and nobody’s keeping Beth anywhere she doesn’t want to be.”

The joke fell flat. Sheila turned around and began slamming cups about, leaving Beth to the attack. She crossed her arms, swallowing her fear. “How long have you been planning this?”

“January.”

When she and Harry had quarreled over which was the worthier fight—the fight with a gun or the fight with a pencil. Neither of them had mentioned that quarrel since. Harry had been tender, pulling her into the cradle of his big body every time they came together, and she’d fallen into him gratefully, glad not to rehash the argument. She’d been grateful, and he’d been planning this all along. Beth gulped in a long breath, and with the air came rage.

“You idiot,” she told Harry. “Your section needs you.”

“Quite honestly, they don’t. This isn’t ’Forty-One, not enough people and everyone scrambling. It’s not even ’Forty-Two, with the terrible shutout. You know how big my section is now? BP’s turned into a well-oiled machine, thousands of cogs all doing their jobs. One cog won’t matter.”

“You aren’t a cog. They can find more chess players and maths students, but they can’t find another Harry Zarb.” Her words scrambled, tumbled, pleaded. “They can’t replace you.”

“Yes, they can.” His voice was gentle, and she hated it. “I’m not special, Beth. You could do my job better than me. So can women like Joan Clarke, who’s one of the best brains in my section. That was the argument that clinched Travis—the ladies here have proved they are perfectly capable of handling the work. So let them do it, and let the men who want to join up go to the front while they can.” Pause. “There’s a big push soon. You know there is.”

The Allied invasion. Everyone knew it was coming.

“You can’t say one more body in that fight won’t make a difference,” Harry continued in that gentle voice. “Every one will count. Any number of qualified women can do my job. But those women can’t join the Fleet Air Arm, which I can. And the Fleet Air Arm needs men.”

“They don’t need you.” But that argument wasn’t working, so Beth switched tack. “What about your son? He needs both of you—”

“Sheila’s parents have agreed to take up the slack.”

“That will be a joy,” Sheila muttered at the sink, banging cups. “You get to slag Krauts over the Atlantic, and I get to listen to my mother tell me I’m doing Christopher’s braces up wrong—”

“If you go down in the middle of the ocean, he will be fatherless. She will be widowed.” Beth waved at Sheila. “Are you that selfish, Harry?”

“No.” A glint entered his voice like a gleam off metal. “What’s selfish is keeping myself bunked up in a safe, cushy job here in Bucks while every other able-bodied man in this country is expected to put his life on the line. They have children and wives, too—it doesn’t exempt them from the danger. I have no right to keep myself safe for my family when they can’t do the same, simply because they don’t have my university degree and my easy out.”

“Oh, don’t be so everlastingly noble,” Beth snarled as Sheila snapped, “Christ, you’re an ass.”

Harry just looked at them both steadily, immovable as a granite pillar in the cramped kitchen. “I’m going,” he said when they were finished. “I love that boy upstairs more than the world, and I love both of you, but I’m going.”

To her own horror, Beth flew at him and began hitting him wherever she could reach. She couldn’t stop. The panic was clawing its way out of her like a trapped bird. “Bastard,” she jerked, realizing she was on the edge of tears, slamming at him with her fists. “You bastard—” Harry stood quietly, taking the blows. Sheila was the one who yanked her back.

“Stop that. People are looking.”

At the door, Beth saw a cluster of newly arrived Mad Hatters hesitating uncertainly—Giles and Mab, the wide-eyed Glassborow twins. Beth turned away to hide her face as Harry awkwardly welcomed everyone inside. She wanted to keep pounding at him till he was bloody. She wrapped her arms around herself, hunching her shoulders, humiliated to have lost control so completely.

“Why were they arguing?” she heard Valerie Glassborow whisper to her twin as they went into the parlor.

“Does someone have to tell you what a ménage à trois is, child?” Giles asked, overhearing. “It’s not going to be me . . .”

Beth seized her coat. “I’m not staying.”

Harry followed her out into the spring twilight. “Beth—”

“You’re a bloody mathematician, not a flier.” She wrenched away before he could touch her arm. “You can do so much more here at BP, and you’re still going to leave out of some—misplaced sense of nobility. And you’re going to die in the middle of the Atlantic—” Beth felt tears rising up her throat at the thought of Harry’s sinking under a glinting sea in a plane riddled by Luftwaffe fire. His complicated, questing brain turned to gray pudding, never to work out U-boat settings or theorize mathematical proofs again. The war had made a waste of so many men; why did it have to waste her beautiful, brilliant Harry?

Do you love me? Harry had asked her in January, and she hadn’t known how to answer. Was this his way of finding out?

“I hate you,” she whispered, aware she sounded like a child, too devastated to care. “Don’t you dare write to me when you leave, you walking-dead fool. Don’t you dare.”

Nine Days Until the Royal Wedding

November 11, 1947

Chapter 59

Inside the Clock

It was only in the darkest, bleakest hour right before dawn that Beth could ever bring herself to contemplate the last name on her list for the position of Bletchley Park traitor.

Giles, a possibility. Peggy, another possibility. The rest of Dilly’s section, suspects every one.

And finally . . . Harry.

Beth squeezed her eyes shut in the blackness of night, pushing down a fit of coughing. Not Harry.

But he had worked Knox’s section from time to time, when they needed extra hands. She could even remember his arguing for greater aid to the Soviets, back in the days when they’d been losing millions to Hitler’s eastern advance.

Harry, a traitor.

It can’t have been Harry, Beth thought, defending him as she had a thousand times. It wasn’t just a cry of He wouldn’t do that to me. Harry had been in the Fleet Air Arm when the traitor wrecked Beth’s life.

But what if he hadn’t gone to the Fleet Air Arm? What if that had only been an excuse, and he’d gone . . . elsewhere? If he’d somehow monitored activity in ISK, or had someone monitoring it for him, when Beth finally cracked that fatal message of Dilly’s abandoned cipher?

Far-fetched . . . but in three and a half years, Harry had never come to Clockwell. When the war ended, she’d pinned her hopes on seeing him come striding through the iron gates. He might not have been able to leave his regiment during the fight, but when the war was over, Harry would have come for her. Even if they’d quarreled before he left, nothing would have kept him away if he’d learned she was here.

They’re going to perform surgery on me, Harry. Beth thought of her silent Go-playing partner, her one friend—taken away for surgery, not returned yet. A lobotomy, like Beth? Who knew? They’ll cut me open, and I don’t know what they’ll do after that. Come get me before . . .

But he’d never come.

So . . . on one extreme, he was dead and had never learned what happened to Beth. On the other extreme, he was the traitor, and he’d put her here, and he didn’t care if she died here.

Beth buried her head in her pillow and wept.

“Is this about my piece on Ascot hats?” Osla cradled the telephone between ear and shoulder, hooking up her stockings. She hadn’t expected her boss from the Tatler to ring her here in York. “I winged it over your desk before I left London.”

“Yes, I saw it—”

“Can I take a puck at turning it into a sort of upper-crust satire? It’ll be an absolute screamer—”

“No, keep it straightforward. But this isn’t about your piece, Miss Kendall.”