The Rose Code - Page 52

“Right,” she said as if he’d answered. “The operator must have been told to send out a dummy message, the way they do after they change the wirings. Just gibberish. But he didn’t bother to make something up. He just pressed the letter L for an entire page, and the machine pushed out every other letter but L. So I had the longest, nicest crib anyone could ask for. A whole page of Ls.”

“Christ.” Harry’s voice was ragged, but that strangled heaving of his shoulders had stopped. “What an arse. Probably having a fag late at night, deciding ‘Hell with protocol.’”

“Just hitting L over and over, thinking about his girlfriend,” Beth agreed. “I get wheel settings off girlfriend names, too. There was a Balkan operator who kept setting a four-wheel machine to R-O-S-A. Another operator in the same district was also using R-O-S-A. We kept debating among ourselves if it was the same Rosa.”

“Not very nice of her, keeping them in the dark.”

“A woman whose only romantic options are fascist Balkan wireless operators has bigger problems than not being nice.”

“True.” Harry turned his head on the grass to look at Beth.

Beth looked back at him. “You’ll get your L,” she said. “At some point.”

“If we don’t, we’re sunk.” He said it very quietly. “That traffic is everything. It’s not just that we can’t keep the Americans safe without it. We don’t get the convoys full of supplies without it. We don’t eat without it. We don’t win without it. And I can’t get in. I cannot get in.”

“You’ll get in.”

He raised himself on one elbow, dropped his head to Beth’s, and gave her one fast, ferocious kiss. He tasted like strong tea and utter desperation. He pulled back before she could react, rising and brushing the grass from his sleeves. Beth sat bolt upright, feeling her face heat like a forge. Her mouth burned.

“Don’t worry.” He stood big and expressionless against the sun, hair disheveled, hands sunk in his pockets as though to stop them from reaching toward her. “Won’t do that again. I just—one time, that’s all.”

Beth looked wildly up and down the bank. No one in view. She still found herself whispering as she blurted out, “You are married.”

“I’m not—that is, my wife and I, we aren’t married in the way you think—” He shook his head, cutting himself off. “Never mind. I won’t make excuses. The heart of it is this: I want you, I can’t have you, and for a moment I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Are you just looking for a bit of fun?” Beth flared. Maybe he’d sensed she had a bit of a crush, noticed the involuntary smile that came over her whenever she saw him. Beth, darling! The thought came in Osla’s slangy Mayfair drawl, except Osla was never cruel. You’re too, too utterly pathetic! Beth wanted to crawl into the lake.

“No, I—Christ.” Harry looked at her squarely. “You’re so bloody brilliant you take my breath away. Ever since I watched you crack Italian Enigma, I can barely breathe around you.”

Beth couldn’t think of a thing to say. She was twenty-six years old and she’d never come remotely close to being kissed before. No one thought of shy, backward Beth Finch that way in BP or the village. They would, Mab had said when she last gave Beth’s hair a trim to keep its Veronica Lake wave, if you didn’t try to melt into the background.

I like melting into the background, Beth had replied. The promise of a film or a few kisses wasn’t tempting enough to make it worth the agony of trying to converse with a stranger on a date. She already had everything she needed: a home away from her mother; work she loved more than life; Dilly Knox and wonderful friends and a dog who curled on her feet at night. It hadn’t occurred to Beth to want more.

It certainly hadn’t crossed her mind that someone wanted her.

Her mouth still burned. The kiss had been glorious, and that filled her with fury. A crush had been safe, a little private glow to enjoy. Now that was spoiled. “You shouldn’t tease,” she said tightly, aware she was still blushing, mortified by it. “It’s hateful, teasing someone with something they can’t have.”

“I’m not teasing you. I’m yours if you want me.” Harry sounded deathly tired. “I just don’t know why you would. There’s not much of me left over, Beth. But all of it belongs to you.” He stared across the lake at the huts, and she could see the five-letter blocks start to spiral into him, working through his shoulders until they looked like stone walls. “And all of it would rather die than hurt you.”

He set off for his desk like he was walking toward a gallows.

Chapter 36

Darling girl, Francis had scribbled hastily on Foreign Office stationery,

I can’t get away from the office until this evening. Pop in on your family, then come back to my rooms and make yourself at home. I shall see when I can get out—hopefully not so late I cannot pin you to my exceedingly narrow bed and do a number of ungodly things to you which I have been daydreaming about, most inappropriately, during work hours. —F

Mab repressed a violent urge to curse. She would undoubtedly shock her husband’s grandmotherly landlady, who had passed the letter over and now stood in the shabby-elegant corridor looking sympathetic. “He sent the note round an hour ago, dearie. Asked me to give his lovely wife the key to his room if she wanted to wait for him.”

I don’t want to wait, Mab wanted to shout. I want him here! Already gone May, and she had barely seen her husband at all since the Lake District. They simply hadn’t had any luck when it came to timing. First Francis had been sent to Scotland for nearly five weeks, completely out of reach, then when he came back and they had managed to line up another weekend—Mab hoarding her days off, working twelve days straight so she’d have forty-eight hours’ leave—that had been scuppered by Wren Stevens, who begged, crying, for Mab to take her shift. “Jimmy’s shipping out to Ceylon, it’s my last chance to see him!” What was Mab supposed to say? Well, she could have said no, if she was as much of a hard-boiled egg as some seemed to think, but she didn’t have the heart. Francis wasn’t shipping out somewhere dangerous; they’d have all the time in the world once the war was done—who knew if poor weepy Stevens’s fiancé would come back alive?

So the only time together Mab and Francis had managed in the last few months had been tea in a railway café between London and Bletchley, surrounded by irritable waitresses and squalling children. They could barely hear each other over the din; conversation died utterly after a few feeble fits and starts. All they could do was hold hands over the rickety table, smiling in silent rueful acknowledgment of their situation, Mab unable to ask in the middle of the noisy café, What did you think of my letter?

Her husband had answered that spilling of her soul with a short letter of his own: I think you are brave and beautiful, Mab. And I shan’t ever bring the matter or the man—though he doesn’t deserve the word—up again, unless you wish to discuss it. Mab had grown weak-kneed with relief, reading those words, but she’d still wondered if something would change in the way Francis looked at her. She didn’t think anything had, but how could you tell from twenty-five minutes in a crowded café?

Now they were supposed to have an entire afternoon and night and morning before Mab returned to Bletchley, and Francis was stuck at the office. Mab unloaded every East End curse she knew in a silent scream.

The landlady was still chattering. “. . . pleased as punch to see Mr. Francis marry! Such a fine man, one of my best guests. Do you wish to wait upstairs, dear?”

“I’ll pop out to see my family first.”

Lucy greeted Mab’s arrival in Shoreditch with a shout. “I drew a picture! C’n I show you? Mum’s making tea, she’s too busy to look—”

“Beautiful,” Mab said over the sound of clanking dishes, admiring Lucy’s latest sketch on the back of an old envelope—a horse with a green mane and yellow hooves. Lucy still wanted a pony more than life. “I can’t get you a pony, Luce, but I brought you mounds of paper. You’ll be sketching ponies for months.”

Lucy gave her a careless kiss and began sorting through the scrap paper Mab had hoarded from Bletchley Park. Lucy was six years old now, lively as a monkey, hair exploding in uncontrollable dark curls. Mab frowned, calling to the kitchen. “Mum, Lucy shouldn’t be running around in skivvies.” The flat was too stuffy even on a rainy May day to be chilly, but Mab wanted to see Lucy in something better than a grubby vest and knickers.

“You ran around like that till you were eight.” Mab’s mother came in with the tea mugs, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “And look how you turned out, Miss Fine and Fancy.”

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