The news from Dunkirk is appalling—German forces everywhere, the French and English shoved off into the docks in chaos, equipment abandoned. June has never felt more useless in her life. At the vicarage, she tunes in to the wireless with her parents, greedy for news about where the Germans are, hoping always for a morsel of new information about Alec’s squadron. If she thinks too much about the peril Alec is in, the war threatens to swallow her.
With her father in his study more, drafting sermons meant to help the village through the darkness, June is untethered. But she doesn’t need the scroll of maps, except to act as a sort of rosary to ward off her fears—all of Europe exists in her mind, the borders and fronts porous and shifting as she ponders the span of the war. Yet the vicarage feels claustrophobic, and she’s glad to escape to the comforting shimmer of midsummer sun on toadflax and yarrow when her worries become too vast.
She bicycles through the village, visits Alec’s aunt, does sums in her head. For the first time, she regrets the way she accelerated through university; had she taken her time, she would have the possibility of school in the autumn. Although—the war might have stopped that too, the way it’s stopping everything else. She feels selfish, sometimes, fretting about that. After all, Alec’s path through university has been interrupted, his service in Cambridge’s student RAF cadet program transferred to the No. 600 City of London Squadron. They fly sorties as the war in the air fills the skies with menace, and when a cluster of planes passes overhead, June stops what she’s doing—is Alec among them, just out of reach? His squadron changes bases so frequently that she is often a step or more behind, but the dots on the maps in her head help. But then in the night she worries—Alec is doing his part, risking his life every day for King and Country, but what is she doing?
Her mother has taken in a ragged cluster of children evacuated from London, and the press of that duty helps June, although the chaos sometimes leaves her feeling a bit strangled. Her mother says they’re doing good work, important work, providing a place for the children. And June knows the truth of that—these children may well be alive because they’re in Fenbourne, bedded down on cots in June’s old nursery, surrounded by wallpaper with pictures of rabbits and cats in woolly jumpers and ridiculous hats. June has always hated that wallpaper, and she doesn’t wish it on the evacuees. When eight-year-old George Cowan, a banty little Cockney, takes a pen and a bottle of India ink to the animals, she secretly supports his cause. Other than George, though, June finds the children daunting at best, and she’s glad enough to accept the help of the girls from the village, who seem perfectly able to navigate the tumult.
Letters come from Alec, always a combination of his tendency to tell her everything and his need to be relatively circumspect about his squadron. She stores the letters in a small wooden box, keeping them close to try to hold the worry at bay, even as it blurs with her frustration that she’s not doing more.
It’s a damp Sunday in August, the sun too hot through the rain, the sound of birdsong and frogs from the fens almost too much to bear, when her father sends for June. Waiting in the drawing room with her father is an old friend of his from his own university days.
“June,” Mr. Attwell says, kneading his hands anxiously before him, “you remember Sir Reginald, I’m sure?”
“Of course,” June says. She puts out a hand, and one of Sir Reginald’s eyebrows quirks upward as he reaches to shake it.
“Can’t say when I last saw you,” he says. “A dog’s age.”
“Quite,” June says. She stands before the men, wondering whether she should look bold or demure. Her mother would counsel demure, but . . .
“You’ve just done at Oxford?”
“I have,” she says. “Applied mathematics.”
He laughs quietly, his mustache bristling across his upper lip. “Don’t be shy, Miss Attwell. You took a double First, if I’m not much mistaken? And Firsts in languages as well?”
June blinks. Her academic honors at Somerville College are a source of pride for her, perhaps too much pride, if her father’s sermons are any indication, and she is unused to talking about them. They often seem to have no real purpose in the life she sees playing out before her, although sometimes there is a tug from an unseen string, pulling her toward something bigger that she can’t quite name. Hearing her accolades from someone else is new, and doubly so in the case of someone like Sir Reginald Cooper-Byatt, whose career at Whitehall is something June’s father has never described clearly; it is incomprehensible that he knows, or cares, what she did at Oxford.
June nods, trying to find her way through the conversation. Next to Sir Reginald, her father frowns, his hands wringing together so intently that June idly wonders if they might burst into flame.
“I believe we have a mutual friend,” Sir Reginald says. “Floss Corbett.”
“Oh, yes,” June says. “He was one of the Fellows at Balliol. He took me under his wing.” Floss is the Honorable Alastair Corbett, an earl’s youngest son, twelve years June’s senior, and, outside of Alec, her closest friend. One of the lecturing Fellows in the mathematics department, nominally attached to Balliol and not part of the faculty at Somerville, he had read her research and challenged her endlessly. There had been innumerable nights when their insular group of mathematicians had stayed up together until nearly dawn, drinking sherry and building ever more complicated puzzles to challenge one another. By the start of her third year, she had become his confidant, despite their age difference, and he her mentor.
“Corpus Christi man myself,” Sir Reginald says. “Any rate, Corbett speaks quite highly of you. Said you might be just the girl we need.”
June smiles, pleased by the reference Floss has given her, and even more curious as to what Sir Reginald might be asking.
“It’s clerical work mostly,” he continues, “lot of Foreign Office claptrap, but we need girls who will do it right the first time.”
“Anything,” June says, startled and confused. She glances at her father. He nods encouragingly. Clerical does not sound like much, and yet. The words Foreign Office seem magical, quite the opposite of Fenbourne. And she will be helping, doing her part, performing her duty. For a moment she is lost in the idea of living in a flat in London, going to Whitehall or somewhere else where people are actually doing something.
Sir Reginald smiles. “Good girl.” He looks at her father again, more serious now. “You worry too much, Attwell. We’ll take care of her.”
Her father regards her with a watery, benevolent smile. “It will be good for you, I imagine, keep you busy while you wait for your young man to come home.”
Sir Reginald chuckles. “Yes, I expect she’ll be considerably occupied. Lots to do.”
The three of them discuss it a bit more before Sir Reginald leaves, and June’s mind turns to the lists she needs to make, the whole unknown future for which she must plan. She’d been away from home for school, but this will be very different. This time it will stand for something.
The next few weeks pass in a blur of aptitude tests in London—drills to test June’s acumen at Morse and simple codes like the Caesar shift, complicated crosswords run on very tight clocks, stilted conversations in German about the weather or what she might find at the greengrocer. It would all feel so basic, except that everywhere she goes there is an undercurrent of tension. It already seems so long ago that she’d gone downstairs to find Sir Reginald waiting with her father. Not a week later she’d gone up to London, to the Admiralty, where a liveried page had led her through the hushed corridors to Sir Reginald’s office. He had sat behind a wide ocean of mahogany and slid a paper across to her. Sign, he’d said, and then we’ll chat, yes? Floss had been there too, as sleek and ageless as a rook, and stooped from a long-ago fever and the cane it left him dependent on.
They had given her a moment to realize she was looking at the Official Secrets Act, enacted to fight espionage in the years before the Great War, and bolstered not long thereafter: Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, it began. She had paused over that and the dire tone of the rest of it, and Sir Reginald had watched her hesitate and smiled quietly. You’re right to think it through, he’d said, as she’d read it again. Everything you’ll do with us will be strictly confidential. You’ll report to Corbett, but not a word to anyone else—that would be treason and handled accordingly. She had considered the Rubicon she was about to cross, and what it would mean. She had always told Alec everything, and now that would be different. But she had known as well that signing the Act was what would let her do her part for King and Country. And so she had taken a breath, excited and a little scared, and signed her name. Attwell, Floss had asked her then, grinning like a fox, do you remember when I showed you the Vigenère cipher back in your second year?
In October Floss takes her to an old manor house in Bedfordshire, where a cluster of mathematicians and engineers show her how best to sweep the dial of a wireless machine and pick even the tiniest sounds out of the emptiness of silent frequencies. She learns about ionospheres and frequencies, and how to change the tubes in the back of the wireless—wherever she’s going, Floss tells her, she may need to fill more than one role. So she absorbs everything they teach her, and before long her rudimentary skills at the wireless blossom into an aptitude for telegraphy and plain-language intercepts.
As autumn deepens, June goes back to London, where she’s staying with Ainsley Finch-Martin, a friend from Oxford, although it often feels as though she spends more time at the commandeered girls’ school in suburban Mill Hill. Her days are full of Morse code and increasingly convoluted discussions in German. Almost everyone she works with comes from a background in maths because, as Floss explains, the newer codes need more lateral thinking than language thinking. The night after he tells her this, June lies awake, remembering how much time he had spent at Oxford guiding her into taking German and more theoretical mathematics. From this distance she can see the skeleton of what must have been his plan all along—how long had he known there would be another war? How long ago had he decided to insert himself into her life with the aim of bringing her into his corner of this strange secret world?
Even as June begins to understand how important this work will be, she strives to be the best at all the exams and drills. Everyone there is more than capable of sending or receiving a message in Morse code, but the goal is something much more challenging. June is pleased when she cracks twenty words a minute of taking down an incoming message, but that’s still not fast enough—her instructors press her until she can take in whole swaths of information all at once, words and phrases instead of a letter at a time. When she’s comfortable at thirty words a minute, with a zero percent error rating, one of the senior radiomen pauses by her station with a muttered Well done, Attwell.
In Bedfordshire again that winter Floss shows her a series of Japanese codes, and she finds that she can see the patterns there as well. Excited by the flurry of new information, June digs into the language texts she’s given. For weeks afterward, even when she’s back in London, the only words she speaks or reads with her trainers are Japanese, and all she reads are reports of the crisis in Manchuria or intelligence documents about the endless build-up of the Emperor’s forces. She’s never been so tired in her life, but it’s a good, purposeful tired, kanji pictographs parading across the backs of her eyelids when she’s drifting off to sleep.
Early in the new year, Floss shifts her duties again, this time setting her up at a wireless interception station on the outskirts of London. Suddenly everything she’s done seems real—the crackle of the radio means something else now, and the first time she hears a German radio operator’s voice her mouth goes dry with trepidation and excitement. Before long, she can identify a few German telegraph operators; they each have a unique signature of sorts in how they tap out the messages. It makes the war more personal, suddenly, more like a genteel game of chess over the radio waves, but now with fatal consequences when checkmate is called.
Through all her training, letters come from Alec, and with each response June has to parse for herself what she can or cannot say. She can’t share her exhilaration about the work or what she’s learned, and so the letters she sends to him grow ever more anodyne and repetitive—the London weather, reassurances about her safety despite the constant German bombing, a few vague words about how glad she is to be doing her part. She builds the idea of herself as just another girl in an office with a pencil and paper, writing down numbers or taking notes in meetings. The only time she feels honest is when she tells him how much she misses him, and asks him to stay safe. Somewhere out there are Germans taking down RAF messages, and June can only hope they are not as good at their work as she is.