Like the rest of London, the greenery of St. James’s Park has not been spared by the war. Even in the height of spring some trees remain bare, but sparrows jostle in the branches, feathers puffed and plush against the chill of morning. It’s a sunny day in London, rare this year, and June waits for Alec on a bench not far from Whitehall. As far as he knows, that is where she still works. But keeping Alec away from Ainsley’s flat in Bloomsbury is necessary, now that June’s belongings are packed and ready to go, and Whitehall seems like the second most logical place for them to meet.
At least the worst of it has passed, although it’s not as though the Germans have stopped their raids altogether. The sky still darkens with Heinkels and Dormiers dropping their bombs across the city, and neighborhoods are still crumbling away into chasms. Every day is rife with the constant tension of waiting for the next raid and the determined way all of London just goes about its business. There is an excitement in being part of it, as grueling and awful as it can be. Still, though, June will be glad enough to leave London and move on to her new assignment.
She checks her watch. Ten o’clock—he should be here soon, if his train was on time. June shifts on the bench, smooths her skirt, watches the sparrows. It’s been an age since she’s seen Alec, and the realization that they are going to be reunited, even for a day, is exhilarating. If only her enthusiasm could be pure, not tinged by her growing secrets. He will come to her here with his heart on his sleeve and have no idea that she is leaving London tomorrow, bound for Scarborough to break coded German messages for the wireless service outpost there.
And of course she hasn’t said a word—can’t say a word—to him about any of it. Her first day with Sir Reginald there had been a moment—a few seconds, perhaps, if that—when she had considered not signing the Official Secrets Act. When the idea of the secrets she might be asked to keep and the logistics of never telling anyone—and how could she not tell Alec, as close as they have always been?—had seemed too large.
It had seemed so weighted, but the whole of it had been blanketed in the idea of doing something useful. Something noble. And in the end, of course, she had taken the pen and signed her name. Until now, it has been a wondrous swirl of codes and ciphers, months of fitting text to idea and passing the notes to the other girls in whatever office she found herself. It was real work, just barely close enough to the clerical work she’d told her parents and Alec she was doing. Nothing to tell, no harm done. But all that changes tomorrow when she boards the train north.
She amends that when she sees Alec come around the corner. All of it changes now, when she says nothing.
“Alec!” Putting her misgivings about the secrets aside, she meets Alec on the path and puts her arms around him, warming into his hug.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he says. He steps back, regards her with an almost giddy smile, and squeezes her hand.
“It’s been far too long,” June says, basking in his happiness. “I’m so pleased you could get the day.”
“Feels a bit dodgy to be away from base, honestly, even with everything in order.” Alec laces his fingers through hers. “I wish it were longer, but a few hours with you is a damn sight better than none at all.”
“I’ve been dying to see you, too,” June says. Alec nods, still smiling down at her, and June goes on, faltering for a moment when he takes back his hand and slips it into his pocket distractedly. “I thought we might go over to the National Gallery. All the regular collections have been evacuated, but there are smaller exhibitions, and most days there’s a bit of a concert over lunch.”
“That sounds like just the thing.” He regards the sky, then turns that ridiculous happy grin to her again. “Lovely day for a stroll, too.”
They fall into step, chatting and catching up, and before long they emerge from the tree-lined path along the Mall and cross into Trafalgar Square. Alec pauses and regards their surroundings. “Bloody hell.”
June nods. “There have been several raids around here.” She gestures at the roadway just south of the square. “There was a dreadful direct hit on the tube station there last October.”
“I heard about that. Terrible,” Alec says, looking up at the buildings around the square. “Do they just keep fixing the windows again and again?”
“Sometimes,” June says. “But now and again people will just decide to cover over them and make do.”
“I always thought you’d be safe in London.” Alec shakes his head.
“I’ve been all right.” She smiles, hoping to reassure him, but inside she feels off-kilter. He might feel better if he knew today would be her last day in London, but she can’t tell him, and he gets neither the comfort nor the truth as a result.
He drifts over to one of the bronze lions and pats it. “Knew a chap at school who used to nick a bottle of gin and climb these during holidays.” He smiles nostalgically. “He’d come from India as well, so I always suspected he pretended they were tigers.”
“Perhaps they gave him an anchor.” June smiles a little, wondering if Alec had ever pretended that himself.
Alec’s eyes rove the square as if he’s looking for something, and then he turns his gaze back to June. “What helped me,” he says, “was knowing that eventually I would come home from school and you would be there.”
She reaches for his hand again. “It was like that for me at St. Swithun’s, as well.”
“The thing is . . .” He pauses, and June can see that he’s moving toward something. “The thing is, June, I love you, and I have for such a long time. Most of my life. And I can’t imagine a life without you in it.” He takes a deep breath. “There is nothing in the world that would make me happier than to have you with me forever.” He slides a hand into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket, and after a moment it emerges with a flash of yellow in the sun.
June’s heart speeds up—she had known this moment was coming for years, and yet it feels completely out of the blue. It’s as though time has split into two streams around them—one sped up and blurry, the afternoon full of the chaos of people and traffic in Trafalgar Square, and the other a pocket of perfect stillness in which she stands with Alec by the lion.
“I know you’ll be here when I come back after the war, but I want to know you’ll be there always. I want to share my life with you.” Alec goes to one knee, and June puts a hand to her mouth as he holds up a ring in the sunlight, a yellow diamond gleaming against gold. His voice rough with emotion, Alec says, “June, will you do me the great honor of being my wife?”
Her pulse thunders. “Yes, Alec. Yes.”
Alec’s whole face lights up, and he slips the ring onto her finger. June stares down at the dazzling warm glow of the gold and the blaze of the diamond. She can’t, won’t, think about Scarborough or the codes or anything but Alec. Everything else will come later, and she will have to work it out, but for now it is just the two of them in the center of the universe, the way it’s always been.
He gets to his feet and embraces her again, trembling slightly, and June smiles against the rough wool of his uniform jacket. Alec bends to kiss her, but the day is split by the shriek of an air raid siren. Alec looks up as if he’s checking for planes.
“Bugger,” Alec mutters. He glances around the square and takes her hand again. Together they hurry to the shelter at the square’s north end, along with a cluster of other men and women. It’s crowded and dark, with a dank, bricky smell, and June wishes they’d gone to the Underground station, although when she thinks about the calamity there last autumn, she’s not so sure.
Alec shifts so he’s got his back to a wall and pulls her closer to him. “So much for lunchtime concerts,” he whispers, and she chuckles. Some part of her listens for the all-clear alert to sound, but she has been in so many shelters, for so many air raids, that this is just a matter of routine now, but for the usual small throb of adrenaline.
“Don’t go having air raids with any other lads,” Alec says, his voice soft against her ear. He smiles and tightens his arms around her.
“I shan’t,” she whispers back. She leans close, relishing the clean, familiar smell of him.
In the back of the shelter, someone starts to sing an old army marching song, and here and there people join in. After a bit, Alec makes a cushion from his greatcoat, and they settle in close together against the wall. It’s not long before he’s talking airplanes with a pair of grocer’s assistants too young to enlist, and June smiles at him. She has always loved watching him enjoy the people around him, and even in this environment he is still himself, the gregarious, handsome boy she’s always loved. Someone else puts on a Noël Coward record, and one of the grocer’s boys opens a packet of sandwiches and offers them to his neighbors.
June strokes the curve of the ring, the glad golden weight of it, like the weight of Alec’s love, the solid fact of his attention. Of course she wants to marry him—she loves him with all her heart and cannot begin to imagine a life without him in it. She has known from the start that he might not survive the next crash, or the one after that. It was an unbearable idea, the loss of him, and of all she loves about him—the idea that she might never again see the knob of his wrist, or hear the sentimental, off-key songs he sings to himself when he thinks she isn’t listening. All the wonders she never would have noticed without him, down to the spark of color in a horse’s mane or the arc of constellations in the night. But all that stacks up awkwardly against the fact of her nascent career and the passion she feels for that, too. Later, she will have to make sure he understands how she feels about her work, about the need she has to be useful. And she will have to find a way to balance the reality of her life with Alec, which the war has left feeling sometimes so ephemeral, with the reality she inhabits with the codes.
By the time the all clear sounds much later, it seems as if Alec has made friends with half of London. The shelter’s occupants file back out into Trafalgar Square, everyone’s eyes scanning the horizon for errant bombers. One of the grocer’s boys points off to the northeast, where thin columns of smoke rise into the sky. Alec’s face tilts up, his eyes narrowing, and June can see in Alec’s face the desire to be in his plane, fighting the war. She wishes she could tell him how much she understands.
“I expect we’re clear until tomorrow,” June says.
Alec nods. With a wry smile he says, “An air raid wasn’t part of my plan.” He takes her hand and grins, rubbing the ring with his thumb. “It was my mother’s, you know. And now it’s yours.” He kisses her fingertips, his eyes gleaming. “I love you, June.”
She studies the way her hand fits into his. It’s reassuring, as if his touch will help her find her way through the confusion. “I love you, too.”
He beams at her and glances at his watch. “Oh, hell. I’m meant to be on a train not too long from now. Bloody Germans stole our time.”
“Well,” she says, “perhaps we ought to get ourselves to Paddington, have a cup of tea while we wait?”
He gives her a rakish grin. “Be like being in a film, rather, when you see me off. Dashing flight officer and his beautiful fiancée, and all that?”
June laughs and puts her arm through the elbow he offers, and together they set off for Paddington Station, the ring on her left hand shimmering beneath the afternoon sun.
A fortnight after her arrival, June takes advantage of a rare morning away from the Y station and leaves her tiny bedsit to walk the sea-scrubbed town. Years of war, but Scarborough holds fast. The shops struggle along despite rationing, and Scarborough Castle looms protectively over the town. The scoop of harbor, the fishing boats dotted across the dark water, the capricious speckling of foam on the waves when the wind picks up . . . They speak to her of a world so much bigger than the Fenlands, bigger than London, even, that she can scarcely imagine it. A gull struggles against a slap of wind, and June turns her face to the water. It doesn’t feel like summer, not with weather like this, although on the moor there are lambs and flowering gorse.
The red and blue shutters of the houses that ring the water remind her of Alec too, although she’s not sure why. It feels like yesterday that she saw him in London, and also as if it has been months ago. Time in Scarborough is elastic—there is the time of now, of the codes coming through and the messages going out, of the urgent clatter of the wireless and the scratch of pencils. And there is the time of everything else, mobile and confusing.
She wishes every day that she could tell Alec the truth, but every day there is more truth to tell, more truth not told. Even among her colleagues, speaking of the Official Secrets Act, acknowledging that there are clandestine works that they are part of, is taboo. Telling Alec is completely out of the question. She believes he would wholly understand—they are both, after all, doing their part for King and Country. But now the thing that was not exactly a lie is explicitly not true: Alec knew she was in London, and now he thinks she still is.
He is such a good man, and it’s so easy to drift into missing him, remembering the lightness of his fingers against her ribs, the thistling of hair cut shorter than she likes up the back of his skull. Too easy. She shifts so she’s closer to the seawall, not quite so much in the wind. The idea of his proposal had seemed so inevitable for so long, and yet, when he had pulled out the ring, it had been a surprise, a weird click in her chest as things fell into place.
And of course she had said yes. That had been inevitable, too. But now, alone in the lee of the castle, she wonders. Increasingly there is the question of whether they want the same future, and that is a conversation they have not ever had. He had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes, and after the air raid, when they’d gone to Paddington to wait for his train and have a cup of tea together, he had talked about a life after the war, and his plan to stay in the RAF. He had said any number of things about the future—their future—and she had told him how grand it sounded. But she had also suggested that they would talk after the war and find their way together, and who knows how he had heard that. She has never been sold on the idea of a house full of children and herself at the helm—shouldn’t Alec know that already?—just as she knows how much he wants exactly that. And now she has a career, a purpose and goals that have nothing to do with motherhood, goals that loom broader even than the life she wants with Alec.
The worst of it is not knowing exactly the moment at which those ideas of the future had changed—at which point she had changed. That day with Sir Reginald, her future with the FO had seemed exciting but temporary. But now, with the war happening all around her, people’s lives held in the balance of the work she’s doing, it feels quite different. Still exciting, but no longer transient. This clandestine life has become something she can’t imagine giving up.
As the summer deepens, June and her colleagues at Sandybed Lane work clustered around the wireless radios, headsets clamped against their ears, civilians like June side by side with women who’ve enlisted in the Women’s Royal Navy Service. Many of these Wrens, competent and businesslike in their tidy uniforms, serve as wireless techs, charged with fixing the machines when they break. The station can’t afford the pauses that come when one of the wireless sets blows a fuse or loses its bearings; every pause is a leg up for the Germans.
But even in summer, the rain can come in fierce off the North Sea, strafing across the rooftops and then off across the moors. In that weather, the signals break up, caught in the fists of wind and water, and June and the other girls must wrestle the messages out of what’s left. One team writes down the codes as they come through the headsets, and the other group translates them onto separate pages, comparing their work against one another’s to make sure they’ve got it right. All of it gets packed into waterproof pouches for the team of Wrens who ride the courier routes from the wireless stations—Y stations for short—to HQ. Now and again, if information seems especially precious, it goes to the station chief for transmission directly to Station X.
June spends many of her shifts at the rickety table in the wireless room’s alcove, where she translates the listeners’ messages into English. One night that summer, the whole place seems to glow with the tension of how close they are to a solution. To an answer. June raises her head, looks around the room. Engrossed, all of them, caught up in the tangle of what often seems like nonsense, until one learns how to see through it. The codes run in her blood, fill her dreams. She has always found patterns nobody else could understand, but now her gift has purpose. She has meaning, or her mind does.
And then something clicks—a phrase repeated once too often by a radio operator, a sequence of taps blossoming into something larger—and she falls into the moment that she knows is waiting around the corner of every message, when the layers of code fall together. The sequences of numbers and letters take on a new shape, as clear as day. June pulls back, looks at her notes, and hands the papers across the table to Wendy Fairchild.
“I say,” June says, “take a look?”
Wendy nods, running her fingers across June’s decoding while she scans the original messages. June takes advantage of the pause to stand and stretch.
“My God,” Wendy says.
“It’s the real thing, then,” June says. She knew it, but hearing the urgency in Wendy’s voice changes what it means.
Wendy turns and flags down one of the wireless men from the Royal Navy as he comes back from a break with a cup of tea. “Fetch the chief, will you?” The sailor puts down his cup and runs for the office at the far end of their compound.
Minutes later the station chief bursts into the room. “Attwell?”
June hands him her notes. “It’s the Lohengrin, sir. They’ve shown their hand.”
He looks up. “You’ve identified their coordinates?”
June nods. “Yes.”
The chief says, “Bloody good show, Attwell,” and rushes back out.
Wendy lights a cigarette. “That’ll teach them to talk to Berlin.”
June chuckles. “I should think we would want them to keep doing it, if we hope to keep stopping them.”
Wendy laughs, tilts her head up toward the tiny slit of window, and blows a stream of smoke. “Rather.”
June says, “So now we wait?” She’s fidgety with the need to keep going, to scratch the messages onto paper and turn them into something that makes sense, but at the same time it feels correct to acknowledge the moments like this, when everything comes together just so.
Her friend shrugs. “That’s our war.”
And so it is. The Lohengrin is a new German battleship, sleek and dangerous, for all intents and purposes invisible in the North Sea as she slips through the waves and sinks British ships. And the war is going badly enough without this—they have lost Crete, and Rommel is waltzing across North Africa, seemingly impossible to stop. So many nights are spent watching the Wrens note down the double-bar sign of a U-boat, or the dispiriting moment when German Control radios back to a ship with a confirmation code—every message the Germans receive that the Y station hasn’t captured . . . Sinking the Lohengrin, or even just stopping her, would be an incredible boost.
It’s two days later, June back at her desk with her pencils and thin sheets of paper, when the message comes from London—the Lohengrin is scuttled, and the prime minister offers his personal thanks to the men and women of the Y station on Sandybed Lane.
“Jesus,” Wendy says, when the station chief has finished relaying the message. She smiles at June. “What miracle will you manage next?”
June ducks her head, embarrassed. The Lohengrin is hardly the first German ship they’ve seen to; Y stations all over Britain send urgent messages to HQ every day. But this one does feel special, and the message from Churchill looms large. It seems so unlikely, and yet somehow perfect, that a collection of scribbled notes could lead to a triumph like this (and, a voice in her hindbrain reminds her, not quite sure how to feel, the loss of thousands of enemy sailors). Then, beyond the word from Churchill, the chief has a message solely for her as well. June follows him back to his office, her heart thumping—it can’t be Alec, please don’t let it be Alec.
“They’re transferring you,” the chief says bluntly, his shoulders sloping unhappily.
“Oh,” June says. “I see.” She hasn’t been here very long at all, despite the elasticity, and the quick friendship with Wendy, but it has felt right for her since the beginning. At the same time, the moves so far have meant learning more new skills and developing her talents. They could be sending her back to London, for all she knows.
“Whitehall will send a car for you,” he says. “I’m afraid I can’t say more.” He shrugs, and June wonders if he disapproves of the use of petrol and the car it will take to get her wherever it is they’re sending her.
“I imagine it’s too many changes by rail,” she says. Even Scarborough to London is two changes at best, and if they’re sending her somewhere more distant than that, it could be four or six. For a second she’s distracted by the ticking of railway schedules in her head, and she shakes it off. “I’ve liked it here, sir,” she says.
“You did good work,” the chief says. “It’s no surprise they want you somewhere else.”
“Thank you,” June says. She looks at the map on the chief’s wall, the corners of it curling away from the pushpins holding it in place, the abandoned pewter tea tray on the edge of his desk, the pipe tipped into a dish on the windowsill. Though it’s only been a handful of months, sometimes it feels like she has known Sandybed Lane, and this office, for years.
The next morning she leaves the Y station and finds Floss waiting.
“June, darling,” he says, clasping her hand.
“Hello, Floss,” she says. “I’m glad to see you.”
He chuckles. “You may be the only one left who feels like that.” He leads her slowly, his stick tapping against the stones as he makes his way to a waiting car, blocky and black, the driver leaning on the bonnet and smoking a cigarette.
The driver takes her valise and tucks it away in the boot. Floss makes sure she’s settled and slides in next to her. The driver throws the butt of his cigarette into the gutter and gets in, and the engine curls to life. Floss props his cane in the corner and turns to face June across the wide seat, his analytical eyes running over her. June doesn’t mind—she is long since used to the way he looks at her, as if she’s an aggregation of data, not a woman.
“So tell me,” he says, pressing the button that raises the partition between the driver and the back of the car, an excited gleam building in his pale gray eyes, “what do you know about Bletchley Park?”
It’s the middle of the afternoon when the car makes its way into the Buckinghamshire village of Bletchley, and June’s mouth goes dry. Here, then, is her future—she has known the work she’s done in the Y stations goes to a place known only as Station X, but everything beyond that has been fuzzy at best. Does it bode well, the glossy light starting to go golden around the edges even in this old brick factory town? The car winds through the village, and Floss points out the newsagent and the greengrocer and the butcher, the various small shops she will need once she’s settled. And then there are the heavy gates, and young soldiers guarding them. Floss shows the soldiers a card, and they step sharply into salutes, then pull the gates open for the car.
The manor itself appears out of the parkland like a vision, but the vision, June thinks, of someone who had never seen a proper country mansion and was putting it together based on a child’s description.
Floss follows her gaze and laughs. “Hideous, isn’t it? But it suits our needs.” He gestures out the window. “And the lake is rather nice.”
June has an unwelcome buzz of anxiety, thinking about this lake that Alec will never be able to skate on. And then they’re at the door, and she follows Floss inside.
Hours later she emerges into the twilight. She has a chit for a billet in town, a ration book, and a vague sense of what she’ll be doing, but for the most part she is feeling unmoored in a way she usually doesn’t. The afternoon has been swallowed by the intricacies of her new post, including another lecture about the Official Secrets Act and its application to the work at Bletchley Park. An officer has told her that violations of the Act are treasonous and will lead to prison, at least. It’s largely the same message she’d had already from Sir Reginald, but with a hint more melodrama—as he’d paced the room, this man’s hand had crept to the holstered revolver at his belt, and June had shuddered at the grim tone he’d given that at least.
She sits on the edge of the steps, waiting for Floss to collect her again. Her new colleagues come and go around her as she considers the surprising path that has brought her here. All those months learning the rudiments of her new trade, and now here she is right in the humming heart of it all.
The Japanese codes move like water around rocks, intricate and alchemical, and June takes to them right away. Her colleagues in Hut 7 love the puzzles as much as she does, and sometimes it’s almost like a game, despite the grind of urgency that lies beneath everything they do. There are nearly infinite variations and nuances, and the new imperative of containing all the variables is exhilarating. This is nothing like traditional Morse code, or like the basic ciphers she made up in school, dots and dashes standing in for letters, just a new alphabet. Most of the cryptanalysts have done Greek at school; new alphabets and grammars are easily absorbed. What makes the Japanese codes so astonishing is the blur of the pictographs and characters, and the speedy transfiguration of those characters in and out of Morse. And then, the ciphering and the meteorological codes on top of that . . . June has never felt more vital or alive.
Bletchley Park feels like home, and she thrives in the company of her peers. Now and again over the summer the powers that be send her back to Bedford or one of the other outposts, but for the most part she is a girl billeted in the tired old village of Bletchley. She and the other girls who board in the old brick house tell the elderly owners that they’re clerks at the radio factory Bletchley Park is pretending to be. When the couple’s son is invalided home from France that October, June moves into the old Abbey building on the manor grounds with the Wrens.
She makes friends, all of them bound by the pressures of their work and of secrecy. She misses Alec, but she would rather miss Alec from the bewilderingly ugly old manor than anywhere else. And he seems happy enough with his airplanes and his mates, no matter her fears for him. Life expectancy for pilots is so low, and she worries he is not careful enough. Although: Can he be? Is there an enough?
In the nights that autumn, lying awake in the room she shares with a host of Wrens, she looks at the ring he gave her that spring, and her heart larrups against the walls of her chest. They have seen each other once since then, in August, a tangled visit in London, where he still thinks she lives.
Such an odd day, that. The chaos of London, Alec trembling when he pulled her into a kiss. Lunch at a café near the British Museum, and Alec’s long hands looped around a porcelain mug chipped in a bombing earlier that summer or reaching across the table to play with her fingers. Alec’s smile, full of promise and lit with hope. The subterfuge for even a single day had exhausted her.
Too, though, he had brought her one of his stories, a quiet balm of normality in their upside-down world. They had been back at the train station, sitting close together on a bench near the platform, and he had sighed and whispered, Once upon a time there was a river. And she had answered as if it were a sacred moment of call and response at church, And on that river lived a bear. Something had flashed bright and happy in his face, and then he had gone on.
The bear lived in an old stone house in the shadow of the Tower, and in the afternoons he liked to look upriver toward the sunset, watching the light filter through the caissons and abutments of the bridges. The house belonged to a princess, who had come to London to establish an alliance in the spice trade.
It was February, and a fog had crept along the river from the sea. The bear had not seen the sunset in days, just the low glint of sun and moon through the icy haze, but he was happy, curled up before the blaze the princess’s manservant had laid in the cavernous marble fireplace. The house was cold, and the princess had fallen into the habit of sitting with her bear by the fire.
One night, the fog left the city in the hours before dawn, replaced by a deadly cold. The river began to close, floes shuddering together into a great expanse of ice between Blackfriars and London Bridge that filled with adventurers and shopkeepers. A fair sprung up. Hawkers and pickpockets strolled the ice. Baiting pits and brothels appeared overnight, penny coins disappearing into pockets and purses, or sometimes into the tiny fissures in the ice.
It was the coldest winter in memory, but the princess took the bear’s ears in her hands, warming them both, and led him out onto the ice. He walked between the bookstalls and mummers, the princess crouched on his shoulders like a jockey, the tiger stripes of her hooded cloak bright against the bear’s tobacco-colored fur.
The story had had no end; they never did. Instead Alec had stopped and taken her hands in his, kissing her palms and fingertips. Later June had sat in the compartment of the train back to Bletchley, thinking about her future with Alec. In the rhythm of train on track she had heard the bear and his princess, the whisper of skates on ice.
In November, a letter comes: Alec and his navigator, Tim Yates, are being temporarily reassigned to train Royal Canadian Air Force pilots in Ontario. June stares at the letter, relieved that she will not have to make excuses or pretend to live in London, and then feels guilty for the relief. She can’t tell from the way he’s written whether he’s excited—shouldn’t he be? Isn’t it a mark of favor that they think he is that good a pilot?
When she writes back, she tells him how proud she is of him. How much she loves him. How much she hopes he will continue to write, no matter where he is. She fills pages with words she knows are true, trying to ignore the prickling feeling of everything she’s not saying.
When Japan strikes at the United States that December, Hut 7 goes into overdrive. The Emperor must be stopped. But despite everything June and her cohort do, despite the sudden long, aching nights of taking apart the codes, Japan continues to march across the Pacific. In February, Singapore falls, and hundreds of British citizens, civilian and military, are swept into POW camps. The war is global now, and there are days when June hardly thinks of Alec, or Fenbourne, or anything but the swirl of ciphers she’s been given to solve. The heel of her hand takes on a dark sheen from the endless rub of thin paper and the thick black pencils they use. Information trickles in about troop movements or the shift of a Japanese carrier from one part of the Pacific to another. At Bletchley Park they benefit from the lack of cooperation between Japan’s army and navy, from the Emperor’s arrogance about the West’s inability to understand the Japanese language, and from the ornate, flowery tone the signal operators layer into the messages—each honorific adds a bit more to the codebreakers’ roster of understanding.
The lake freezes, and frost bristles on the windowpanes. Some of the girls organize skating parties, and one morning at the edge of the woods a herd of deer appears, hoofing gently at the frozen ground to shift what’s left of the grasses. In the vast great hall of the manor, the codebreakers and analysts and secretaries put on sometimes-ribald panto shows. Some of the men have come to Bletchley from careers as musicians or actors, and June is astonished by the caliber of their entertainments. She is less astonished by the way her colleagues seem to pair off, and by how much it makes her miss Alec. When his letters come, his handwriting often drifting into illustrations of the sky or trees or something else that’s caught his eye, she keeps them close.
Winter deepens, and she takes to doing her work with her hands half-warmed in fingerless gloves, a muffler tight around her throat. June spends most of the winter with her haversacks of messages on A4 paper, painstakingly crafting the paraphrases designed to confuse the Japanese if, God forbid, the British codebreaking work should fall into enemy hands. The Axis nations cannot know that the Allies have cracked their codes. Thus, “Troops of 19th Division will attack April 15” becomes “Expect attack from east mid-April, probably division nineteen.” Place names are replaced with code words or left out entirely, numbers written out, dates blurred into rough timeframes. The paraphrases she slips into a customized pair of envelopes—an inner envelope with one coded address, an external one with another. Those, in turn, vanish with the dispatch riders, out of sight and out of mind. It is more tedious work than the loops of the codebreaking itself, but she finds a quiet satisfaction in the process of information moving through the channels Britain has created so laboriously.
Still, the conflict in the Pacific spreads as Japanese forces conquer territory. June and her colleagues have to break codes and transcribe messages faster than ever—there are at least twenty different code and cipher systems the Japanese are using, perhaps more. Her cryptanalysis relies on a working knowledge of the transliteration of the kanji pictograms and kana phonetic symbols into a Romanized alphabet. The Japanese have built a new version of Morse, quite unlike the international code June has known since childhood—this version has twice as many signs, one set for the kana syllables and another for the Romaji letters. And throughout both sets of signs are the honorifics and epithets of the Emperor’s hierarchy. For June, the paired signs make a beautiful, imposing litany.
Most of the messages come through in sets of two-kana groups that stand in for phrases and four-kana groups that mean a particular word or number. And, as she grows more familiar with the basic pattern in which most Japanese radio operators transmit information, the better she internalizes the kana she sees most often. Even when the Japanese change their code books every fortnight or so, June’s turns at the wireless have taught her the idiosyncratic touches of different operators, and there are a handful of planes whose messages she can identify whether or not they change their call signs.
When the world thaws and the parklands around the manor blossom green and gold again, relief escapes the buildings like water over a dam. June and her friends bicycle out into the countryside, despite the lingering damp. The geese take back their spots on the lake and hiss and honk at anyone foolhardy enough to row out too close.
At the end of April, when June has been at Bletchley Park not quite a full year, she finds herself traipsing down to the lake with a group of girls, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and an old plaid blanket. The spring sun is low in her face and it’s a bit chilly yet, but breathing something that doesn’t taste like smoke and pencil nubs feels good. There are four of them, a determined group of picnickers brought together by Portia Wallace and Sybil de Cler, a pair of Hut 4 girls from families with the wherewithal to make sure they have the best cigarettes, a decent claret, even nylons. June likes Sybil well enough, but Portia can be tiring—she’s being courted by an army man from HQ, and rarely misses a chance to mention him. Sarah Crossley is a clerk’s daughter from Yorkshire, a brilliant Wren from a poor family, come to Bletchley Park to work with the enormous Bombe machines that break the codes in Hut 11. They have found one another time and again over the last year, and at this point June knows the friendships are as much a respite for the other girls as they are for her. With these girls, she can be normal, more or less—they’re all too clever by half, aren’t they? And better for it?
They settle onto the blanket, keeping an eye out for the terrible geese. Sybil kicks off her shoes and rolls up her trouser legs, stretching her toes into the cool grass.
“God,” Portia says, “look at you, rolling about.”
Sybil smiles. “Practically indecent,” she says wryly. “Not my fault my skin calls for air.”
“It smells like home, nearly,” Sarah says. She sits on the corner of the blanket, her arms wrapped around her knees, eyeing the picnic basket that Portia has casually settled among them.
Sybil sits up again, her attention shifting to the basket also. “What riches, Wallace?”
“Watercress sandwiches,” Portia says. She throws back the basket’s lid and shuffles through the contents. “Egg mayonnaise on toast as well. Chicken and leek pies. Potted eel. A bit of trifle.” She lifts out each item and lays it on the blanket with a showy wave of her hands.
“Anything to drink in there?” Sybil peers into the basket.
“Not my department,” Portia says, smiling.
“As it happens,” June says, “I’ve brought this.” She reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls out a bottle of Champagne from before the war.
“God bless the Honorable Alastair Corbett,” Portia says.
Sarah says, “He makes me nervous, a bit.”
“He makes us all nervous,” Portia says. She tilts her head. “Well. Not June.”
June laughs. “I’ve known him longer.”
“Are you and he . . . ,” Sarah trails off, blushing.
“Attwell is hardly his type,” Sybil says. “I was in town a few months ago and saw him coming out of a theater with a girl who looked rather cheap, if you take my meaning.”
“An actress?” Portia shrugs.
“Actress,” Sybil says, chuckling. “If that’s what you’d like to call a girl like that.”
“You never know,” Sarah says.
“In any event,” June says, eager to stop talking about Floss and his personal life before Sybil says anything more damning, “it seemed like a good day to open this.”
“It’s always a good day for bubbles,” Sybil says.
Portia smiles and hands around the sandwiches on thin porcelain plates. “When John and I marry, we’ll have ever so much Champagne.”
Sarah says, “And dancing?”
“Oh, yes,” Portia says. She accepts a glass and sips. “We’ll drink and dance all night. My sister says there’s a jazz band she knows. It’ll be marvelous.”
“I’m not giving this up for anything, least of all a man.” Sybil leans forward, gesturing at the lake. “Perhaps I’ll feel differently when the war ends, but right now . . .” She shrugs and smiles at Portia. “You and June seem to have it all worked out, though.”
Portia nods, but June looks up, alarmed. She had never thought of herself as being like Portia, and the idea that Portia’s path is hers . . . How can that be? She’s engaged, but until now she hasn’t really understood how that affects how people see her. That even someone like Sybil looks past the codebreaker, past the triumphs of math and patterns and logic, and instead sees someone’s future wife and someone else’s mother.
She wants to say something—but what? And to what purpose? Difficult enough that she will have to have that conversation with Alec, but must she really defend herself against this from Sybil as well? More than ever she realizes the necessity of making Alec understand, truly understand, what she means by that yes she gave him. He knows her better than anyone, miles better, but what if he sees her as Sybil does? Could she blame him if he can’t see the shift in who she is now from who she was before the war?
Six weeks later, she’s summoned to the chief’s office, where Floss is waiting—they’re moving her again. She smiles, eager to continue the work wherever they need her most, but she’ll miss Bletchley Park. She has friends here. She fits. Where? she asks. Back to Scarborough? Back to London? Floss shakes his head, his eyes glinting wolfish in the noonday sun where it pushes through the half-pulled blackout curtains. The Far East Combined Bureau, he tells her. Colombo. She stares at him, speechless first with shock and delight, and then with the worry about what this would mean to Alec.
That night she sits in Hut 7 and works until dawn, listening to the wireless and writing down clusters of kana syllables. She focuses on the encryptions harder than ever; if she is busy enough she may not have to consider the layers of worry tugging at her about Colombo. It has been almost two years of the lie, but at least the lie has been roughly the same—not clerical, not really, but close. All these months, all those nights in the hut, the stubs of pencils chewed by the glow of the too-bright overhead lights, walking back to her lodgings and trying not to step on the frogs that creep out of the lake and infest the walkways . . . This has been her life, and she has found her footing in sending letters to Alec that tell him she’s okay, and feeling useful, without really saying anything at all about where she is or what she’s doing.
So she packs her valise and says goodbye to her friends, and in the early part of the summer she finds herself back at the Thames, boarding a ship that will take her to India, where she will transfer to a series of trains and ferries to Colombo. Not telling Alec where she is when she’s in Britain has been hard enough—but to keep from him that she will be in Ceylon, in the very shadow of India? It is impossible, and she wants more than ever to tell him, knowing that he would feel in his chest the tightening of their overlapping lives, as she does. But she can’t, no matter how hurtful she finds the responsibility of keeping the truth to herself.
During the weeks at sea, she practices her Japanese and walks the perimeter of the ship every evening. During her walks, she watches the water carve away from the prow of the ship, drinks weak gin and tonics with the cluster of Wrens she’s sailing with. Increasingly, she wonders whether that is a path she should consider—the responsibilities and privileges of the uniform pull at her. She is part of something immeasurably important now, but what would it be like to be official, to expand her service from civilian life to the Wrens? But how then to reconcile that idea with marriage to Alec? If he is expecting a wife who will dedicate herself to the management of home and hearth, is that someone she can be? For that matter, if she were to become a Wren and he is a pilot in the RAF, would a marriage even be possible? Separate paths and separate postings, trying to match up their leaves and furloughs until one of them sees fit to retire from service?
She pushes the idea away—right now those questions cannot be her prime concern. Her country needs her; her king is sending her to lead other young women in the war against Japan. She is a civilian, nominally attached to the Admiralty, and she knows that if her ship, or her person, falls into Japanese hands, none of that will protect her. Since the fall of Singapore, there have been rumors of what it’s like in the Japanese POW camps, but she can’t quite think about that possibility head-on. Worse, though, is the knowledge that she carries secrets like other women carry virtue. It is imperative that she remains free—if she is captured, there is the risk that the Japanese will learn about the work being done against them at Bletchley Park, Hut 7’s success with Purple and JN25 and the other codes, the systemic work creeping along to dismantle the Emperor’s secrets. If she is captured, it is best for King and Country if she is not taken alive.
And if she is? Who will tell Alec? Who will tell her parents? What will they think, if they hear that she has been captured in the waters off Ceylon? If Burma or India fall to Japan, and she is taken to one of the nightmare camps in Sumatra? Is it really possible that they will never know where she is unless she dies? What damage would it do to her parents, or to Alec? It is unbearable to consider.