Maryland, Spring 1975
“Ready for the big day tomorrow?” Uncle Silas sat across from Millie in the living room of her and Henry’s large suburban home. He was still tall, with impeccable posture, but his hair had turned white, and wrinkles lined his face. He’d flown in from England for the wedding of Millie’s youngest daughter, Eva, to a man she’d met while at university.
“I hope so.” Wedding preparations had left Millie’s feet sore and her back a little achy, but all the work on the yard where they would have the reception, all the visitors coming in and out of the house for days on end, it was all for a good cause. “I’m glad Henry convinced me to hire a caterer. I don’t think I could have managed it all otherwise.”
“Mom?”
Millie turned at Glenn’s voice. He and his wife, Sally, stood near the door, and Glenn held their four-year-old son, David, on his hip.
“I’m going to take this little rascal home before he does anything that ruins your perfect garden.”
Millie stood to hug them all goodbye. David wrapped his arms around her and kissed both of her cheeks. “Good night, Grandma.”
“Good night, little Davy.” He was growing up fast, but he always made time to give his grandma his full affection. She wasn’t sure if it just came naturally or if he liked the way she told the story of the Austrian princess and the dragon or if her famous chocolate chip cookies had won him over. “See you all at the church tomorrow.”
Davy nodded. “I’m going to wear my suit, and I’m not going to mess up my hair.” His blond locks were currently in a state of disorder, as was typical for him.
“I’m sure your aunt Eva will appreciate her nephew’s dignified hairstyle.” Sally ran her fingers along her son’s head with a chuckle.
When Millie finished her goodbyes to Glenn’s family, she went back to sit with her uncle. The sound of Henry hammering something on the gazebo made her smile. Glenn had been helping him, and she had thought they were done, but Henry had a meticulous streak when it came to projects around the house.
“When can I meet the groom?” Uncle Silas asked.
“Not until tomorrow. Jens is taking his parents to see the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Eva went too.”
“Jens. I’ve been meaning to ask about his name. That’s not so common for a Yankee.”
“He was born in Germany, immigrated when he was a toddler. He said his father was a POW in America during the Second World War and wanted to come back. I haven’t had a chance to ask Jens’s dad any of the details yet.”
Uncle Silas fingered the book he held in his lap. “I’ve been thinking about the war lately.” He handed her the book. “Have you read this?”
Millie shook her head. She hadn’t even heard of it, but as she read the description on the front flap of the dust jacket, one word jumped out at her: Enigma. She held her breath and looked up to meet her uncle’s eyes.
“It’s not secret anymore. You can talk about it. That was published last fall, and some French accounts came out even earlier.”
Thirty years of secrecy. Never telling Karl. Never telling Henry. Never telling Glenn, even when she was fairly certain he had gone into much the same thing as she had when he’d joined the navy and served a tour on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam, then joined Henry working at the CIA.
Uncle Silas nodded at the book. “Keep that one. I’ve already read it, and I’ll pick up another copy if I need to. Some of it you already know, but the author had more of a bird’s-eye view than you did.”
Later that night, when everyone had left or gone to bed, Millie picked up the book. Suddenly, she was back in England, riding a bicycle with Shirley on their way to Bletchley Park, scribbling away at a translation in Hut Three, guessing the contents of a message in Hut Eight as she tried to create a crib. She read the entire book without stopping until she reached the final page.
* * *
Millie stood on the front lawn of her home and wiped a few tears from her eyes as Jens and Eva drove away, now husband and wife. Staying up until the small hours of the night reading plus the wedding of her youngest child equaled exhaustion, but the day had been beautiful. The car, trailing ribbons and flowers, disappeared around the corner.
Millie dodged the pellets of rice that Glenn and her daughter Carol were flinging at each other. “You were supposed to throw that at the newlyweds.” She said it with a smile, and her children laughed.
“We did, Mom.” Glenn chucked another handful at Carol. “But this sister got married while I was deployed. I’m making up for it now.”
Memories of that wedding, and of Glenn’s, filled her mind as she joined Henry to bid farewell to some of his coworkers, then to one of his cousins.
“Millie, do you have a moment?” Shirley asked after Millie said goodbye to Nancy and her family.
“Of course.” She’d barely had any time to speak to Shirley and Irving, but now things were settled enough that she could ignore the remaining guests for a chat with her sister-in-law.
Shirley took Millie’s arm and walked to the backyard, then along the garden and around the cluster of tables spread across the lawn. “I forgot to mention it in my last letter, but when Irving and I went on our cruise, the captain’s name was Tremblay.”
“Jake Tremblay?”
Shirley nodded. “We made it a point to find him and see. He asked about you and Glenn, sent you his highest regards. Captain Tremblay is now married with four children—or was it five?” Shirley thought for a moment. “Maybe Irving will remember. But his sons, Millie. He named one of them Jacob. And he named one of them Karl.”
Millie felt her eyes prick with tears. So many emotions. The marriage of her daughter. The book Uncle Silas had given her and all the memories it had stirred up. Now this. “I’m glad to hear it. That he survived the war and has a family and that I’m not the only one who remembers Karl.”
Shirley glanced at Millie’s face. “I am glad I waited until after the wedding to tell you.”
Millie chuckled. “I cried off and on all day anyway. Just for different reasons.”
“Captain Tremblay also mentioned that Billy Scarlett is ship’s master on a cargo ship. They served together most of the war. On a few voyages after the war too.”
Millie picked up a punch cup that someone had left on the rock border dividing the grass from the flowers. “The war has come up a lot the last few days.”
“It does that every once in a while.”
Millie nodded. “Uncle Silas brought me a book. I want you to read it. It’s all about Enigma and Bletchley Park and—”
Shirley’s eyes widened in alarm, and she glanced around to see who might have overheard. “That’s classified. We all signed the Official Secrets Act.”
“Someone decided it didn’t need to be secret anymore. I’ll grab it for you, and you can read it too. It brought a lot of things back. Added in a lot of things I didn’t know.”
By the time Millie had retrieved the book and returned to the garden, Shirley was sitting at a table with Henry, Irving, Uncle Silas, and Jens’s parents. Millie sat between Henry and Shirley, and as she put the book on the table, Mr. Denhart inhaled sharply.
“Have you read this?” Millie asked him.
Mr. Denhart seemed hesitant to say anything, but his wife glanced at the book and asked, “That’s the one Ilsa gave you for Christmas, isn’t it?”
Mr. Denhart nodded. “It shed light on a lot of things.” He bit his lips for a moment, then continued. “Hitler needed to be defeated. Frieda knew that even during the war. I took a while longer to reach that conclusion.” He pointed at the book. “But I suppose that book explains why so many of my comrades did not return from their voyages.”
“What did you do during the war, Mr. Denhart?” Uncle Silas asked.
“I served on U-boats. In the radio shack.”
A chill ran along Millie’s spine. She and Henry had met Jens several times, and they liked him a great deal, but they had met Rolf Denhart only a few days ago. U-boats brought up images of torpedoed ships and waves slick with oil and a life-and-death struggle that had begun the day Britain declared war on Germany and continued until the war’s last hours. Henry seemed to guess what effect that knowledge would have on her, and he slipped his hand into hers. She grabbed it and held on tight.
Uncle Silas kept his eyes on the book. “I would very much like to hear your thoughts on the book. U-boat crews proved an adversary worthy of respect.” Silas turned his eyes to Millie and Shirley. “I would very much like to hear both your thoughts on the book as well.”
Henry picked the book off the table and read the description. “Goodness. I thought you were reading a novel last night, you were so absorbed. Why would . . . ?” He glanced at Uncle Silas, then at Millie. “All that rather boring and routine war work you did before Glenn was born.” Henry held up the book. “Did it have something to do with this?”
Millie nodded. “For a while, I was a translator. Then I was part of the team breaking the Naval Enigma. Or trying to. I never knew what Shirley did.”
Shirley seemed hesitant to speak. Thirty years of silence was hard to break. “I helped organize the information so it could be referenced when needed.”
Mr. Denhart sat back in his chair. “And here we are, all us old adversaries, sitting together at the same table.” He smiled, though the expression looked a little uneasy. “If you’re half as brilliant as Eva, I can see why we lost the war. To think that all those messages I enciphered for U-boat command—you might have been the one deciphering them.”
“There’s more, Millie.” Uncle Silas rested his arm on the table and leaned toward her. “I couldn’t tell you before, but Karl was in on two of the codebook pinches.”
Codebook pinches. She remembered instances when stolen bigram tables or weather codebooks had ended blackouts or suddenly sped Bletchley Park’s work along until they were reading the messages almost as fast as the Germans were.
“I wanted to tell you about it,” her uncle continued. “So I had an old friend arrange for me to read the reports archived in the Admiralty. It’s not mentioned in the book, but he was part of the boarding parties that grabbed papers from U-115 and U-690.”
Mr. Denhart gasped. “But those were my boats.” He looked stunned. “I remember the men boarding the U-115. I . . . I was to destroy the codebooks if we had to abandon ship, but I was also trained in first aid. I was needed elsewhere, so I told a subordinate to do it.” He shook his head. “He promised me he’d thrown everything into the bilge. And then the U-115 went down. We thought our secrets went down with it.”
“No,” Uncle Silas said. “They retrieved enough to end a blackout. A short blackout, thanks to what happened on the U-115.”
Mr. Denhart tapped his hands along the table. “It was foggy the day the U-690 sank. I don’t suppose most of the crew saw, because they abandoned ship without me, but I knew the British had been on board.” He glanced at his wife. “That’s why they wouldn’t let me write to you for so long. Because I knew they’d been on board.”
Uncle Silas nodded. “Yes, that’s what the Americans did when they captured the U-505. Isolated the crew, wouldn’t even let them send Red Cross postcards. Couldn’t risk any of them telling someone back home that the Allies had one of the U-boats and all its secrets.”
“But . . .” Henry broke off, then continued. “That’s against the Geneva Conventions. War prisoners have the right to contact their families.”
Uncle Silas shrugged. “The cost of complying would have been new German ciphers and a great many more ships lost in convoy.”
Millie glanced at Mr. Denhart. “You said it was foggy when the U-690 was abandoned. When was that?” She had a feeling she already knew the answer.
Mr. Denhart shook his head. “I don’t know the day. Sometime in June 1943.”
Millie met her uncle’s eyes. “That’s how Karl died, isn’t it? Pinching codes from the U-690.”
Her uncle nodded.
Millie fought emotion. Karl had done something important. Something vital. Sublieutenant Randall had said as much. But to know what he had done, to know how it would have changed what had gone on at Bletchley Park and all the information it would have given the Allies over the next few months as they’d fought to keep the convoys safe . . . She vaguely heard Shirley explaining to the Denharts that Karl was Millie’s first husband. “So that’s why he left the Fireweed. And that’s why he came back crushed. He was stealing secrets.”
“Not just that.” Mr. Denhart kept his eyes on the table’s floral centerpiece. “He also saved my life.”
“He what?” Millie felt her throat tighten.
“One of the depth charges . . . I was injured. Left for dead. The British sailors got me out. Your husband, did he speak German?”
Millie nodded.
“And did he have blond hair and blue eyes and come back to his ship injured so badly he couldn’t walk?”
She nodded again.
Mrs. Denhart reached for her husband’s hand, and he continued. “They rescued me, but the U-690 began sinking. The blond sailor was the last one out. Got trapped between the sub’s hull and the launch.” He stared at Millie. “But you can’t have been his wife. She was there. I saw her in the infirmary. And she had black hair.”
Mrs. Denhart frowned. “Wives don’t travel on Royal Navy ships, do they?”
Millie swallowed. “I was there because my ship was torpedoed. I swam through oil and hadn’t had time to wash it from my hair.”
“And the child?” Mr. Denhart asked. “You were expecting, weren’t you?”
Millie pointed to Glenn, across the garden, playing catch with Davy, who was up far past his bedtime but had eaten several servings of cake and didn’t seem likely to fall asleep anytime soon.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Denhart said. “He would have been out and safe if he hadn’t stopped to rescue me.”
Millie realized something then, something from a memory almost thirty-two years old. “One of the last things he said to me—” Millie broke off and tried to force the emotion down. “It was difficult for him to talk. He said he was sorry, and then he said God put someone in his path. But he never had a chance to tell me more, and I’ve wondered about it for decades. He must have meant you.”
Mr. Denhart, too, seemed to grow emotional.
Henry put his arm around her shoulders. “So, let me get this straight.” He glanced at Mr. Denhart. “Your U-boat torpedoed Millie’s ship. And then Karl’s corvette dropped depth charges on your boat and stole its codebooks. And before that, Millie was breaking your enciphered messages and Shirley was indexing all the information from them.”
Uncle Silas raised an eyebrow. “That about sums it up. And now we’re all together at a wedding reception, thirty-some years later.”
The sober expression on Henry’s face eased for a moment, and he forced a smile. “Maybe we should wait a while before we tell Eva and Jens.”
Irving chuckled, and gradually, the conversation turned to other things. Only later, as the Denharts were getting ready to leave, did Mrs. Denhart take Millie’s hands in both of hers. “I’m sorry that your husband lost his life saving Rolf, but I’m grateful to him. And I’m grateful to you—and to your late husband—for bringing about a defeat for the Nazis.”
Tragedy plus time plus knowledge of what Karl’s final actions meant . . . it didn’t make the sorrow and grief disappear, but it made it easier to bear. Death wasn’t alone on its side of the equation. It was surrounded by honor and sacrifice.
* * *
Millie was surprised when Henry put a cup of hot cocoa into her hands that night after everyone had left and most of the decorations had been taken down. “It’s a little warm for this, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “Borderline. But you seem to process emotions best when you have something warm to drink.” They’d been married twenty-seven years. They knew a lot about each other’s habits. Henry continued. “And I imagine that war memory hit you a little harder than most.”
“It did.” Karl had saved a man’s life. An enemy’s life. And one of her and Henry’s daughters had just married that man’s son. “Yet it seems like everything has come full circle. A few mysteries solved, a few events connected.”
“And a few secrets broken. You know, I’m not all that surprised to hear you were a codebreaker.”
“You aren’t?”
Henry shook his head. “You’re too smart to have been put to work doing something ordinary.”
“So are you, but that didn’t stop you from having ordinary work during the war.” Or had his work been ordinary? Henry hadn’t ever said much about his role in the war. His first postwar job with the State Department had lasted until the Central Intelligence Agency was formed, but he still told people he worked for the State Department. “You were in intelligence, weren’t you? Even during the war?”
Henry gave her his most innocent look. “I don’t think that’s been declassified yet. But I’m glad your work has been, because I want to hear all about it.” He yawned. “Tomorrow. I want to hear all about it, starting tomorrow.”
* * *
May 21, 1975
Dear Karl,
I wasn’t going to write anything else in this journal, but I ran across it while putting away a few things from Eva’s wedding.
After the reception, when most of the guests had left and only family remained, I looked around and realized how many of them wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for you. Glenn and I would have died. Carol and Eva would never have been born. Nor would your grandson, David. He has Glenn’s eyes. Your eyes.
It wasn’t just the Stevens and Bridger families you saved. Rolf owes you his life, and he and Frieda’s four youngest children were born after the war. You saved part of the Denhart family too. Irving and Shirley have four children and two grandchildren. They would never have met if it hadn’t been for our wedding, so that branch of the Stevens family is indebted to you too. So are the Tremblay families and the Scarlett families. Your life may have been cut short, but you made such a difference to so many people.
And so I wanted to say thank you. There was a time when I was angry that you’d died when you could have lived. But now I know some of the strangers you saved, and it makes it easier to accept your sacrifice.
There are times when I still miss you, times when the pain takes me by surprise, times when I mourn an opportunity we never had. But the last thirty years have been good ones for me. Life has its ups and downs, of course, but overall, I’ve been happy. Thank you for saving my life, Karl, because it’s been a good one, and none of it would have been possible if you hadn’t pulled me from the Atlantic thirty-two years ago.
You’ll always have my affection, my regard, and my gratitude.
Love,
Millie