Princess Elizabeth's Spy

It was late by the time Maggie returned to Windsor. She’d missed dinner, and the sun had long set. Still agitated from her meeting with Frain, not to mention thoughts of Hugh, she paced around her rooms, chilly despite the fire dancing in the grate, finally throwing herself on the sofa. She picked up the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Maybe reading will help me calm down, she thought.

She kicked off her oxfords and tucked her feet under her, then picked up the book. What gorgeous illustrations, she thought, looking at the four-color Rackham pen-and-ink drawings, softened by watercolors. She began to read the first story, “Hansel and Gretel.”

Again, she noticed the tiny holes that the spilled tea had spotlighted. Damn bugs. Ugh, disgusting. But on closer examination, the holes were too regular in their appearance, too specifically spaced.

What they were, Maggie suddenly realized, was a series of tiny pinpricks in the pages of the book, each under a letter, in seemingly random order. It was code of some sort. Maggie’s heart beat faster.

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: “What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?” “I’ll tell you what, husband,” answered the woman, “early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.” “No, wife,” said the man, “I will not do that; how can I bear to leave my children alone in the forest?”

That was all of the pinpricks. There were no more.

Pinprick encryption, Maggie thought, her mind whirling wildly. First used by Aeneaus the Tactician, an ancient Greek historian, who conveyed secret messages by making tiny, almost imperceptible pinpricks under letters in chunks of text. Imperceptible—that is, unless someone spills tea on them.

Getting a pad of paper and a pen, she copied down each letter, in order, that had a pinprick under it. There weren’t that many, really. When she was finished, she had:

tandersensfaulkeshthompson

From there, shivers dancing up and down her spine, it was easy enough to get to:

T. Andersen, S. Faulkes, H. Thompson

A list of British-sounding names, sent in secret code to her father. Names. But of whom? And why? To get information from them? To try to turn them? To assassinate them?

Maggie went back over the list of names. H. Thompson? Hugh had mentioned his father had worked for MI-5, as well.

That he had died in the line of—

Oh, no, Maggie thought, suddenly realizing. Oh, no, no, no, no, no … 

The next morning after Lilibet’s maths lesson, Maggie climbed the pitted and crumbling stairs of the parish church of St. John the Baptist, on High Street in Windsor, and walked inside, her pumps echoing on the cracked tiles. It was between services and the cavernous arched church was empty, except for an organist to the left of the altar, behind a glowing bank of candles, practicing Bach’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” the majestic reedy tones echoing through the open space. Maggie saw Hugh and took a seat in the row in front of him. Hugh knelt behind her, on wooden pew worn from centuries of use, hands folded as if in prayer.

In a rush, dread in her heart, Maggie whispered, “Thanks for meeting with me.” She wished with all her heart that she could go back to that moment when he’d put his arm around her. Back before she knew.

“I knew if you contacted me, it had to be important.”

There was a pause, and the organist began the left hand’s countermelody. Then Maggie began. “My mother —my mother loved to read, and my father would buy her books, fairy tales mostly, German. He sent one to me, after he stood me up in Slough. Last night, I discovered code hidden inside those books. Code! It must have been how Sektion was sending him messages.”

“What kind of code?”

“Pinprick encryption.”

Hugh raised one eyebrow. “Classic Sektion.”

“Exactly.”

There was another long pause, before Maggie got up the nerve to speak. She knew she had to. And she knew that things would never be the same between her and Hugh, ever again. “The code—it spelled out a list.”

“A list?”

“A list of names,” Maggie said, hating what she was about to tell him.

“All right,” Hugh said, “a list of names. I can check them out.”

There was still a chance, though. Still a chance that it was just a horrible coincidence. A cosmic joke of the worst sort. “Hugh,” she said gently, “I need to ask you, what was your father’s name?”

Hugh’s eyebrows knit together. “Why do you ask?”

“Was it also Hugh?” Maggie asked, dreading his response.

“Why, yes, yes it was,” he said. “But—?”

“Hugh Thompson? H. Thompson? And did he die in 1915?”

“What—?”

Maggie passed him a Bible, in which she’d hidden the Grimm text and her notes.

“Oh, Hugh,” she said, as he began to read. “I’m so, so terribly sorry.”

Chapter Twenty-one

In a fog of shock, Hugh returned to the MI-5 offices in London. Without apparent emotion, he dropped the book and Maggie’s decryption of the pinprick code on Frain’s desk, leaving Frain, for once, looking shocked. Then he went to his office and sat down at his desk. He didn’t even pretend to work, just stared at the wall.

A while later, Mark entered the small windowless office and looked at Hugh. Then he sat down at his own desk, pretending to work. Finally, he spoke. “I heard,” he said. “Maggie broke the code found in her mother’s book. The names of three MI-Five agents. All of whom were assassinated. Including your father.”

“Yes,” Hugh said, without moving. “That sums it up nicely.”

Mark reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of gin. “Drink?”

“Do you need to ask?”

Mark took out two tea mugs and poured gin into each. He got up and handed one to Hugh.

“Thanks,” Hugh said, accepting the mug. He downed the gin in one gulp.

Silently, Mark poured Hugh another, then went back to his desk and pulled out some paperwork. He pretended to be engrossed in it, crossing things out, scribbling in the margins.

Finally, still staring at the same spot off in the distance, Hugh spoke. “It’s a strange thing, you know. When you’re a child, you learn that your father’s dead. You don’t really know what that means besides your mother always crying and everyone wearing black. At some point you put it all together—that he’s not away on a trip, that he’s never coming back. He’s gone. Forever.

“Then, when you’re older you learn more—that he was ‘killed in the line of duty.’ But even that’s vague. It doesn’t tell you where, or when, or how.” He downed the gin. “Or by whom.”

Mark was thinking ahead. “Should we go to the Red Lion? Because given what’s just happened, I doubt that Frain would mind.” He closed his folder and stood up. “And, if he does, he can bugger off.”

Hugh went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “And then, then you find out the details. The particulars. That the Germans knew about your father. That they wanted him dead. That his name was written in code. In a line of tiny