about to emerge when one of them said, “That Digby Hoare doesn’t waste time-talk about a fast worker.”
Hermia froze with her hand on the doorknob.
“I saw him move in on Miss Mount,” said an older voice. “He must be a tit man.”
The others giggled. In the cubicle, Hermia frowned at this reference to her generous figure.
“I think she gave him the brush-off, though,” said the first girl.
“Wouldn’t you? I couldn’t fancy a man with a wooden leg.”
A third girl spoke with a Scots accent. “I wonder if he takes it off when he shags you,” she said, and they all laughed.
Hermia had heard enough. She opened the door, stepped out, and said, “If I find out, I’ll let you know.”
The three girls were shocked into silence, and Hermia left before they had time to recover.
She stepped out of the wooden building. The wide green lawn, with its cedar trees and swan pond, had been disfigured by huts thrown up in haste to accommodate the hundreds of staff from London. She crossed the park to the house, an ornate Victorian mansion built of red brick.
She passed through the grand porch and made her way to her office in the old servants’ quarters, a tiny L- shaped space that had probably been the boot room. It had one small window too high to see out of, so she worked with the light on all day. There was a phone on her desk and a typewriter on a side table. Her predecessor had had a secretary, but women were expected to do their own typing. On her desk, she found a package from Copenhagen.
After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, she had laid the foundations of a small spy network in Denmark. Its leader was her fiance’s friend, Poul Kirke. He had put together a group of young men who believed that their small country was going to be overrun by its larger neighbor, and the only way to fight for freedom was to cooperate with the British. Poul had declared that the group, who called themselves the Nightwatchmen, would not be saboteurs or assassins, but would pass military information to British Intelligence. This achievement by Hermia-unique for a woman-had won her promotion to head of the Denmark desk.
The package contained some of the fruits of her foresight. There was a batch of reports, already decrypted for her by the code room, on German military dispositions in Denmark: army bases on the central island of Fyn; naval traffic in the Kattegat, the sea that separated Denmark from Sweden; and the names of senior German officers in Copenhagen.
Also in the package was a copy of an underground newspaper called
The package had been smuggled out of Denmark to a go-between in Sweden, who passed it to the MI6 man at the British Legation in Stockholm. With the package was a note from the go-between saying he had also passed a copy of
Thinking about the Nightwatchmen reminded her painfully of her fiance. Arne was not one of the group. His character was all wrong. She loved him for his careless joie de vivre. He made her relax, especially in bed. But a happy-go-lucky man with no head for mundane detail was not the type for secret work. In her more honest moments, she admitted to herself that she was not sure he had the courage. He was a daredevil on the ski slopes- they had met on a Norwegian mountain, where Arne had been the only skier more proficient than Hermia-but she was not sure how he would face the more subtle terrors of undercover operations.
She had considered trying to send him a message via the Nightwatchmen. Poul Kirke worked at the flying school, and if Arne was still there they must see one another every day. It would have been shamefully unprofessional to use the spy network for a personal communication, but that did not stop her. She would have been found out for sure, because her messages had to be encrypted by the code room, but even that might not have deterred her. It was the danger to Arne that held her back. Secret messages could fall into enemy hands. The ciphers used by MI6 were unsophisticated poem codes left over from peacetime, and could be broken easily. If Arne’s name appeared in a message from British intelligence to Danish spies, he would probably lose his life. Hermia’s inquiry about him could turn into his death warrant. So she sat in her boot room with acid anxiety burning inside her.
She composed a message to the Swedish go-between, telling him to keep out of the propaganda war and stick to his job as courier. Then she typed a report to her boss containing all the military information in the package, with carbon copies to other departments.
At four o’clock she left. She had more work to do, and she would return for a couple of hours this evening, but now she had to meet her mother for tea.
Margaret Mount lived in a small house in Chelsea. After Hermia’s father had died of cancer in his late forties, her mother had set up home with an unmarried school friend, Elizabeth. They called each other Mags and Bets, their adolescent nicknames. Today the two had come by train to Bletchley to inspect Hermia’s lodgings.
She walked quickly through the village to the street where she rented a room. She found Mags and Bets in the parlor talking to her landlady, Mrs. Bevan. Hermia’s mother was wearing her ambulance driver’s uniform, with trousers and a cap. Bets was a pretty woman of fifty in a flowered dress with short sleeves. Hermia hugged her mother and gave Bets a kiss on the cheek. She and Bets had never become close, and Hermia sometimes suspected Bets was jealous of her closeness to her mother.
Hermia took them upstairs. Bets looked askance at the drab little room with its single bed, but Hermia’s mother said heartily, “Well, this isn’t bad, for wartime.”
“I don’t spend much time here,” Hermia lied. In fact she spent long, lonely evenings reading and listening to the radio.
She lit the gas ring to make tea and sliced up a small cake she had bought for the occasion.
Mother said, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Arne?”
“No. I wrote to him via the British Legation in Stockholm, and they forwarded the letter, but I never heard back, so I don’t know whether he got it.”
“Oh, dear.”
Bets said, “I wish I’d met him. What’s he like?”
Falling in love with Arne had been like skiing downhill, Hermia thought: a little push to get started, a sudden increase in speed, and then, before she was quite ready, the exhilarating feeling of hurtling down the piste at a breakneck pace, unable to stop. But how to explain that? “He looks like a movie star, he’s a wonderful athlete, and he has the charm of an Irishman, but that’s not it,” Hermia said. “It’s just so easy to be with him. Whatever happens, he just laughs. I get angry sometimes-though never at him-and he smiles at me and says, ‘There’s no one like you, Hermia, I swear.’ Dear God, I do miss him.” She fought back tears.
Her mother said briskly: “Plenty of men have fallen in love with you, but there aren’t many who can put up with you.” Mags’s conversational style was as unadorned as Hermia’s own. “You should have nailed his foot to the floor while you had the chance.”
Hermia changed the subject and asked them about the Blitz. Bets spent air raids under the kitchen table, but Mags drove her ambulance through the bombs. Hermia’s mother had always been a formidable woman, somewhat too direct and tactless for a diplomat’s wife, but war had brought out her strength and courage, just as a secret service suddenly short of men had allowed Hermia to flourish. “The Luftwaffe can’t keep this up indefinitely,” said Mags. “They don’t have an unending supply of aircraft and pilots. If our bombers keep pounding German industry, it must have an effect eventually.”
Bets said, “Meanwhile, innocent German women and children are suffering just as we do.”
“I know, but that’s what war is about,” said Mags.
Hermia recalled her conversation with Digby Hoare. People like Mags and Bets imagined that the British bombing campaign was undermining the Nazis. It was a good thing they had no inkling that half the bombers were being shot down. If people knew the truth they might give up.
Mags began to tell a long story about rescuing a dog from a burning building, and Hermia listened with half an ear, thinking about Digby. If Freya was a machine, and the Germans were using it to defend their borders, it might well be in Denmark. Was there anything she could do to investigate? Digby had said the machine might emit some kind of beam, either optical pulses or radio waves. Such emissions ought to be detectable. Perhaps her
