Page 1 of The Number of Love
1
OLDADMIRALTYBUILDING
LONDON, ENGLAND
25 SEPTEMBER1917
The numbers marched across the page in a glory all their own. Margot De Wilde stared at them for a long moment, looked back at the German telegram sitting on her desk, and then scratched a new number onto the column. Almost there. Almost. She darted a glance out the window.
The sun grew mockingly brighter. When last she’d looked up, it had been only the slightest glimmer beyond the buildings of Whitehall. Now it had cleared them. Soon the day shift would arrive, and if those on night watch hadn’t cracked the new codes, there’d be an insufferable amount of jeering.
Her lips twitched. She did her own share of jeering when it was another team that failed to crack the Germans’ new codes between midnight and eight in the morning. And her fair share of shoulder slapping and approving nods when she came in of a morning to find the night watch happily asleep at their desks, the new cyphers waiting.
“Come on, come on, come on.” At the desk beside her, Nigel de Grey fisted his fingers in his hair. Months ago, he had been the starof the office, having been the one to hand the Director of the Intelligence Division the telegram from Zimmermann that had brought America into the war. The Germans had thought themselves quite clever, trying to strike a deal with Mexico to bring them into the war on their side. But the Americans hadn’t taken too kindly to it when they were informed thattheirterritory was to be Mexico’s reward.
But that wouldn’t matter today, not if their night shift failed to break the daily code for the second night in a row.
“We’ll get it.” Remington Culbreth indulged in a long stretch, squeezing his eyes shut. “We’re too close not to.” He’d grown more serious over the last three years, his smiles less frequent. He’d never said why, but Margot suspected it had something to do with the photograph in his wallet that he didn’t take out to look at anymore.
She heaved a sigh and let her eyes slide shut. Let the intercepted telegram that had come zipping up the pneumatic tubes just after midnight play before her eyelids. Let the numbers she assigned to correspond to each word go from marching to jumping.
“That’s what we said last time. I’ll not go out hanging my head again. Dilly didn’t stop mocking me about it all week. I—”
“Got it!” Margot surged forward as those beautiful digits settled at last into her mind in the proper order. Ignoring the rustling of her colleagues as they slid over to look at her work, she picked up her pen again and scratched the final numbers into the column on her paper. Checked it against the telegram. Breathed a laugh as she finally was able to scrawl the decrypt of the intercepted message onto the fresh sheet of paper.
“Ah.” De Grey gave her shoulder a friendlywhack. “Good man.”
Were Maman in her usual spot at the desk by the door, her lips would have thinned at that compliment—as they always did every time the other cryptographers seemed to forget she was a young woman and not another of them. But Margot grinned. And took a moment to be grateful that the secretaries weren’t obliged to take a night shift once a week like the cryptographers were.
Victory sang through her veins.Three, nine, twenty-seven, eighty-one, two forty-three...
“You have saved us infinite shame, De Wilde.” Culbreth nodded, almost smiling, and then wilted onto his desk. “Have we time for a nap, do you think?”
“Doesn’t sound like it.” Margot could just make out the first of the morning’s footfalls on the stairs and thedingof the lift. The Old Building, or OB as they often called it, was coming to life.
She took a moment to order her desk while her colleagues did the same. To obliterate, as much as possible, the evidence of a night hard at work—empty cups, the stale crust of what had been a sandwich, eraser leavings. They had no cleaning ladies in the hive of Room 40. No girls to wheel in tea carts and wheel out the dishes. What tidying got done, they did themselves. The decrypt she’d just managed in hand, she stood and turned to her mother’s desk. Her eyes skimmed the message again. It was a list of ships, possible targets for the U-boats that day.Boynton. City Of Swansea. Dinorah.
Nothing out of the ordinary. She’d long ago given up wishing they could send a warning to each one. They couldn’t—it would mean revealing to Germany that they intercepted their every message. It would compromise Room 40. It was a form ofyosu-miru, as the terms of the game Go stated it—a move that might require sacrifice, but for a greater purpose.
Besides, all the ships in all the world knew the dangers, with unrestricted submarine warfare declared in January. They would be on their guard. They would travel in convoys.
But still, an average of fifteen per day would still sink. Margot dropped the list of U-boat targets into the basket and tried not to do that math.Fifteen a day, average of thirty days in a month, four hundredfifty ships every month for the nine months since the declaration, equaled four thousand fifty ships lost.
The door opened, and Margot looked over to see Admiral Blinker Hall stick his head in. “How did the night go, chaps?”
De Grey motioned to Margot and, presumably, the decrypt she’d just carried over. “De Wilde cracked the cypher. Haven’t had time yet to apply it to whatever has come in since.”
The Director of the Intelligence Division—fondly referred to as DID by everyone under his command—sent her an approving smile. “Well done, Margot.” He blinked a few times and moved his gaze to take in de Grey and Culbreth. “Will you be leaving, then? Knox was just behind me, and Adcock too.”
Culbreth nodded and stood, placing his hat over his blond hair in the same motion. De Grey smoothed his tormented locks back down to hide the hours of frustration his fingers had left in them. “I need to speak to Dilly first, but then I shall, yes.”
Hall arched his brows her way. “Margot?”
“I’ll wait until my mother arrives before I go.” Otherwise she might miss her on the walk to their flat, and then Maman would worry all day. No matter how many times she’d made the trek on her own, no matter how old she got, still her mother worried.
Her prerogative, Maman claimed.
A useless argument, Margot knew.
