Page 4 of Apt to be Suspicious
Sunday, October 19th
“Is that you, Pen? Tea?” A voice called out from a room by the stairs as Pen reached the first floor landing, making her pause before going up the last flight to her room.
“Actual tea?” Pen called back. She was coming in from hall, and she had reading to do. More importantly, she had a slightly tedious problem set to finish. On the other hand, she was not eager to get into it.
“We thought we’d put in our remaining dust from last month’s ration and get a pot or two out of it?” Audrey sounded hopeful about it. Tea was currently on even shorter rations than usual, two ounces a month. They’d got this month’s ration distributed two days ago, but of course everyone was hoarding it still. There were some hopes they’d be able to get three ounces in November, apparently.
“Minute, then.” Pen went up the next flight of stairs, automatically hanging her gown on the hook by the door so she wouldn’t forget it in the morning. She considered her options, and briskly changed out of her frock into a nightdress, dressing gown, and slippers. Then she rummaged for her last bit of tea from the near-empty tin. She had maybe a teaspoon left, if one were optimistic about the dust. She dumped it into a smaller tin that would fit in her pocket and brought it back downstairs.
By the time she turned up, Audrey had acquired Vesta, making up that knot of friendships and those who spent time together. They were also the only three in second year who were magical, which made certain conversations rather easier. Pen nudged the door closed and pressed her hand against it, muffling the sound just enough. It probably wasn’t needed. Pen was here. Gladys, who had the other room in the attic corridor above, would be elsewhere until curfew. There shouldn’t be anyone coming up the stairs for a bit.
It made the sitting room a trifle crowded, but none of them minded much. Pen handed over the container of tea, and Audrey dumped it in her pot. “Just put it on to steep.”
Pen nodded and settled down. “How much work are we all putting off? A problem set for me.”
“I’ve got reading.” Vesta wanted to be an archaeologist; she always had reading. If she didn’t have reading, she assigned herself more, many excavation reports both historical and more recent.
“Preparing for a lab.” Audrey expected she’d do an apprenticeship in alchemy, but right now she was focusing on chemistry. Cousins, certainly, but with decidedly different goals.
“Right.” Pen stuck her slippered feet out in front of her, eyeing the fireplace. It wasn’t lit yet, of course. It was technically too early in the year for that. But Audrey had a couple of bricks there that were charmed for heat, with a little help.
Audrey snorted. “You always want a bit more heat. Vesta, can you feed the bricks, or shall I?” Coal was a problem. Magic was somewhat less so.
“I can,” Pen objected. “Just.” She shrugged. She was more used to living without the show of magic or the comforts of it. Grandfather had people in and out at home, of course, and that was a problem. And when she visited Aunt Agnes, of course she couldn’t use magic there.
“You can do it next time.” Aubrey shrugged and went to rest her fingers lightly on the edge of the bricks, letting out a breath as she fed a bit of magic into the stove. “And it’ll keep the tea warmer.”
“Efficiency.” Vesta and Pen said it in unison and then started laughing. Vesta was her age, and she’d been in the ATS. She talked about what she’d done in the war a little— mostly dispatch work— but not so much that it was awkward that Pen never discussed that topic at all.
Audrey was a little younger. She’d gone into the ATS, but she’d only barely been out of training when things ended. If it weren’t for the three of them being magical, they might not have spent so much time together. But this was how things were, and Pen was glad of their friendship. Also, she learned things from them, about all sorts of subjects.
Audrey sat back down, sticking her own toes toward the stove. “We missed you at hall, Pen. Did you come in late?”
“On time, thank you.” She’d been so firmly trained into that during the war. “But I was talking to Reddington.” She was in her last year, also reading maths, and she’d had several ideas about what Pen might do to get her tutor a bit more onside with additional reading. Miss Sarginson was an exceedingly competent theoretical mathematician, but she wasn’t a cryptographer. And more to the point, Pen couldn’t really talk to her about cryptography, even to get a recommendation of who else to talk to.
Not that she could talk about any of that here, either. One didn’t talk about being at Bletchley Park, not unless it was someone who’d worked in the same hut, and what they’d worked on was already shared knowledge. Not with people who’d just been on the grounds. Pen even knew of men and women who’d met at the park, working different places, and who did not know what the other had done. If the woman had been doing the maths or the code-breaking, or the filing. Not that the filing hadn’t also been critical, actually.
“No luck there?” Audrey sounded sympathetic.
“She had a few ideas of things to try. And I need to ask around at the Academy again. I don’t think anything’s changed, but maybe it has.” The thing was, there at least, she could ask about something she’d been chewing on for years now: namely, what would happen if you applied chronological or locational magic to encoding, rather than the endless discs and rotations of the current machines. It would be so much harder to break, and it was entirely possible the entire machine could be passed off as just better randomisation.
The problem with the current codes— well, current as of the war— was that people were human. The actual people sending the codes would do things that were less random than they ought to be. They’d repeat a code word, or they’d use the same starting phrase. If you had enough from the same person in a short enough period of time, it was possible to brute-force some of the code-breaking.
But a code that relied on the chronological or locational information as part of the randomisation, that would be much harder to crack. There were still problems with the idea. Pen knew that. But she didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it, or even who she could talk to about it. She’d heard there were a couple of Academy tutors who might know something, but none of them were taking new tutorials this year.
So she was left with what Miss Sarginson knew. That was quite a lot, and if Pen did as she expected on her exams and earned a First, she could go on from there. Maybe. Probably. But it meant that her actual university time, what she’d been told to anticipate and enjoy and frolic in, was rather faded.
There were parties, but no one asked her to them. The food was rationed, so that couldn’t even be a moment of abundance outside her closely managed accounts. The city was gorgeous, and the libraries were wonderful. She loved going for a walk along the Isis or the Cherwell, or finding herself in a museum. But that did not stop her from feeling like she was treading water and wasting time.
Oh, she went around to the lectures at the Academy. They were often interesting, and even when it wasn’t interesting to her directly, she enjoyed watching how other people reacted to whatever topic was at hand. There was one on Tuesday, when she should have time, about the role of rivers in communication over history. None of those things individually made her ears prick up, but the combination somehow did. And there might be something useful for living here, with two rivers right on her doorstep, one of them the Thames. Or as local usage had it, the Isis.
Pen was thinking so hard she missed half a sentence until Audrey nudged her with one foot. “I said, have you noticed anything odd so far this term?”
“Odd? What sort of odd. Sorry. I was thinking.” Pen offered the apology automatically. She meant it, but she also knew that saying the words mattered.
“I heard one of the men— um, posh, has one of those nicknames, has a laugh like a horse. Brown hair, not blond.” Audrey offered it.
“That’s not very identifying.” Vesta reeled off a list of names. “Bump, Biggs, Cart, Heffalump, Cog, Tugs, Handy, Ritz, Tango?”
