第12章 The Escape

The escape was necessary, but it was also inevitable. Margaret knew that she could not remain at Bletchley while the investigation continued. The traitors were still at large, and they would not hesitate to come after her. She needed to be somewhere safe, somewhere that Hayes's network could not reach. She chose the country house of an old family friend, a woman named Mrs. Whitfield who lived in a remote village in the Lake District. Mrs. Whitfield had known Margaret's father, and she had offered to shelter Margaret during the investigation, to provide a safe haven where she could wait until the danger had passed. Margaret accepted gratefully, and she left Bletchley with heavy heart but with a renewed sense of purpose. She had survived, but she had lost friends, and she had witnessed horrors that she would never forget. The war was not over, and the fight was not finished. But she was still here, still fighting, still believing in the power of truth. And she would not stop. Margaret stood alone on the platform at Bletchley station with a single suitcase and a return ticket she had no intention of using before January. The morning had that thin winter brightness that promises nothing and delivers less, and the porter who wished her a safe journey did not know, as she did, that the woman he had waved off in October was not quite the same woman he had waved in three years before. She had spent the night before in her own quarters for the last time, going over the things she had decided to take and the things she had decided, more carefully, to leave. The algebra text with its mended spine went into the case. Webb's copied pages, sewn into the lining of her coat, went onto her back. The rest of the hut's secrets she had sealed behind the chimney breast where no inventory would ever find them, on the principle that a woman who might be evacuated at a day's notice should travel as if evacuation had been her profession. The train was waiting on the up platform when she walked out, and she handed the porter her case without telling him that it weighed more in paper than in clothing. The journey north took most of a day: Euston packed with soldiers sleeping upright against their kitbags, the corridor windows fogged with forty people's breathing, then the slow climb out of industrial Lancashire into country that looked as though the war had agreed to pass it by. She changed at Oxenholme, missed the connection by four minutes, and used them to buy oranges, which cost more than she remembered. The bus to the village dropped her at a lane end, and the last mile she walked between dry-stone walls with her suitcase knocking her knee at every uneven flag. Mrs. Alice Whitfield turned out to be seventy years of flint wrapped in a cardigan, with a beekeeper's calm hands and a habit of feeding people before questioning them. She had known Margaret's father before the war through some county committee both had found tedious; she wrote to Margaret's mother in Cornwall twice a year and received answers once a decade. The house smelled of wax and woodsmoke. Your room is at the back, she said. The fell keeps the weather off. You'll find I don't ask questions I can answer myself. The days arranged themselves into an unexpected discipline. Margaret carried water, split kindling badly, learned to hold the smoker steady while Mrs. Whitfield robbed the hives, and discovered that hard physical tiredness was a drug no prescription had ever matched. In the evenings she forbade herself cipher-work and broke the rule nightly, re-deriving old systems in her head like a pianist practising on a silent keyboard, because silence itself had become the enemy. She marked the passing days in pencil on the psalter's flyleaf, small strokes that nobody would read as a calendar, and the postman's eleven o'clock rattle became the fixed point around which every morning revolved. Christmas came with snow squeaking underfoot and a chapel service where the congregation numbered nineteen and sang as though outnumbering the Germans single-handedly. Mrs. Whitfield gave her a slab of honeycomb on a plate that had clearly survived three generations of clumsy children, and said, without preamble or pity, that her father had once predicted his daughter would outwait anybody alive. Margaret managed thank you, and then managed tears in the privacy of the back bedroom, which was its own strange gift. She wrote to Dorothy every week and the replies troubled her more than silence would have. They arrived late, they were warm but oddly weightless, and one bore the previous Tuesday's date inside a Friday's postmark. To Brennan she wrote asking for the honest state of things and received two pages of reassurance so bureaucratic they might have been composed by committee. On the ninth of January the frost seized the lane solid, and she made up her mind to request a return; that same evening a motorcycle with a sidecar passed the gate twice at walking pace, engine throttled low, and did not stop either time. Two mornings later a boy came up from the village carrying an envelope, saying only that a gentleman on the Windermere road had paid him a shilling to bring it up first post. The envelope held a single page in Dorothy's careful round script—come back, things are unravelling here, trust nobody's silence—and Margaret stood at the gate reading it until her fingers stiffened around the paper. Whatever else the day had planned, it now meant packing. Mrs. Whitfield received the news without visible surprise, produced a hamper that could have provisioned a patrol, and remarked only that the bees would fly again in February if Margaret cared to see it done properly, which was as close as flint came to affection. They spent the last evening by the kitchen range while wind tested every pane in turn, and the older woman talked at last, unprompted, about Margaret's father: how he had argued three hours over drainage rates and then wept quietly when the vote went against the small men. It was the finest gift anyone had given her all winter, and it weighed less than the letter in her coat pocket, which she checked four times before sleeping and once more at first light. ---