Today's Reading

PROLOGUE
September 7, 1940

Miss Redfern!" snapped Miss Wilkes, causing me to jerk up and my pencil to skitter across the page of my notebook.

"Yes, Miss Wilkes," I said, slowly reaching for an old dispatch to pull over my shorthand practice in hopes that she wouldn't notice.

I needn't have bothered. My supervisor looked distractedly at a clipboard she held in her ringless hands. "You're due for your first sunlamp treatment."

"Sunlamp treatment," I repeated.

"All of us are required to go. It helps keep us healthy, what with the amount of time we're underground," Miss Wilkes explained. "I'm certain that one of the other girls must have mentioned this while training you."

I fought the urge to protest that, in the few days I'd been employed in the typing pool at Prime Minister Churchill's secret underground bunker, there had been so much information to take in that I hardly knew which way was up any longer. The cabinet war rooms had security protocols, shift patterns, air raid and ground invasion warnings. Working there was like being dropped into a foreign land without a dictionary.

"I apologize, Miss Wilkes. I became caught up in my work, and it slipped my mind," I fibbed.

Miss Wilkes shot me a look that seemed to say, A likely story. "Go now while there is a lull before the evening shift change. And remember to secure your notes."

I hurried to tidy my desk. My notes and the old dispatch went into the locked container with a slit at the top that would be taken to the incinerators later so that all potentially sensitive materials could be burned. I had no handbag with me—there really is no need for one when your bed and your desk are separated only by a veritable rabbits' warren of tunnels. Instead, I flung my pistachio green cardigan over my cream-colored blouse with the rounded collar, slung my brown leather gas mask case over my shoulder, touched my hair to make sure the dark brown curls were in place—you never knew whom you would meet in those corridors—and set off with purposeful steps.

Around the corner from the typing pool, however, I hesitated. I'd been warned that taking a sunlamp treatment would require stripping down to my unmentionables and then standing in front of the blasting ultraviolet light with my eyes firmly shut. During busy times, this could mean waiting in queues that stretched down the corridor, and I was not going to stand around without a book. I changed course and headed to the Dock.

I knew the risk I was taking with this extra trip to the barracks, where all of us more junior staff who made up the nerve center of Britain's most secretive, sensitive wartime hub slept during our three-day shifts. I didn't know how things were on the men's side—it was made explicitly clear to me that I would never see that part of our barracks—but descending into the women's Dock meant I was just as likely to find myself alone as I was to be caught up in an assessment of the attractiveness of a newly sewn siren suit, a heated debate of our military strategy in Europe, or a detailed discussion of why some half-wit boyfriend had just left a crying typist or switchboard operator who was clearly the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Really, going to the Dock with a deadline on one's hands was a fool's errand. However, I was fifty pages from the end of Busman's Honeymoon by the incomparable Dorothy L. Sayers, and I needed to see if I was right in my suspicions about who had killed Mr. Noakes.

I was in luck. As I descended the stairs, I found myself nearly alone except for four girls I recognized from the typing pool's night shift playing a rubber of bridge. I nodded a polite but quick hello and scurried over to the bunk that I'd claimed that morning when I'd come underground for my shift.

When I'd taken this job, I'd retained my room with my best friend, Moira, which meant that most of my clothes were still crammed into the wardrobe at our digs on Bina Gardens. I did make sure to take my knitting and bundle up five mystery novels with a leather belt like a schoolgirl to keep me occupied through the sometimes-long nights. I could go without many things during a time of war, but I could not abide the thought of being without books.

With Busman's Honeymoon in my hand, I retreated from the Dock, happy as always to leave the damp, slightly moldy air and the lingering funk of the chemical toilets behind. I'd been told that I would become accustomed to the stench over time, but I very much doubted that.

The corridors were unusually quiet that afternoon, although I passed a pair of clerks ladened with folders and a stone-faced Royal Marine stationed at the base of one of the staircases who barely batted an eye despite my choice of a particularly bold shade of lipstick that day.
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