Windflower Wedding. Elizabeth Elgin

do,’ Tatiana whispered. ‘And thanks, Daisy.’

      ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

      ‘For being my friend – and for understanding. And tomorrow, before I leave, we’ll go to see the rooks – okay?’

      ‘The good old rooks,’ Daisy smiled. ‘You bet we will!’

      Keth had not done so much writing since his student days. He put down his pen, rubbing the back of his hand, frowning.

      He would be gone for ten days, they told him – certainly no longer than two weeks. So write your letters to the people you usually send them to, they said; address them and date them as if you were still in Washington, and write them as if you were still in Washington too.

      ‘But my mother and fiancée will carry on writing to that address – I won’t get any letters!’ he had protested.

      ‘They’ll be redirected to you. You’ll get them – eventually.’

      ‘But why? And where am I going for ten days?’ Surely not another stupid course trying to make a soldier out of him when all he was good at was mathematics and code-breaking.

      And then an awful thought filled his head and he quickly dismissed it because they couldn’t be sending him to make another parachute jump? He shuddered to remember the last, the only, jump he had made; tried to shut out the look of disbelief on his instructor’s face. And far worse than that had been the awful bruising he got on landing and how lucky he was, he’d been told, not to have been badly injured, and to go back to signalling because surely he was better at signalling than parachuting out of a plane!

      ‘Where you’re going you’ll know when you’ve been kitted out,’ he was told. ‘And you can leave your stuff here because here’s where you’ll be coming back to.’

      ‘I see,’ he’d said, but he hadn’t understood a word of it because they still weren’t giving straight answers to straight questions. All he knew was that the muscular sergeant major he encountered on his first night at Castle McLeish was a drill instructor who supervised assault courses and who took great delight in putting officers with soft hands through it time and time again. He could also be very insulting – respectfully insulting, that was!

      So Keth had written two letters to his mother and four to Daisy and he would have to write at least two more because usually he wrote to Daisy every day.

      Two of the letters he had supposedly written from Kentucky where he was having a weekend with Bas and Kitty’s parents, told how delighted they were that Kitty and Drew were engaged and how sad Mrs Amelia was not to be having the time of her life organizing engagement showers and fussing over her daughter’s trousseau. He felt all kinds of a heel as he wrote them.

      Trouble was, he had seen no evidence yet of anything in the least familiar to him. As far as he was concerned, Castle McLeish was little better than a drill camp and Keth Purvis was being toughened up for something that this far had nothing to do with Enigma nor bombes nor code-breaking. Something, somewhere, didn’t fit and the more he thought about it, the more apprehensive he became.

      If only somebody would say – in answer to his oft-asked question – ‘Yes, Purvis, this is what you are here to do,’ then go on to explain exactly what it was they wanted of him and why he was going away for ten to fourteen days. It was a simple enough request to make but it had not been answered. Nor had anyone looked him straight in the eye and that, he decided, was what made him even more apprehensive.

      Well, he’d had enough! He laid down his pen, picked up his cap, in case it became official, and made his way to the mess where he knew he would find the adjutant. And he would have answers to his questions; eyeball-to-eyeball answers, or his name wasn’t Keth Purvis!

      He had waited his time in the mess; waited until the adjutant was alone, then walked across the room to face him.

      ‘A word, if you please – sir!’

      The adjutant recognized the narrowed eyes and jutting jaw and asked him if it wouldn’t wait until tomorrow.

      No, Keth said, it wouldn’t. Either he got a straight answer now to a couple of questions he wanted to ask or he would put in a request to see the Commanding Officer!

      That was why he sat here now, in the outer office. Wait, he had been told. The Commanding Officer would see him in just a minute. The minute had stretched out to fifteen; the customary waiting time for all subordinates intent upon wasting the CO’s time. A heel-cooling period.

      Yet Keth did not want to cool down. He wanted to know why he had come from Washington only to do physical jerks and be ignored when he asked the sane and sensible question: what the hell was he doing here?

      The phone on the ATS sergeant’s desk rang. Keth wondered why every army girl here was a sergeant. This one was a good-looker; hair like Lyn Carmichael’s. She smiled and told him to go in. He jumped to his feet, hoping his stare hadn’t been too obvious, then knocked on the door she indicated.

      ‘Enter!’

      Keth closed the door behind him, came to attention and saluted.

      ‘At ease, Purvis.’ He was not invited to sit, so he stood feet apart, relaxing his shoulders, hands behind back. ‘Now the way we do things here, Purvis, is not to make a b nuisance of ourselves. We speak only when spoken to and we don’t ask questions – right?’

      ‘Sir …’ Keth acknowledged cautiously, because he had been speaking out of turn and he had made a nuisance of himself, he supposed.

      ‘Has the nature of what goes on in this establishment been lost on you, then? Did you never wonder why you had been asked to leave letters behind you?’

      ‘Yes. And I wondered – with respect, sir – what kind of a course I was going on, for about a fortnight. I thought I would be doing the work I did at Bletchley Park, but I can see no indication of it here.’

      ‘Enigma, you mean? Well, you’re right. We only know about Enigma here. We know about a lot of things.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’ Keth’s mouth had gone dry. He was beginning to wish he had left well alone.

      If you’d kept your mouth shut for just another day, I could have given you the whole story, but since it seems you can’t,’ the senior officer paused to let his words sink in, ‘since you want to know why you were brought back from Washington, I’ll tell you.

      ‘We had your card marked, Captain – just in case we wanted something done by someone who had a working knowledge of the Enigma machine. And then we found we did and we want you for a courier’s job. And please let me finish,’ he snapped as Keth opened his mouth to speak. ‘There are any of a dozen other men could do the job and a damned sight more efficiently than you; men who don’t ask questions nor throw their weight about as you have been doing! But none of those men has your knowledge of Enigma, you see.’

      ‘Courier?’ Keth breathed, running his tongue round his top lip. ‘Deliver something?’ Was that what all the fuss was about, for Pete’s sake?

      ‘No. We – They – want something picking up. From occupied France.’

      ‘Ha!’ Keth’s body sagged. Then he straightened his shoulders, stared ahead and asked of the regimental photograph on the wall, ‘And if I don’t want to be parachuted into occupied France, sir?’

      ‘Then you can start packing your bags now and I’ll guarantee you a seat on the very next plane back to Washington! You asked to return to UK. You knew there would be conditions attached. You were specifically told so! What’s the matter with you, man – got a yellow streak?’

      ‘No, sir. Only when it comes to parachuting!’

      ‘Hm. Understandable, I suppose, when your one and only jump was an utter fiasco, according to your records. That’s why you won’t be parachuting in.’