“I just want to make sure the Stavanger op gets filled in properly,” he said. “Get Louisa to do it—her writing’s always tidy. See how I’ve done the other Enigma ops, look—I put a Morse E at the start, just a dot, to remind me which flights were connected with the coding machine. Don’t want it to be too obvious.”

I knelt beside Ellen with the book against the bed as I wrote out the details, at his instruction, determined I wasn’t going to weep. Miss Lind watched over my shoulder. When I’d done, and blown on the ink to dry it off, I shut the book.

It felt very final. We all knew he wouldn’t write in it again.

For a moment we were quiet about that.

Then Elisabeth Lind, looking down, smiled her crooked little half smile at me kneeling by the side of the bed.

“I’m Julie,” she said.

“Ellen told me. After you left Windyedge.” I simply couldn’t think of her as anything other than Miss Lind.

“Ellen told me that you seem to think you’re responsible for Pimms Section’s flight leader being a headstrong Scots lunatic.”

“I wanted so badly to help!” I wailed. “I wanted to do something!”

“Buckets of blood!” She sounded exactly like her brother. “You did do something, Louisa Adair! You gave us our only Enigma machine!”

“I could have given it to you as soon as I found it. We could have contacted your commanding officer somehow. And then maybe everything would have worked out differently, and—” I glanced at Jamie. I wasn’t going to be the first to mention again that not a single crew in Pimms or Madeira had survived their last mission.

Miss Lind looked thoughtful. “But, you know, if you hadn’t used it, perhaps it would have been destroyed in one of those early bombing raids, just as the papers were. Or if you hadn’t ever found it, it would have still been in the Limehouse, but you wouldn’t have guessed when the Luftwaffe was coming. And instead, you were always one step ahead of them. Remember the bomber you turned away in the air, that awful night of freezing fog? Maybe that bomber would have killed all of us and destroyed the machine at the same time, if the coded message hadn’t warned you. And B-Flight would have still gone down in flames. Maybe if you hadn’t done anything it would have turned out worse.”

“If you hadn’t recognized Felix Baer whistling his SOS, we might have shot down his plane on Christmas Day,” Jamie put in hoarsely. “If he hadn’t thought you were Calypso, and even if they hadn’t bombed Windyedge, perhaps no one would have ever discovered where he hid the machine.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and realized they were right.