Princess Elizabeth’s Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal
New York; Bantam Books [2012]
978-0-553-59362-4; $15.00
In the Prologue, Ms. MacNeal sets the stage, with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Lisbon, meeting with Walther Schellenberg, personal aide to Heinrich Himmler. The couple had just gotten “banished” to Bermuda by Churchill, and they are none too happy. Their love was condemned by the Royal Family, for not only was Wallis Simpson a two-time American divorcée, but she was also a close personal friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop’s, Foreign Minister of Germany. In fact, there were rumors that they had slept together.
Germany hopes to put the former King Edward VII back on the throne of Great Britain, along with his disapproved-of-wife, who had never even been given the title of Her Royal Highness. This would, of course, give Germany an easy road to conquering the resolute little island.
The scene then moves to Bletchley Park, a manor house about 50 miles northwest of London, the home of the Government Code and Cipher School. The Poles had passed a reconstructed Enigma machine, used by the Germans, on to the British. Alan Turing and others were learning to use it and working on finding the right configuration to decode Nazi secret messages.
A young woman who works there, Victoria Keeley, and a young codebreaker named Benjamin Batey have a date. Batey, a proverbial nerd, can hardly believe his good luck, and is not paying attention to what is going on when she vamps him and takes away a decrypted message. After a brief sojourn in her rooms, she kicks him out and makes a phone call, saying she has something for her “darling” to see, and that she’s coming to London. She checks into the fashionable Claridge Hotel in Mayfair. She puts the decrypt on the bed, and goes to take a bath. There she is shot between the eyes, and the decrypt disappears.
Head of MI-5 Peter Frain goes to see his “go-to” guy at Bletchley, Edmund Hope, who is trying to suss out the traitorous person rumored to be working there. Perhaps there is a connection?
Meanwhile, our heroine, Maggie Hope is falling into the mud of the obstacle course at “Camp Spook,” somewhere in Scotland. When she had been Churchill’s secretary, she’d never thought of being a spy. But here she is, a member of MI-5, the British secret service. But she fails her training – she just not athletic enough to be dropped behind enemy lines, although she is fluent in both French and German, excellent at math, and a whiz at codebreaking. She is sent back to Peter Frain in London for another assignment. Just before leaving the camp, she gets word that the man she loves, John Sterling, an RAF pilot, has been shot down behind enemy lines: missing, presumed dead.
Her new job is to be ostensibly a math tutor for Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, but she is really there to keep watch on the Princess, to see that nothing happens to her, the heir apparent to the British throne, and to spy out what she can. The Royal Family has decided to stay in England, and they are staying at Windsor, out of the direct flightpath of the Blitz.
Although Maggie is not happy to be in such a secondary “women’s work” sort of role, she rallies when she learns that a German, called Commandant Hess, is receiving radio transmissions sent from Windsor by an unknown. She takes the position and meets her handler, Hugh Thompson, a pleasant and capable, and very good-looking, young man.
Maggie’s flatmate and former colleague at No. 10 Downing Street, the gay secretary to Mr. Churchill, David Greene, agrees to chauffeur Maggie to Windsor. She is greeted by Ainslie, the Royal Butler, who takes her to meet the Princesses Elizabeth, aged 14, and Margaret, aged 8, and their staff. The end of the tour is at her rooms in the Victoria Tower – with the toilet and bath on the roof. (Castles weren’t built with indoor plumbing, don’t you know?) With the ominous “We dress for dinner,” Ainslie leaves Maggie to unpack.
The castle is so cold, and Maggie has so few clothes, she puts on a wool dress, and her coat, and goes downstairs. Then she realizes that she doesn’t know where the Octagon Room is, where dinner will be served. After walking what feels like miles and miles, she sees an apparition in the distance.
It turns out not to be an apparition, but a wounded war veteran of the RAF, Gregory Strathcliffe, who is currently serving at Windsor as an Equerry to the King. He takes her to the room. She enters and is rebuked for being late and for not dressing up. She has witty response, which takes the rebuke aback. The Gregory enters, says that, because they are late, they should go out. Maggie agrees, causing the rebuke to be discomfited.
They go to a pub in town, where Maggie gets to meet 3 ladies-in-waiting, all recently returned from London, where they stayed at Claridge’s. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant stay, since there were air raids and bombs and not enough clothing rations to buy anything decent. Maggie mentions that she’d read in the paper about a suicide there, and the young women agree that that wasn’t fun, either, will all of the police running around. When one of the ladies gets ill as a reaction to the food, Maggie follows her to the Ladies’, learning that she is having morning sickness, and went to the city to see a doctor. She is, indeed, pregnant, and no one else knows. Her name is Lady Lily Howell.
The next day, Maggie is talking to Crawfie, Miss Marian Crawford, who is the governess to the two Princesses, when the Princesses burst in with awful news. They were out riding with Lady Lily and one of the grooms. Lady Lily went on ahead, and fell off her horse! When they came up, Margaret didn’t see her, but Elizabeth did – she had no head! Yes, they say, it is most horribly true, and it must be, for the police come and interview everyone. Later, Maggie goes to see the detective in charge, and tells him about Lady Lily being pregnant.
But why was Lily killed? Maggie goes to check and finds the place where the wire was attached that decapitated her. She also goes to check in Maggie’s rooms, and discovers some books gone. She finds them with the housekeeper, and takes a copy of The Phantom of the Opera with Lily’s bookplate in it. When she sits down in her room to look at it, she discovers something under the endpapers: a decryption of a message from a German U-boat commander. It was dated the day that Lily and the others were at Claridge’s – the day the woman was shot in her bath. What was Lily involved with?
Princess Elizabeth is not impressed with having to learn math, until Maggie tells her about Mary, Queen of Scots and Sir Anthony Babington, who communicated in code based on the frequency of letters in the message, and how Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, broke the code. Elizabeth becomes very interested, and creates her own code. She plans on trying it out with the man she’s sweet on, Prince Philip of Greece, who is now in the Royal Navy. The Princesses also teach Maggie about the dungeons in the basement, and the secret passage out of the castle.
On another front, Maggie’s handler is changed from Hugh to a fellow named Nevins. Hugh predicts that will not be a Good Thing, and he is right. Nevins meets openly with Maggie, who tells him off for being so unprofessional. He tells her he doesn’t take orders from women, and does not give her the information that she had asked Hugh to get for her, and which hugh has passed on to Nevins. Maggie is revolted by Nevins’ condescension and patronizing attitude.
She is vindicated in her opinion of Nevins when Gregory asked her who the man was she’d been seen with. She begins to work with the Princesses on the show they are to put on for Christmas, a version of Sleeping Beauty, and she works on the sets with Gregory. They also play Sardines, a hide-and-seek game, and Gregory makes a pass at her, which she rebuffs, saying that she likes him, but “not in that way.” Then she breaks into Gregory’s office and films Lady Lily’s file.
Meeting with Nevins again, he orders her to give him the film, and calls her “Darling.” She tells him he was seen with her and she was asked about it. She says Frain will not get the film unless it is picked up by Hugh. When Nevins says that Hugh is a nobody, she tells him that Hugh is a better agent than he is, for he – Nevins – is all ego and no integrity. Nevins calls her a bitch.
Determined to solve the murder of Lady Lily, Maggie goes back to the scene of the crime. There she sees the Royal Falconer with his birds at the top of the Castle, and she convinces him to tell her what he saw. He doesn’t want to tell, but finally does: it was Mr. Tooke, the head gardener. He was still angry at the Royal Family for having his German-born wife taken away to a camp, where she died. Lady Lily didn’t have to go to a camp, and she was German, too. Maggie reports this to the detective in charge.
Maggie had wanted to meet with her father, have dinner, and have her father explain to her the many secrets that seemed to swirl around her family, but her father stood her up. Instead he sent her a book belonging to her mother – a volume of Grimm’s fairytales. When she is with Princess Elizabeth, the Princess sneezes, and spills tea on the book. She is ever so sorry, but Maggie then sees what she has not seen before: little pinpricks above certain letters. There is code in this book!
Maggie meets with Hugh and tells him about all she has learned. They skate together while talking – she has been exercising all the time she has been at Windsor, and is much stronger now than when she was such a failure at Camp Spook. Hugh agrees to get her father’s MI-5 file, which he does. That, plus the code in the Grimm’s adds up to some disappointing things.
Then it is Christmas, and the Princesses get to do their show. Everyone is there, including Frain and Hugh, Churchill and his secretary, David Greene, Gregory, who has become even more prickly, but does show an interest in David, and all of the Royal Household.
This is capped off by a kidnapping of several people; the escape of several spies; the meeting of a U-boat, off the coast of England; several good guys being wounded; and a daring rescue at sea. This last bit seems to be – as far as I know – out of the canon of World War II British experiences, but it has been built up to in a very exciting, and seemingly true-to-history way.
MacNeal has done extensive research on MI-5, Bletchley Park, and Windsor and the people who live there, as proven by her lengthy historical note. So much rings true. It’s an exciting and plausible mystery, with a plucky heroine and excellently-drawn secondary figures. Highly recommended. ~lss-r
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My book.
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