The Black Hand, vol. 11

Welcome back!

Omg, it’s so nice to be here! I had a lovely holiday, and I hope you managed to get some time away from all this too *waves hands vaguely at all this*.

I do want to tell you about my vacation, but I have a lot to share with you in this newsletter, so I’ll save the vacation nostalgia for the next edition. And I’m back a little early – remember how I said I wouldn’t send out another newsletter until February? Well LOL, that plan went awry, but I’m okay with it because it went awry for Exciting Reasons.

So let’s get on with it!

THE KILLING CODE cover

This is one of the Exciting Reasons! The beautiful cover of THE KILLING CODE was released today through Barnes & Noble, and I’m rapt – I hope you like it!

Here’s the blurb:

Virginia, 1943: World War II is raging in Europe and on the Pacific front when Kit Sutherland is recruited to help the war effort as a codebreaker at Arlington Hall, a former girls’ college now serving as the site of a secret US Signals Intelligence facility. But Kit is soon involved in another kind of fight: Government girls are being brutally murdered in Washington DC, and when Kit stumbles onto a bloody homicide scene, she is drawn into the hunt for the killer.
 
To find the man responsible for the gruesome murders and bring him to justice, Kit joins forces with other female codebreakers at Arlington Hall—gossip queen Dottie Crockford, sharp-tongued intelligence maven Moya Kershaw, and cleverly resourceful Violet DuLac from the segregated codebreaking unit. But as the girls begin to work together and develop friendships—and romance—that they never expected, two things begin to come clear: the murderer they’re hunting is closing in on them…and Kit is hiding a dangerous secret…

The official hashtag for the book is #TheKillingCode 🔑, and you can now add the book on GoodReads, if that’s a thing you’d like to do. While it won’t be available on shelves until September, you’ll now find it popping up on the Barnes & Noble website and other places for preorder. Outstanding 😊

THE KILLING CODE preorder sale

ALSO – and this is another Exciting Reason – if you preorder THE KILLING CODE now through Barnes & Noble you can get 25% off!

This sale is only on from January 26-28 (US dates), so please do grab a cheap copy while you can.

The preorder offer is available for both hardcover and ebook – just remember to use code PREORDER25 at the checkout!

THE KILLING CODE excerpt

I’ve been so very grateful for the support I’ve received from my newsletter folk over the last year (you are all officially boss-level, for real) and my publisher agreed that it would be awesome if I could share a little excerpt from THE KILLING CODE with you, to say thank you. I hope you like it!

And I’m about to float away on all these happy feelings now! So I’ll see you again in Feb and sign off with lots of love, while finishing with a grand flourish: Here it is – an excerpt from the first chapter of THE KILLING CODE, I really hope you enjoy the book in September 😊

xxEllie

1

We knew, from our training, about cryptographic continuity— how these new

codes were based on old codes, and some of the old elements were bound to

show up again.

— BRIGID GLADWELL

June 1942

This is the story of a murderer and about the fast friendship between girls.

Of course, the Great Murderer was the war, in which young men were dashed to pieces while their mothers cried for them back home and millions of innocents were killed by hate in the terrible ovens of Europe. It was not enough merely to love and to hope that the world could be changed by loving. Change would come only with gunshots and battle stations and bomb blasts— love and hope were insufficient.

But it was love and hope that created an immense change of fortune in a third-​story room in the mansion schoolhouse of Arlington Hall during the summer of 1942, where Katherine Sutherland lay dying.

Katherine had been dying for most of her life. She had been a sickly infant and a sickly child, sent in her time to more doctors than she could count. Now she was a dying young woman, counting each gasping breath. She’d fought to be allowed to come to this finishing school, where the hunt course and the riding arena and the hockey fields were largely out of her reach. She’d fought to complete her classes in deportment and literature and astronomy and botany and good homemaking. She would never make a good home with some handsome smiling man returned from the war, but it comforted her to know that in a different world, in a different, healthy body, she might have had the option.

Options were the thing.

Katherine fought to die in her own way and on her own terms. Mainly that meant fighting to stay where she was happy even at her worst, on the grounds of the school, rather than returning to the clammy embrace of her parents in Pennsylvania, who had long ago realized that nothing they or the doctors did was going to help, that she was never going to make a match or improve the family fortunes. Katherine knew she was a lemon.

Lemon girls, forced to be brave, get to set their own terms.

So Katherine stayed. As the schoolgirls in other rooms packed up for their summer break— a break from which they’d never return, as it happened— she lay on her bed in her nightgown, with the big window open. She looked through it to the cherry trees outside and held the hand of a girl beneath notice because she wore a maid’s uniform. This was Kathleen Hopper, and she was Katherine’s companion.

Companion and nurse and lady’s maid, Kathleen had been hired four years previously because she wasn’t Black (Katherine’s mother had insisted on a white girl). A sickly girl needed someone to help her dress, read with her, fix and carry her meals, walk at her pace while others ran. If it was a confinement for Kathleen— a little like she was slowly dying herself— then that was just the price you paid to hold down a good job. With five siblings back in Scott’s Run, she was lucky to have a job. But the daily routine of Katherine’s life had been the entire existence of Kathleen’s for so long that the barriers between employer and domestic had thoroughly broken down, which is why they held hands.

Maybe that wasn’t the only reason they held hands.

Now here they are— two lemon girls, lives and minds so intertwined they can’t imagine one without the other. Kathleen truly believes that Katherine is only alive because of her. Not in a practical sense, but in a soul sense, like she’s easing some of her own energy into Katherine’s body. But things have started to change for the worse. She’s given and she’s given, but it hasn’t been enough, and there’s nothing Kathleen can do about it.

They’ve kept pace with each other over these long summer days, reading Austen and Euclid aloud, talking about the way the stars turn in their glimmering constellations and which horse in the stables is the nicest for patting. Kathleen has fed Katherine possets and mopped the floors to keep off the dust, and now the windows are open on a glorious soft afternoon.

Katherine folds both their hands into a tented arch and speaks in her breathless voice. “Did you ever think about it, the way our names are so similar? I mean, the day you first came, I said—”

“I know what you said.” Kathleen adjusts her seat on the bed. “I was there. I remember.”

Katherine isn’t deterred. “I said, Oh my, we’re like name twins. That was the best day.”

Kathleen remembers that day’s terrors: whether her new employers would like her, whether they’d be awful or take advantage, like her mother had told her sometimes happens. Pressed into service at fourteen, Kathleen was dismayed to find herself in charge of the daily care of a girl her own age. At first it had felt as if she and Katherine were gasping for the same air. But then it became normal and easier, like they were breathing together.

Now Kathleen says nothing in reply, and Katherine, who can least afford to speak, goes on. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do in the fall? When all this is over?”

Kathleen shakes her head, because all this is too big, and she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. Katherine is her all this and has been for some time.

“I’ve been thinking,” Katherine says, then pauses to draw breath. Each breath is like shrapnel in her lungs. She leans forward for help with a sip of honey tea, settles her back against the pillows. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided. But you have to decide, too.”

Kathleen, who knows her decisions mostly mean nothing in this world, plays along. “What have you decided? And don’t tell me to start giving away your jewelry again, because you know that’s stupid and I won’t do it.”

Katherine smiles because she can’t laugh, but then her smile sobers. “I’m not talking about the jewelry, Katie.”

Katherine is Katherine and Kathleen is Katie, so other people can keep them straight. But in the night, they are only Kitty and Katie, which is just how it is when you’re cuddled together in solace. Four years, and Kathleen is praying for four more, although she can tell it isn’t going to happen.

“Shut up,” she whispers, but Katherine will not shut up.

“Listen, and listen good.” Katherine’s tone is dangerous now. “When all this is over, they’ll tell you to go back to West Virginia. A girl like you, with a head full of geometry and piano playing and crossword puzzles and the Latin names of plants—”

“— and how to steam iron and lay a tea tray and light a fire in the grate,” Kathleen says, ever practical.

Katherine shakes their joined hands. “You know that’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. Not anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kathleen says, but her throat is thick.

“This is the last thing, okay?” Katherine looks out the window, looks back. “It’s the best thing I can give you to make up for all the coughing and the bad days.” She waves to the foot of the bed. Her trunks are arranged there, and Kathleen always keeps them neat. “Listen to me— listen. I’ll go, and then everything will need to be packed up. Sent home.”

“No,” Kathleen says.

“That’s right. No.” Katherine has fine blue eyes, and at the moment, they’re clear and hot. She clutches both hands with her best friend in all the world. “I want you to take my big trunk, Katie. It has everything in it you’ll need. Clothes. Papers. References. Not the jewelry, because someone would make a fuss about that, but money, yes, that they don’t know about. Enough to set you on your way. Enough to launch you.”

It’s like she’s talking about a boat setting sail. She’s giving Kathleen a boat. Kathleen’s heart is pounding. What the hell will she do with a boat?

What will she do without one?

“Someone will notice,” Kathleen says, urgent. She doesn’t want to think about this. The idea of going back to her parents’ tiny shack in Scott’s Run— back to copperheads and coal dust and bitter wind whisking up through the plank floor— fills her head with a rushing, panicked sound. But she doesn’t want to think of launching into the unknown, alone.

“Nope.” Katherine shakes her head. “They’ll notice me and what a trouble I am. And they’ll probably take what they can carry— the little trunk, my blue handbag. But the big trunk will need to be packed up, and the rugs and blankets and everything will need to be cleared out, and you’ll be here to do that.”

She coughs again. More honey tea. A respite in her breathing. “I heard from Miss Grey— they’ve sold Arlington Hall. It’s going to the War Department or some such, and you know how muddled everything is with the trains and the gas rations. It could be weeks before anyone notices the trunk has been mislaid. You could take it to Union Station. You could take it anywhere. It’s just dresses to them. No one will care.”

“I will care,” Kathleen says. Her tears are so well trained they stay on her cheeks without falling.

“You’ve always cared,” Katherine says, then gently, “and this is how I can care back. It’s all I can offer, but I give it to you. You can be me to be you. Say you’ll take it, Katie. Say you’ll live, even when I can’t…”