The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “—boss her about like her mother does?”

  Mab sighed.

  Dear Philip, Osla thought. I have, if you will pardon the phrase, made a royal muff of things.

  Chapter 12

  September 1940

  Hallo, can we sit here?”

  Two weeks ago, Beth would have jumped out of her skin. Now she felt so weary and low, all she did was nod at the two young men who joined her table in the mansion dining hall.

  “I know you.” The massively built fellow with the black hair paused as he set down his tray. “You were at the first meeting of the Mad Hatters.”

  “. . . What?”

  “The literary society. We did Through the Looking-Glass, and at the second meet-up, Giles brought bread and margarine, moaning how Alice at least got butter when she had tea with the Mad Hatter. We’ve been the Mad Hatters Tea Party ever since. Less pompous than the BP Literary Society.” The black-haired fellow snapped his fingers. “You were only at the first meet-up, weren’t you? Don’t tell me . . . Beth Finch.” A grin. “I’m good with names.”

  Beth managed some kind of smile, pushing her food around her plate. It was two thirty in the morning, middle of night shift, and the converted dining room smelled of Brylcreem, stale fat, and kidneys on toast. All around, night-shift workers were grabbing seats, some half-asleep, some bright eyed and joking as if this were midday break at any ordinary job. Beth’s stomach still wasn’t used to cafeteria-style cooking, and after nearly a month her skin should have stopped prickling when she was surrounded by strangers, but it just wouldn’t. “Mr.—Zarb?” she managed to say as he and his friend slung in opposite.

  “Call me Harry. This is Alan,” he added, indicating the young man beside him, who stared at the ceiling as he munched. “Alan Turing. We all call him the Prof, because he’s such a clever bugger . . .”

  Everyone here seemed to go by nicknames or first names. Everyone here seemed eccentric, too—look at Mr. Turing (Beth couldn’t bring herself to think of a man she’d just met as either Alan or the Prof), with an ancient tie holding up his flannel trousers instead of a belt.

  “These kidneys are abysmal,” Harry Zarb went on cheerfully. “Not fit for a dog. If my son were here, he’d say we need to get a dog, so the kidneys wouldn’t go to waste. All conversational roads lead to requests for a puppy, at least in my house—”

  Beth had always wanted a dog, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. Fleas . . .

  “I saw you headed into the Cottage yesterday,” Harry went on, addressing Beth. “Knox’s section? You must be a clever one. Dilly only takes the brainy girls for his harem—”

  Beth burst into tears.

  “Steady on—” Harry fumbled for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said harem. No one means anything off-color by it. Dilly’s a good chap—”

  “Excuse me,” Beth sobbed, and ran out of the room.

  Bletchley Park at night might have been the dark side of the moon: every hut window blacked out to block the smallest chink of light. Beth fumbled her way across the lawn, tripped over a wooden bat left over from someone’s afternoon rounders game, and finally just stopped, worn out to the bone.

  It was exhausting, spending your day being stupid. Over three weeks she’d been working at the Cottage: staring at blocks of Enigma code, trying to manipulate her cardboard rods the way she’d been shown, trying to make sense of the nonsense. Hour after hour, day after day. Beth knew she was a dolt, but you’d think with three weeks of solid concentration she might achieve something. There was something on the other side of the curtain of code, she could feel it, but she couldn’t get there. She was stymied. Thoroughly dished, darling, as Osla would have drawled. Utterly nobbled. Completely graveled.

  “You’re obsessing too much,” Peggy Rock had said. “Think of it as a word game.”

  “I don’t understand it—”

  “You don’t really have to. Doing this work is a bit like driving a car without having a clue what’s under the bonnet. Just have at it.”

  Peggy had been very encouraging; so were all the other girls. But they had their own mountain of work; none of them could stand looking over Beth’s shoulder all day. They sat with their crib charts and Italian dictionaries, flipping lettered rods about, and periodically someone would say something inexplicable like “Got a beetle here . . . ,” and someone else would say, “I’ve got a starfish,” and send Beth even deeper into despair.

  “It’s all Greek to me,” she burst out her first week, and Dilly Knox had chortled, “M’dear, I wish it were!”

  “He’s a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek,” Peggy whispered, also laughing, and Beth shriveled in her chair. Dilly was very kind, but he got so wrapped up in his own work that he barely seemed to know where he was, much less anyone else. The only reason Beth could think why she hadn’t been sacked by now was because everyone was too busy to realize what a dismal flop she was.

  And then to go home every single day and face her mother, so hurt she wouldn’t even speak to Beth, even when Beth turned over her entire Bletchley Park salary as Mother insisted . . . “You have no idea what you’re doing to her,” Dad had said yesterday, shaking his head. Osla and Mab were giving Beth a wide berth; Beth flinched when she remembered how she’d hissed at them, but she wasn’t sorry. Osla shouldn’t have meddled. Beth Finch didn’t belong here, and that was a fact.

  I’m packing it in, she thought. Tomorrow. Three weeks ago she wouldn’t have dreamed of marching up to the imposing Christmas-cake façade of the mansion and resigning, but now she knew she could screw up the courage.

  Only a few girls were inside the Cottage when Beth slipped back inside—most worked days alongside Dilly. Sliding out of her cardigan, Beth sank behind her desk looking at the mess of paper slips.

  “The thing about the Enigma machine,” Peggy had said (though Beth hadn’t even seen an Enigma machine), “is that it’s got a great big gap we can exploit. You press the A key on the keyboard, an electrical current passes through the three wheels and a reflector, which sends the current back through the wheels and lights up the bulb of a different alphabet letter on the lampboard—A scrambles out as, say, F. Press the A key again, and another current goes through, and this time it scrambles out as Y. There’s no direct equivalent, A won’t always equal F—A always comes out different; that’s why Enigma’s so hard to crack. Except for one thing, thank goodness. The machine won’t let A ever come out as A. No letter can ever be encrypted as itself.”

  “That’s a gap?” Beth had said, utterly adrift.

  “About as wide as the English Channel, duckie. Look at any block of encrypted letters: ADIPQ. Well, you know A is any letter but A, D is any letter but D . . .” Peggy had paused to light a cigarette. “Most messages that are encrypted have common phrases or words—cribs, we call them. For Italian Enigma, most messages start out with the officer the message is intended for: Per Comandante. So, slide through each block of letters looking for a string where not one letter matches up with P-E-R-X-C-O-M-A-N-D-A-N-T-E—the X for the space between the words—and there you are; it’s a match. I’m not saying it’s easy,” she added. “We’ve been banging our heads on Italian Enigma for months, trying to figure out if it’s the same machine they used in Spain in the thirties when Dilly broke their codes before. But this is how it’s done—this is how you find your way in.” Peggy saw Beth’s despairing look. “Look, it’s a bit like playing Hangman in a foreign language. You have a phrase that’s all blank spaces, you guess a letter that’s common in most words, and maybe it fills one or two slots in the phrase. Then you guess another letter, and the more you get, the more of the phrase you can see.” She smiled. “What I’m saying is, stop focusing and let your mind play.”

  WIQKO QOPBG JEXLO began the code in front of Beth, five-letter block after five-letter block. She looked at the clock. Three in the morning.

  Without any hope at all, she put in PERXCOMANDANTE for the machine’s right-hand wheel and began t
rying different positions—rodding, Peggy called it, because of the slim cardboard rods with letters printed along them in the order they appeared in the wiring of each Enigma wheel. Peggy had shown Beth how to slide the rods under the encoded text to try to find a point where the text of those all-important common phrases began to appear. Cribs, Beth reminded herself, not phrases. Everything has a special name here. It sounded easy, looking for places where there was no letter overlap, but there were seventy-eight different trials to make in order to cover all twenty-six positions of each of the machine’s three wheels . . .

  Her eyes were aching by the time she found something. The first three letters paired up with the rod, P-E-R . . . but it gave the fourth letter as S, not X. She nearly switched over to the next, but paused.

  Is there another crib starting PERS?

  Beth wavered, then swiped Dilly’s Italian dictionary and flipped to P. Persona . . . personale . . .

  “Jean,” she asked the nearest girl, “could personale be a crib?” It was the first time she’d addressed anyone in the Cottage unprompted.

  “Maybe?” came the distracted answer. Beth swiveled in her chair, flipping her plait over one shoulder. “Personale,” she muttered. Meaning “Personal for.” Surely the Italian navy had occasion to mark things Personal for ____. It gave her five more letter couplings to check: she had P-E-R-S; now to try for O-N-A-L-E—

  Clicks. She’d heard the other girls tossing that word around for weeks, and now she saw why, because things were going click right on the rods in front of her. Direct clicks when both letters of a crib phrase came up side by side on the same rod; Dilly called them beetles for some reason. Then cross-clicks when one crib letter came up on one rod, and the other on a second rod; Dilly called those starfish, and Beth’s breath stopped when she realized she had one. She hadn’t been able to see it before, it hadn’t made sense, but suddenly this bit right in front of her came swimming out of the rows of letters.

  Well, if it was “personal for,” then it stood to reason that next there would be a name, a rank, an honorific . . . She pulled out two letters, N-O. Beth dropped her rods and went pawing through the cribs again. Signor? Painstakingly she pulled S-I-G-out of the mess, then the R, then gobbledygook that was probably a man’s name. But she had enough, she could go after some of the missing rod couplings now . . . Her braid fell over her shoulder again, getting in the way, and she twisted it up behind her neck and pushed a pencil through it. Another click . . .

  “Beth,” one of the other girls said. “Go home, your shift’s over.” Beth didn’t hear. Her nose was almost touching the paper in front of her, the letters marching along in a straight line over her rods, but somewhere behind her eyes she could see them spiraling like rose petals, unspooling, floating from nonsense into order. She was working fast now, sliding the rods with her left hand, elbow holding the Italian dictionary open. She lost an hour on a crib that didn’t work, then tried another and that was better, the clicks started coming right away . . .

  Dilly Knox came in, already looking exhausted. “Anyone seen my ’baccy?” The new shift of girls went on the usual hunt for his tobacco tin. “What are you still doing here, Miss—what’s your name again? I thought you were on the night shift.”

  Beth just handed him her worked-out message and waited, pulse racing. She’d never felt like this in her life, very light and remote, not entirely back in the present. She’d been going at it six straight hours. The message was a mess of scribbles, still gobbledygook in patches, but she’d broken it open into lines of Italian.

  Her boss’s smile made her heart turn over. “Oh, well done!” he all but caroled. “Well done, you! Bess?”

  “Beth,” she said, feeling a smile break over her face. “What—what does it say?”

  He passed it off to one of the other girls, who spoke Italian. “Probably a routine weather report or something.”

  “Oh.” Her cautious, dawning pleasure sank.

  “It doesn’t matter what it says, dear girl. Just that you broke it. We’ve had such trouble cracking Italian Enigma since they entered the war. This might be the best break we’ve had in ages.”

  “. . . It is?” Beth looked around at the others, wondering if they’d think she was showing off. But they were grinning; Peggy clapped. “It was an accident—”

  “Makes no difference. That’s how it happens. Now we have this, we’ll get the rest quicker. Until the Eyeties change things up, at any rate.” He gave her a swift assessing look. “You need breakfast, a proper one. Come with me.”

  DILLY DROVE HIS Baby Austin out through the gates of Bletchley Park like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were after them and was soon tearing up Watling Street with absolutely no regard for either tank traps or passing traffic. At any other time, Beth would have been sure she was about to die in a ditch, but rather than clutching the door and whimpering, she sat statue-passive in the passenger seat. She was still coming down from another world, electric and distant, spirals of letters turning lazily behind her eyelids.

  Dilly didn’t seem to expect conversation. Hands only now and then connecting with the wheel, he careened them down Clappins Lane and then a long woodland drive, pulling up at last before a gracious, gabled manor house. “Courns Wood,” he announced, swinging out of the car. “I call it home, though with the war on, I’m hardly here. Olive!” he called, moving into a dim paneled hall. A plump graying woman appeared, dusting flour off her hands. “My wife,” Dilly said, somewhat unnecessarily. “Olive, meet Beth—a budding cryptanalyst in need of sustenance.”

  “Hello, dear,” Mrs. Knox greeted Beth tranquilly, as if utterly unsurprised to find a disheveled young woman trailing behind her husband after what had very clearly been a long night. If you were married to Dilly Knox, perhaps you got used to living in a perpetual Wonderland. “Could you eat an omelet?” she said, then answered her own question, clearly seeing Beth was beyond speech. “I’ll bring two. Library, dears . . .”

  Somehow Beth found herself in a disorganized study lined with books and warmed by a roaring wood fire, gin and tonic in her hand. “Drink up,” Dilly said, mixing one for himself and settling into a leather chair opposite. “Nothing like a stiff gin after a hard night with the rods and cribs.”

  Beth didn’t stop and think, What would Mother say? She just lifted her glass and drank half. The gin fizzed like sunshine and lemons.

  “Cheers.” Her boss raised his own glass, eyes sparkling. “I think you’ll be a good addition to the Cottage, m’dear.”

  “I thought I was going to be sacked.”

  “Nonsense.” He chuckled. “Now, what did you do before coming to BP?”

  Nothing. “I was just—the daughter at home.”

  “University?” Beth shook her head. “Pity. What are your plans?”

  “What plans?”

  “After the war, of course!”

  There were tank traps the length of Watling Street, and every headline was full of German Messerschmitts poking their snouts over the coast. “Are the Germans going to give us an after the war?” Beth heard herself wonder.

  It was the kind of thing no one said aloud, but Dilly didn’t chide her for letting down morale. “There’s always an after. Just depends what it looks like. Finish that drink; you’ll feel worlds better.”

  Beth lifted the glass again, then stopped. She realized in a sudden rush of returning caution how this looked: a girl of twenty-four drinking gin at ten in the morning with a man in his fifties, alone in his private library. What other people might think.

  He seemed to know what was flashing through her mind. “You know why I only want gels for my team?” he asked, eyes no longer vague behind the glasses. “Not because I want pretty faces around me, though heaven knows you’re all nicer to look at than a lot of university swots with horse teeth and dandruff. No, I take gels as my new recruits because they are far better, in my experience, at this kind of work.”

  Beth blinked. No one had ever told her young ladies w
ere better at any kind of work than men, unless it was cooking or sewing.

  “These young mathematicians and chess players in the other huts—they do similar work to what we do, rodding and cribs, but men bring egos into it. They compete, they show off, they don’t even try to do it my way before they’re telling me how to do it better. We don’t have time for that, there’s a war on. And I’ve been doing this work since the last one—I helped crack the Zimmermann telegram, for God’s sake.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind. What I’m saying is, I don’t need a lot of young cockerels chesting about, competing with each other. Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen. That’s why I like fillies instead of colts, m’dear, not because I’m building a harem. Now, drink your gin.”

  Beth drank it. Mrs. Knox brought their breakfast, retreating with another tranquil smile, and a wave of hunger nearly flattened Beth. “I don’t know if I can do it again,” she found herself admitting even as she balanced the plate on her lap. No food had ever tasted so good.

  “Yes, you can. Practice makes perfect. I’ve turned more schoolgirls into first-rate rodders than I can count.”

  “I didn’t exactly get much training when I started.”

  Dilly chewed a forkful of his own omelet. “That’s because I want you coming to it fresh and inventive, not with every instinct and impulse trained out of you. Imagination, that’s the name of the game.”

  “It’s not a game.” Beth had never contradicted a superior in her life, but in this cozy library overlooking a tangled garden, none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply. “It’s war.”

  “It’s still a game. The most important one. You haven’t seen an Enigma machine yet, have you? Monstrous little things. The air force and naval machines have five possible wheels, which means sixty possible orders depending on which three are picked for the day. Every wheel has twenty-six possible starting positions, and the plugboard behind it has twenty-six jacks. That makes one hundred and fifty million million million starting positions . . . and then the Jerries change the settings every twenty-four hours, so every midnight we have to start over. That’s what we’re up against. The Italian Enigma machine isn’t quite such a beast—no plugboard—but it’s quite bad enough.” Dilly toasted her with a tilted smile. “It’s odds to make you weep, which is why we must think of it as a game. To do otherwise is sheer madness.”