The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  Beth closed the bedroom door as Boots trundled in on her heels. “We were talking shop. You know . . .” Codebreaking, Osla knew she meant but wouldn’t say, even here in private.

  “Cheek to cheek?” Osla couldn’t help saying.

  Beth looked puzzled. “Yes. So no one could overhear.” Back in her high-necked nightdress with her hair combed out of its waves, she looked very much the colorless wallflower who had never been on a date in her life.

  Osla sighed. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone moony over Harry Zarb.”

  Beth looked horrified. “We’ve worked together, that’s all. He’s good at what he does, I’m good at what I do, it’s easy to talk . . .”

  Osla and Mab exchanged glances.

  “That’s called getting moony.” Mab tossed her brush down. “High time you started looking about for a fellow, Beth, but don’t settle for a married man giving you a line.”

  “There was no line.” Beth reached for the end of her plait to fidget with, but it was no longer there. “He didn’t—try anything. He only asked me to dance so we could talk safely, no one hearing.”

  “Only at BP.” Mab settled on her own bed in her nylon slip. “Not ‘Let me whisper sweet nothings in your ear’ but ‘Let me whisper ciphers in your ear.’ It doesn’t mean it still wasn’t a line, Beth.”

  Osla wasn’t sure. Was Harry really the sort to step out when he had nice, tired-looking Sheila at home looking after their frail son in his leg braces? She wasn’t so worried he would try things on with Beth—more like, Beth would get all starry for the first man who flirted through “Moonlight Serenade” without meaning anything serious by it.

  “You can never predict what kind of man steps out on his wife,” Mab said as though reading Osla’s mind. “That’s why you steer clear of all married men. Because it starts as a harmless friendship, and then you’re hearing how their wife doesn’t understand them and they’re going to leave her soon, and then you’re sneaking off behind the wife’s back until things get sorted, which they never do. It’s all rubbish. I’ve never got into that situation,” she added, seeing the look on their faces. “But I’ve known girls who did, and their stories all turned out the same—not at the altar. Because the men were just looking for a bit of you-know.”

  “Bit of what?” Beth asked, perched on the edge of Osla’s bed.

  “You know.” Mab looked at her. “Don’t you?”

  “No . . .”

  Osla stared down at her hands. “Actually,” she heard herself saying, “I don’t, either. About . . . It.” She could barely get the words out, but she couldn’t lie either. Not in this blackout-curtained bedroom with two girls she’d worked with and wept with and shared untold fears with for the last year.

  “Come off it!” Mab scoffed. “I’ll believe that Beth here never learned the facts of life from Mrs. Finch—though didn’t your sisters tell you, after they married?” she demanded, sidetracked.

  Beth looked blank. “They said never to let a boy kiss me until we were engaged, so I thought maybe kissing made you pregnant.”

  “Methodists,” Mab muttered, and looked at Osla. “All right, I believe Beth, but I don’t see how you can possibly be in the same boat considering that racy mother of yours, you dizzy deb.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Osla flared, knowing she was being oversensitive, not particularly caring. She was tired, tired, tired of climbing an endless ladder where she thought she’d finally reached a rung where she’d never be called dizzy deb or silly socialite again, only to find it still ringing in her ears, classifying her as dim-witted, inconsequential, ignorant. Only when it came to this, she was ignorant, no getting around it. You could spend your days translating Hitler’s personal telegrams and still be an utter ignoramus in other spheres. “You think my racy mother ever told me anything, Mab? I grew up surrounded by hirelings. Nannies taught me to wash behind my ears; boarding school taught me German grammar; finishing school taught me to make a court curtsy. My mother was too chuffed getting married, getting divorced, and getting remarried to notice I was there, much less teach me the facts of life. So I know nothing, and none of the girls I went to school with did either, because everyone’s mothers were too terribly proper to get into the whole nasty subject.”

  Mab still looked skeptical. “The day we met, you embarrassed a pervert on the train by asking if he needed to hide the tent in his trousers—”

  “You think I had any idea what I was talking about? I fake being terribly worldly, darling, but it’s all flimflam.” Osla looked down at her hands again. “At the Savoy last year, I was telling a friend that I wished my boyfriend wouldn’t carry his torch in his front pocket when we danced, and this old dowager at the next table rears back and hisses at me, ‘You silly fool, don’t you know what an erection is?’ And I laughed like I knew what she meant, but I had not the foggiest. And now I’m twenty years old and in love, and I still have no idea how It happens.” Osla ran out of breath, finally looking up. “I hate being such a—a silly deb. Can you just enlighten me?”

  “Why do you think I know all about it?” Mab looked peculiarly still in the light of the candle stub. “Because Shoreditch girls are tarts?”

  “No, because you didn’t grow up wrapped in cotton wool like a china doll.” Osla realized she had utterly derailed the conversation from Beth and Harry and the conundrum of married men, but who knew when a chance like this would come again? “What happens?”

  There was a short, embarrassed silence. Boots broke it with a yelp, because the scarlet-faced Beth was twisting her fingers through his collar. Mab looked between Osla and Beth and shook her head. “We need a drink for this.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Beth blurted as Mab rummaged in her handbag and brought out a silver flask.

  “Nicked it off Giles. He’ll never miss it.” Mab swigged; Osla swigged. Beth hesitated, but as soon as Mab said, “All right, when a man’s trousers come off . . . ,” she reached for the flask and gulped till she choked. Osla pounded Beth on the back, and the two of them listened, cringing, to Mab’s brief, blunt lecture.

  “There are things you’ll hear,” she finished. “Anyone who says you can’t get knocked up if it’s your first time—wrong. Anyone who says you can’t get knocked up if a man pulls away at the end—also wrong. The only thing that stops you getting knocked up is if a man wears a French letter”—a brief explanation of what that was; Osla and Beth made faces—“or if you get a doctor to fit you for a little rubber device you push up inside.” She mimed. “But no doctor will give you that until you’re married or at least engaged, because doctors are men. And if a man promises he’ll marry you if you do it with him, that’s the lie that’s been told since Adam and Eve.”

  “Well,” Osla said at last. “I can’t say I’m tempted to do it at all.” It sounded perfectly horrid.

  “Is it . . . nice?” Beth was nearly inaudible with embarrassment.

  “I thought so.” Mab’s voice was carefully toneless. “Very nice. But I was only seventeen, so what did I know?”

  “. . . Who was he?” Osla asked.

  “A fellow I shouldn’t have listened to.” Mab took another swallow of Giles’s gin. “So is your Philip prompting this desire for information? Or is someone new putting the make on you?”

  “Oh, the men I know don’t try to put the make on. Maybe a kiss after a date, but that’s all, or they’re on the NSIT list.”

  “NSIT?” Beth said.

  “Not Safe In Taxis.”

  “But you want this information for a reason.” Mab refused to be deflected. “Come on, Os. You’ve told us all about your Philip being on the Valiant, and how his eyes are blue-gray and give you spasms—now give us the goods!”

  Somehow that cracked the tension—Osla laughed, Mab grinned, and an almost invisible smile escaped Beth. “I adore Philip,” Osla confessed, “and I haven’t heard anything from him since Matapan, so—what?” Beth had frozen at the word Matapan.

  “Nothing.” Bet
h took another sip from the flask, looking poker-faced.

  “And when he comes back from Matapan, do you think you’re getting an offer to become Mrs. Philip—” Mab paused. “You know, I don’t think you’ve told us his last name.”

  “Because he doesn’t really have one.” Osla cleared her throat. “He’s, well, he’s Prince Philip of Greece.”

  She looked up. Mab’s eyebrows had lofted clear to her hairline, and the flask in Beth’s hand hovered half-lowered.

  “A bloody prince,” Mab told Beth. “Of course. And a foreign prince!”

  “Not really. He’s Danish and German, but he went to school in Scotland and his uncle is Lord Mountbatten . . . it’s complicated. The family left Greece when he was a baby. He’s not heir to the throne.”

  “Good,” drawled Mab, “because it would be funny if I’d just given the facts of life to the future Queen Osla.”

  “Shut up!” Osla smacked her with a pillow. “This is exactly why I didn’t mention it, because you’d start talking drip, and he’s not like that. He’s just my Philip.”

  Mab took the flask from Beth, turning it upside down. “Not nearly enough gin for this discussion.”

  Beth actually laughed aloud. Her cheeks had faded from humiliated red to a rosy pink; she looked positively pretty. Osla wondered if Harry thought so, too. “Look, Beth, about Harry. I like him, so I want to think he wasn’t laying a line on you. But be careful.”

  Beth wrinkled her nose. “Someone married—I couldn’t.” She glanced at the candle stub; it was down to the last half inch of wax. “I’d better get to bed.”

  She tucked Boots under her arm and padded out. Mab looked at Osla, waiting until they heard the other bedroom door click. “I worry about Beth,” she said bluntly. “Shy girls like her are just the sort to fall into the wrong man’s arms and get in trouble.”

  “I think the appeal of someone like Harry is that he’s unattainable,” Osla mused, sliding between her sheets. “He’s a topping good crush for a girl who doesn’t actually want to step out of the shadows. I can see Beth as a ninety-year-old virgin, breaking codes and living alone with her dog, happy as a clam. A lover or a husband would break that up.”

  “The end of war will break that up. Who’s going to be asking Beth Finch to break codes then? She’ll be a spinster at home again.” Mab blew out the candle. “God help her.”

  “Things will be different after the war.” Osla stared up into the darkness over her bed. “They have to be. Or else what’s it all for?”

  “Some things never change.” Mab’s voice came through the dark, suddenly serious. “Listen, Os . . . you might know a bit more biology now, but that doesn’t mean you know other things.”

  Osla stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You don’t know how men sometimes use women.” A long exhalation. “How they use and then leave women they never intended to marry. Nice boys do that. Gentlemen do that. Even princes.”

  Chapter 24

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MAY 1941

  * * *

  Goodness, who knew that the head of naval section once trod the boards in London pantomimes? Apparently his “Widow Twankey” was a smasher. The things men keep from us; how can we ever truly know them . . .

  * * *

  Miss Churt.” Francis Gray’s warm, courteous voice crackled over the line. “I thought you might enjoy dinner at the Savoy your next evening off.”

  Mab smiled, waving Osla on ahead—they were both leaving for the evening shift. “Will the food be electric yellow?”

  “Dover sole is guaranteed. Nice white food, completely without flavor. Very English.”

  “I’m off Tuesday next—I’m going to Sheffield to see my sister, but I’ll take the evening train to London after.”

  “I look forward to it, Miss Churt. Wear sky-scraping shoes.”

  He rang off, and Mab’s smile slid to a thoughtful frown. This would make her third date with her poet—after the Indian supper at Veeraswamy, he’d invited her to a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery, where she’d heard some deeply inexplicable music—and he still puzzled her exceedingly. He barely spoke but listened attentively; he smiled a good deal but never laughed. He didn’t press to use her first name—he didn’t press for anything, as a matter of fact. Mab found Francis Gray something of a mystery.

  “Is he on your short list?” Giles had asked after the Mad Hatters discussed Francis’s unsettling war poetry.

  “I don’t think so.” Mab knew when a man was keen, and Francis Gray didn’t seem to be. He regarded everything—an air-raid alarm, a bowl of Mulligatawny soup, Mab in her berry-colored frock—with the same pleasant remoteness, like he sat friendly and removed behind an invisible curtain. She found herself rereading Mired from cover to cover, looking for clues to how his mind worked, but all the poetry told her was that he’d been a scared boy who tried to get rid of his trench nightmares by putting them in verse. He wasn’t that boy anymore, so who was he?

  “Bump him up your list,” Giles had advised. “He’s a catch. Parents dead, so no interfering mother-in-law. Owns a good-sized house in Coventry. No millionaire—nobody ever made a packet off poetry—but his father patented some cough medicine that’s done rather well. More than enough to keep you in silk stockings and your little sister in ponies.”

  “I know all that.” Mab always vetted her dates thoroughly. “But I’m not just after silk stockings and ponies, Giles.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I want someone to be contented with.” She didn’t ask for grand romance, but she did want contentment . . . and Mab didn’t think anyone as disinterested in life as Francis Gray had it in him to be content. He was a puzzle, all right; her very own enigma in a park full of them.

  “I really do not approve of men telephoning.” Mrs. Finch appeared in the hallway the minute Mab replaced the handset. “Unless they are family.”

  “He’s my cousin.”

  “You seem to have a great many cousins.”

  “Big family! If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a long evening shift ahead—”

  “Doing what? Because you’ve started coming home with oil droplets on your cuffs . . .” Mrs. Finch smiled, but there was a glint in her eye. “And then I keep finding these, of course. What on earth—”

  Mab examined the square of numbers scribbled in her own handwriting. “I have no idea.” Ever since Beth had taught her and Osla how to crack a Vigenère square, they’d started using the cipher whenever leaving each other notes. A bit overelaborate, but none of them could resist: finally a way to cut out a snooping landlady and drive her mad in the process! The key was always LASSIES.

  “That is your handwriting,” Mrs. Finch accused, waving the square.

  “Must dash, Mrs. F!”

  The late afternoon was fragrant and beautiful. By the time Mab got off shift it would be black midnight under a half-moon. They had been so lucky out here in the countryside, no bombing raids to speak of . . . last week London had endured the worst attack since the beginning of the war. Even the perpetually optimistic newspapers couldn’t make cheerful hay out of the fact that the House of Commons had been destroyed.

  Coming through BP’s gates and making her way to her hut, Mab had to stand a moment outside the door before she could steel herself to face those hissing, enigmatic machines. Why haven’t I asked for a transfer? More Wrens had shipped in to service the bombes; Mab was still the only civilian assigned here. Probably because they’d forgot she was here at all. If she reminded them, she’d be back on a Typex by next week.

  But she hated begging out of a job that needed doing. Even a job she hated—and bloody hell, she hated the bombe machines. Day shifts weren’t so bad; you could step outside for a welcome jolt of sunshine and suck your soul back into your lungs. But on the evening shifts the hut seemed like an airless capsule in some dark ocean, draining air and cheer away like a leech.

  “Were you at the Bedford dance?�
� Wren Stevens asked as she and Mab received their first menu and began plugging Aggie up.

  “Yes.” Mab stretched to reach a plug at the top. Her turn to be on her feet tonight, as Stevens sat at the checking machine going over Aggie’s settings. Oh, but her toes were going to ache by morning.

  “I went with a fellow from Hut 7,” Stevens went on. “Ugh, he was all hands the moment we got on the dance floor.”

  The men I know don’t try to put the make on. Mab could hear Osla’s voice asserting that. Lovely, clueless Osla who thought gentlemen were safe.

  Gentlemen don’t try to put the make on girls like Osla, Mab thought, setting Aggie going with a deafening racket. With girls like me, they aren’t so gentlemanly. Or so safe.

  Aggie clacked, and Mab heard the clack of the register at Selfridges as she rang up his purchase . . . his name was Geoffrey Irving; he read French literature at Christ’s College, and he’d come to Selfridges to buy a present for his mother. Mab, behind the counter in her black shopgirl’s dress, all of seventeen years old, had sold him a silk scarf. He’d sold her a lot of nonsense about how pretty she was.

  I wasn’t pretty, she thought, looking at that gawky girl who had just hit five foot eleven and hadn’t ironed Shoreditch out of her vowels yet. I was available, and I was thrilled to get a date with a university boy. He took her to the cinema and they were kissing before the newsreel was over, his hand inside her blouse ten minutes later. He wouldn’t have tried that on Osla—what Cambridge boy wanted to be labeled NSIT among all the debutantes of London?—but he hadn’t hesitated with Mab, and she hadn’t stopped him. He had her knickers off within three weeks, in the leather backseat of his Bentley convertible, and it had been marvelous; so much for any of those stories about pain and blood the first time.

  “You’re wonderful,” he’d panted afterward. “Wonderful, Mabel . . .” And they went again with hardly a pause, Mab blissfully certain she was in love. Blissfully sure that this was the start of something special, something lasting.