The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  Especially when he said he wanted to take her for a night on the town with his friends.

  Stop there, she thought, mechanically prying open a drum, tweezing two wires apart with exquisite care. Just . . . stop.

  It was hard to stop, in the airless depth of the night shift. Night shift was when all Mab’s demons came out to play.

  She still remembered the dress she’d bought to meet Geoffrey’s university chums. Sunshine-yellow rayon with a big red silk rose at the shoulder. She’d spent half her savings on it, certain it was the chicest thing she’d ever owned. “Very nice,” Geoffrey had said when she came tripping out to meet the Bentley, and his two friends had echoed him in identical Cambridge drawls. “How about a little joyride before the party?” They were already passing a flask back and forth when she hopped in.

  Stupid girl, Mab thought, swapping out the wheel order on the drums. There wasn’t any party. The party was you.

  Seventeen-year-old Mab would have sniffed that out—if they’d been Shoreditch boys like the ones who had been whistling at her legs since she was twelve. But seventeen-year-old Mab, who was already head over heels for Geoffrey, assumed that young men who read literature at Cambridge were gentlemen.

  Stupid girl.

  She and Geoffrey had been kissing in the backseat, the taste of brandy on his lips, when the Bentley canted to a crooked halt and one of his friends began fumbling under her skirt. She pulled back, smacking him off with a protest of “Hey—” and Geoffrey laughed. “Wait your turn,” he told his friend lazily, pulling Mab’s sleeve down and nibbling at her shoulder. “I brought her, I go first.”

  Stupid, maybe, Mab thought, mechanically tweezing the wires apart on another drum. But not slow. There had been one ice-cold moment of incomprehension, looking at the boy she’d fallen for—but only that one moment. Then she’d shoved him away with all her strength, and there were hands at her back and on her breasts, and voices laughing. “You didn’t say she was such a firebrand!”

  Maybe they’d thought it would be easy, that they’d each take a turn in the backseat while the other two waited their turn smoking by the bumper. But they were all drunk and Mab was taller than any of them and blazing with fear and fury. Geoffrey had a set of triple-scored scratches down each side of his face, and his friend was bent over his balls in soundless groaning; his third friend had turned around to lend a hand from the front seat, and Mab had yanked his hair so hard a handful of short strands came out in her fist. She had shrieked the whole time, cursing and snarling with rage and terror. It took all three of them to wrestle her out of the car, flailing and clawing all the way, getting another rake of her nails across Geoffrey’s neck as they dropped her in the road. Mab was on her feet in a flash, knees stinging and scraped, pulling her shoe off and gripping the sharp heel in one trembling hand. “You touch me,” she grated, shaking so hard she could barely stand, “and I will drive this through your fucking eye.”

  “Walk your common little arse in your common little rayon frock back to Shoreditch, you cheap stupid slut,” Geoffrey bit off in that posh voice that had always turned her knees to butter, and the Bentley swerved off in a blare of headlights.

  “Go to hell, you pathetic three-inch excuse for a man . . . ,” Mab shrieked after it, seeing the outraged white smudge of Geoffrey’s face before the car disappeared. Leaving her standing on the midnight road somewhere on the outskirts of London, no handbag or money, one shoe in her hand and the other nowhere to be seen, yellow dress torn all the way to her waist, vibrating with vast, humiliated sobs.

  It had taken her four hours to walk home, limping barefoot through the streets. Three words vibrated through her with every step. Cheap stupid slut. Cheap stupid slut.

  She’d walked into the kitchen on bloodied feet, every tear long sobbed out and dried on her cheeks, and she’d thanked her lucky stars Mum was asleep. Mab peeled off her ragged stockings, her torn slip, the dress she’d thought so beautiful, and chucked it all in the bin. She’d stood tall and naked in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette and smoking it all the way down with a face like stone.

  That was when she decided she was done being Mabel. Mabel was young and dim and easily fooled. She was going to be Mab instead. Cool, imperious, untouchable Queen Mab.

  Chapter 25

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JUNE 1941

  * * *

  BB spotted Dilly Knox coming to work in his pajamas again. The ladies of his section are all too brilliant to be minding their boss’s wardrobe, but surely there are any number of fashion designers twiddling their thumbs—if Mr. Hartnell and Mr. Molyneux can dress royalty and Wrens, can’t they be seconded to dress Dilly Knox? There’s a war on, after all!

  * * *

  Ladies, you’ve been reassigned.”

  Beth was down the rabbit hole on a new message and didn’t look up at Dilly until Peggy reached over and took the pencil out of her hand. “Italian naval traffic is being rerouted to another section,” Dilly went on, tugging the bathrobe sash holding up his trousers, “since there’s now so little of it—”

  “Not much naval traffic when you don’t have a navy anymore,” Peggy smirked. Beth smirked back, though the thought of their Matapan triumph gave her an odd feeling now that she knew Osla’s princely beau had been involved in that battle. Beth usually forgot that the puzzle work she loved meant something concrete for the troops—meant life or death for men far away on a dazzling blue sea. She’d been very glad she couldn’t say as much to Osla. It was my work that flung your boyfriend’s ship into the thick of the biggest naval battle since Trafalgar. Does that make it my fault, at least a little bit, that you have no idea if he’s alive or dead?

  “We’ve been given a new puzzle,” Dilly continued, passing out messages and rods. “It’s a proper jabberwock, I warn you.”

  Beth flipped through the stack, frowning. Something looked different . . .

  “The Abwehr Enigma.” Dilly saw the blank looks between the girls like Beth who could work German cribs but not speak the language. “The Enigma used by German military intelligence. Just call it the Spy Enigma. Our intelligence chaps can find the German agents on our soil and feed them false information, but we haven’t a clue if it’s being believed by the Abwehr officers running the show in Berlin.”

  “What’s different about their Enigma?” Peggy frowned.

  “They use a four-wheel machine, not a three-wheel. Four wheel settings to find instead of three, and they turn over a deal more frequently. It’s a beast,” Dilly concluded, running a hand over his hair, which was already thinner than it had been when Beth first laid eyes on him. “Welchman thinks if the boys in his hut can’t break it, it can’t be done. Let’s prove him wrong.”

  Beth had a go for six hours, and all she got was a headache. It felt like her first weeks in the Cottage, flailing in the dark, and she could see matching discouragement from all the others. But Dilly was sanguine. “Come back fresh tomorrow and go at it again. We’ll get there—blast it, where’s my pipe?” Beth found the pipe under a German dictionary, handed it to him, and trailed dejectedly home.

  She was still wandering mentally among four-letter indicators as she leashed up Boots and set out on her mother’s list of errands—fetching the post, a stop by the chemist. Mother’s little helper . . . only Mother’s little helper wasn’t quite so content anymore. Mother’s little helper now spent her time counting the hours until she could go back on shift.

  Beth sighed, tugging Boots toward the chemist, where she had to step around a pair of huge booted feet. “Harry?” She blinked.

  His head jerked up. Clearly he’d dozed off sitting on the shop bench, leaning against the wall. “Sorry. I’m waiting for the chemist to mix something up, and a week on the night shift got the better of me.” He had circles like tar under his eyes and his collar was a wrinkled mess. Beth knew Hut 8 was working round the clock on the U-boat traffic—it wasn’t any secret that the wolf packs had been bringing down close to
a hundred Allied ships a month between March and June. Harry gave a hard blink, squinting up at Beth. “I haven’t seen you since the dance, have I?”

  Where we danced and talked codebreaking techniques, and people apparently thought we were . . . Beth felt her cheeks color. She’d been appalled when Osla and Mab thought something romantic might have been going on. Embarrassed, wondering if she’d given Harry the wrong idea. And ashamed—because yes, maybe Beth had developed a harmless crush on her favorite BP colleague and only just realized it.

  Either way, she’d resolved to steer clear of Harry in future. “Picking up a toothbrush for my dad,” she murmured, edging past, but Boots had stopped to sniff at Harry’s outstretched hand.

  “I’m getting a tincture for Christopher.” Scratching Boots’s jaw. “I don’t know if it does any good, but the doctor has faith in it.”

  Beth hesitated despite herself. “How long—I mean, when did he contract polio?”

  “He was eighteen months old.” Harry’s voice went flat. “Careening around the lawn one moment, the next moment screaming. By morning he couldn’t stand . . . by evening he was in hospital, in an iron lung.” Harry looked up. “Have you ever seen one of those damned torture chambers? Just an enormous metal cylinder, with his tiny head sticking out . . . even when he was moved to the next ward, he’d lie there in a sterile crib, crying and crying, and we’d stand at the door on the other side of the chicken wire, not able to come close because of quarantine. Five more months before we got him back for good.” Harry’s big hand lay still across Boots’s head. “We’re lucky he has use of his arms. We’re lucky. I keep telling myself that. But he’s in and out of hospital all the time. He’ll need to have his ankle fused at some point, to stabilize the foot. And he’s such an active little sprat, he cries out of pure rage whenever he’s put into a cast . . .”

  The chemist poked his head outside. “Your tincture’s made up, Mr. Zarb.”

  Harry gave Boots a final scratch, rising. Beth followed him inside and took a toothbrush from the rack, arriving at the counter as Harry was putting down coins. The chemist’s wife was eyeing him with distaste, gaze traveling over his vast height, his shabby tweed jacket with the button missing.

  “I don’t know if I should be serving you.” She pushed his change across the counter with a fingertip. “A strong young fellow not in uniform, shame on you. There’s a war on, you know!”

  Harry paused, looking at her. “I know,” he said evenly. “I know.” He leaned forward until his nose nearly touched the woman’s, even as she pressed backward with eyes growing round. “I KNOW.”

  He shoved the coins back across the counter so hard they flew up, some hitting her, some falling to the floor. He grabbed his tincture bottle and banged out, shop door rebounding against the wall. Beth pushed her own exact change for the toothbrush at the wide-eyed chemist’s wife and went after him.

  “Harry,” she called, then hesitated. She had no idea what to say when people were angry or upset. He stood struggling with his old bicycle leaned up against the lamppost, hands moving too roughly to disengage the chain, not looking up.

  “I could use some help with a problem,” Beth said at last. Not much in the way of comfort, but work was a comfort in its way. Or maybe not a comfort, but a drug. It certainly felt that way to her. A drug that could make you forget anything—even, for a tiny space of time, the horror of seeing a child in pain.

  “What problem?” He looked up, blinking as if his eyes were prickling, and Beth’s embarrassed determination to steer clear of him dissolved. He hadn’t been feeding her lines at the dance, for all Mab’s cynicism about married men looking for fun. He wasn’t going to try anything, and Beth didn’t want him to, crush or not. First and foremost, Harry had always been a friend.

  “What can you tell me about working a system with four-letter indicators?” Beth asked, making sure there was no one in earshot.

  His gaze went from angry to speculative in a blink. “Four wheels?” She nodded. He unchained his bicycle and began to walk it along rather than mounting up, and Beth fell into step on the other side. “K Enigma uses a four-wheel machine,” Harry said when they were clear of the village. The country road was empty, elms arching overhead, robins twittering. “I did a bit with that. A four-letter indicator means there’s a settable Umkehrwalze . . .”

  “It’s difficult.” Beth could feel both their minds ranging ahead in unison, like a pair of greyhounds bounding down this path into a gallop. “We haven’t got much in the way of textual cribs.”

  “I might be able to help there. Have you got a bit of paper?”

  Chapter 26

  Hullo, princess—I’m back in England. Did my letter after Matapan go astray? Everything’s been chaos. I’ve come to take my sublieutenant’s courses and exams; for the moment I’m bunking with the Mountbattens. Tell me you can get to London Saturday next. —Philip

  You’ll miss the next Tea Party.” Beth looked up from the rug, where she was brushing Boots. “We’re discussing Carry On, Jeeves.”

  “Bugger Jeeves. Philip’s not dead!” Now that Osla had the proof in his handwriting, she could laugh at her own fears. But like a child terrified of a monster in the closet, you could only laugh at the fear when the light was switched on.

  “This one?” Osla pulled out a dress. “It’s the very latest go—how do I look?”

  “Jumpy,” said Mab from the bed. “Like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner gong due any minute.” Osla gave her a look. Mab held up Carry On, Jeeves. “Unlike you, I did the reading.”

  “Oh, go boil your head, Queen Mab. Wait, do my hair? You set the most topping waves . . .”

  Euston station on Saturday night was thronged with harried women and jostling servicemen, but the whole crowd might as well have been shadows to Osla as she ran for the Great Hall.

  As a little girl forever shuttling back and forth between London and her latest boarding school, Osla had hurried countless times under this hall’s coffered ceiling, always outstripping her luggage in her haste to get aboveground for sunshine and the start of summer hols—but today she stopped dead in the middle of the throng, not caring if she ever saw sunshine again. Because there he stood at the foot of the sweeping double flight of stairs, a man in naval uniform and greatcoat, hat over blond hair, shoulders wide and feet braced, profile bent over a letter. The sight of him nearly stopped Osla’s heart.

  Philip looked up as if he’d felt her gaze. He looked more like a Viking than ever: golden, hard, tanned dark by the Mediterranean sun. His gaze hunted over her a little uncertainly, as if trying to merge the irreverent Osla he’d met at Claridge’s in a boiler suit with this Osla: her serious face, her blush-pink crepe dress, her little fuchsia hat tilted over one eye. An Osla who, unbeknownst to him, had spent her day translating German naval secrets.

  “Os . . . ,” he began, and trailed off.

  “Philip.” She too was suddenly floundering. “I’m on shift tomorrow morning—I only have this evening, then I have to catch the train back.” Desperate for distraction, she gestured at the Great Hall around them. “Euston’s a bit of an eyesore, isn’t it? I always preferred coming into Paddington when I was little, because it had the statue of the Unknown Soldier—you know the one, standing there in his bronze greatcoat, reading a letter from home? I always wanted to ask him who wrote the letter. Was she beautiful, did he come back to her, did she love him . . .”

  “Did he ever answer you?” Philip’s eyes drifted over her face as if he hadn’t quite remembered her right. They hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, Osla thought. She hadn’t remembered him quite right either—his eyes weren’t blue-gray, they were just blue. So very blue.

  She took a step closer. “No, he never answered. Being bronze, and all.”

  “I suppose I could answer for him.” Philip held up the letter in his hand, and she saw her own writing. “The girl who wrote this letter is
definitely beautiful. And he definitely survived and came back to her . . .”

  Philip trailed off before the third question. Did she love him? Did he even want an answer?

  Osla knew it would be very easy to guide this train onto safer tracks. They hadn’t spent very much time together, after all, and it had been more than a year. She could play the flirtatious chum, trill, “Darling Phil, how long it’s been!” and then they’d splash out at the Savoy and part with no more heartache than any other set of friends who met for a fizzing night on the town. That would probably be the wiser course, Osla thought, remembering Mab’s nighttime warning about princes and the girls they wouldn’t consider marrying.

  But: the third question.

  Did she love him?

  Osla took two steps forward, flung her arms around Philip’s neck, and pressed her lips to his. He pulled her against him with a yank, lifting her up onto her toes. She was too busy drowning in his kisses to notice when the lights of Euston station went out.

  “I THINK WE’RE stuck here, princess.”

  “Such a tragedy, sailor.”

  The air-raid siren still sounded somewhere in the distance, but Osla could not hear the drone of planes—if bombs were falling, they were on the other side of London. The station lights had come on again, but only partly; their side was enveloped in shadow. Philip sat with his back against the station wall with Osla curled on his lap, his greatcoat draped about her shoulders so he could wrap his arms round her inside it. His hat lay on the ground with Osla’s fuchsia toque on top of it beside her handbag. None of the others caught in the station paid any attention to the midshipman and his code girl hidden in the shadow of the hall, clinging so tight they nearly fused.