The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Marry me,” he said, lips still brushing hers.

  “Yes,” she heard herself whispering back into his. Her heart wasn’t fluttering in her chest as she’d thought it would; it thumped slow and hard, as if too astonished to speed up. Francis Gray, war poet and Foreign Office official, had proposed marriage. She had said yes.

  She tried to catch her breath, collect her thoughts. Who knew what had swept those curtains of polite distance away from his eyes and made him blurt out a proposal, but who cared? Three-day wartime marriages blossomed all over Britain. She’d have been an absolute fool to turn him down; he was everything she’d dared to hope for in a husband, and more. Kindness, courtesy, education, career . . . maybe he was a little older, but that meant he was steady, established, not some callow boy. Perhaps she didn’t know him very well, but she had the rest of her life to figure him out.

  It was all so much more than she had hoped for.

  His fingers untangled from her hair, picked up her hand instead. Turned it, looking at her long fingers lying across his broad palm. “This isn’t very good timing,” he said, and gave a short laugh. “Next week I’m being sent to America.”

  Mab blinked. “America?”

  “Washington, DC. I’m afraid I can’t say anything more, but I’ll be overseas for months.”

  He hesitated, and Mab could tell it wouldn’t take much to be married within the week, before he left. To say Let’s run up to London and get it done! Servicemen and their girlfriends did it all the time, squeezing a wedding into a two-day leave. Mab nearly suggested it but bit her tongue. She was not going to race down the aisle without a few cautionary checks first; she’d known too many girls in Shoreditch who’d married in haste and repented at leisure. “We’ll do it when you get back,” she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “Just promise you’ll meet my mother and sister before you go.”

  If she was hoping to bring Lucy into her home as a married woman, she had to see how Francis responded to that idea and how he got on with Lucy. If he put his foot down on it, well, that was that. But she didn’t think he would. He was going to love Lucy, and she’d have every advantage in the world: snow-white socks and a day school blazer and a pony . . .

  “Damn it.” Francis glanced over his shoulder. There was motion at the door of the mansion as the ministerial party began to move outside. “Ten more minutes, that’s all I ask.” He looked up at her. “It will be a bit of a wait for you. Overseas post being what it is, I don’t know how often I’ll be able to write.”

  “As long as you let me know when you arrive safe,” she said softly. Worry was already clutching hard in her stomach. Surely diplomats went back and forth across the Atlantic all the time; it wasn’t like the convoys, getting targeted by German wolf packs. He’ll be perfectly safe, she told herself. As soon as he came back, they’d be married. This man was going to be her husband. She’d make him the best bloody wife in Britain.

  “Tea next week with your family, then, before I leave.” Francis passed his thumb over her knuckles. “D’you want a ring?”

  “Yes,” she heard herself laugh. “I want a ring.”

  “Bound to be a ruby somewhere in London that matches your lips.” He let go of her hand, backed up toward the little fleet of cars. The prime minister had already climbed inside and his chauffeur was starting up; the aides hovered by the next vehicle, waiting for their driver. Francis looked at Mab another long moment, the curtains still swept aside from his naked gaze. No one had ever looked at Mab like that in her life.

  Her fiancé climbed into the car. It moved off, and Mab walked, still in a daze, back toward her hut. Mab Gray, she thought. Mrs. Gray.

  Mab saw Winston Churchill’s face turned out the window of the lead car as it swept around the drive toward the gates. She put up her hand and flashed a V with two fingers, his famous sign. V for victory. Because today she’d won, damn it. She’d won.

  The prime minister put a hand out the window and flashed a V back.

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, OCTOBER 1941

  * * *

  Preoccupied”—adjective, “engrossed in thought.” Taken to an entirely new level by BP personnel, who are frequently too preoccupied to notice if they have put their knickers on backward, if the prime minister has dropped in for tea, or if everything except the pencil actually in their hand is on fire.

  * * *

  Beth missed everything that autumn. Churchill’s visit, Mab’s engagement—it all passed Beth in a blur. “Honestly, where do you Cottage girls go?” Osla demanded. “The blinking moon?”

  Beth just stared, exhausted. She was sleeping very badly—at night her brain roiled so much with five-letter groups and quartets of wheels, she was lucky if she got more than a few hours of tossing and turning. Boots had given up sleeping on her feet and retired in disgust to the basket on the floor.

  “MI-5 manages the controlled German agents,” Dilly had mused aloud at the beginning, with his usual complete disregard for Bletchley Park’s paranoia about keeping its workers in the dark. “MI-5 makes them send out false information on their own wireless transmitters, as directed by our case officers, using their own hand cipher given to them by the Germans. Their controllers are usually in Lisbon, Madrid, or Paris; they analyze everything before transmitting to Berlin. We just need to crack the one they use to make sure Berlin is swallowing it . . .”

  But “just” hadn’t happened yet, even though Dilly’s entire section had been banging their brains against it for three months so far. This wasn’t like the three-day sprint they’d flung themselves into to break the Matapan battle orders—excruciating but finite. This was a desperate, endless slog of dead ends, going down one promising path until it petered out, then trying another. With no time for recovery or rest.

  “If I analyze the hand-cipher traffic from the individual network, we should get some good cribs,” Dilly muttered, but he’d been analyzing the traffic all this time and nothing consistent came up. With Italian naval Enigma, cribs gave you something to rod for. Here they had nothing. It was those damned four wheels used in the Abwehr Enigma, turning over much more frequently with no predictable pattern.

  Have to crack it, have to crack it. Her entire body was tense as wire, and she was so far down the rabbit hole she felt like screaming. If she screamed, she’d probably scream in five-letter clumps. Have to crack it.

  Beth wasn’t going anywhere except the Cottage, where she overstayed her shifts and barely came home in time to walk Boots before being hauled into the kitchen. Then she’d stand stirring rice pudding over the heat, watching boxing chains unspool in her head until her mother had her by the elbow, shaking her. “Bethan, you’ve burned it—”

  Five minutes later Beth would realize she’d gone sideways in her thoughts all over again, not listening to a word of the lecture. Sometimes she managed to mumble, “I’m sorry, Mother, what were you saying?”

  And Mrs. Finch would walk away quivering with anger, saying, “I think you’re going mad, I really do!”

  I think so too, Beth sometimes thought.

  Dilly burst into the Cottage one interminable night shift, waving his glasses. “Lobsters!”

  Beth traded looks with Phyllida at the next desk. “Lobsters?” When Dilly was in one of his Catherine wheel moods and started firing ideas off like sparks, it was best to patiently ask questions until he started making sense. Peggy was better at it than Beth, who knew she wasn’t making much sense these days herself. Only yesterday she’d noticed the big ruby glinting on Mab’s hand, and said, “How long have you had that?” Mab had looked at her a little strangely and said, “A month, Beth. Francis gave it to me before he went overseas. After I took him to meet Mum and Lucy.”

  “After there was that tempest in a teapot the high-ups made about the new Agatha Christie book?” Osla had prompted when Beth looked blank. “Don’t tell me you forgot that, too!”

  Beth had, apparently. And now she was bein
g asked to think about lobsters.

  “The moment all four wheels in the machine turn over between the first two letters of the indicator and again in its repeat position—think of that as a crab.” Dilly waved four fingers like crab legs all moving together.

  “It’s not a way into the cipher.” Beth poured cold coffee into a cup and pushed it into his hand.

  “But if there are four-wheel turnovers on both sides of the throw-on indicator key-block, there could be more turnovers on one side of the key-block alone. Think of that as a lobster . . .” He made lobster claw gestures, spilling coffee, jabbering as Beth listened. Nothing made sense, but she was used to Dilly’s Lewis Carroll logic by now and found her brain diving down the right angle he’d just proposed.

  “If we could find your lobster,” she said slowly, “and a long block of text after it, maybe we’d have better luck breaking key-blocks of indicators on the same setting . . .” She didn’t really know where she was going with that yet, but the best way to find out was to have a go, as Dilly always said. Beth pulled out the pencil stub holding her knotted-up hair. “Let’s go lobster hunting.”

  It took four days to find a message with the right turnover, but as soon as Beth had it, numbers started spiraling and chaining madly. “Yes,” she yelped in the middle of the day shift. “Give me a cipher letter pairing in position one, I can chain together some deductions about the other pairings . . .” Her words tumbled madly. “Don’t you see?” she finished in a rush, blood fizzing.

  Phyllida rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Sort of.”

  Peggy peered closer. “Show me.”

  “Where’s Dilly?” Beth looked around. “Did he go home?”

  “Yes, he did.” Peggy’s face was drawn. “And we aren’t bothering him. Show me . . .”

  It had gone October, trees flaming yellow and orange around the lake, by the time Beth could crack one wheel setting. November frosts had hardened the ground before the Cottage girls could theorize how often the German technicians, when they picked four-letter wheel settings for the day’s traffic, fell back on particular words: NEIN, WEIN, NEUN . . . “Four-letter names, too,” Peggy mused.

  Then Beth broke a wheel setting on some Balkan-based traffic after she broke S-A for the two right-hand wheels, and made a grainy-eyed, dawn-hour guess that the Balkan operator had a girlfriend named ROSA. With R and O fixed in position, everything fell into place; generated alphabets of text and cipher could then be swiftly buttoned up, and lists of four-letter German names and words were soon pinned up on every Cottage wall.

  “We’re getting there,” Dilly encouraged, sprinkling tobacco all over Beth’s work. “It’s coming, ladies.”

  In early December, the moment came. Everyone clustered around Beth’s desk, barely breathing as she pulled blocks of German out of the chaos. There it was, a decrypted message—the German-speaking women confirmed it was legible. Beth didn’t ask or care what it said. She put her knuckles to her mouth and bit down savagely, little dying fragments of code spasming across her vision. She was suddenly hungry and didn’t know when she’d last eaten, didn’t know when she’d last been home or what day it was. She didn’t know anything except that she’d done it. They’d all done it. They’d broken the Spy Enigma.

  Peggy swayed where she stood at Beth’s shoulder. She put her head in her hands, and suddenly the silence snapped. Phyllida threw herself into the arms of the puzzled tea lady, who had just trundled in with fresh chicory coffee. Several girls laughed as if they were drunk, several cried, all so finely balanced between elation and exhaustion they couldn’t speak a single coherent word.

  At last Peggy lifted her head from her hands, looking like she was swimming up through deep water, and said, “I’ll telephone Dilly, then inform Commander Denniston.” She reached for the message on Beth’s desk, giving Beth’s shoulder a fierce squeeze.

  Someone else was looking at the schedule, calling out the girls who were on until midnight. “Beth, it’s your day off tomorrow. Go home before you drop.”

  Beth struggled into her coat and stumbled outside, winter chill striking her in the face. It was full dark, but whether it was six o’clock or midnight, she had no idea. Beth’s ears were roaring as she came out of the stable yard, and it took her a fuddled moment to realize the roar wasn’t in her head—it was coming from the mansion. Men and women were spilling out the front door, shouting, laughing, calling out to each other. “You heard—” “I heard!” “About bloody time—”

  “What?” Beth called, buffeted by the stream of ecstatic codebreakers. “What happened?” She caught sight of a familiar red-banded, slant-brimmed hat and caught Mab’s elbow. “What is it?”

  Mab threw her arms around Beth, all her usual cool poise gone. “They’re in, Beth! The Americans are in the war! The Japanese attacked one of their bases—”

  “They did?”

  “Don’t tell me you missed that, too. Pearl Harbor?” Mab took a gulping breath. “The announcement was coming, we all knew it. Everybody’s been cramming into the mansion round the radio. Not an hour ago President Roosevelt came on, and the Yanks are in it!”

  America in the war, and the Spy Enigma broken—after so many months of hoping and waiting for both, they’d come all at once. Beth took a shaky breath and began sobbing. She stood there with tears pouring down her face, utterly spent and utterly, utterly happy.

  Mab put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed, a flash of light from the mansion sparking red fire off her ruby ring. “Cry all you want, I won’t tell. Have you got a day off tomorrow, like Os and me? We all need to sleep late . . .”

  By the time Beth had cried herself into hiccupping silence against Mab’s shoulder, she was limp as a dishrag and Osla had found them. “Darlings, isn’t it topping!” She and Mab steered Beth between them as they headed for home, chattering excitedly. The world was coming back to Beth’s eyes in its usual shapes by the time they came through the Finch door, and as she unbuttoned her coat, she called eagerly, “Did you hear, Dad? Have you got the radio on?”

  “We heard.” Beth’s father came into the corridor smiling. “Lovely news, lovely—the war will be over in no time! Mabel, your fiancé telephoned. He’s back from America earlier than expected.”

  Mab paled. “My God, did he sail in the middle of—”

  “No, he was back day before yesterday. Said he was quite as surprised by Pearl Harbor as we were. He’s at his London digs if you want to ring.” Beth’s father smiled indulgently as Mab flew for the telephone, but that smile shuttered as he looked back at Beth. “Your mother’s in the kitchen. She’s had a very difficult day—”

  Beth kissed her father’s cheek, blew into the kitchen, and flung her arms around her mother’s waist where she stood at the stove. “Isn’t it wonderful news? Let me take over, I know I’ve been gone forever, you wouldn’t believe the workload.” The exhaustion and frustration of the past months were fading like a dream. The first message had been broken; they’d break more. I can break anything, Beth thought, smiling. Give me a pencil and a crib, and I’ll crack the world.

  She reached for an apron, looking around. “Where’s Boots?” She was hours overdue to take him out.

  “Do set the table.” Her mother kept stirring. “Yes, it’s lovely news. Though when I think of those poor people in Pearl Harbor—”

  “Let me take Boots out, then I’ll set the table.” Beth whistled, but no woolly gray shape trundled crossly into the room.

  “I told you, Bethan.” Her mother looked up from the pot she was stirring, her smile serene. “I told you that dog was out if it ever made a mess in the house. You said you’d always be home to take it out. I told you—”

  Beth took a step, suddenly numb. “What did you do?”

  “BOOTS!”

  Beth caught her foot on a stone, stumbling. Bletchley after sundown was a black pit, every chink of light battened down. She had a torch but it was pasted over with regulation paper so only a shadowy beam emerged. A village she
’d walked her entire life suddenly became an alien landscape.

  “Boots!”

  Her dog had made a puddle in the parlor when Beth was late coming home. And her mother had taken him by the collar, put him outside into the dark street, and shut the door.

  “Now, Beth,” her father had said, placating. “See it from your mother’s side—” But Beth had grabbed the torch and run straight out into the street, forgetting everything except that her dog was blundering through the winter night alone.

  She stumbled again, filling her lungs in a hitching sob. “Boots!”

  A chink of light showed down the street as a door opened. The indistinct ripple of Osla’s voice: “Pardon me, have you seen . . .” Mab had the other torch, looking in the opposite direction. They’d followed Beth without a moment’s hesitation, as Beth’s mother stood with arms folded, shaking her head more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you what would happen, Bethan. You can’t blame me.”

  Yes, I can, Beth thought. But she couldn’t focus on the flickering rage; despair welled up over it. How was she going to find one small dog in the middle of the night? He was gone, the longed-for dog she’d claimed in the most monumental act of will of her life. He was gone and she was never going to find him. Or if she did it would only be his body, half-eaten by foxes or crushed by a car careening through on the way to London . . .

  She screamed into the dark, ripping the paper off the torch. “Boots!”

  “Beth!” Mab’s voice. Beth reversed, stumbled toward the bouncing beam of Mab’s torch, heart suddenly cannoning inside her ribs. Mab’s tall shape formed up in the black, clutching a small, shivering bundle.