The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Granted, but you love me anyway.”

  “Oh, do I?”

  “Because I don’t slaver over you, and girls like you are so used to being slavered over, you’ll adore any fellow who just wants to be chums.”

  Osla grinned. “Aren’t you perceptive?”

  “Perceptive enough to know no one else is going to beat Prince Charming. Don’t waste any time nailing him down, that’s my advice. I dithered about too much and lost the girl of my dreams.”

  “Giles, I never. Who is she? Maybe it’s not too late to take a puck at her.”

  “Oh, it’s too late. The ink’s barely dry on Queen Mab’s marriage certificate.” Giles clapped a melodramatic hand to his heart. “I’m soft as a sponge about her. Daft as a basket. By the time I was ready to make my move, Mr. Sensitive Bloody War Poet swooped in.”

  “You don’t seem too heartbroken, Giles. If I know you, you’ll console yourself with a string of Wrens.”

  Giles snorted, Osla ground out her cigarette, and they parted ways. “I told you Travis would give you a set-down!” Sally Norton called over when Osla came back into Hut 4.

  “I’m already missing Denniston,” Osla grumped, squeezing in at the crowded table of translators. The close quarters didn’t make it any warmer; they all sat shivering over their stacks of reports, wrapped in scarves and mittens against the hut’s arctic chill. Osla was snuggled inside the huge wool overcoat belonging to her Café de Paris Good Samaritan, Mr. J. P. E. C. Cornwell—who cared if it was like wearing a circus tent; it was warm. And it still smelled like him, some combination of smoke and heather . . . She might not know the man’s name, but just from wearing his coat she knew he had excellent taste in cologne and shoulders like Alps.

  She blew on her hands, steeling herself to pick up the half-translated report waiting to be finished: a page of idle chatter between German radio operators who should have kept better discipline on air, but the Y-stations transcribed idle chatter as well as official traffic . . . and these men had been discussing the rumor that Jews were being murdered on the eastern front, lined up on the lips of ditches and shot as the German army advanced.

  It’s not verified, Osla told herself. It’s vicious gossip between bored men. But even in a spotty transcript with missing words, she couldn’t miss the lightheartedness, the fact that those radio operators thought it all a great joke. Even if it wasn’t true, they thought it was a perfectly decent idea.

  My God, but I wish I was Mab or Beth. Or at least, sometimes Osla did. She wasn’t begging off the job she’d worked so hard to get—it was too important—but neither Mab nor Beth spoke German, so they didn’t have the burden of understanding whatever information came through their hands on duty. Osla dreamed at night of the things she translated, dreams that inevitably got muddled with the explosion at the Café de Paris. Sometimes she could wake herself before she had to watch Snakehips Johnson’s head be blown off, but more often she was bound inside the memory until the bitter end. Only it didn’t end; she just shook and wept in the bloodied rubble, and no one wrapped her in a coat that smelled like smoke and heather, and called her Ozma of Oz.

  Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt . . .

  “Who’s Ozma of Oz?” she mused aloud when she met up with Mab and Beth at shift’s end.

  “What?” Mab asked, buttoning her coat.

  “Never mind. Is that another letter from Francis I see poking out of your pocket, Mrs. Gray?” They climbed aboard the transport bus—the one disadvantage of their new billet was that it was eight miles away, no longer a five-minute stroll from the Park. Not that it wasn’t worth a daily bus ride just to avoid the Dread Mrs. Finch. “Are you finally getting a proper honeymoon?”

  “Francis is taking me to the Lake District.”

  “About bally time. Have you had a single night together, these last two months since you tied the knot?”

  “Not the way our schedules clash. It’s just been the odd café dinner or tea at a railway station between shifts.” Mab’s face didn’t exactly soften at the mention of her husband—Queen Mab wasn’t the sort to go buttery around the edges—but she gave her wedding band a pleased twirl, and Osla felt a jab she couldn’t even pretend wasn’t envy.

  As soon as she got home, she rang London. “Hullo, sailor.”

  “Hullo, princess.”

  Philip’s voice came warmly down the line. He was staying with Lord Mountbatten until the lieutenant’s exams—Osla could hear the rustle of paper. “Burning the midnight oil?”

  “Writing a letter, actually.”

  “Sending love notes to some tart?” Osla teased. “I just know you fell into the arms of a hussy or two whenever your ship nipped into port.”

  “Darling, that’s not something a gentleman can talk about.” Which meant, of course, that it had happened. Women had to be good, but not men out to sea halfway around the world. Unfair, but there it was.

  “As long as those hussies are on the other side of the world, I can leave them be,” Osla decided. “Who’s the letter for?”

  “Cousin Lilibet, and she’s still in the schoolroom, so don’t get a case of the green-eyed monster.”

  “Princess Elizabeth? That cousin?”

  His shrug was almost audible. “She began writing me when she was thirteen. I send her a line now and then. She’s a nice little thing.”

  Every so often, it struck Osla all over again that her Philip was, in fact, a prince. She knew he was descended from Queen Victoria; she knew he sometimes visited Windsor Castle—and apparently he was posting letters to the future queen of England, whom he was allowed to call Lilibet. Still, it was difficult to reconcile the prince with the irreverent, tousle-haired naval officer who drove too fast and kissed her senseless.

  “What’s on your mind, Os?”

  So many things. The frustration of being tossed out of Travis’s office without a fair listen; the worry that someone really might smuggle decrypted reports out of BP. Nightmares of the Café de Paris; the horror of hearing that Jews were being murdered in eastern Europe . . . if only she could say it aloud. Philip told her so much: his mother, his dreams about Cape Matapan, his sadness at being cut off from his sisters in Germany. What could she tell him? Absolutely nothing.

  How could you hope to build anything with a man, when so many of the things you had to tell him were lies?

  “Nothing,” she answered brightly. “Just bored to tears out here!”

  “Better bored than in danger. You’ve no idea how glad I am you’re safe in boring old Bucks.” A pause. “I love you, you know.”

  Osla caught her breath. He’d never said that before, not aloud. She hadn’t, either. “I love you,” she whispered back.

  So let’s make it official, Philip. The words trembled on her tongue. Run off to the registry office like Mab and Francis, make a home in hotel rooms whenever you’re on leave. Why not?

  “Because princes don’t marry commoners,” Mab would have said. Sometimes Osla thought she was right—that surely there wasn’t much future for Philip and herself, even if they had been going together for more than two years. At other times she was inclined to set her jaw and challenge the odds. Philip didn’t have a kingdom to rule; he’d made his home in England like Osla; he fought for England like Osla. There was no reason he couldn’t please himself, marry whom he chose. It wasn’t as if Miss Osla Kendall were a chorus girl dancing on a bar in her garters—she’d been presented to the king and queen; she had funds from her dead father that she’d inherit when she was thirty or when she married, whichever came first. She had a job that mattered, helping save lives, and she was damned good at it. I’m good enough for Philip of Greece, Osla thought defiantly. I’m good enough for anyone.

  “Are you sure nothing’s on your mind, princess?”

  “Flimflam and feathers, darling. You know me.” If there was still a world left by the end of this war, there’d be time to work out what that world held for her and Philip. Today, there was only the now
, and she wasn’t going to waste the now obsessing about what lay ahead. “Want to take this dizzy debutante out dancing?”

  “You’re far more than a dizzy deb.”

  “I’m glad someone thinks so.”

  Chapter 32

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, FEBRUARY 1942

  * * *

  Those men who slither up from London, you know the ones, with their pin-striped suits and their hints about all the secrets they know . . . why are they all such crashing bores? Ian Fleming from the Admiralty (known as the Phlegm among the many BP females he has backed into a corner) is a classic case in point: damp hands, gin fumes, slinks about like something out of a cheap spy novel. BB wonders if his Berlin equivalents are just the same . . .

  * * *

  Mab groused when their joint alarm went off, and Osla burrowed under her pillow with a moan, but Beth always sprang from bed early, blood humming in her veins.

  “I hope you three don’t mind sharing the top room,” their new landlady had said as she welcomed them to the redbrick Queen Anne house in Aspley Guise. “I know you girls like your privacy, but I’ve already got a philosophy professor billeted in my other spare room.”

  “We’ll be snug as biscuits in a tin,” Osla had reassured her as Beth stood in the middle of their new digs, bursting with happiness. A big light-filled room with two beds and a wide couch for a third; a bathroom of their own to share—no more outdoor loo!—and an overgrown lawn behind the house where the landlady promised to take Boots every day if Beth was working late, because she liked dogs. It had seemed too much to hope for, getting a decent place the three of them could share. Beth had been terrified she’d get lobbed in with new billet-mates—strange girls who would think she was odd, laugh at her absentmindedness, tap their temples with one finger when Beth said something that didn’t make sense because she was thinking about the Abwehr Enigma.

  It was Giles who pulled strings and landed the three of them together. “It’s a beaut of a place,” he said of lovely, friendly Aspley Guise. “I will happily accept physical demonstrations of gratitude—” Mab and Osla had promptly kissed his cheeks, and Beth managed to give him a hug.

  It wasn’t just the house. I do not have to see Mother. I do not have to see her or hear her or feel her nails in my arm. And Beth had her work—work she was getting so good at. A tricky new network had popped up at the beginning of the month, the one Dilly called the GGG after the call sign of the Abwehr office in Algeciras, which used it constantly. “Put Beth on that,” he said, standing up too quickly and steadying himself with a hand on his desk. “She’ll turn it inside out if you give her a lever, a chisel, and enough coffee. It’s all their traffic on the Strait of Gibraltar, and God knows we can’t let their spies start messing with that . . .”

  Beth didn’t really care what the GGG Enigma did or what kind of information it passed. It was just a new puzzle. “Are they transmitting weekly?” Taking the stack from Dilly with one hand, she raised the other to pluck the spectacles off his nose where he’d perched them upside down and drape them back right-side up.

  “Messages from Abwehr offices in Tetuán, Ceuta, and Algeciras to Madrid nearly every day. Shipping movements and aircraft spotted near the entrance to the Mediterranean, likely. It goes to Berlin on the standard Abwehr cipher, but this local one is its own beast.”

  Yet Beth had an eye for the beast now. You’re just another ugly little four-wheel egg waiting to be cracked, she told the stack of messages, plucking her pencil out of her knotted hair. She had a feel for the way those four-wheels worked; she couldn’t describe it any better than that. Not that it wasn’t hard, painstaking work, of course it was, but she had a sense of what she needed, what kind of message might produce the prized crack. Of course, they were trying to find the message sent on GGG and its corresponding message on the main cipher . . . “I need a GGG message where the time and length of the intercept pinpoints the actual repeat message with a minimum of textual additions—” She gave a yelp of triumph when one landed on her desk. “Come here, you—!”

  It took Beth two weeks. She dearly wished she could have had Harry to work on it with her—it would have been much less frustrating—but when that wheel wiring came out of the fug of letters in front of her, she let out a whoop. “I’ve got it,” she said, looking around the room. “With the right-hand wheel locked, standard rodding and charting will pry it the rest of the way open.” She massaged her neck, which she only now realized ached like it had been squeezed in a vise. “Where’s Dilly?” She couldn’t wait to tell him.

  Phyllida and Jean were looking at her a little oddly. “Don’t you mean Peter?”

  “Peter who?”

  “Peter Twinn. From Hut 8? He’s running our section now.”

  “What?”

  “For God’s sake, Beth. He might be on a different shift rotation, but he introduced himself to the whole section weeks ago. When he took over for Dilly.”

  “Well, yes. But that’s only temporary . . . ?” Beth felt the statement trailing upward into a question. She remembered someone giving a speech, Hallo, I’ll be heading things up now, but she’d been eleven hours into a double shift, following the chains down the spiral, barely listening. “I thought Peter was filling in until Dilly was feeling better.” He couldn’t be gone for good. The entire section was now designated Illicit Services Knox—what was ISK without Dilly?

  “Dilly isn’t ever going to feel better. Don’t you ever get your head out of the rods and lobsters?” Phyllida drew a short breath. “He is dying.”

  “HULLO, DEAR.” MRS. KNOX greeted Beth at the door of Courns Wood, not looking at all surprised to see her there, white faced and twisting her hands. “Did one of the transport drivers drop you?”

  “I’ve brought some papers for Dilly.” Files were usually assigned a courier, but Beth had leaped on the chance today. “May I see him?”

  “Of course, dear. He’ll be delighted to see you; he talks of you so often. Peggy Rock comes when she can . . .”

  Beth cringed with shame as she followed Mrs. Knox up the passage. Peggy had come to visit. Peggy knew Dilly had been cutting back his time at BP since autumn, and why. Beth hadn’t even realized he was coming into work less and less, never mind guessing the reason behind it. She hadn’t seen anything, really, not for months, unless it was in a cryptogram waiting to be deciphered.

  Dilly looked up as the library door opened, glasses perched on top of his head. He was sitting in his leather chair facing the long view onto the terrace, and he had a lapful of messages and rods. “Oh, hullo, Beth,” he said absently. “Have you seen my glasses?”

  For a moment, Beth couldn’t speak. She wanted to weep, because now that she was actually looking, she could see how thin he was, how his hair, which had once been largely dark, was graying. She walked across the room and took the glasses off the top of his head, her hand shaking. “Here, Dilly.”

  He rearranged the specs on his nose, peering up at her. “I see someone’s been telling tales,” he said. “We’d better have a drink.”

  He set his papers aside, rose stiffly, and went to the decanter. As he’d done the day Beth made her first break into Enigma, he mixed a gin and tonic. “Drink up. You’ve been working all night, I take it?”

  “Yes,” Beth managed to say. “I broke the GGG Enigma.”

  “Well done, you!” He beamed. “The best of my Fillies. You and Peggy, and you might be a hair tougher than Peggy.”

  “Is something wrong with her?” Now that Beth was looking back on the last few months, at all the things she’d completely ignored, she realized she hadn’t seen Peggy at work for a while either. “I thought she’d changed shifts . . .”

  No, Beth told herself brutally. You didn’t think that. She hadn’t even noticed that her favorite colleague, a woman she considered a friend, was gone in the first place.

  “Peggy’s a bit run down.” Dilly eased back into his chair, and Beth didn’t miss the pain that
flashed across his face. “Pleurisy, but it’s as much nervous exhaustion as illness. She’s been sent home for bed rest.”

  Nervous exhaustion. Breakdown. There were a hundred euphemisms at BP, but everyone knew what it meant. It meant you’d cracked, snapped, broken. Peggy Rock, as impervious as her name, had cracked. Beth sat clutching her glass. What else did this day hold?

  “She’ll be back.” Dilly seemed quite certain. “It happens, you know. Strain. It gets even the best brains in the business. Sometimes the best brains are the ones that get it worst.”

  They sat quietly, sipping.

  “How’s Peter Twinn carrying on?” Dilly asked finally. “He’s a good chap, for a mathematician. Promised he’d let my girls work the way they were used to working.”

  “Have you really stopped working yourself? This doesn’t look . . .” Beth waved at the messages and rods he’d laid aside.

  “Oh, I’m not out of the game. Twinn runs my section day-to-day, but I’ve still got my hand in, working from home where Olive can keep an eye on me. I’ll be at the rods and cribs till they carry me out in a box.”

  He laughed, but Beth flinched as if she’d been struck. “Don’t say that. Surely it can’t be as serious as—”

  “Lymphatic cancer, m’dear. Had my first surgery right before going to meet the Polish cryptanalysts in ’39, pooling our knowledge on Enigma.” He smiled. “Don’t look so long faced! Some rest and a cruise will put me right, I’m sure.”

  Beth wasn’t. He looked so ill . . . How obscene that in the middle of a world-enveloping war, with so many dying in bombing raids and on battlefields, people could still suffer from mundane diseases. Perhaps it was also obscene to be so overwhelmed by one man’s mortality with so many others dying every day, but she couldn’t help it. A small choked noise escaped her before she could stop it.

  Dilly handed her a handkerchief, then picked up his pile of messages and decrypts and walked to the library wall, clearly giving her space to compose herself. He pressed an oak panel, and it sprang open to reveal a little wall safe. “As long as I take a few precautions, Travis lets me take home whatever I want. The odd networks, the ones no one has time to work on but me.” He stuffed the heap of paper inside, started to close the door, peered back in, and pulled out a pipe with a murmur of “So that’s where you’ve been hiding.” Then he locked the safe with a key hanging from his watch chain before closing up again. “Can’t leave raw intelligence lying about, even in the middle of Bucks! Now tell me, how’d you break GGG?”