The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  They slept late, and by noon his fever was entirely gone and he was sitting up in bed demanding toast. They ordered from the hotel kitchens, ate in bed . . . Osla looked at the clock, sighing. “An hour till I catch the train.”

  “And I have no more excuses to skip the Christmas pantomime at Windsor.”

  She brushed a crumb off his lip. “Can’t see you at a children’s panto.”

  “It’s more than that. The princesses do it every year for a private audience, to raise money for the men at the front.” He smiled. “Lilibet always gets stuck doing the men’s parts, because Margaret has to get the princess role.”

  “She already is a princess. Can’t she play something else for one night?”

  “You don’t know Margaret.” Philip looked down at his plate, tearing the last piece of toast to bits. “Os . . . you never really answered my question last night.” He looked up. “Why you stopped writing.”

  “I said—”

  “—a lot of vague stuff about it being a terrible year. That’s not an answer.” His gaze was keen. “I know you. Terrible year or not, Osla Kendall keeps her chin up and goes right on fizzing along. So what happened?”

  She couldn’t look at him. “You’ll have to trust me, Philip.”

  “Are you going to write when I ship out again? Or go out with me while I’m in town?”

  I’m not sure it’s wise, Osla thought. This meeting had been accidental. If they started being seen around town again, she might be called on the carpet to face more questions. Turn over his letters. Tell us if he contacts his family. Tell us what he says over a pillow . . . And her oath meant she’d have to do it.

  Philip’s face shuttered as she remained silent. “Thanks for playing nurse, princess.”

  “THOUGHT YOU OUGHT to hear it from a friend,” the voice on the telephone said.

  “David, what on earth are you blathering on about?” It was the day before New Year’s; Osla had been working up this week’s BB with a razor-sharp lampoon of the Bletchley Park dramatic society’s Christmas revue when her landlady had called her to the telephone. Osla had been puzzled to find Philip’s chum David Milford Haven on the other end. “I know Philip went to Windsor for Christmas after the pantomime. It was in the papers.”

  “What’s not in the papers is that he and Princess Elizabeth sparked like a bonfire. Charades with the family after Boxing Day dinner, dancing to the gramophone—”

  “So? Philip and Lilibet have been pen pals forever. Charades—that’s something you play with your little sister.”

  “Not so little—she’ll be eighteen this April. Solemn, wants to join the ATS, blue eyes, lovely legs. Philip got an eyeful of those when she was prancing round the panto stage in tights.”

  “Do you have to slaver quite so audibly?” Osla wrinkled her nose.

  “I’m serious, Os. All through Christmas, our princess was looking at Philip like he was God, and he wasn’t exactly looking away. There’ll be gossip soon; I thought you might want to hear it from me first.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart? That’s just topping of you.”

  “Fancy drinks at the Four Hundred? Just you and me—”

  Osla rang off. She stood in the passage a moment, looking at her own legs, which were rather sturdy and wouldn’t be much of a sight in tights.

  Princess Elizabeth. The future queen of England. And Philip?

  He calls her Cousin Lilibet. He thinks she’s a child.

  “Osla!” Beth’s voice floated in from the front gate. “The bus—”

  “Coming!” Osla flashed out the door for work, where she tried all day not to think about princesses with big blue eyes.

  Chapter 55

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, JANUARY 1944

  * * *

  What is the worst toll taken by BP’s necessary secret-keeping? The worry of disclosing information while under anesthesia at the dentist, the pressure of lying to one’s friends? No, according to an informal BB poll, it’s having to bite one’s tongue when Cousin Betty purrs yet again over the Christmas roast, “At least my husband/brother/father is in uniform, unlike yours!”

  * * *

  Beth sat in one of the listening booths at Scopelli’s, earphones clamped over her ears, chin on her folded arms. Harry wasn’t coming today; he had a pack of six-year-olds coming over for Christopher’s birthday, so he’d given Beth the music shop key for herself. Bach’s parallel lines of melody were pouring into her ears now, precise and rippling, and behind closed eyelids Beth saw the new cipher. The cipher Dilly had been working on before he died.

  Who knew what the Soviets were sending over their captured Enigma machine, or why—Beth knew it was probably dummy messages, but the cipher itself fascinated her. It seemed to have been sent over a three-wheel German army Enigma machine, but it was somehow different from the others she’d seen. Dilly was right about its spiraling inward; it seemed downright hostile to being wedged open.

  “Why waste time on that?” Peggy asked one slow night shortly after the year turned. “We’ve got stacks of more recent unsolvables if you’re bored.” As long as Beth had worked in Knox’s section, there had been a basket heaped with the messages that couldn’t be broken—you worked on the duds when you were at loose ends, but no one had much free time now, with the Allied invasion of France looming. “Why waste time on Dilly’s old stuff?”

  “Because it was his last work.” On and off since bringing it from Courns Wood, she’d turned back to it whenever she had a spare moment, working her way patiently through all the exercises she knew. Nothing to show for it, but being stalled didn’t give her the colossal, mind-shattering frustration Harry had experienced with the U-boat blackout. Maybe because Dilly’s discarded traffic hadn’t been deemed critical—no one was dying in the cold waters of the Atlantic because Beth couldn’t crack this cipher; it was merely a puzzle. She was starting to have dreams where a rose bloomed into lines of Enigma that then folded up on themselves like a bud flowering in reverse.

  She was turning the record to the second side when the shop door banged open. Harry came in like a thunderstorm, hands balled into fists.

  She pulled her earphones all the way off. “Is it Christopher? His party—”

  Harry slammed the door so hard the frame rattled. “I’ve been uninvited.”

  “What?”

  “Christopher asked me not to be there. He says his friends will tease him. Because he’s the only one whose father isn’t in uniform.”

  That little brat, Beth barely managed not to say. She hoped Sheila had smacked him.

  “Sheila gave him what for,” Harry said, as if reading her mind.

  “Good,” said Beth. “You should have stayed anyway.”

  “It’s his birthday.” Harry began to pace. “He wasn’t throwing a tantrum or trying to be cruel. Boys that age, the boys he goes to school with . . . They play war, they brag about whose father is off killing the most Nazis. Christopher’s already a wog and a cripple”—he spat the words out with savage precision—“which puts him at the mercy of any bully who wants some fun. And on top of everything else, he doesn’t even have a father he can be proud of.”

  “Yes, he does,” Beth said.

  “He has no idea what I do.”

  “Sheila doesn’t know either, but she knows it’s important.”

  “Christopher’s six. All he knows is that the other boys torment him because his dad’s a coward, and I can’t protect him. And when he asks me why I’m not fighting, I don’t have an answer.” Harry dropped into the chair opposite Beth, face bleak. “The women working at BP—no one gives you dirty looks because you’re not in uniform. Strangers don’t stop you in the street and ask how you can hold up your head every day when other able-bodied young men are dying. Blokes don’t give you a shove and say You don’t belong in this country, and you won’t even fight for it.”

  “I’m only allowed this work because there’s a war on,” Beth said, “and I sti
ll don’t get paid what you’re paid, Harry. Don’t tell me I’ve got it easy.”

  “I’m not,” he snapped, eyes flaring. She held his gaze, not backing down, and he reached across the table, enveloping her hand in his bigger one. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t whine like this.”

  She studied him. “It’s not just Christopher, is it?”

  Harry looked down at their hands, spreading her fingers like a fan. “If I’d known coming to Bletchley Park meant I could never fight—that none of us BP chaps would ever be allowed to enlist, because they can’t risk us being captured—I’m not sure I’d have come. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

  “You wish you’d joined the RAF and died somewhere over Kent in ’Thirty-Nine?” Beth asked, incredulous. “Or been a gunner and got captured at Dunkirk? That would have been a better use of your brain?”

  “Being clever shouldn’t exempt me from danger. I’m not saying they aren’t right to keep me from joining up now—the Park’s secrecy is more important. But I wish I could have had the chance to do more than I’ve done.”

  “Are you saying you have no impact on this war? Estimate how many transports have crossed the ocean safely because you broke the U-boat traffic.” She paused. “Anyone can be fodder for machine guns, but only a few can break top-level ciphers. This war needs your skull intact. Let someone else get blown up—better them than you.”

  “You’re not saying we’re better than the boys who get blown up—”

  “A lot of them, yes. You are. We are. Our souls aren’t worth more to God, but our brains are worth more to Britain.”

  Harry looked at her a moment. “God knows I love you, Beth,” he said. “But sometimes I find it hard to like you.”

  “What?” She felt like she’d been slapped.

  “Our brains work a certain way—a way that makes us useful. And yes, we save lives. But it is colossally goddamned arrogant to look down on those lives we save because their brains don’t work like ours.”

  “It’s not arrogant to know what we’re worth, Harry. And it’s ridiculous to think that shooting our enemies is a nobler or more effective part of the fight than decrypting their battle plans. We might fight with paper and pencil, but that doesn’t make it less of a fight.”

  “I know that. I know the fight is worthwhile. But it’s hollowed me out until I’ve wondered if I’ll end up in a padded cell, and it’s put a target on my son’s back, and I’ll be damned if I pretend I don’t have regrets.” He pulled away, rising and beginning to pace again.

  “I wouldn’t have you if not for this job,” Beth said, feeling cold. “Is that something else you regret?”

  Harry stopped. She saw the tension in his broad back. “No,” he said quietly.

  But . . . ? Beth thought.

  “I envy you sometimes.” Harry turned, leaning an elbow against the doorjamb. “How you sail through every day, oblivious to everything but work. I can’t decide if you really don’t care, or you care but you’re so focused it all ceases to exist as soon as you fall down the rabbit hole.”

  “Care? About what?”

  “The war, as it exists outside a stack of ciphers. Your friends, whom I know you love but you don’t pay much attention to—”

  “I do, too—”

  “Mab’s drinking herself sick in the Recreation Hut after every shift. She’s hanging by a thread. Haven’t you bloody well noticed?”

  “. . . No.” Mab was unhappy, of course she was, but hanging by a thread? Mab who still trimmed Beth’s hair in its Veronica Lake wave every month, who had taken her to London for her contraceptive device. “I didn’t realize,” Beth said in a small voice.

  “And I just told you I love you, and you didn’t even blink.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Do you love me, Beth?”

  “You also said you found it hard to like me,” Beth rallied. “That might have hit a little harder.”

  “When you’re clicking along like a clockwork mechanism completely oblivious to everyone around you, yes, I find that hard to like. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I do. Fairly incurably.”

  Beth looked down, fiddling with the earphones on the table, feeling one of her persimmon blushes sweep over her face. “I don’t—know what to say to that,” she said finally. “Or what to do with it. We can’t change anything. I don’t want to change anything. So why do we have to discuss it?”

  Harry came over, tilted up her face, and kissed her gently. “Beth,” he said, “you don’t know what to do with it because it doesn’t come in five-letter clusters.”

  Chapter 56

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, FEBRUARY 1944

  * * *

  Dutch gin,” as served in the Recreation Hut, bears no resemblance to either Holland or gin. It’s drinkable only when you’ve had the worst day in the world. For example, the kind of day BB had, upon coming across the phrase zur Endlösung in the course of work. It referenced a transportation of Jews, and it means “for the final solution.” BB has never come across that particular expression before, but it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to fill in the possibilities, does it? [Draft destroyed unread by anyone but its author, and replaced with humorous write-up of BP chess tournament]

  * * *

  Four months? God help us.”

  “Preparations are well under way.”

  “Better hope so . . .”

  The conversation in Commander Travis’s office retreated as Mab picked up the tea tray and a stack of reports, closing the door behind her. It was all anyone had talked about since the year had turned: the Allied invasion of France, which Mab now knew was planned for June or thereabouts. She was also privy to the exact number of Lancaster bombers and Flying Fortresses headed to flatten Germany’s airfields in long-term preparation for the invasion. Mab supposed indifferently that she was better informed about Britain’s war plans than the cabinet.

  Ditching the tea tray, she went to lock up the files she’d just collected. Nothing important was ever to be left lying about unlocked, even for a moment—Mab knew one of these cabinets had reports about assassination attempts against Hitler, and reports about the new and improved computing machines here at BP that would supposedly crack Enigma traffic even faster than the bombes. But she didn’t think about any of it. Her brain wasn’t required in this new job. She was in administration now; filing, typing, and organizing records. Pure secretarial work; something to get up for each morning, but requiring no deep thought or focus.

  Mab came off shift at last, and ten minutes later had her first drink sitting in front of her at the Recreation Hut. She downed two Dutch gins in quick succession, then ordered a pint of lager and sipped slowly. Two quick, one slow; that was the ticket. Get drunk too quickly and she’d end up weeping into her glass; too slow, and she wouldn’t get as numb as she needed in order to sleep. Two quick, one slow—repeat for four hours, until it came time to sway dizzily toward the transport bus. She was fine. It was all fine.

  She rummaged in her handbag for a cigarette, squinting when she found the ring of keys for the cabinets where she’d finished today’s filing in the mansion—she’d forgot to turn them in to the watchman in the main hall. He already had another set, thank goodness, so she’d just pop back in and hand hers over when she left here. All was well as long as the keys stayed on Park ground and were never left unattended.

  “Queen Mab, you gorgeous thing. May I get you a drink?” Giles asked, his face agreeably out of focus. “Any good gossip?” Dropping his voice to a near whisper under the cheerful noise of off-duty codebreakers drinking, playing table tennis, and dealing bridge in the background. “Has Travis hit the bottle yet from the stress of the coming invasion?”

  “I’m not saying a thing about work, Giles.” Even three drinks in, half-drowning in grief, and ensconced here at the heart of BP, the knee-jerk was reflexive.

  “Darling girl, I want gossip, not work secrets. Bletchley Bletherings isn’t very funny these days�
�letting down the side. So tell me whose nerves are in a lather picking the invasion date; tell me if the PM really is screaming down the line every other day about Montgomery. We can’t talk secrets, but we can talk people. Nothing? Well, I’ve got plenty for you. The Glassborow twins have joined the Mad Hatters—you know, the brunettes in Hut 16? My God, but they’re irritating. They never stop giggling. If that’s what youth is coming to, we should throw in the towel and let Hitler have the empire. We’re reading Bleak House, by the way, for the monthly pick. I’ll save you five hundred pages: it’s bleak.”

  Mab remembered plowing through most of Dickens on “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well-Read Lady.” Had she ever finished the list? Not that it mattered now.

  “—You’re missed at the Tea Parties, Mab. The Mad Hatters aren’t the same without you. Osla’s too gloomy lately to provide much sparkle—have you heard the whispers about that prince of hers?—and sweet Beth may be brilliant but she’s never been one for banter. Though I confess there’s a certain amusement value in watching her and Harry sit across from each other, pretending they haven’t just been at it like rabbits in the air-raid cellar. Who those two think they’re fooling, I have no idea . . .”

  Mab swallowed the rest of her drink, ordered another. The sides of her head felt soft. She looked past Giles, and sat bolt upright. Francis was sitting in the far corner of the Recreation Hut—his back was to her, but those were unmistakably his stocky shoulders, his hair with its tracing of gray . . . she slid off the stool so quickly she almost fell, pushing past a quartet of bridge players. “Excuse me—” It was Francis, he was alive, and he was going to turn round smiling and tell her Lucy was asleep in the nursery.

  Her hand fell on his shoulder. The man turned his head and it wasn’t Francis. Of course it wasn’t. Just a stocky fellow with a red face, nothing like Francis. Mab nearly wept. She turned and blundered back toward her stool, missing it as she tried to slide back on.