The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Careful.” Giles put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t look too steady on your pins.”

  Mab had been cursed like this since Christmas—seeing Francis and Lucy everywhere. But not really seeing them at all. Every skinny-legged girl playing with a ball turned into Lucy; every man with a chestnut gleam in his hair was Francis. Mab knew her mind was playing tricks, but she couldn’t stop running up to strangers, hoping against all reason. Cruel, mad mind. Crueler, madder world. Turn it off . . .

  She swallowed the dregs of her beer and looked at Giles, stretching her lips into a smile. “You were saying . . .” She didn’t listen to his answer, just kept nodding and sipping until the world transformed into fizzing and sparks. Mab woke with sunlight in her eyes.

  She sat up, looked around a strange room with a sheet sliding down her naked body, pain splitting her skull, and realized Giles lay stretched out in the bed beside her.

  “NO NEED TO blitz out of here like you’re making for the last lifeboat off the Titanic.”

  Mab straightened, a wave of nausea rolling through her stomach, snatching up her clothes, which had apparently been dropped on the floor wherever they fell. This had to be Giles’s bedroom—he’d been one of the lucky ones billeted in the Shoulder of Mutton. He was sitting up in bed, red hair standing on end, coverlet drawn to his waist. Mab’s stomach rolled again. “Am I late for shift?” Perhaps it was a pathetic point of pride, but all the times she’d stumbled home to bed half-drunk, she had never once allowed it to make her late the following day. She’d failed all her promises to Lucy, she’d failed all her promises to Francis, but she hadn’t failed the oath to her country. “Giles—”

  “It’s not even six.” He reached for the pack of Gitanes on his night table.

  She would have sagged in relief, but that was only the first of the worries making her stomach clench. “Did—” she began, still clutching the clothes against her own nakedness. Giles appeared to be wearing his drawers still, but she could hardly bear to look. “Did we—” She didn’t remember a single thing past being helped through BP’s main gates.

  “We did not.” He struck a match. “Try not to look quite so surprised, will you? You were keen enough last night, and I admit I was fairly keen, too, but you were out cold the moment your back hit the mattress. I don’t require protestations of eternal love from the women I take to bed, but I do require consciousness. So I put the covers over you and climbed in myself for some shut-eye. I’d have taken the couch like a gentleman, but as you see”—he gestured around the tiny room—“there isn’t one.”

  “Th—thank you. I’m sorry to impose, I—” Mab managed to pull her slip over herself. Her stomach churned again. What else did I do? What spectacle did I make of myself? This had never happened before, in all her hours drinking at the Recreation Hut. How had she got drunk and thrown herself at Giles, of all people?

  An entirely different panic seized her as she remembered her ring of keys from the mansion. She grabbed her handbag. “Giles, my keys—”

  “Relax, darling. You insisted on dropping them with the main hall watchman before we came here. You might have been plastered, but irresponsible? Never.”

  Mab exhaled relief. “Can I use your washstand?”

  Giles exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Be my guest.”

  The water was freezing cold, just enough to gulp down a half glass, then splash the rest over her face and neck. Straightening, she looked at herself in the mirror and recoiled. The soot with which she meticulously blackened her lashes in place of mascara now ran down her cheeks like black tears, and her hair was a rat’s nest. She didn’t look like Francis Gray’s elegant wife in her chic hats and perfectly shined shoes. She didn’t even look like Mab Churt, the pugnacious Shoreditch girl in rayon frocks who was going to tow Lucy out of the hole they’d both been born in.

  “You cry in your sleep.” Giles’s voice came quietly behind her.

  Mab began crying now, hunched over the basin.

  “You’ve had a rotten time, haven’t you?” Giles stretched out a pale, freckled arm. “Don’t be ashamed. You were drowning your sorrows last night, and frankly so was I.”

  Somehow Mab found herself crawling onto the bed and under his arm. She shook, racked by sobbing, as Giles passed her a handkerchief and talked lightly in a way that required no reply.

  “I used to have a dreadful pash for you, you know. I got over it when you married the war poet, though I can’t say my luck got any better, because I promptly lost my head for another woman I can’t have. Which is why I thought last night it might be a good idea to forget about her in your arms, but you’re the one who needs arms right now. Poor Mab . . .” Squeezing her shoulders. Mab’s sobs were subsiding, even as her head continued to throb. “Part of me envies you,” Giles continued. “At least your Francis loved you back. I can’t even get Beth to look my bloody direction.”

  He wasn’t really equating his unrequited crush with Francis’s death, she knew. He was trying to distract her, and she was grateful. “Giles, don’t tell me you’ve lost your head over Beth.” Mab pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

  “Ever since getting transferred to ISK. You can’t really know someone at BP till you see them work. I never knew what Beth did until I came there.” Giles whistled. “When she’s really working, she practically shimmers. I used to think I was fairly bright, but here everyone has a First from Oxford or translates Egyptian papyri. Brains like mine are plain tuppence pieces to Beth’s golden guinea. Harry, now, he’s a solid pound sterling. No wonder she looked past me and snapped him up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mab managed to say.

  “I’ll get over it.” A shrug. “Besides, if I wait a bit, Harry might bugger off home to his wife and Beth might look my way. A chap can dream, eh? Until then . . .” Giles placed his last half inch of cigarette in the saucer on the bedside table and cupped a hand to her cheek. “You’ve got someone you’d like to forget, and I do, too. Now that we’re both sober, what d’you say we give it a try?”

  Part of her wanted to, just to get out of her own miserably aching head. But he was Giles, one of her few remaining friends, and he didn’t deserve a woman who was only going to shut her eyes and wish he were someone else. “I can’t, Giles.”

  He smiled, dropping his hand. “Then what do you say to breakfast, my queen?”

  Chapter 57

  * * *

  FROM BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS, MARCH 1944

  * * *

  Trains and train stations—what a thing they become in wartime. How many heartbreaks and homecomings, ecstasies and agonies, have we experienced with a rocking floor, a platform crowd, and a sweaty ticket clutched in hand?

  * * *

  This time Osla was the one to wait on the platform at Euston.

  A gleam of ash-gold hair—there was Philip, right on time, coming through the crowd with his loose-limbed stride. He hadn’t written since Christmas or invited her to meet up before today. He’d said he was up to his ears, reassigned to a new W-class destroyer in Newcastle upon Tyne . . .

  Perfectly reasonable, Osla thought, watching him approach. She was up to her ears too; the clock was ticking down to June and the planned invasion, and the Hut 4 translators were swamped. But her mental insistence that things were fine couldn’t entirely banish Philip’s cool voice at Claridge’s: You never really answered my question last night. Why you stopped writing.

  And the voice of Philip’s friend David: He and Princess Elizabeth sparked like a bonfire . . .

  Philip stopped before her. “Hullo, princess.” Eyes traveling over her blush-pink dress—the same one she’d worn the very first time they’d met at this spot—and landing on his naval insignia pinned between her breasts. He smiled despite himself, scooping up her hand and kissing it. “I’m only in town the one night. Tomorrow it’s back to Newcastle—lots to do, overseeing the Whelp’s finishing touches.”

  “Whelp—what a name for a fighting ship.”

  “She’s
a nice, fast piece of work . . .” He waxed technical, hands flying. He wanted to be back at sea, Osla knew. A man like Philip was meant for heavy seas and dodging fire, not squiring ladies around London.

  “And you?” He tucked her hand in his arm, drawing her back toward the shelter of the wall. A train had just roared in, soldiers spilling out hauling kit bags, harried-looking women scolding children. “What are you up to in that dull job of yours, Os?”

  Yesterday, my fellow translators and I were all having a good snicker at Herr Hitler, Osla thought. The Führer seems to have written off the idea that the Allied invasion is coming through France. He thinks it’ll be Norway; isn’t that an absolute screamer, Philip? You really have to wonder about Hitler—if a lot of dabbling debs can point out there’s no practical way a huge amphibious force could bang through those North Sea choppers and then clamber over those rocky shores inland, you’d think the supreme leader of a Reich that’s supposed to last a thousand years could figure it out. But he hasn’t, and a hut full of women is laughing their heads off at his expense. That’s my week in a nutshell! Isn’t it a hoot?

  “Oh, you know. Nothing to tell!” Osla squeezed his arm. “According to your friend David, you’ve got something to tell. He rang me after Christmas, saying poor Lilibet has a mad crush on you. I hope you haven’t broken our princess’s heart.”

  She made her voice warm and teasing, inviting him to laugh. But Philip glanced down at her, and an expression shifted across his face. “I wondered if you’d heard anything.”

  “Is there anything to hear?”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  “Then what . . .” Osla didn’t know where to go with that, so she trailed off. They stood silent on the platform. How much time had they spent here, waiting for each other? “Philip, I’m not jealous. Though I think that was David’s aim—why else call up your friend’s girl and tell her he spent Christmas getting ogled by a seventeen-year-old in pantomime tights?”

  Philip sounded clipped. “Elizabeth is far too young for people to be hashing out wedding plans—”

  “Wedding plans?” Osla’s heart pounded unpleasantly. “Who’s hashing those?”

  A pause. “I’d rather not talk about this anymore, Os.”

  “I’m not trying to pry into—royal matters,” she managed to say. “But you gave me this to wear”—touching the naval insignia—“and you’ve told me you loved me more than once over the last four years. Even if things have been strained lately, I think I have a right to know if your name is being seriously bandied about in wedding plans to someone else.”

  “It isn’t.” He rounded. “Far too early for that.”

  “Well, isn’t that topping.” There really was something then. Something besides idle whispers. Osla let out a slow breath. “Shall I wait a year or two and bring it up then? Will that still be too early? Or too late?”

  “Osla, let’s drop this. Go get Dover sole and champagne at the Savoy.”

  “I’ve lost my appetite.”

  They stood looking at each other. The platform was almost empty; the crowd from the last train had cleared out, and passengers for the next had yet to gather. “I’m not discussing this here,” Philip said at last. Osla heard the bite of royal disdain that so rarely cropped up in his voice; disdain for saying anything remotely personal in public.

  “This is about as close as we’ll get to private, Your Highness, given that we don’t have a room at Claridge’s this time. So I’d like to hear what is happening with you and dear Cousin Lilibet.”

  He thrust his hands into his pockets. “She’s fond of me,” he said finally. “She has been since she was thirteen.”

  “That’s a silly girl’s crush.”

  “She’s not silly. She’s very serious, actually. Solemn. She knows what she wants.”

  “And she wants you. And now that she’s nearly eighteen”—the age I was when I met you—“people are starting to think about whom she might marry one day.”

  “I suppose.” He looked restless. “I’ve never given it a thought, Os. I’m still not. I’ve got a ship to think about. I’m heading out to fight—that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s a war on.”

  I know there’s a war on, Osla wanted to shriek. I know! I know! But something else went on at the same time war did, and that was life. It kept right on going up until the moment it stopped, and this was hers, limping along like a horse suddenly gone lame, all because someone had chucked an obstacle in her path called Lilibet.

  “So she’s thinking about you, but you aren’t thinking about her.” Osla kept her voice level. “Why are you so edgy, then? And why have you been avoiding me since Christmas?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Yes, you were.”

  A long pause.

  “My family’s got the bit in their teeth,” he finally said. “Some guests at Christmas noticed the lay of the land—with Lilibet, I mean—and that’s how my cousin George got wind of it.” George as in the king of Greece, currently in exile from the throne. “Suddenly the whole family’s buzzing. Uncle Dickie loves the idea, Cousin Marina won’t let it go—she’s written my mother. Everyone’s harping on the possibility . . .”

  “So?” Osla folded her arms. “They can’t force you down the aisle because they want an alliance, Philip. This isn’t the Middle Ages.”

  “I have obligations.” He couldn’t look her in the eye. “They’re my family.”

  “Which family members would that be? The ones in exile from their own homeland? Or the ones allied with Hitler? You have told me for years that you feel you hardly have a family at all, and now that you might potentially make a match of it with the future queen of England, their wishes are suddenly paramount?”

  “I have obligations,” he repeated flatly.

  “You have other obligations first, as you pointed out. There’s a war on, Lieutenant, and fascists to fight. But what if we get to the other side of this war and your solemn, serious princess is still taking a dead set at you?”

  A long pause. “Then my family will expect me to step forward.”

  Osla unfolded her arms, clasping her hands together to keep them from trembling. “And what will you do?”

  Another long pause. Osla turned and took a seat by the wall, remembering the blackout when she and Philip had sat here all night kissing. She took some deep breaths, waiting for the tightness in her throat to subside. “Were you ever doing more than—marking time with me?”

  “You know it’s more than that!”

  “Is it? You love me. I know you do. But did you ever mean it to last?” A brittle laugh. “You didn’t, did you? What you said to me the night we met: I’ll lay odds you’re hard to get over.”

  “I never promised you it was going to last.” Philip dropped down beside her, linking his hands between his knees. “You’re too good for me by half—”

  “That is a bunch of noble bloody rubbish. Another way of saying ‘You’re not good enough.’ But I am, Philip. I’m of age, I’ll have money of my own, I run in the same circles as you, and I’ve always been good enough. Yet I’m still just the one you telephone for a night out.” She lifted her chin, refusing to look away. “It has been four years. Why did you never—”

  “Be fair. I never took things far enough in the first place to raise your expectations.”

  “You mean because you never took me to bed, you think you’re in the clear. Well—”

  “Keep your voice down!”

  “—there are other ways of raising expectations, Philip.”

  They were both shaking. Philip looked, Osla thought, like he wanted to give her a good slap. She wanted to claw his face bloody. But it wouldn’t have taken much for them to fall into each other’s arms, either. It never had. She tore her eyes away, staring at the tracks as another train rushed in. They both sat waiting as another flood of passengers jostled off, pushing for the stairs. Waited until the train pulled away and the platform was empty again.

  “Maybe you
should go home.” Philip’s voice was back under control. “We’ll talk when I get more than a night off from the Whelp.”

  “And go back to how things were, is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “How they are, Os. You know how I feel about you. Nothing has changed.”

  “Sorry, Philip. Having already given you four years, I don’t really feel like pouring more of my heart into you.” The words scraped out of her throat like broken glass. “Not when I know you’re ready to put on royal racing colors the minute Cousin Lilibet trots to the starting post.”

  “Don’t talk about her like she’s a horse,” he flared. “She’s got feelings, you know.”

  “So do I.” Osla tried to swallow around the spike in her throat. “Do you love her?”

  “I was curled up around you at Christmastime—you think I’d bounce from that to falling for a girl barely out of the schoolroom?”

  “I don’t know. What would your family expect?” Pause. “Could you love her?”

  The longest silence yet. Osla’s heart contracted as if it were shrinking away from him.

  “I think that might be a yes,” she managed to say.

  He looked at the ground between his feet, as if seeing something else. “The world she lives in . . . At Christmas I got to see them all behind the scenes a bit more. Her family’s not like mine, scattered and quarreling. Us four, the king is always saying, so proud. Just a man and his wife and his two daughters—that’s what they are, by themselves. Not grand.”

  “Not grand? A family with what, ten palaces?”

  “You know what they do in those palaces? They drink tea and listen to the gramophone, and laugh while dogs flop about on everyone’s shoes. Margaret reads a magazine while her mother talks horses and Lilibet and her father go walking . . . I could be part of that,” Philip finished, low voiced.