The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  Osla flew out, tugging on her long white gloves, pushing diamond clips into her hair. “Is it too early for a drink?” The sound of cheers and noise from the streets below made their way through the windows. Osla slung a few ropes of pearls about her neck, took the flask Harry offered, and swigged. They were all waiting for the knock. Harry prowled back and forth like a black-maned lion; Beth ripped at her nails; Mab was on the telephone trying to get through to someone at MI-5, GCHQ, anywhere. Mike massaged his knee, remarking, “Can I pound this bugger?”

  “I get first crack,” Harry growled.

  “I get first crack,” Beth protested. “I’m the one he locked in a loony bin.”

  The minutes ticked by. Mab turned on the radio, and they heard the commentators: “At Kensington Palace, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh”—so that was Philip’s new title, Osla thought—“with the Marquess of Milford Haven, his best man, checked the time for the start of his drive . . .”

  “Giles is late.” Mab and Osla exchanged glances. “He’s never late.”

  “Traffic?”

  Osla didn’t dare take that chance. “Mike, stay here. Nab him if he turns up.” Osla, Mab, Beth, and Harry headed for the door. Osla ditched the silver fox stole she’d have worn if she really were going to the wedding, yanking on J. P. E. C. Cornwell’s trusty old overcoat as she ran for the stairs. Surely Giles couldn’t have smelled a trap . . .

  His flat was just a few scant miles from Osla’s, but the way lay right through the heart of the city, and they hadn’t a hope of a taxi. People were flooding off the sidewalks and spilling into the street; here and there an automobile inched along, horn blaring, but the crowd was a relentless river flooding inexorably toward the abbey. Harry forced a path through the crush, Beth at his elbow, Mab and Osla bringing up the rear. Overhead the sky lowered, gray and cloudy. Osla’s heart thundered.

  Is he making a run for it?

  Over an hour, forcing a path through the crowds. By Buckingham Palace, people lined fifty deep along the street, holding up mirrors to get a better look. Banners flapped, pennants waved, and a great heaving cheer went through the crowd as a horse-drawn carriage emerged from the gates and began rolling toward the abbey: the queen and Princess Margaret. Osla caught a flash of white flowers in the bridesmaid’s dark hair, then the carriage was gone. The crowd surged, and Harry shouted back to form a chain, dragging them bodily through.

  Off the main thoroughfare at last, into the residential streets, where people still buffeted past toward the abbey. Giles’s building—a stitch stabbed Osla’s side like a stiletto, but she took the stairs two at a time. How many times had she come here after a date, chatting companionably? Rot, she thought, knocking her gloved knuckles against the door, hoping her breathlessness sounded like excitement. “Giles, darling, don’t faff about. What’s keeping you?”

  No answer.

  “I’m breaking it down,” Harry said, forcing the knob—but the door swung open, unlocked.

  The room inside had been ransacked. Every drawer stood open, clothes lay on the floor, a rattle of change spilled near the door as if money had been counted too hastily.

  Beth gave a wordless snarl, barely human.

  I cannot have tipped him off, Osla thought frantically, going over her telephone call. She would swear Giles had heard nothing in her voice to cause alarm. If she’d made the mistake that ended up ruining this operation . . .

  “He was coming to meet you.” Harry picked up the gloves lying atop the pristine hat by the door—a gentleman’s finishing touch to a formal wedding ensemble. “It can’t have been our call that spooked him. What made him—”

  Mab held up a newspaper lying beside a tea mug. The newspaper’s front page was all wedding news, but it was folded to the back pages—a picture of Beth’s unsmiling face. “‘Reward offered for news of the woman in this photograph. Contact the following number, as her family is concerned’ . . . That’s an MI-5 number, or I’ll eat my hat. ‘Recently spotted in Buckinghamshire’—bloody hell, do you suppose one of Dilly’s neighbors saw—”

  “Who cares who spotted her? Giles knows Beth’s done a bunk.” Osla’s mouth had a sour taste. “And he’d know if she got all the way to Bucks, she could find BP friends. People who would believe her.”

  Beth stood silent, shaking, furious.

  “All right, so he’s rabbited,” said Mab. “Wherever he goes to ground, MI-5 will track him down. We stick to the plan, present our evidence, let them bring him in.”

  “It could be tomorrow morning by the time they’re putting things in motion. What if he uses the wedding confusion to train it out of London, head for the channel? If he leaves the country . . .”

  They all looked at each other.

  “He can’t have got far yet.” Osla touched the teakettle on the stove. “Still warm. He’ll never get a car through these crowds, so he’ll be on foot. Probably making for the next train out of the city.” Osla knew the trains here like the back of her hand. “Victoria station is nearest.”

  That would take them into the thick of the crush again, but there was no help for it. Mab rang Osla’s flat, telling Mike to meet them at Victoria as Osla hurtled down the stairs. The others pressed behind, back out to the main thoroughfare, where they were met by a wall of screams. All London was going wild. A gilt-decked coach pulled by two swiftly trotting white horses was rolling past, and Osla caught a flash of white lace in the window: Philip’s royal bride.

  “This way,” Osla shouted, hauling her silver satin train over one arm and taking off for Victoria through the brick wall of wedding revelry.

  Chapter 83

  He will get away. The words slid through Beth’s blood like poison. She didn’t trust that MI-5 could find him if he disappeared from London. Who knew what Moscow connections might help him vanish overseas? Perhaps the fear was irrational, but she couldn’t shake the thought: if he got away now, he might get away for good.

  “He could take the Chatham main line all the way to Dover.” Mab’s eyes flew over the train schedule. “Disappear across the channel—”

  “There’s a train leaving twenty minutes sooner than that for Brighton, he might grab the first ride out of London—”

  “Check them both—”

  Mike and Mab charged toward the Brighton line like a couple of long-legged greyhounds. Harry went for the Chatham line, Osla shoving behind in her silver satin and diamonds, Beth bringing up the rear. Victoria station was more of a madhouse than Clockwell during a full moon. Women in wedding-day best poured off trains with flowers and pennants, men passed flasks to toast the royal pair, children shrieked with excitement. The crowd heaved out toward the stairs like a boat wallowing in heavy seas, Beth and her friends seemingly the only ones fighting their way in and not out. Beth couldn’t breathe around the scream locked in her lungs. He won’t get away—he will not get away . . .

  Osla halted, diamond roses coming loose from her hair as she craned her neck. She looked like a royal bridesmaid who had been cut out of the wedding party and run mad—mad, mad, mad; the word chimed through Beth’s mind. They fought their way through to the last platform, Harry checking every bench, Beth pushing into the gents’ loo, looking for that flash of red hair. “Hey there—” a startled man protested, dribbling piss over his shoes. Back out, toward the station’s entrance. The most recent train had emptied, passengers squeezing toward the surface; the crush thinned. Beth’s eyes hunted. Nothing.

  “Too late.” The words pushed out through her stone-stiff lips.

  “That son of a bitch,” Osla snarled.

  The nearest ticket booth had the radio turned all the way up. Over the squeal of train wheels came the sound of the broadcast from the abbey: “Philip, wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife?”

  “We are not too late,” Osla said fiercely, a tiny diamond-decked lioness yanking Beth along. Over the pushing throng, Beth saw Mab and Mike coming toward them, no sign of a red-haired man dragging between them. The sob bui
lt in Beth’s throat.

  “Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, wilt though have this man . . .”

  Then the crowd eddied, and Beth saw him.

  A split-second glimpse of a man in an impeccable overcoat and trilby, fingers drumming on the handle of his overnight case as he looked down the track, and then an excited family in Sunday best pushed across the platform and hid him from view.

  But he was there.

  “Giles,” Beth whispered, and then she was making for him. “Giles.” Shoving a man twice her size out of her path, knocking over a display of wedding-day pennants. “Giles.”

  He couldn’t have heard her, but his head jerked up, as though he felt her coming. Beth saw shock ripple across his face. For all his fear at seeing her escape in the paper, fear sufficient to send him running for the nearest train, he’d surely never thought she was so close: Beth Finch, the woman he’d wronged, no longer confined behind walls and straitjackets but mere feet away, aiming at him like a sword thrust. And behind her the others: Osla, Mab, Harry, Mike, catching sight of their enemy and closing in like hounds.

  Be afraid, Beth thought, feeling her hair blow across her face from the whirling gust of another train as she advanced on him. Be afraid now, traitor.

  Giles dropped his bag and ran.

  Beth sprinted after him, and Osla was only half a step behind, silver satin billowing in her wake.

  A party of schoolchildren cut off Mike and Harry, slowing them down, but Mab’s tall shape broke forward ahead of the crush. Beth saw the cry that escaped Giles the moment he registered Mab’s unmistakable Valkyrie head. He broke left; Mab made a grab for his elbow and tweaked his gabardine sleeve, but he stumbled and kept moving, sliding through the clumps of passengers disgorging from the newest train. He was making for the stairs leading aboveground.

  Mab and Osla and Beth were all running together now, Harry and Mike somewhere behind, but the crowd was too thick and they’d all sprinted themselves breathless getting to the station. Mab’s breath was coming in cigarette rasps—Osla with her shorter stride was falling back—Beth tried to put on a burst of speed but her lungs were still weak from asylum pneumonia—and Giles was pulling ahead with a bound onto the first stairs. If he lost himself in the vast crowds outside—

  Beth saw Osla swing toward a man leaning against the station wall, reading a heavy leather-bound book. Osla wrenched it out of his hands and hurled it like she was bowling a ball in a Bletchley Park rounders game.

  The book hit Giles square on the shoulder, and he stumbled on the steps. That was all Mab needed, catching up in three leaping strides of her endless legs, seizing him by the elbow, and swinging him back round into the station with a snarl that bared every tooth in her head.

  Giles ripped his arm free with a shout, but momentum sent him stumbling headlong toward Beth. Everything seemed to slow in that instant, enough for her to gather her limbs and launch herself into his chest. Beth bore him to the ground with a scream of fury that scraped her throat like a handful of knives and spun every head within fifty yards.

  In the sudden stunned hush, Beth heard tinny voices from the ticket-booth radio: the Westminster Abbey choir, voices lifted in joyous clarion song. The royal couple were married.

  Underneath her, Beth could feel Giles shuddering. She looked into his face inches under her own, and a wave of disgust and fury lashed her as she realized he was crying. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “I don’t—want—your sorry,” Beth spat, lungs still fighting for air. “You cut-price—second-rate—asinine little traitor.”

  “I’m not—”

  “That’s exactly what you are.” Osla limped up, panting, one shoe missing, and sat down in a billow of silver satin on Giles’s tangled legs. “Don’t even think about getting up. And by the way”—twisting off her emerald—“the engagement’s off. Never liked green stones, anyway.”

  “Shall I spike him?” Mab placed one smart-heeled boot on Giles’s forehead, glaring down. He lay without struggling, tears slipping down his cheeks in tired gusts. Whispers were rising from the puzzled onlookers.

  “Here now, what’s going on?” A policeman, red faced, indignant, the most welcome sight on earth. “Brawling on Her Highness’s wedding day, now, I won’t stand for that, not in Victoria station.”

  Mab tried to explain, Harry’s voice sounded, and then people were shoving, voices rising. A railway conductor tried to haul Mab away from where she was still half standing on Giles, and Mike promptly clocked him. The man went down like a sack of turnips. Osla was gesticulating at the policeman, who shouted her down, and Beth was the only one to hear Giles’s terrified whisper.

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  Beth looked down into his eyes. The man who’d stolen years of her life. Betrayer of her friends; betrayer of the future queen who was even now signing her bridal registry; betrayer of the stalwart stammering king who had walked her down the aisle. Betrayer of Churchill, who beamed beside the new prime minister in the abbey—Churchill, who had limped into Bletchley Park and told them the war couldn’t be won without them.

  Betrayer of Bletchley Park, all that it was, all that Beth loved.

  She pushed herself unsteadily away from Giles, not wanting to touch him. “Whatever happens to you,” she rasped, “it won’t be enough.”

  “You are all under arrest,” the policeman trumpeted, and the world went right on sliding into madness.

  Chapter 84

  I missed the wedding of the century, Osla thought, contemplating her cell bars. Oh well!

  The police had ended up arresting Giles, Osla, Mab, Beth, Harry, Mike, the man with the leather-bound book, and two ticket collectors. Now here they all were in a drunk tank, who knew where, with threats from the policeman that they could all bloody well stay there overnight or until the wedding celebrations were over, whichever came first. Somewhere further along the corridor Osla had seen Mab and Mike go into one cell, Beth and Harry and Giles into another. Giles was protesting, but not very clearly. Somehow in the scuffle before handcuffs came out, he’d tripped over Harry’s boot, crashed to the ground, and come up with a dislocated jaw. Sad, that. Osla smiled, contemplating the wreck of her silver satin Dior, hearing the rattle of bars. We did it, she thought.

  Well, almost. Giles Talbot couldn’t talk his way out of this cell before Peggy Rock got through to someone at her GCHQ offices and rallied assistance—or, failing that, before Osla played her trump card. “If it’s not too too inconvenient, sir,” she’d already drawled to the sergeant, sliding a discreet pound note into his palm, “could I just bip out to the desk and make the teensiest ’phone call before you release anyone in our party?” Blinking her lashes, playing up the Mayfair vowels: clearly a female with the kind of family you didn’t want descending wrathfully on your doorstep to rescue their lost princess.

  “Witless bloody debs,” the sergeant had muttered, but Osla just grinned. The phrase had lost its sting. Could a witless deb have helped catch a traitor to the crown? No. And the important people—her BP family, the consort of their future queen, and a highly secret portion of MI-5—knew, or would soon know, what she’d done. If the rest of the world continued to rate her low, well, that was their loss. Osla Kendall had proved herself to everyone who mattered.

  “You’re definitely not my wife,” a voice commented from the other side of the cell bars. Osla looked up to see a tall officer in Rifle Brigade uniform.

  “I don’t think I’m your wife either,” Osla replied. “Unless I’m suffering from spectacular amnesia.”

  The officer turned to the sergeant. “Why exactly did I get called to the clink for some woman I’m not married to?” His voice sounded familiar . . .

  The sergeant handed Osla’s overcoat over. “Your name was in the label, Major Cornwell. That desk clerk should have verified—” Commotion further along the corridor made the sergeant break off. “A moment, I’ll be back . . .”

  He hurried off, and Osla looked at the worn-out o
vercoat she’d been hauling about since the Café de Paris. Looked at the man holding it: dark haired, a major’s insignia on his uniform, a Military Cross . . . “You’re J. P. E. C. Cornwell.” Her Good Samaritan with the low voice, so soothing in the aftermath of the explosion: Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt . . . Osla scrambled up, coming to the bars. “What do all those initials stand for? I’ve been wanting to know for years.”

  “John Percival Edwin Charles Cornwell,” he said, still looking bemused, throwing a half salute. “Major, Rifle Brigade. First in Egypt, then with the partisans in Czechoslovakia—”

  Osla reached through the grill, took hold of her Good Samaritan’s collar, drew his head down, and kissed him warmly on the mouth through the bars of her cell. She smelled heather and smoke—that wonderful scent that had long since faded out of his overcoat. “I’ve owed you that since you pulled me out of the rubble of the Café de Paris,” she said, drawing back with a grin. “For God’s sake, tell me: who’s Ozma of Oz?”

  “L. Frank Baum’s lost princess. My favorite book.” He gave her a slow, thoughtful look. “Pleased to meet you, Osla Kendall. May I say, you have very nice handwriting.”

  “Oh, blast. You actually got my message-in-a-bottle letters?” Osla had assumed those missives had dropped into limbo, considering the lack of response. She’d never written anything about BP, but still . . .

  “They sat in a heap with my old landlady until I finally came back to London. I wrote you back then, but that Buckinghamshire address was defunct.” He regarded her with a nearly invisible smile. “Did you ever get over that chap who broke your heart?”