The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “You’ll get used to it, Osla Kendall. I’ve never lived in a single flat with a loo inside.”

  “Oh, shut up, Queen Mab!”

  Mrs. Finch frowned. “What is it you young ladies will be doing over at Bletchley Park?”

  “Clerical work,” Osla said breezily. “Such a snore.”

  Another frown, but Beth’s mother left it for now. “Lights out at ten. Hot baths every Monday, no dawdling in the tub. We have a telephone”—proudly; few homes in the village did—“but it is for important calls only. If you’ll come upstairs . . .”

  The kitchen seemed to echo when the newest additions to the household swept out. Dad, who hadn’t said a word after shaking hands, sat back down with his newspaper. Beth looked at the tea tray, scrubbing her hands up and down her apron.

  “Bethan . . .” Mrs. Finch swept back into the kitchen. “Don’t just stand there, take up the tea.”

  Beth made her escape, glad to be spared the dissecting of the two lodgers she was certain her mother was about to deliver. She paused outside the spare room door, mustering the nerve to knock, and heard the rustling of suitcases being unpacked.

  “. . . one bath a week?” Mab’s voice, crisp and scornful. “I call that stingy. I’m not demanding hot water; I don’t mind a cold-water scrub, but I want clean hair however I can get it.”

  “We’ve a washstand at least—hello again!” Osla Kendall exclaimed as Beth came in. “Tea, how scrummy. You’re a darling.”

  Beth couldn’t remember ever being called a darling. “I’ll leave you,” she muttered, but she saw a copy of Vanity Fair unpacked from one of the bags and exclaimed despite herself, “Oh! That’s a good one.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  Beth flushed to the roots of her hair. “Don’t tell Mother.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it!” Osla plucked a scone off Mrs. Finch’s second-best china. “No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to. Curl up with us and have a chin-wag . . .”

  Without knowing how it happened, Beth found herself perched on the end of Osla’s bed. It wasn’t much of a conversation; she hardly said two words as the other girls nipped back and forth about Thackeray and whether they should start a literary society. But they both smiled at her periodically, all encouraging glances.

  Maybe they weren’t quite so intimidating after all.

  Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?

  Too soon to tell . . . but perhaps this was, in fact, going to be one of them.

  Twelve Days Until the Royal Wedding

  November 8, 1947

  Chapter 5

  Inside the Clock

  Three girls and a book—that was how it all began. Or so it seemed to the woman in the asylum, lying in her cell, fighting the cocktail of lethargy that had been pumped into her veins.

  “Our institution is very progressive,” a balding doctor had said when she first arrived, spitting and struggling, at Clockwell Sanitarium. Nearly three and a half years ago—6 June, the day of the Normandy invasions, the day that began Europe’s liberation, and her own imprisonment. “You may have heard horror stories about patients chained to walls, hosed with ice water, and so forth. We believe in gentle handling here, mild activity, sedatives to calm the nerves, Miss Liddell.”

  “That is not my name,” she had snarled.

  He ignored her. “Take your pills like a good girl.” Pills in the morning, pills at night, pills that filled her veins with smoke and her skull with cotton wool—who cared then about mild activity? There were blunted tools for working in the rose garden around the big gray stone house; there was basket-weaving in the common hall; there were novels with missing pages—but very few patients made use of these things. Clockwell’s inmates dozed in armchairs or sat outside blinking at the sun, eyes dulled and dreamy from the fog they swallowed every morning in tablet form.

  Progressive treatment. This place didn’t need chains or electrical shocks; it didn’t need beatings or ice baths. It was still a killing bottle, an eater of souls.

  Her first week here, she’d refused to swallow anything the doctors gave her. She got the syringe instead, orderlies holding her down for the needle prick. Afterward she stumbled back to her cell—they could call it a room, but any room with locks on only the outside was a cell: window barred with mesh, bed bolted to the floor, a high ceiling so she couldn’t reach the light fixture to hang herself.

  She thought of hanging herself that first week. But that would have been giving in.

  “Looking well today!” The doctor beamed, popping in on his daily rounds. “Still a bit of a cough from that springtime bout of pneumonia, eh, Miss Liddell?”

  The woman registered under the name Alice Liddell no longer bothered to correct him. She swallowed her pills obediently, then as soon as he left went to the plastic basin that served as a chamber pot at night. Forcing her fingers down her throat, she threw the tablets up in a wash of bile, then reached an indifferent thumb into the mess and ground everything together so the nurses wouldn’t guess. She’d learned a few things in three and a half years. How to vomit up her medicine. How to fool the doctors. How to slide past the orderlies who were spiteful and cultivate the ones who were kind. How to keep her sanity in the midst of madness . . . because it would be easy, so easy, to go authentically mad here.

  Not me, thought the woman from Bletchley Park. She might have been sitting gray-faced and coughing in a madhouse cell, but she had not always been this.

  I will survive. I will get out.

  Not that it would be easy. The walls circling Clockwell were high and barbed; she’d walked them a thousand times. Every entrance—the big gates at the front, the smaller access doors used by the grounds crew—was locked, the keys kept under guard. And even if she could get past that wall, the nearest town was miles away across barren Yorkshire moors. A slippered woman in an institutional smock stood no chance; she’d merely wander the gorse until she was recaptured.

  She’d known from her second week here that if she was to get out, she would need help.

  She’d smuggled her ciphered messages out last week. Two desperate missives launched into the void like messages in bottles, sent to two women who had no reason to help her.

  They betrayed me, the thought whispered.

  You betrayed them, the whisper said back.

  Had they received the letters yet?

  If they had, would they listen?

  London

  Osla stood in her lace slip and robe, looking at the message that had thrown such a spanner into her day. The echo of the telephone’s furious slam on the other end of the line in Yorkshire still reverberated, along with her former friend’s choked voice. Go to hell, Osla Kendall.

  A clock ticked in the corner, and a blue satin dress slid off the heap on the bed. What she would wear to watch Princess Elizabeth marry her own former boyfriend now seemed the stupidest bit of bobbery in the world. Osla flung down the cipher message, and sunlight bounced green sparks across the lines of code, reflected off the big emerald ring her fiancé had put on her left hand four months ago.

  Any other woman, Osla reflected, would have run to her husband-to-be if she got menacing letters from a madhouse inmate. It was the sort of thing fiancés liked to know, if the women they loved were being threatened by lunatics. But Osla knew she was not going to tell a soul. A few years at Bletchley Park turned any woman into a real clam.

  Osla sometimes wondered how many women there were in Britain like her, lying to their families all day, every day, about what they’d done in the war. Never once saying the words I may just be a housewife now, but I used to break German ciphers in Hut 6 or I may look like a brainless socialite, but I translated naval orders in Hut 4. So many women . . . by the end of the war in Europe, Bletchley Park and its outstations had four women to every man, or so it seemed when you saw the swarm
of Victory-rolled hair and Utility frocks come spilling out at shift change. Where were all those women now? How many men who had fought in the war now sat reading their morning newspapers without realizing the woman sitting across the jam-pots from them had fought, too? Maybe the ladies of BP hadn’t faced bullets or bombs, but they’d fought—oh, yes, they’d fought. And now they were labeled simply housewives, or schoolteachers, or silly debs, and they probably bit their tongues and hid their wounds, just like Osla. Because the ladies of BP had certainly taken their share of war wounds.

  The woman who had sent Osla the Vigenère square wasn’t the only one to crock up and end in a madhouse, gibbering under the strain.

  Get me out of here, the ciphered message read. You owe me.

  The cipher message said a lot of other things, too . . .

  The telephone shrieked, and Osla nearly jumped out of her skin. She snatched up the handset. “Did you change your mind about meeting?” It surprised her, the thrum of relief that went through her. No love lost between herself and her old friend, but if she had someone to face this problem with—

  “Meeting whom, Miss Kendall?” The voice was male, insinuating, oilier than Brylcreem on a Cheapside shoe salesman. “Where are you off to? Private rendezvous with the royal fiancé, perhaps?”

  Osla straightened, jangling nerves subsiding in a rush of straightforward loathing. “I don’t remember which scandal rag you write for, but stop talking slush and bugger off.” She banged down the handset. The sheet sniffers had been haunting her doorstep ever since the royal engagement had been announced. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t anything to find; they wanted dirt. One hour ago, she’d been looking for any excuse to get away from them, from the wedding hysteria, out of London altogether . . .

  She heard the furious voice through the telephone again: Go to hell, Osla Kendall.

  “Oh, plug it,” Osla said aloud, making a sudden decision. “I’m coming to talk to you whether you like it or not.”

  Because nothing about the woman in the madhouse could be discussed by telephone, and the only person she could talk to about it lived in York now. A long, long way from London.

  Two birds, one stone.

  Seven Years Ago

  June 1940

  Chapter 6

  Dear Philip: I work in a blinking madhouse, Osla imagined scribbling to her fair-haired prince—not that she could give him details about her new job in those letters posted to Philip’s ship, but she’d got into the habit of talking to him in her head, spinning the straw of daily life into entertaining gold anecdotes. It’s a small madhouse tucked inside a larger one. The large one is Bletchley Park, the small one is Hut 4. Hut 4 simply defies description.

  She’d turned up for her first shift promptly at nine the morning after signing the Official Secrets Act, thrilled to her bones to be doing something more important than pot-riveting seams. All she wanted in this world was to prove herself, prove once and for all that a Mayfair giggler who’d curtsied to the king in pearls and plumes could poker up in wartime and serve as well as anyone else. Could do something important, even . . .

  Well, banging Hurricanes together might have been useful, but this was in a different class. Osla had already vowed she’d stick it out here, no matter how hard it was. She was only sorry she and Mab wouldn’t be working together. Dear Philip: The girl I’m billeted with is simply divine, and I forbid you to ever meet her because you would probably fall in love on the spot and then I would have to hate her. Not you—you wouldn’t be able to help yourself; Mab would wing a superb eyebrow at you and that would be that—but I can’t afford to hate her because it’s clear I will need allies if I am to survive in the house of the Dread Mrs. Finch. More about her later.

  Osla and Mab had sauntered to the gates of Bletchley Park in the bright June morning, where Mab was shunted to Hut 6 and Osla to Hut 4. “Well then . . .” Mab perched her little chip hat at an aggressively chic angle. “Show me just one eligible bachelor, Hut 6, and we’ll get along fine.”

  Osla hoped Mab was met by a more appetizing specimen than the fellow who answered her own knock: a stocky balding fellow in a Fair Isle jumper. “German naval section,” he greeted Osla as she stepped into the long green-painted building squatting next to the mansion like a frog. “You’ve got the German, then?”

  “You mean have I got a German tucked in my handbag?” Osla quipped. “’Fraid not, darling.”

  He looked blank. She sighed, spouting some Schiller in her impeccable Hochdeutsch. He waved for her to stop. “Good, good. You’ll assist with the registration, the W/T sorting, the teleprinted traffic . . .”

  He whisked her inside the hut and showed her through: two large rooms separated by a door, a small room at the end, another little room after that which had been subdivided even smaller. Long tables heaped with papers and atlases, swivel chairs, pigeonholes, green steel filing cabinets . . . it was stiflingly hot, the men in shirtsleeves while the women patted perspiring faces with handkerchiefs. With a distracted “Have a go!” he passed Osla over to a motherly middle-aged woman who took in the new arrival’s evident confusion with a smile.

  “It wouldn’t be any clearer if he tried to explain. These Oxbridge types are hopeless at explaining anything.”

  Dear Philip: My entire introduction to the world of codebreaking was “Have a go!”

  The middle-aged woman introduced herself as Miss Senyard and made introductions to the others—a few girls like Osla, all Mayfair diction and pearls; a few girls with “university” stamped all over them, all efficient and friendly as they showed the new girl the ropes. Some were sorting wireless telegraphy forms; some were collecting unknown German naval codes and identifying call signs and frequencies with slashes of a pencil. Osla received a towering stack of loose papers and a punching machine—“Take these signals and bind them up properly, dear. It’s the early naval Enigma traffic; poor Mr. Birch’s cupboards are positively overflowing and we’ve got to get it filed.”

  Osla studied a sheet: a report of some kind, translated German broken and patchy as if parts of the sentence hadn’t come through. “Why is this in German and not that?” she asked the girl next to her, nodding at the cards with their keys and call signs, much of it gibberish.

  “This is the undeciphered stuff. We log it, register it, then it goes out to the naval section boffins to be broken. The boffins are the brainy ones.” Admiringly. “Who knows what they do or how they do it, but the undeciphered stuff comes back to us broken into readable German.”

  “Oh.” That was where the important work was done, then. Osla wrestled with the punching machine, fighting a sense of deflation. Punching holes to bind papers together and stick them in cupboards—was this really the best use of her language skills? Had she managed yet again to land in a place where the real work was being done by someone else? Not that she was going to get in a wax about needing to be important, she just wanted to be used well . . .

  Never mind that, she scolded herself. It’s all important. And it’s only your first day. “What do we do with all these reports and signals, then? Once they come back broken into German.”

  “It’s all translated, logged, analyzed. Miss Senyard’s box files have copies of every German naval and naval air signal—periodically we get someone in a tearing hurry, requesting a copy of this report or that one. And we send the raw decrypts to the Admiralty, as well as reporting by telephone. We’ve got a direct line; Hinsley rings since he’s liaison, then they give him the brush-off and he goes about muttering insults for the next hour.”

  “Why do they brush him off?”

  “Would you believe it if some reedy Cambridge student from the middle of nowhere called to tell you where the U-boat wolf packs were, and when you asked how that information was obtained, his reply was You don’t need to know?”

  Dear Philip: The Admiralty currently making decisions for your beloved navy lurches along on shrugs, shoeboxes, and ignorance. Is this entire war run by idiots? That woul
d explain why we’re on the verge of being invaded. Not that she ever would have written Philip anything so defeatist. Osla kept her letters cheerful; the last thing a man at war needed was gloom from the home front. But to herself, in her own head, she didn’t mind being pessimistic. It got difficult keeping your chin up, all the while imagining what London would look like once the Jerries had nailed German street names over the signs to Piccadilly and St. John’s Wood. It could happen. Not that anyone said it, but everyone was in a pelter worrying that it would happen.

  The Americans weren’t coming to the rescue. Most of Europe had fallen. England was next. That was the bleak reality.

  I might see the news here first, Osla thought, reaching for a new report. She might know before anyone else in the country—before Churchill, before the king—when they were being invaded, because the next decoded German report might be orders for a pack of destroyers to sail for Dover. Just because the brainy boys here could decode what the Nazis said to each other, that didn’t mean they could stop it.

  I don’t know what you’re doing in there, Osla thought to the boffins breaking codes for the U-boat packs that hunted ships like Philip’s, but do it faster.

  That made her wonder. “If this is naval section, can we look up our own ships in the decrypted reports? See if the Germans have flagged them in their radio traffic?” Like HMS Kent, currently bearing a certain fair-haired royal midshipman toward Bombay . . . “Or are we not allowed to ask about such things?” The orders had been no talking to anyone outside Bletchley, and no talking to anyone outside or inside about one’s work, but those instructions still left quite a few gray areas. Osla had no intention of breaking the Official Secrets Act on her very first day. Dear Philip: I’m going to be hanged for treason, or possibly shot by firing squad.

  “We all talk in-hut,” the reassuring answer came. “It’s all right as long as everything you learn stays in-hut. You can try looking up a ship if you’ve got a fellow on board, but you can’t pass on anything you find to his mum.”