The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Really, it’s too boring to talk about.”

  “You can trust me!” Mrs. Finch was clearly not giving up. Her voice was cozy, but her eyes had a certain gleam. “Just a hint. I’ll dole you a bit extra from the sugar ration.”

  “No, thank you,” Mab said coldly.

  “Such a careful one.” Mrs. Finch patted her arm, gleam in the eye hardening, but she moved out of the way. Mab rolled her eyes at the retreating back, not realizing until she heard the nearly inaudible voice that Mrs. Finch’s colorless daughter was sitting in the corner of the kitchen, shelling peas.

  “You should just tell Mother something. She won’t be satisfied till she knows.”

  Mab looked at the other girl. Hardly a girl; she was twenty-four and she volunteered with the Women’s Voluntary Services when she wasn’t being run off her feet by her mother—but she gave the impression of a girl, with that colorless skin that showed every wash of emotion and those eyes that never rose from the floor. Mab couldn’t help a flash of annoyance. “I’m not here to satisfy your mother’s curiosity, Bess.”

  The girl flushed dull red. “Beth,” she said almost inaudibly. She sat shoulders rounded, like a puppy whose cringing practically invited a certain kind of person to give a good kick. As she carried the shelled peas to the counter, Mab could see the outline of a paperback hidden in her skirt pocket.

  “Done with Vanity Fair yet?”

  Beth flinched, fiddling with her plait’s stringy ends. “You didn’t tell Mother, did you?”

  “Oh, for—” Mab swallowed some less than polite words. A woman of twenty-four should not be apologizing to her mother about a library habit. Grow a spine, Mab wanted to say. While you’re at it, put a lemon rinse on that hair and try looking people in the eye. If there was anything Mab couldn’t stand, it was limp women. The women in her own family were hardly perfect—in fact, most of them were flint-hard cows—but at least they weren’t limp.

  Beth sat back down at the kitchen table. She’d probably sit here the rest of the night until her mother told her to go to bed.

  “Get your coat, Beth,” Mab heard herself saying.

  “W-what?”

  “Get your coat while I change. You’re coming to the first meeting of the Bletchley Park Literary Society.”

  Chapter 8

  The Shoulder of Mutton reared its thatched head at Buckingham and Newton roads, the bar cozy and bright, the private sitting room low beamed and inviting. It was everything Beth feared about social gatherings: tight quarters, loud noises, cigarette smoke, fast conversation, strange people, and men. Anxiety choked her throat, and she couldn’t stop fiddling with the end of her plait like it was a lifeline.

  “—you billet here, Giles?” someone was asking the lanky red-haired man. “Blimey, you got lucky.”

  “Don’t I know it, Mrs. Bowden’s a gem. Not much bothered by rationing; I swear she’s queen of the local black market. We’ve got the private room, get your drinks . . .”

  Beth found herself clutching a sherry she didn’t dare sip. What if her mother smelled liquor on her breath?

  “Swig that down,” Mab advised.

  “W-what?” Beth was eyeing the group piling around the table. Osla, laughing as an army lieutenant lit her cigarette . . . several gangling academic sorts gawping at Mab like puppies . . . red-haired Giles and a truly massive black-haired man who had to duck under the rafter . . . all of them worked at the mysterious Bletchley Park, so what was Beth doing here? She didn’t know what to make of these people—some looked so shabby in their patched tweeds that her mother might have taken them for tramps, but they talked in such overeducated drawls she could hardly understand a word they said.

  “Relax,” Mab said. She had a glass of beer, and she’d thrown one leg over the other in casually elegant fashion. “We’re only here to talk books.”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” Beth whispered.

  “It’s a literary society, not a bordello.”

  “I can’t stay.” Beth set her sherry down. “My mother will pitch a fit.”

  “So?”

  “It’s her house, her rules, and I—”

  “It’s your house, too. And really, it’s your father’s house!”

  Beth’s words dried up. Impossible to explain how slight a presence her father really was in the Finch household. He never put his foot down. He wasn’t that kind of husband, that kind of father. The finest of men, Beth’s mother always said smugly when other women in the village complained of overbearing husbands.

  “I can’t stay,” Beth repeated.

  “‘The greatest tyrants over women are women,’” Mab quoted. “Have you read that far in Vanity Fair?” She arched one brow, then addressed the men across the table. “So, shall we vote on a book every month? How shall we tally up—”

  “Popular vote,” one of the skinny academics was saying. “Or the ladies will have us all reading romantic tosh—”

  “Romantic tosh?” Osla demanded, squashing in on Beth’s left. “The last thing I read was Vanity Fair!”

  “That’s about girls, isn’t it?” Giles objected.

  “It’s written by a man, so that’s all right,” Mab said tartly.

  “Why do you men get the swithers if you have to read anything written by a female?” Osla wondered. “Aren’t we a century out from poor Charlotte Brontë signing herself Currer Bell to get published?”

  Fish and chips arrived, leaking grease. Beth didn’t dare touch hers, any more than the sherry. Nice girls did not eat in public houses; nice girls did not smoke or drink or argue with men . . .

  Osla’s a nice girl, Beth thought, marshaling arguments for later. Nothing Mab did was going to find approval with Mrs. Finch, but Osla was another story. She’s been presented at court; you can’t say she isn’t a lady, Mother! And here Osla was crunching up chunks of fried cod, swilling sherry, and arguing with Giles about Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, obviously having a grand time.

  Somehow Beth didn’t think that argument was going to weigh much with her mother, either. Mrs. Finch wasn’t going to care about anything except that Beth had gone out, without permission.

  “I vote for Conan Doyle,” the huge dark-haired man on Beth’s right was saying. “Who doesn’t like Sherlock Holmes?”

  “You’ve already read everything Doyle ever wrote, Harry . . .”

  He didn’t look like a Harry, Beth thought, trying not to stare at the man. He wasn’t just enormous—nearly a head taller even than Mab; broad enough he’d nearly turned sideways through the door—but he was black haired and swarthy, almost dark skinned. Beth could imagine the village ladies whispering, “Is he a wog or an Eyetie?” but he didn’t sound like a foreigner. He had exactly the same university drawl as the rest.

  “Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian,” he said, catching Beth’s eye.

  She flinched. “What?”

  “My father’s family is originally from Malta, my mother was born to an Egyptian diplomat and the daughter of a banker from Baghdad.” He grinned. “Don’t be embarrassed; everyone wants to know. I’m Harry Zarb, by the way.”

  “You speak English very well,” she managed to reply.

  “Well, my branch of the family’s been London based for three generations, I was baptized Church of England, then went through Kings College in Cambridge like my father and grandfather before me, so . . . be rather embarrassing if I didn’t speak English well.”

  “I—I’m so sorry,” Beth whispered, mortified.

  “Look like me and everyone thinks you were born in a tent on a sand dune.” He shrugged, but Beth was too embarrassed to answer. She let the talk pass over her head, reaching for the newspaper abandoned at the next table and turning for the crossword. It was half obliterated by grease stains but she fell into it gratefully, doing it up with a pencil stub.

  “You went through that like a Derby winner,” Osla laughed, but Beth just stared down at her feet. Would this night never be over?

  ONE LOOK AT he
r mother, sitting at the kitchen table with her Bible, two bright spots of color flaring in her cheeks, and Beth shriveled down to her bones. “Now, you mustn’t put yourself in a pucker, Mrs. F,” Osla attempted with her winning smile as they filed into the kitchen. “It’s not Beth’s fault—”

  “We dragged her out,” Mab added. “Really—”

  “Hadn’t you better get to bed, girls?” Mrs. Finch looked at the kitchen clock. “Lights out in twenty.”

  There wasn’t anything the other two could do but go upstairs. Mrs. Finch’s nose twitched at the smells of cigarette smoke, beer, sherry. “I’m sorry, Mother—” Beth began, but that was all she managed to say as her mother seized her arm.

  “The whole village will be talking. Did you think about that?” Mrs. Finch didn’t shout, she spoke sorrowfully. That made it so much worse. “The ingratitude, Bethan. The disgrace.” She held out her Bible, open to Deuteronomy. “‘If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them—’”

  “Mother—”

  “Did you think that didn’t apply to daughters? ‘They shall say to the elders of the city, “This daughter of ours is stubborn and rebellious, she will not obey us, she is a glutton and a drunkard—”’”

  “I didn’t drink a drop—”

  Mrs. Finch shook her head sadly, holding out the Bible. Beth took the heavy book and held it straight out, tear-blurred eyes fixed on the page of Deuteronomy. The longest she’d ever had to hold it up was thirty agonizing minutes. Surely it being so late, Mother wouldn’t—

  “You’ve disappointed me, Bethan.” A hard pinch to the inside of Beth’s arm as the Bible began to droop, then the gentle disapproval flowed on. Beth had behaved shamefully. She had disgraced her mother, who took care of her when she was too slow-witted and head-in-the-sky to look after herself. Beth was lucky she’d never marry and have children, so she’d never know how they broke your heart . . . Fifteen minutes later, Beth was hiccupping with sobs, tears dripping off her hot cheeks, arms shaking and burning with the effort to keep the book level with her eyes.

  “Of course I forgive you, Bethan. You may lower the Bible.” A pat instead of a pinch to Beth’s arm as she dropped the book. “This is bringing on one of my headaches . . .”

  Beth flew teary eyed for a cold cloth, a footstool. It was half an hour before she was allowed to go to bed. Her arms hung loose as noodles, muscles aflame. Finally daring to massage the tender flesh inside her elbow—Mrs. Finch had strong fingers; they pinched so hard—Beth reached the first landing and heard voices through Osla and Mab’s door.

  “—poor Beth,” Osla was saying.

  “She could grow a spine,” Mab responded tartly. “If my mother went at me like that at my age, I’d dish it right back.”

  “She’s not you, Queen Mab. I’ve never seen anybody so perfectly, hopelessly Fanny Price in my life.” Mab made an inquiring noise. “You know, the dishrag heroine in Mansfield Park, who goes about looking like a dog’s dinner and raining on everyone’s fun? Don’t tell me you haven’t read Austen—”

  Beth didn’t wait to hear any more. Tears sliding from her eyes all over again, cheeks burning with dull humiliation, she stumbled into her bedroom. How idiotic, how pathetic, thinking that because the Bletchley Park girls threw her a few nice words like a bone to a dog, they actually liked her in the slightest. Even more idiotic and pathetic to think that just because the redbrick mansion down the road had become a hive of wartime activity, life would change.

  Nothing for Beth was going to change, ever.

  Chapter 9

  June rolled into July, and Osla was dying for a project. Work in German naval section might have carried on at a frenetic pace, but it was about as intellectually taxing as noughts and crosses. I need a challenge, Osla thought, yawning as she helped Miss Senyard notate unknown German codes to be passed up the ladder for identification. Or at least I will when I’m back on days . . . The nine-to-four shift wasn’t bad, but when the shift change rolled around to the four-to-midnight, Osla had to fight to keep herself from falling in the dismals. It was one thing to trip home after midnight because you’d splashed out at the Café de Paris. It was quite another to fall into bed at one in the morning after a night spent making preparations for when the enemy invaded.

  “There are plans to organize a mobile section of GC & CS,” Miss Senyard told her girls, quite matter-of-factly. “Those members of German naval section chosen will be supplied with special passports in preparation for hasty departure.”

  So they can bunk off into the hills and keep up the fight once the Germans have taken over here, Osla thought with a sick twist of her stomach. Until now she’d been able to contemplate her country’s takeover in the abstract, a black cloud on the horizon—but to see practical preparations being made for the day German tanks came rolling through Bletchley village . . .

  If Miss Senyard’s announcement had come during day shift, Osla might have been able to toss her head in defiance: We will never need a mobile GC & CS to flee into the hills, because you’ll never pull this invasion off, Herr Hitler. You’ll have to run your tanks over my dead body and the dead bodies of everyone else in Britain first.

  But in the eerie, stuffy blackness of night, Miss Senyard’s announcement and its implications seeped into Osla’s bones like poison. If documents were being issued and orders passed down, it was fairly obvious Germany would be invading very soon.

  Dear Philip: If you stop getting my letters . . .

  “At least we’re not on night shifts yet,” one of her fellow indexers yawned, noting Osla’s long silence. “The brainy boys work a midnight-to-nine shift too, because the Jerries change all the cipher settings at midnight.”

  “I wonder how they do it—break the ciphers.” Osla wondered if she could learn to do it herself, get a transfer from filing and binding to something more taxing. Something to keep her mind from the invasion. “Not that one would ever ask; you just know Commander Denniston would have you dragged out behind the mansion and shot. But one can’t help wondering. They must be fearfully clever fellows.”

  “Not only fellows.” The answer surprised Osla. “There’s a whole clutch of girls in Knox’s section, that little outbuilding by the stable block? The harem, they call it, because Knox only recruits women.”

  “Let me guess—they’re all slap-up lookers, and none over twenty.” Osla wasn’t eager for that kind of transfer, much as she wanted more useful work.

  “No, it’s not like that. Hinsley was raving a month ago how Knox poached a German-speaking girl he wanted for our section, a girl named Jane—well, I’ve seen Jane and she’s got a bill like a duck. No one trying to stack his office with lookers would pick her. She’s brainy, though. The brainy girls go to Dilly Knox. No idea what they do.”

  That was the thing about the Park; gossip ran fluid as a river, but no one knew anything for certain.

  Midnight had descended black and cloudless as Osla yawned her way out of Hut 4. Codebreakers and linguists were fleeing for home and bed, as another stream of rumpled academics and girls in crepe frocks trudged in on the dreaded night shift already looking absolutely knackered. “If Mrs. F knocks on our door at six in the morning again, I’ll pitch a fit,” Mab grumbled, sauntering to join Osla. “I need my beauty sleep tonight. I’m going for lunch with Andrew Kempton before tomorrow’s shift.”

  “Is that the third man asking for a date, Queen Mab?”

  “Fourth.” Mab didn’t sound smug, just matter-of-fact. “He was born in Whitstable, read German philosophy at Cambridge, no parents—”

  “Feel his withers and examine his teeth while you’re at it. Are you taking a dead set at the delicious Harry Zarb, too?”

  “He’s married,” Mab said, regretful. “At least he dropped that in right away. Most men only tell you they’re married after trying to get a bit of the old you-know.”

  “Married, what a shame. You two wo
uld have had the world’s tallest children.” All the marriage talk made Osla think of the perennial spinster in the Finch household, and the lurking desire for a project reappeared after the night’s horrified preoccupation with the German invasion. “We need to do something about Beth. The Dread Mrs. Finch has her thoroughly nobbled.”

  “You can’t help people if they won’t help themselves. She won’t even look us in the eye since the literary society meeting.”

  Osla was quite certain, after that night two weeks ago, that she’d seen bruises all over the inside of Beth’s arm. The kind made by strong, pinching fingers targeting the sensitive skin inside the elbow, like a bird pecking at the tenderest part of a plum. Introducing a little fizz and fun into Beth’s life without putting her mother in a pucker—now, that was a project worth tackling.

  Osla and Mab were rounding the corner through Bletchley village, walking down the center of the road to avoid the muddy ruts on the verge, when a set of headlights reared behind them. Osla shrieked and leaped into a bush, and Mab staggered and fell into a deep rut. The car ground to a halt, the driver’s door flying open. “Are you all right?” A man came round the bonnet, his shadowed shape hatless and stocky. By the flare of the car’s headlights, he lifted Osla easily out of the bush. “I didn’t see you till I rounded the bend.”

  “Partly our fault,” Osla said, getting her breath back. “Mab—”

  Stiffly, her friend picked herself up. Osla winced. Even in the indirect glare of the masked headlights, she could see that Mab’s crisp cotton print was mud from collar to hem. Reaching down, Mab slipped her left shoe off and examined the snapped heel, and Osla saw her face crumple in the shadows. Every night she watched Mab polish those cheap shoes before bed, no matter how tired she was, to give them a Bond Street shine.

  “I’m sure we can fix it,” Osla began, but Mab’s crumpled expression vanished. She drew back and hurled the broken shoe straight into the chest of the man who’d nearly run them off the road.