The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “What are you doing taking a turn at that speed, you bloody bastard!” she bellowed. “Are you blind, you stupid bugger?”

  “Clearly,” the man said, barely catching the shoe. He stood half a head shorter than Mab, a shock of russet hair falling over his forehead as he shaded his eyes to look at her. “My apologies.”

  “We were walking in the middle of the road,” Osla pointed out, but Mab stood on her one shod foot in the mud and let the stranger have it. He let it rain down, expression more admiring than horrified.

  “Blew your tire,” Mab finished with a withering look. “Guess you’ll have to get down in the mud and change it out.”

  “Would if I could,” he replied. “I’ll just leave the car and head for the station. Are there any trains this late?”

  Mab folded her arms, cheeks still scarlet with indignation. “Easier to put the spare on, if you’ve got a kit.”

  “Haven’t a clue how.”

  Mab slipped out of her other shoe, whizzed it into his hands, marched in her stocking feet through the mud to the car’s boot, and hurled it open. “Have my shoes properly mended, and I’ll change your ruddy tire.”

  “Deal.” He looked on, grinning, as Mab began yanking out tools.

  “How do you know how to change a blinking tire?” Osla wondered. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “A brother who works in a garage.” Mab rolled up her skirt at the waist to keep it out of the mud. Her flat stare promised the stranger slow, painful death if he ogled her legs. “Have you got a torch? Shine it over so I can see what I’m doing.”

  He deposited Mab’s ruined shoes on the bonnet and switched on his torch, still grinning. “You two are BP workers?”

  Osla smiled politely, not answering that question on an open road. “Are you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Gray. And no. I’m in one of the London offices.” Intelligence, Osla thought, approving of his vagueness. Or Foreign Office. “I was running some information to Commander Denniston personally, from my own boss. He was late getting me a reply, hence the midnight drive.”

  Osla offered a hand; he shook it over the beam of the torch. “Osla Kendall. That’s Mab Churt, cursing at your tire.”

  “I’ll need help winching up the car.” Mab’s irate voice floated up. “Not you, Os—no sense both of us ruining our stockings.” Osla watched as Mr. Gray lent a hand. He stayed to lug the spare through the dark and pass a few more tools, until Mab snapped, “You’re in my way, now; just hold the torch.”

  “Pity you don’t work at BP instead of London, Mr. Gray,” Osla said as he straightened. Hard to tell in the dark, but he looked thirty-six or thirty-seven, his face broad and calm and creased with smile lines. “We need more fellows in our literary society.”

  “Literary society?” He had a country voice, soft midland vowels. He spoke to Osla, but he was watching Mab do something incredibly capable to the spare tire. “I thought you BP girls were all maths-and-crosswords types.”

  Something niggled at the back of Osla’s mind. Something about crosswords . . .

  “There.” Mab straightened, pushing her hair off her muddy cheek. “That should get you to London, Mr. Gray, then you can get the other patched.” Her eyebrows lifted. “I’ll expect my shoes back good as new.”

  “You have my word, Miss Churt.” He shouldered his blown tire so he could sling it into the boot. “I don’t want to be found dead in a gutter.”

  Mab nodded grudgingly, turning to look at Osla. “Coming, Os?”

  “You go,” Osla said as Mr. Gray nodded farewell in the dark and slipped back into his car. The bit about crosswords had dropped in her head with a click. “I’ve had an absolutely topping idea.”

  She hadn’t been back inside the mansion since her first day; even at midnight, it hummed like a beehive with exhausted men in their shirtsleeves. Osla couldn’t get in to see Commander Denniston, but red-haired Giles was in the conservatory flirting with a typist, and Osla nipped her hand through his arm. “Giles, d’you know if Denniston’s still recruiting?”

  “Crikey, yes. The rate traffic’s mounting, they can’t vet people fast enough.”

  “I remember hearing something about crosswords . . .”

  “There’s a theory that crossword types, maths types, and chess-playing types are good at our sort of work. Personally I think it’s bollocks. I certainly can’t tell a rook from a bishop—”

  Osla cut him off. “My landlady’s daughter is an absolute whiz at crosswords.”

  “That mousy little thing you brought to the Shoulder of Mutton? Are you mad, you dim-witted deb?”

  “Her name is Beth Finch. And don’t call me that.” Osla remembered how fast Beth had finished the newspaper crossword at the pub. Osla Kendall, not only are you not a dim-witted deb, you are a genius. Because maybe what Beth needed was a peroxide rinse, a new dress in the latest go, and a date with an airman or two, but she wasn’t going to get any of those things if she never got out of the house. Even sitting behind a typewriter or binding signals on night shift had to be better than toiling for the Dread Mrs. Finch until the Nazis came goose-stepping into Bletchley. “Take a puck, Giles, and put in a word with Denniston. Beth’s going to fit right in at Bletchley Park.”

  Chapter 10

  August 1940

  You’ll do.”

  Beth stared in utter horror.

  “Were you worried, Miss Finch?” The tired-looking man—Paymaster Commander Bradshaw, as he’d introduced himself at the start of Beth’s interview—stamped something on the file in front of her. “It’s not all Oxford graduates here, you know. Your background came in clean as a Sunday wash, and being a local girl, we won’t have to billet you. Start tomorrow; you’ll be on the day shift. You’ll need to sign this . . .”

  Beth didn’t even hear the dire imprecations of the Official Secrets Act as they were rattled off. They weren’t supposed to take me, she thought in a blur of panic. It had never occurred to her that Bletchley Park would hire her, even when the summons came a week ago. “It only says to present myself for an interview,” Beth had reassured her mother, who had slit Beth’s letter open when it arrived and demanded explanations. She’d present herself as called, but the Park wouldn’t have any use for her. Far too stupid, she thought, wondering how they’d got her name at all. And the interview, conducted in a muggy back room behind the redbrick mansion’s staircase, had seemed utterly routine: questions about typing and filing, which Beth couldn’t do; education, which Beth didn’t have; and foreign languages, which Beth didn’t speak. She whispered one-word answers, mind half on the strange things she’d seen while trudging up to the mansion: a man cycling through the gates wearing a gas mask as though he expected an attack any moment; four men and two women playing rounders on the lawn . . . Even as she walked up the drive, Beth had already been relieved at the thought of going home and telling her mother it was all over.

  Then, suddenly: You’ll do.

  “S-surely there’s a mistake,” she managed to stammer.

  But Mr. Bradshaw was shoving a pen at her. “Sign the Act, please.”

  Dazed, Beth signed.

  “Excellent, Miss Finch. Now for your permanent pass—” Mr. Bradshaw broke off as a commotion resonated outside. “Good Lord, these codebreakers are worse than quarreling cats.”

  Out the door he went. Beth blinked. “Codebreakers?!”

  Following him out toward the entrance, she saw a weary-looking gentleman in shirtsleeves addressing a grizzled professorial type who was limping up and down the oak-paneled hall—“Dilly, old thing, do stop roaring.”

  “No, I will not,” roared the man with the limp. To Beth he looked like the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass, which Osla and Mab were reading for the first literary society book pick: long, gangling, faintly comical, eyes snapping behind horn-rimmed spectacles. “Denniston, I won’t have my work passed off half-done—”

  “Dilly, you haven’t got the personnel, and you keep turning down the new ones
I send you.”

  “I don’t want a yard of Wrens all looking the same—”

  “We haven’t even got any Wrens—”

  “—and I don’t want any debutantes in pearls whose daddies got them into BP because they knew someone at the Admiralty—”

  “This one might do, Dilly,” Mr. Bradshaw interrupted, and Beth shrank as every eye in the hall turned to her. “I was going to put her into administration, but you might give her a trial first if you’re shorthanded.”

  “Eh?” The White Knight turned with a glare. His eyes behind the glasses raked Beth, and she stood frozen. “You’re good with languages?”

  “No.” Beth had never felt so shy, slow, stilted, and stuck in her life. From Commander Denniston’s grateful glance at Bradshaw, she knew perfectly well this was a diversion—chucking her into the line of fire to avert further shouting. Her face burned.

  “What about linguistics? Literature?” the White Knight fired off. “Even maths?”

  “No.” Then for some reason, Beth whispered, “I—I’m good at crosswords.”

  “Crosswords, eh? Peculiar.” He pushed his glasses further up his nose. “Come along.”

  “Miss Finch hasn’t got her official pass yet—”

  “Has she signed the Act? Let her start. As long as you can shoot her if she blabs, who cares about the pass?” Beth nearly fainted. “I’m Dilly Knox. Come with me,” the White Knight said over his shoulder, and led her through the looking glass.

  What is this place? Trailing after Mr. Knox as he limped out of the mansion toward what appeared to be a converted stable block, Beth couldn’t stop Lewis Carroll from chaining together in her whirling head. Her brain did that sometimes, went flashing down an association and kept linking others to it to make a pattern. Glancing up at the bronze-faced clock mounted on the half-timbered upper tower, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see the hands running backward. Why hadn’t Osla and Mab warned her? But they couldn’t say anything; they’d signed an oath . . . and now, so had Beth. Whatever happened here now, she wasn’t going to be able to tell her mother a thing.

  Her stomach swooped. Mother is going to be furious.

  Beyond the old stable yard was a compact single-storied block: three brick cottages joined together in a single whitewashed unit, with two doors. Mr. Knox struck open the rightmost. “We work here,” he said, beckoning Beth through a corridor. “It’s like a great factory, the rest of BP. Here’s where we do proper cryptography.”

  Cryptography, Beth thought. I now do cryptography.

  There was no Wonderland inside the desk-crammed, chalk-dusty room where he led her, just five or six women hard at work—short and tall, pretty and plain, looking as young as eighteen or as old as thirty-five in their jumpers and skirts. None looked up. “Were you shouting at Denniston again, Dilly?” an older woman with straw-fair hair asked.

  “I was sweet as a lamb. I told him just last week that he couldn’t—”

  “Dilly darling, no.” The woman was manipulating a set of cardboard strips in a pattern Beth couldn’t follow. “You didn’t tell Denniston anything last week.”

  “Didn’t I?” He scratched his head, all his earlier rage seemingly dissipated. “I rather thought last week one had said the right thing . . .”

  “One hasn’t said anything before today. One hasn’t spoken to Denniston at all for two weeks.” The straw-haired woman exchanged smiles with the younger girls.

  “That would explain why he looked so puzzled.” Mr. Knox shrugged, turning back to Beth. “Meet my ladies.” He gestured to the room. “Dilly’s Fillies, they call ’em at the mansion. Utter rot, but around here, if it rhymes, it sticks. Ladies, meet—” He looked at Beth. “Did you tell me your name?”

  “Beth Finch—”

  “Ladies, Beth Finch. She’s . . .” He trailed off, patting his pockets. “Where are my glasses?”

  “On your head,” at least three of the women said, without looking up.

  He located his spectacles and draped them over his nose. “Take a desk,” he said, waving at Beth. “Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes.”

  He flung himself down at a desk by a window, fumbling for a tin of tobacco and seemingly forgetting Beth’s existence. Most of the girls went right on working as though this were a perfectly normal state of affairs, but the small woman with the straw-fair hair rose, extending a hand.

  “Peggy Rock.” One of the older women, thirty-five or thirty-six, a plain face that sparkled with intelligence. “I’ll show you the ropes. That’s Dillwyn Alfred Knox,” she said, pointing to the White Knight, “and he was breaking German codes back in the Fourteen–Eighteen War. Dilly’s team here researches the stuff that has to be lockpicked rather than brute-force assembly-lined through the other huts. Right now we’re working the Italian naval Enigma—”

  “What’s Enigma?” Beth said, utterly bewildered.

  “The machine the enemy uses to encrypt most of their military traffic,” Peggy said. “Italians and Germans, naval traffic and air traffic and army traffic, and every cipher has a different setting. The machine has, well, let’s just say a dizzying number of setting combinations, and the settings change every day, so that should make whatever they encrypt with Enigma unbreakable.” She gave a small smile. “Not as unbreakable as they think.”

  Did Osla know all this? Beth wondered. Did Mab?

  “We tend to get a bit more of the big picture here than the others at BP,” Peggy added as if reading her mind. “They’re such fiends for compartmentalization here—most people just see the bit in front of them, and maybe they put a bit together from what they see going in and out of the other huts, but that’s all—”

  “Utter rot.” Dilly’s voice floated from his desk. “I want my girls to have a large, unhampered range. You benefit from seeing the whole picture, not bits and pieces of it.”

  “Why?” Beth asked.

  “Because we do the tricky part.” Peggy Rock spread her hands. “The traffic gets registered and logged elsewhere, and once it’s broken it gets translated and analyzed—but we do the important bit in the middle. The prying-it-all-open bit, every message individually. We use a technique called rodding to identify the start position of the message as seen through the window indicator setting. Let me show you—”

  “I won’t understand it,” Beth blurted out. “I’m not clever, you understand? I can’t do—” Rodding. Cryptography. This. Her chest was tight; her breath heaved; the walls pulsed around her. It paralyzed her to stray even a few steps outside her usual routine, and here was a whole new world. Any moment now she was going to panic. “I’ll hold you back,” she insisted, close to tears. “I’m too stupid.”

  “Really?” Peggy Rock looked at her calmly, fanning out a handful of those curious cardboard strips like a winning hand of cards. “Who told you that?”

  Chapter 11

  I miss you, Os. I miss you a shocking lot, to be honest.

  Philip’s handwriting was clear, no flourishes. Seeing it always made Osla’s heart thump. Shut up, heart, she scolded.

  “Mrs. F’s really having a go.” Mab was eavesdropping unashamedly downstairs, head poked into the dark landing. Beth’s first shift at Bletchley Park had been today, right after her interview, and Mrs. Finch had been twitching. Now Beth was back, not that they could hear her. Just her mother’ s insistent voice, quoting something from the Bible about For son treats father contemptuously, daughter rises up against her mother—

  “Should we pop down?” Osla looked up from the bed where she was curled rereading Philip’s old letters. “Interject various patriotic things like ‘Let your daughter work, you meddling cow, there’s a war on’?”

  “We’ll only make things worse,” Mab said. “Mrs. F’s on Ezekiel now.”

  Gnawing her lip, Osla turned back to Philip’s salt-stained letter from May. Being transferred to the Kent when I was just getting used to the Ramillies; that was a bit of a letdown. None of the ratings here are all that keen
on having royalty aboard, even third-rate royalty like me. You should have seen the eyes rolling when I first came on. Whisper is we’re off to hunt for some action soon. Don’t worry, darling girl—

  He hadn’t seen any action with the Kent, but now he was being transferred again, to her sister ship—who knew where it would take him? Osla shivered. U-boat wolf packs roaming the sea, and of course he'd want to charge right into the thick . . .

  “Here she comes,” Mab whispered as Beth’s footsteps came up the stairs. Osla slid off the bed, tucking Philip’s letter into her copy of Through the Looking-Glass. When Beth appeared on the landing, Osla and Mab whisked her into their room and shut the door.

  “Well?” Osla checked Beth’s arms—no bruises, thank goodness. “Your mother can’t refuse, surely! You know, I thought it might take longer when I put your name in. Sometimes the vetting takes weeks—”

  “So you did recommend me.” Beth’s voice was flat.

  “Yes.” Osla smiled. “I thought you might need an excuse to get out of the house—”

  “You thought.” Osla had never heard Beth interrupt anyone, but she cut Osla off now. Her cheeks flared scarlet. “You know what I think? I think I wanted to be left alone. I think I want my mother not to be angry with me, or make me hold the Bible up for twenty minutes. What I don’t want is a job with strange people doing work I don’t understand.”

  “We were just as lost the first few weeks,” Mab reassured. “You’ll get the hang of it. We were just trying to—”

  “You want me to grow a spine.” Beth’s imitation of Mab’s voice was savage. “But maybe you two should have thought that somebody like me—someone perfectly, hopelessly Fanny Price—would have been happy to stay home where she belongs.”

  She whirled out of the room. Her bedroom door banged a moment later. Mab and Osla looked at each other, stunned.

  “I should have asked before I put her name up.” Osla sank down on the bed. “I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in.”

  “You didn’t mean to—”