The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  And really, it was all going to be fine. They wouldn’t be like those deadly old-fashioned couples who lived in each other’s pockets. They weren’t in love, and who needed to be? It was 1947, darling, not 1900. Better to marry a friend, even one who called her kitten, than expect some grand romance. A friend whose presence at the royal wedding would assure all onlookers that Osla Kendall was a radiant fiancée, not a bitter old maid.

  “Sorry to snaffle your plans, darling, but I’ll be back before you miss me.” Osla rang off, then whisked downstairs with her traveling case. A taxi screeched to a halt, and soon Knightsbridge fell behind her. The thought of her fiancé’s eyes was replaced by the memory of a woman’s serious blue gaze—the eyes of the woman who had disappeared three and a half years ago into Clockwell. The last time Osla had seen those eyes, they’d been wide and bloodshot as she simultaneously wept and laughed, rocking back and forth on the floor. She’d looked utterly on her beam ends, like she belonged in an asylum.

  The cipher message crackled in Osla’s pocket. You owe me.

  Maybe I do, Osla thought. But that doesn’t mean I believe you. Believed the other half of that desperately scribbled message, the very first line, which Osla had read and reread in shock.

  But she remembered those blue eyes, so painfully earnest. Eyes that had never lied.

  What happened to you? Osla wondered for the thousandth time. What happened to you, Beth Finch?

  Inside the Clock

  “Into the garden, Miss Liddell! We want our exercise, don’t we?”

  Beth caught herself rocking again, back and forth on her bench, as she wondered what was going on in the world outside. At BP she’d been better informed than anyone outside Churchill’s cabinet. Living here in this wool-padded ignorance—

  With an effort, Beth stilled herself. Only madwomen rocked back and forth. She wasn’t mad.

  Not yet.

  “Miss Liddell—” The matron hauled her up, voice dropping from sugary to sharp as the doctors bustled out of earshot. “Outside, you lazy bitch.”

  The thing Beth hated most here: anyone could touch her whenever they wanted. She had never liked to be touched unless it was on her own terms, and now every day there were hands: at her arms to steer, at her jaw to pry her mouth open, touching, touching, touching. Her body was no longer her own. But she moved out into the garden, because if she didn’t she’d be dragged.

  “That Liddell gives me the shivers,” Beth heard the matron mutter an hour later, sharing a cigarette in the rose garden with another nurse. “Underneath that empty stare it’s like she’s thinking how to take you apart.”

  Correct, Beth thought, maintaining her vacant look as she wandered the roses.

  “Who cares what they’re thinking, as long as they’re quiet?” The nurse shrugged. “At least we don’t have the dangerous ones like at Broadwell or Rampton. They’re docile here.”

  “They’re docile, all right.” The matron reached over to the vacant-eyed old woman who had been wheeled out to the garden in her bath chair and tapped hot cigarette ash onto her wrist. No response, and both matrons giggled.

  Endure. Beth picked up the discarded, half-smoked cigarette after they wandered away, taking a welcome drag. Just endure.

  She left the rose garden and wandered the high outer wall, which had been cleared of trees or shrubs or anything that might provide help climbing upward. A trio of burly orderlies walked the perimeter every hour, looking for knotted sheets or makeshift ropes flung over the walls. Not looking too seriously; it had been years since anyone tried to make a break for it. I intend to be the next, Beth thought. And then I will come for the person who put me here.

  Three and a half years, and she still wasn’t entirely sure who that was. She’d told her former friends as much in her cipher message:

  Osla & Mab—

  There was a traitor at Bletchley Park, selling information during the war.

  I don’t know who, but I know what they did. I found proof it was someone who worked in my section—but whoever they are, they had me locked up before I could make my report.

  You may hate me, but you took the same oath I did: to protect BP and Britain. That oath is bigger than any of us. Get me out of this asylum, and help me catch the traitor.

  Get me out of here.

  You owe me.

  “Everyone in, now! Exercise over.” The same hard-faced matron called across the garden, sounding impatient. “Pick up your feet when I talk to you, Liddell.” Giving Beth’s arm a hard, careless twist as she passed.

  Beth lifted the still-smoldering cigarette she’d managed to conceal between two fingers and planted the burning end on the matron’s hand. “Not. My. Name.”

  Two orderlies dragged her to her cell, face stinging with slaps. Beth fought every step of the way, clawing and spitting as they buckled her into the straitjacket. She tried to lie low, oh, she did, but sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. She snarled as she felt the needle’s prick, felt her veins filling with smoke, felt herself heaved like a hay bale onto her cot. The furious matron lingered as everyone else left, waiting until she could spit down Beth’s cheek. It would dry and be mistaken for drool, Beth knew. “You can lie in those sheets till you’ve pissed them, you little cow. Then you can lie in them a while longer.”

  Go to hell, you starched bully, Beth tried to say, but a fit of lung-rattling coughs erupted, and by the time she was done hacking, she was alone. Alone, straitjacketed, drugged to the gills, with nothing to think about but the traitor of Bletchley Park.

  Mab and Osla would surely have the letters by now, Beth thought dizzily. The question was, would they dismiss her claim as a madwoman’s paranoid fantasy?

  Or would they believe the unbelievable: that a traitor had been working at Bletchley Park and passing information to their enemy?

  Six Years Ago

  March 1941

  * * *

  BLETCHLEY BLETHERINGS

  BP’S NEW WEEKLY: EVERYTHING WE DINNAE NEED TO KNOW!

  March 1941

  * * *

  Bletchley Bletherings has it on good authority that some unknown prankster smeared Commander Denniston’s office chair with strawberry jam during night shift. Waste of good jam, says BB!

  This month’s Mad Hatters Tea Party is discussing The Great Gatsby. It is officially Giles Talbot’s turn to bring the topper—for all you gigglemugs who have not clapped eyes on this monstrosity, picture a Dickensian stovepipe festooned with false flowers, ancient Boer War medals, Ascot plumes, etc. The topper is worn in dunce cap fashion by any Mad Hatter to propose the Principia Mathematica for the monthly read (that’s you, Harry Zarb), preface every statement with “I’m sorry” (ahem, Beth Finch), or otherwise wet-blanket the proceedings. BB doesn’t see stovepipe toppers catching on any time soon in Vogue . . .

  Speaking of fashion trends, London continues to sport 1941’s enduring, classic combination of shattered buildings and bomb craters, topped with eau de Messerschmitt and a dashing plume of smoke. Bomb away, Krauts—the boffins and debs of BP will still flood into London every night off and dance defiant in the rubble. There’s a war on, after all, and tomorrow we might be dead!

  —Anonymous

  * * *

  Chapter 15

  Osla crawled along the floor, blinded by blood.

  “Daisy Buchanan is one of those girls who goes about pretending they’re ever so fragile,” Mab proclaimed, “and really they’re as tough as old boots.”

  “I thought she was a bit sad,” Beth ventured. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Beth said I’m sorry again!” A chorus of laughter from the Mad Hatters, and the ancient festooned hat was lobbed toward Beth . . .

  That wasn’t right, Osla thought dimly, feeling blood run into her hair. She wasn’t at the Mad Hatters Tea Party anymore. That had been this afternoon, everyone wrapped in their coats against the March chill but determined to discuss The Great Gatsby in the spring sunshine on the lake’s shore. Mab wi
th her legs elegantly crossed, Harry stretched full-length leaning on an elbow in the grass, Beth primly upright with her tea mug.

  “You’re very smart today, Os.” That had been Harry, packing away the hat and the books post–Tea Party. “Night off?”

  “I’m catching the evening train to London.” Osla patted her bag, which she’d crammed that morning with her favorite Hartnell evening dress: emerald green satin that sluiced over her skin like water. “I’ve got an old friend on leave from his ship; we’re going to splash out at the Café de Paris.”

  The Café de Paris . . . Osla looked around, blinking blood out of her lashes, but couldn’t see anything through the splintered darkness but rubble and overturned tables. Humped forms lay along the floor. Her eye refused to recognize them, what they were. There—the famous nightclub staircase, taking you from the street to the intimate underground splendor of cocktail tables and champagne dreams. Osla tried to seize the bannister and haul herself upright, but she tripped over something. Looking down, she saw a girl’s arm, its dainty wrist still looped with a diamond bracelet.

  The girl’s corpse sat slumped and armless in a blue chiffon gown at the nearest table.

  “Oh,” Osla whispered, and threw up into the rubble. Her mind was full of broken glass, her ears rang with sirens, and it was all coming back. She looked around at the carnage that had, minutes ago, been London’s most glamorous nightclub—the safest in the city, its manager boasted. The Blitz couldn’t touch you here, twenty feet belowground, so dance the night away.

  “Philip,” she heard herself whispering, “Philip . . .”

  Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his band had packed the floor, the Café de Paris jammed with dancers as the trumpets blared. Even when the area between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square was being strafed by German bombers aboveground, here you could forget the air raids. Here you were safe. Perhaps it seemed heartless or foolhardy to dance when the world above was pounded by fire, but there were times you had to either dance or weep—and Osla chose to dance, her hand in her partner’s strong tanned one, his arm in its naval uniform snug about her waist.

  “Marry me, Os,” he said into her ear, spinning her through the tango. “Before my leave’s up.”

  “Don’t talk drip, Charlie.” She executed a flashy turn, smiling. “You only propose to me when you’re half-sauced.” Osla couldn’t help but wish she were doing the tango with Philip tonight, but he was still out to sea. Charlie was an old chum from her deb days, a young officer heading out into the teeth of the Atlantic. “No more marriage proposals, I mean it!”

  “That Canadian heart of yours is frozen solid—”

  Snakehips and the band swung into “Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh!” and Osla threw her head back to sing along. Winter was over and warmth starting to creep back over Britain; the government might still have been on alert for a German invasion, but Osla hadn’t heard a peep in BP about any such operation moving forward. Maybe the headlines were still bleak, and maybe Osla was still bored to tears filing and binding in Hut 4—all right, not just bored but smarting from some drawling comment she’d overheard about Miss Senyard’s flock of dim-witted debs in pearls—but there was, overall, a great deal more to sing about in this dawning spring of 1941 then there had been in the autumn of ’40.

  Snakehips sang away, dark skinned and slender in his white jacket, dancing with all the fluid grace that had won him his nickname. “He warbles it better than the Andrews Sisters,” Osla half shouted over the music, jitterbugging away in her green satin pleats, and she never heard the two bombs that hit the building aboveground, then rattled down the ventilation. She only saw the blue flash exploding before the bandstand, and in the instant before everything went away, saw Snakehips Johnson’s head blown from his shoulders.

  And now here she was, rocking back and forth on the floor, evening dress covered in blood.

  There was more light now, torches blinking on as survivors picked themselves up. A man in RAF uniform, trying to stand when one leg had been blown off at the knee . . . a boy who barely looked old enough to shave, trying to lift his moaning dance partner off the floor . . . a woman in a sequined gown crawling through the rubble . . . Charlie, Osla thought—there he was, faceup on the dance floor. The blast had exploded his lungs out onto the front of his naval uniform. Why had the bombs killed him and flung her clear? It made no sense. She tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t move.

  Someone buffeted down the stairs, shouting, and suddenly there seemed to be a rush of feet and bouncing torch beams. “Please,” she tried to ask the man who had run past, who was now moving from body to body. “Can you help—” But the man wasn’t here to help; he was yanking bracelets off a woman’s bloodied arm, then moving to a disembodied torso by the stage and rummaging for a wallet.

  It took her a long moment to see it for what it was. Looting, he was looting the bodies—a man had come into a room full of dead and wounded, and he was looting their jewelry—

  “You—” Osla struggled upright, fury like glass shards in her mouth. “You—stop—”

  “Gimme that—” A young man with sandy hair reached out, and pain bolted down Osla’s spine as she felt her earring torn away. “Gimme that too,” he said, fingers fastening around Philip’s jeweled insignia.

  “You can’t—have it,” Osla heard herself scream, but her limbs were moving with jerky uncertainty, and she heard the strap of her dress tear.

  Then a voice snarled, “Get the hell off her—” and a champagne bottle swung in a short arc through the flickering dark. There was a sound like a china plate hitting a brick floor, and Osla’s attacker dropped where he stood. She felt a gentle hand on her arm. “You all right, miss?”

  “Philip,” she whispered. She still had the naval insignia, clenched so tight in her palm she could feel its edges cut.

  “I’m not Philip, sweetheart. What’s your name?”

  “Os—” she began, and her teeth chattered so violently she couldn’t finish her own name.

  “Like Ozma of Oz?” The man’s voice was light, soothing. “Sit down, Ozma, and let me see if you’re hurt. Then we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain.” He had a torch; he guided her to the nearest chair. Her eyes were blurring so badly she couldn’t see what he looked like. She had a vague impression of lean height, dark hair, an army uniform under a greatcoat. Who’s Ozma of Oz?

  The man who had attacked her lay limp among the rubble. “Is—he dead?” Osla jerked.

  “I don’t care if he is. Christ, the blood in your hair . . . I can’t see if you’ve got a wound under there.” He picked up the champagne bottle he’d swung against the looter’s skull, popped the cork, and poured gently over Osla’s hair. Pinkened bubbles streamed down her neck, still cold from the ice bucket.

  She shivered, starting to weep. “Philip . . .”

  “Is that your boyfriend, Ozma?” The man was examining the back of her head now, sorting through her champagne-soaked curls. “It doesn’t look like this is your blood. Keep still, there’s aid workers on the way—”

  “Philip,” Osla wept. She meant poor Charlie, but her tongue wouldn’t produce the right name. She tried to stand—she should be helping, finding bandages for the others, doing something—but her legs still would not move.

  “Keep still, sweetheart. You’re in shock.” The dark-haired man shrugged out of his coat and draped it around her shoulders. “I’ll try to find Philip.”

  He’s not here, Osla thought. He’s in the Mediterranean, being shot at by Italians. But her Good Samaritan disappeared before she could tell him, moving to bend over an RAF captain who lay against the wall. The dark-haired man yanked a tablecloth off the nearest table to wad against the other man’s wounds, then a line of chorus girls in feathers and sequins hid him from sight as they stumbled past weeping—they must have been shielded in the wings when the bombs went off . . .

  Time slipped sideways for Osla. She was on a stretcher suddenly, still huddled in the
greatcoat, and aid workers were lifting her up the stairs to the street above, where someone made another examination.

  “We can take you to the doctor, miss, but you’ll wait hours while they see the bad cases first. My advice is go home, clean up, see your doctor in the morning. Is there someone at home waiting for you?”

  What do you mean, “home”? Philip had said that at the Café de Paris on New Year’s Eve. Home is where there’s an invitation or a cousin. Osla, standing in her bloodied dancing slippers on the rubble-strewn street, had no idea where her own home was. She was a Canadian living in Britain; she had a father under a gravestone and a mother at a house party in Kent; she had a billet in Bletchley and a thousand friends who would offer her a spare bed, but home? No. None.

  “Claridge’s,” she managed to say, because at least she could have a hot bath in her mother’s empty suite. She’d have to catch the dawn milk train to get back to Bletchley in time for her shift.

  Once at the hotel, it was a long time before she could get undressed. She couldn’t bear to touch the bloodied fastenings of her favorite, utterly ruined gown, couldn’t bear to shed the overcoat, which was soft and worn and held her in its warm arms. She didn’t even know her Good Samaritan’s name, and he didn’t know hers either. Sit down, Ozma . . . we’ll get you back to the Emerald City, right as rain . . .