The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  She waited. He moved his elbow, dropped his arm back into the grass.

  “Right,” she said as if he’d answered. “The operator must have been told to send out a dummy message, the way they do after they change the wirings. Just gibberish. But he didn’t bother to make something up. He just pressed the letter L for an entire page, and the machine pushed out every other letter but L. So I had the longest, nicest crib anyone could ask for. A whole page of Ls.”

  “Christ.” Harry’s voice was ragged, but that strangled heaving of his shoulders had stopped. “What an arse. Probably having a fag late at night, deciding ‘Hell with protocol.’”

  “Just hitting L over and over, thinking about his girlfriend,” Beth agreed. “I get wheel settings off girlfriend names, too. There was a Balkan operator who kept setting a four-wheel machine to R-O-S-A. Another operator in the same district was also using R-O-S-A. We kept debating among ourselves if it was the same Rosa.”

  “Not very nice of her, keeping them in the dark.”

  “A woman whose only romantic options are fascist Balkan wireless operators has bigger problems than not being nice.”

  “True.” Harry turned his head on the grass to look at Beth.

  Beth looked back at him. “You’ll get your L,” she said. “At some point.”

  “If we don’t, we’re sunk.” He said it very quietly. “That traffic is everything. It’s not just that we can’t keep the Americans safe without it. We don’t get the convoys full of supplies without it. We don’t eat without it. We don’t win without it. And I can’t get in. I cannot get in.”

  “You’ll get in.”

  He raised himself on one elbow, dropped his head to Beth’s, and gave her one fast, ferocious kiss. He tasted like strong tea and utter desperation. He pulled back before she could react, rising and brushing the grass from his sleeves. Beth sat bolt upright, feeling her face heat like a forge. Her mouth burned.

  “Don’t worry.” He stood big and expressionless against the sun, hair disheveled, hands sunk in his pockets as though to stop them from reaching toward her. “Won’t do that again. I just—one time, that’s all.”

  Beth looked wildly up and down the bank. No one in view. She still found herself whispering as she blurted out, “You are married.”

  “I’m not—that is, my wife and I, we aren’t married in the way you think—” He shook his head, cutting himself off. “Never mind. I won’t make excuses. The heart of it is this: I want you, I can’t have you, and for a moment I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  “Are you just looking for a bit of fun?” Beth flared. Maybe he’d sensed she had a bit of a crush, noticed the involuntary smile that came over her whenever she saw him. Beth, darling! The thought came in Osla’s slangy Mayfair drawl, except Osla was never cruel. You’re too, too utterly pathetic! Beth wanted to crawl into the lake.

  “No, I—Christ.” Harry looked at her squarely. “You’re so bloody brilliant you take my breath away. Ever since I watched you crack Italian Enigma, I can barely breathe around you.”

  Beth couldn’t think of a thing to say. She was twenty-six years old and she’d never come remotely close to being kissed before. No one thought of shy, backward Beth Finch that way in BP or the village. They would, Mab had said when she last gave Beth’s hair a trim to keep its Veronica Lake wave, if you didn’t try to melt into the background.

  I like melting into the background, Beth had replied. The promise of a film or a few kisses wasn’t tempting enough to make it worth the agony of trying to converse with a stranger on a date. She already had everything she needed: a home away from her mother; work she loved more than life; Dilly Knox and wonderful friends and a dog who curled on her feet at night. It hadn’t occurred to Beth to want more.

  It certainly hadn’t crossed her mind that someone wanted her.

  Her mouth still burned. The kiss had been glorious, and that filled her with fury. A crush had been safe, a little private glow to enjoy. Now that was spoiled. “You shouldn’t tease,” she said tightly, aware she was still blushing, mortified by it. “It’s hateful, teasing someone with something they can’t have.”

  “I’m not teasing you. I’m yours if you want me.” Harry sounded deathly tired. “I just don’t know why you would. There’s not much of me left over, Beth. But all of it belongs to you.” He stared across the lake at the huts, and she could see the five-letter blocks start to spiral into him, working through his shoulders until they looked like stone walls. “And all of it would rather die than hurt you.”

  He set off for his desk like he was walking toward a gallows.

  Chapter 36

  Darling girl, Francis had scribbled hastily on Foreign Office stationery,

  I can’t get away from the office until this evening. Pop in on your family, then come back to my rooms and make yourself at home. I shall see when I can get out—hopefully not so late I cannot pin you to my exceedingly narrow bed and do a number of ungodly things to you which I have been daydreaming about, most inappropriately, during work hours. —F

  Mab repressed a violent urge to curse. She would undoubtedly shock her husband’s grandmotherly landlady, who had passed the letter over and now stood in the shabby-elegant corridor looking sympathetic. “He sent the note round an hour ago, dearie. Asked me to give his lovely wife the key to his room if she wanted to wait for him.”

  I don’t want to wait, Mab wanted to shout. I want him here! Already gone May, and she had barely seen her husband at all since the Lake District. They simply hadn’t had any luck when it came to timing. First Francis had been sent to Scotland for nearly five weeks, completely out of reach, then when he came back and they had managed to line up another weekend—Mab hoarding her days off, working twelve days straight so she’d have forty-eight hours’ leave—that had been scuppered by Wren Stevens, who begged, crying, for Mab to take her shift. “Jimmy’s shipping out to Ceylon, it’s my last chance to see him!” What was Mab supposed to say? Well, she could have said no, if she was as much of a hard-boiled egg as some seemed to think, but she didn’t have the heart. Francis wasn’t shipping out somewhere dangerous; they’d have all the time in the world once the war was done—who knew if poor weepy Stevens’s fiancé would come back alive?

  So the only time together Mab and Francis had managed in the last few months had been tea in a railway café between London and Bletchley, surrounded by irritable waitresses and squalling children. They could barely hear each other over the din; conversation died utterly after a few feeble fits and starts. All they could do was hold hands over the rickety table, smiling in silent rueful acknowledgment of their situation, Mab unable to ask in the middle of the noisy café, What did you think of my letter?

  Her husband had answered that spilling of her soul with a short letter of his own: I think you are brave and beautiful, Mab. And I shan’t ever bring the matter or the man—though he doesn’t deserve the word—up again, unless you wish to discuss it. Mab had grown weak-kneed with relief, reading those words, but she’d still wondered if something would change in the way Francis looked at her. She didn’t think anything had, but how could you tell from twenty-five minutes in a crowded café?

  Now they were supposed to have an entire afternoon and night and morning before Mab returned to Bletchley, and Francis was stuck at the office. Mab unloaded every East End curse she knew in a silent scream.

  The landlady was still chattering. “. . . pleased as punch to see Mr. Francis marry! Such a fine man, one of my best guests. Do you wish to wait upstairs, dear?”

  “I’ll pop out to see my family first.”

  Lucy greeted Mab’s arrival in Shoreditch with a shout. “I drew a picture! C’n I show you? Mum’s making tea, she’s too busy to look—”

  “Beautiful,” Mab said over the sound of clanking dishes, admiring Lucy’s latest sketch on the back of an old envelope—a horse with a green mane and yellow hooves. Lucy still wanted a pony more than life. “I can’t get you a pony, Luce, but I brought you mound
s of paper. You’ll be sketching ponies for months.”

  Lucy gave her a careless kiss and began sorting through the scrap paper Mab had hoarded from Bletchley Park. Lucy was six years old now, lively as a monkey, hair exploding in uncontrollable dark curls. Mab frowned, calling to the kitchen. “Mum, Lucy shouldn’t be running around in skivvies.” The flat was too stuffy even on a rainy May day to be chilly, but Mab wanted to see Lucy in something better than a grubby vest and knickers.

  “You ran around like that till you were eight.” Mab’s mother came in with the tea mugs, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “And look how you turned out, Miss Fine and Fancy.”

  Mrs. Churt couldn’t keep a slightly adversarial awe out of her voice whenever she addressed Mab now. Being chauffeured to a fancy London hotel by a Greek prince, getting kitted out in a borrowed silk dress, and watching her Hartnell-clad daughter recite her vows to a gentleman in a Savile Row suit had knocked Mrs. Churt for a loop. “Why couldn’t my other girls turn out like Mabel?” Mab had heard her mother saying to one of the neighbors. “They settle for dockworkers and factory men, when she nabs herself a dyed-in-the-wool gentleman easy as taking candy from a baby!”

  “Don’t suppose you could spare a few quid?” she asked now as Mab handed over all her extra clothing coupons for Lucy.

  “That’s near a week’s wages, Mum—”

  “What, that husband of yours doesn’t give you pin money?”

  Francis had offered, but it seemed greedy when her billet and meals were covered. Mab didn’t want him thinking she was the kind of woman who always had her hand out. “I don’t keep house for him yet, so it’s not necessary.” Mab pushed a couple of pound notes across the table, then bundled Lucy into her clothes and took her to the park. “Do you want to live in Coventry after the war, Luce? It’s in the very middle of England, and there’s a house there that will be mine, and you could learn to ride.”

  “I don’t want to learn to ride later. I want to learn now.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Mab took her hand as they crossed Rotten Row. “There are a lot of things I want now, too. But there’s a war on.”

  “Why does everyone say that?” Lucy said crossly. She probably didn’t remember when there hadn’t been a war on.

  Mab headed back to Francis’s digs at twilight, hoping . . . but the landlady shook her head. “He’s not back yet, dearie. Would you like to wait in his room? Normally I’d insist on seeing a marriage certificate before letting any young lady into a gentleman’s quarters under my roof, but Mr. Francis is such a perfect gentleman . . .”

  Not so perfect as that, Mab thought with a certain grin, mounting the carpeted stairs. Francis could, in his quiet way, pen an absolutely indecent letter. Something else she’d learned about him, since the Lake District.

  I’m sitting at my desk in my shirtsleeves under a hideous gaslight, smudged in pencil, dreaming of the long map of your body unscrolled across my unmade bed. A map I’ve nowhere near finished charting, though I know a few landmarks well enough to dream on. Your hills and vales, your valleys and mounds, your wicked eyes. You’re an endless serpentine ladder to paradise, and I wish I could coil your hair in my hands and climb you like that great mountain in Nepal where countless explorers have died in ecstasy searching for the peak. I am mixing my metaphors horribly, but longing does that to a man, and you already knew I was a terrible poet. I’d fall back on a better one and pass his work off as my own, except you read far too widely for that to work. “License my roving hands, and let them go, before, behind, between, above, below . . .” O my Mab, my newfound land! Is John Donne on your list of classic literature? He is probably considered too indecent for females. Certainly he’s no help to a gentleman’s peace of mind either, especially when dreaming of you, my lovely map, my unclimbed ladder . . .

  Francis’s room was at the top of the house. Mab let herself in, realizing she had no idea how he lived—for all his letters, he had never once described this place. She looked around the neat, anonymous bedroom, not seeing Francis at all; it was cluttered with the Victorian landlady’s crocheted antimacassars and silk flowers. Nothing here smelled like him, his hair tonic or his shirts or his soap.

  Make yourself at home, his note had said. She didn’t want to pry, but she was desperately curious. His bedcovers were pulled taut enough to bounce a shilling—clearly he’d never lost the army habits from the last war. The desk was bare except for pen and blotter and stationery. One photograph in a much-handled frame, facedown on the desk . . . turning it over, Mab saw four young men in uniform. With a stab to her gut like a bayonet thrust, she realized the shortest was Francis, his uniform so big it puddled at his ankles. He stood clutching his weapon with a huge grin, as if he had joined the greatest adventure in the world. The three men around him looked grimmer, their smiles more cynical, or was she reading too much into those blurred, unknown faces? The scribbled date in the corner read April 1918.

  “You poor bugger,” she said softly, touching her husband’s young face. She’d never once seen Francis smile that wide—she wondered if he ever had, since April 1918. There were no names written under any of the men around him. They didn’t live, Mab thought, replacing the picture where she’d found it. I’d stake my life on it.

  No other photographs, not of his parents, not of Mab. She didn’t have a single picture of herself to send him—she’d have to do something about that—and they hadn’t snapped any wedding photographs. Osla hadn’t been able to find a camera on short notice. Mab went to the bookshelf—no poets, mostly treatises on distant history, long-ago Chinese dynasties and Roman emperors. He seemed to like his reading to take him as far from the twentieth century as possible. At the very back of the shelf, wedged almost out of sight, she found a copy of Mired: Battlefield Verses by Francis Gray, with a copyright page from 1919—it must have been from the first printing run. The spine cracked as if it hadn’t been opened in years, but there were angry scribbles all over the pages, almost every poem marked up. From “Altar,” his most well-known poem:

  Mab laid the book aside, feeling stripped to the core. All the letters he’d written and never a word about any of this. But why would he? No one talked about their war when it was over. If the day ever came that Hitler was defeated and Bletchley Park closed for good, Mab suddenly knew down to her bones that she and everyone else wouldn’t need the Official Secrets Act to tell them to scorch it from their minds. They’d do it anyway. That was what Francis and his surviving friends had done after the last war; it was probably what the Roman and Chinese soldiers in his history books had done after their wars long ago.

  In the top drawer of his desk, she found a packet of her letters. She leafed through them, every one clearly much handled, all the way back to the very first note she’d written him after they became engaged—just a few lines suggesting a date he could meet her family. Underneath her signature, he’d scribbled in pencil:

  The girl with the hat!

  A knock sounded, and Mab jumped out of her skin. Still holding the bunch of letters, she rose to answer.

  “Mr. Gray telephoned, dearie. He won’t be able to get away at all tonight—possibly by tomorrow morning. He’s very sorry—some line of questioning he can’t get free of.”

  Mab’s heart sank.

  “Would you like some supper? Just mock duck and turnip-top salad, but no one goes away from my table hungry, even with a war on.”

  Mab demurred politely, then shut the door and looked around the little room. It might not have looked like Francis, smelled like him, or carried the shape of him in its shadows, but at that moment she swore she could almost feel him breathing at her shoulder. Before she could lose the feeling, she sat down at his chair and helped herself to his pen and paper.

  Dear Francis—sitting in your room without you in it fills me with questions. I know the direction you slant your hat when you cram it over your hair with one hand. I know you take your tea without sugar, even when sugar isn’t rationed.
I know you have a ticklish spot at your waist, and I know the song you hum while shaving (“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”). But sometimes I don’t feel I know you at all . . . and you seem to know me so well.

  I wish I had known the boy I saw in the photograph on your desk, the one with a smile that nearly runs round the back of his head. I wish I knew who his friends were. I wish I knew why you called me “the girl in the hat.”

  I wish you were here. —M

  Darling Mab—I missed you by eight bloody minutes this morning. I ran all the way home, shamelessly shoving small children into ditches and old ladies into oncoming traffic. Your scent was still lingering when I wrenched the door open. I said a good many words then of which my landlady did not approve. Damn my job, damn the Foreign Office, damn the war.

  Don’t regret never getting to know the boy in that photograph. He was an idiot. He’d have been utterly tongue-tied in your presence, and you’d have spent all night talking to his three friends, who would have charmed you. They were all far better men than Private F. C. Gray. (C stands for Charles. Did you know that? It’s entirely possible I never told you.)

  As for the girl in the hat, she’s you. Or rather, she’s become you.

  I was sixteen, and I’d been in the trenches four months, quite long enough to lose every ideal I’d had. You’ve read the wretched poetry, I won’t repeat anything trite about barbed wire or flying bullets. I had forty-eight hours’ leave coming with my friend Kit—in the photograph, he’s the towhead on the end. The other two had already died, Arthur two weeks before of peritonitis, George three weeks before that of a scrape gone septic. It was just Kit and me left, and he was hauling me to Paris on our next leave. Only he was killed six hours beforehand, gut-shot in a pointless skirmish. I listened to him scream for an hour before a sniper on our own side finally finished him. So I went to Paris on my own.