The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “This is her.” A big jowly man in a checked suit stepped forward, gripping her shoulder in a massive hand. “The Finch girl.” He nodded at a shorter fellow in pinstripes smoking a Pall Mall by the guard station.

  “What do you want?” Beth tried to tug away but it was like trying to move out from under a boulder. At her feet, Boots was whining. “I don’t know you—”

  “We know you, missy.” The man in pinstripes sauntered over. “You’ve been talking about things you shouldn’t. Or maybe you’re just not right in the head. That’s for other people to figure out, fortunately.” He clipped her pass out of her hand and tossed it to the gate guard. “This pass is revoked, orders of Commander Travis. Bethan Finch is not to be allowed back inside Bletchley Park’s grounds.”

  “What?” Beth’s voice scaled up. “No, I have to see Commander Travis—”

  “Afraid that’s not possible, missy. He’s a very busy man right now.”

  “It’s important. I have documents—” She remembered to whisper, aware of the passing flood of codebreakers making their way through the gates. Showing their passes, slipping through, looking sideways at the little knot of disturbance. “There is information being passed out of the Park. It’s very important—”

  “Oh, I see. An informant? A spy?” The pin-striped man chuckled. “That’s what they said you’d say.”

  “Who said?” What in God’s name had been happening over the last few hours? It had still been daylight when she left ISK with her Rose decrypts, no one giving her a second look—now she was being escorted from the premises?

  A gesture to the jowly man gripping Beth’s shoulder. “Take her.”

  Boots barked wildly, towed by the lead around Beth’s wrist as she was frog-marched toward a long black Bentley. “Just ten minutes with Commander Travis—”

  They ignored her completely. Pinstripes leaned in to the driver. “You have the address for Clockwell Sanitarium?”

  “Yes, not the first time I’ve driven a cracked-up boffin to the loony bin.”

  Beth heard the word sanitarium and went mad. She clawed the jowly man’s hand off her shoulder, drawing blood from his knuckles, and turned to sprint for the gates. But Boots was still barking and wheeling on his lead, and she stumbled over him, going down hard on the road. The jowly man was on her then, picking her up bodily and carrying her to the car. The lead fell off her wrist as she thrashed and shouted. Every Bletchley Park codebreaker within fifty yards was staring.

  “Don’t mind her,” Pinstripes called briskly. “She’s had a bit of a crack-up, and now she’s going for a rest.” Beth realized with a splinter’s clarity how it looked: the shiny, official car; the shiny, official men; the wild-haired woman with her swollen eyes, her crumpled clothes, her snarls and howls.

  She threw herself at Jowls again as he slid into the car after her, but he captured her wrists, muttering, “So you’re one of those . . .”

  “Please,” Beth babbled to the driver, “you can’t take me to a sanitarium, I haven’t had a crack-up, I have evidence of an informer—”

  But the driver didn’t respond, and Beth’s eyes were drawn to the flash of silver as Jowls drew something out of his coat. She twisted frantically as the car started up, staring out the back window, gulping in a breath to shriek—and then she felt the prick of a needle through her sleeve.

  The last thing she saw before everything went dark was the woolly gray shape of her dog, blundering up and down the shadowed road, dragging his lead behind him, as the Bentley pulled away.

  SHE WOKE SLOWLY, to the smell of cigarettes and rain. Her entire body felt heavy, her skull stuffed with wool, her mouth dry.

  The backseat was shadowed with gray light, empty besides herself. It was barely dawn, the Bentley parked on a barren hillside clouded with morning mist and spiky gorse. She couldn’t see Jowls or Pinstripes—just the driver in the front seat. He’d cracked one window open enough to tap his cigarette outside.

  “You’re awake.” He looked around: a blocky man, nondescript, middle-aged. A complete stranger. “We’re out of petrol, if you’re wondering where the other blokes are. They hoofed it to the station a few miles ahead to get a jerry can. MI-5 gets all the petrol coupons they need, you know. I said I’d sit with you.”

  Beth glanced groggily at the door handle, wondering if she could make a run for it.

  “Don’t try,” he said, seeing her glance. “The needle stick you’ve had, you’ll be moving like you’re dipped in treacle. Besides, we’re in the middle of the Yorkshire moors; nothing about but gorse and the odd sheep.”

  Yorkshire. They must have been driving all night. What was the place they had mentioned—Clockwell Sanitarium? What is that? Where’s my dog? Her senses still felt dulled; the terror wasn’t slicing her to pieces the way it had at Bletchley Park’s gates. “Who are you?”

  “Just the driver.” He took another drag off his cigarette. “Driving for these London fellows doesn’t pay as much as it should, so I’m not averse to making the odd shilling on the side . . . and before we left BP, someone paid me five quid to give you something, assuming I could get you alone.”

  “Who?”

  “Not saying is part of the five quid.”

  “I’ll pay you,” Beth said desperately. “If you let me out, I’ll—”

  “No chance, duck. Five quid to pass on a message no one else will ever see is one thing. Letting you go is trouble I don’t need. You want the message or not?”

  Beth swallowed. “Yes.”

  He poked a folded sheet of paper across the seat divider. Beth shook as she read the terse, typewritten words.

  I saw the report you broke in ISK. I want to know what you did with it, and the others. Tell the driver yes and I’ll find a way for you to send word from Clockwell. Once I’ve had a bonfire in the grate, I’ll see you’re released.

  Say YES.

  If you don’t, you’ll rot in a madhouse the rest of your life. Osla and Mab testified against you. Your mother testified against you. No one will save you.

  Give me what I want.

  Beth looked up. “Who gave you this?”

  But the driver only snatched the paper back. “Yes or no?”

  “Do you even know what you’re asking? It is a traitor who paid you off.”

  A snort. “What I heard was you took something that didn’t belong to you, that’s all. You’re on the way to a loony bin, and you’re saying I should believe your story over that?”

  “When the others come back with the petrol, I’ll tell them—”

  “Go ahead.” The driver held the typed message out the window, set it on fire with his cigarette, and watched it flare up brightly before dropping it into the road. “I’ll deny everything. I’ve driven for them for five years, and you’re a crazy bint with veins full of sedative. So, yes or no? I get another five quid when I give your answer back.”

  To the informer. Whoever that was, they’d done a fine job of sewing her up, Beth thought bitterly. It wasn’t hard to seed doubt about a codebreaker cracking up. As far as BP was concerned, she was a potential risk that had been plugged; they’d forget about her and plunge into the chaos of the Normandy landings. Distantly, Beth wondered how that invasion was progressing. Allied soldiers might be battling through waves on those distant beaches already, and she wasn’t at her desk—she’d never sit at that desk again. For an instant, that hurt more than the knowledge she was headed to a madhouse.

  You took it from me, she thought to the traitor in a flash of murderous fury. In one day, she’d been stripped of everything: her job, her friends, her oath, her home, her dog, her freedom.

  Not everything, Dilly Knox said. You’re the cleverest of my Fillies.

  “So?” The driver looked impatient. “Yes or no?”

  Beth doubled over with a sudden gasp, clutching at her lower belly. Reaching under her skirt to her soaked sanitary towel, she brought her hand out covered in blood. “My monthly—”

  Like most men, the dr
iver went completely to pieces when confronted with a woman’s private functions. He fumbled for a handkerchief, for water, for anything that would get the blood off her fingers. It was the easiest thing in the world for Beth to reach into her knicker pocket with her unbloodied hand, take out the little key to Dilly’s library safe, and slip it into her mouth.

  The brass clicked between her teeth, metallic as blood. She took a shuddering breath, and then she swallowed it. It took some doing, forcing the metal edges past her own reflex to gag, but she got it down.

  “Look, give me an answer.” The driver eyed her as she cleaned the menstrual blood from her fingers, looking sorry that he’d ever taken that five quid. “Our friends will be back with the petrol soon. Yes or no?”

  Beth leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “No.”

  She didn’t say a word when the others returned, or when the car started up again. She didn’t say a word for hours, until the Bentley rolled through the gates of a high, forbidding wall up to a stately gray stone house. Where Beth Finch was escorted through a blaze of summer roses to the front doors of the sanitarium, and heard the whirring gears of a great clock rise to a scream in her ears as the madhouse gates closed behind her.

  Chapter 67

  German intercepts decrypted at Bletchley Park during Normandy invasion

  From: 11th U/B Flotilla

  Immediate readiness. There are indications that the invasion has begun.

  From: GRUPPE WEST

  MOST IMMEDIATE. Off LE HAVRE 6 battleships and about 20 destroyers.

  From: Seeko NORMANDY

  MOST IMMEDIATE. MARCOUF reports: a great many landing craft approaching, protected by battleships and cruisers.

  To: KARL

  Endeavor to reach CHERBOURG. Attack enemy formations as long as ammunition lasts.

  The prime minister’s voice poured through the telephone into Osla’s ear like weary gravel. “News?” She could imagine him pacing his study, staring at the eastern wall toward Normandy. “Well?”

  “In a jiff, sir.” Osla had been at her desk for too many hours to feel a thrill at talking to the prime minister. She handed the telephone off to her superior and went back to translating, mind feeling as if it had been sanded. She read nothing she translated; it flowed into her eyes, through her pencil, and out again without leaving a trace. Thirty hours later she staggered home.

  And found that Beth’s half of the room had been cleared out. Her blouses and dresses were missing from the wardrobe; her drawers stood empty. There wasn’t so much as a hairpin to indicate Beth Finch had lived here. Even Boots was gone.

  Osla sat down on her bed. She had never in her life been so knackered, too tired even to crawl into bed. A familiar clack of heels sounded on the stairs, and Mab came into the room. “Beth’s gone,” Osla greeted her. “Maybe she went back to her family, or—”

  “She’s gone to a sanitarium,” said Mab. “The gate guards told me—she completely crocked up.”

  Osla stared. “You’re chaffing me. Beth would never break down like . . .” But right here in this room when they were all last together, Beth had had a fit of hysterics. Laughing and crying on that high-pitched note like a nail gouging slate. Osla rubbed her aching temples. “Did we do this? Land her in the basket—even if she deserved it—when she was exhausted and keyed up for the invasion?”

  “I don’t know.” Mab sat down on Beth’s stripped bed, looking as wrung out as Osla. “I shouldn’t have shouted at her. Given the invasion, I should have left it till later.”

  “And who told Travis Beth broke her oath?” The timing of all of this . . .

  “London intelligence monitors all of us informally, to make sure no one’s talking. I’ve heard them talking about it at the mansion,” said Mab. “Someone must have heard something about Beth, that’s all.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Osla’s head ached. “The invasion,” she said eventually. “Did you hear anything at the mansion?”

  “The Germans swallowed our Pas-de-Calais deception hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Well, isn’t that just topping.”

  Another silence as they sat hoping that far away in the bloody sand and surf of Normandy, the death knell of Hitler’s Reich was sounding across the beachheads.

  “I’m leaving Bletchley,” Mab said. “Not yet, but soon. They’re sending a few ladies to the Admiralty in London. In the middle of all the fuss today, someone remembered to tell me I’d been chosen. Your friend Sally Norton, too. ‘To facilitate cooperation between Bletchley Park and the naval high-ups’ . . . I think they want us to flash our legs at the admirals so they won’t fuss about how the naval information from BP is obtained.”

  No Mab at BP. No Beth, either. Harry already gone, Sally going . . . “Take care, Mab,” Osla said, wondering if maybe they could at least part friends, of a sort anyway. She stretched out a hand.

  Mab jerked away, her face hard. “I don’t want your good wishes, Os.”

  “Well, I won’t bother you with them.” Osla’s anger flared through the exhaustion. “You East End bitch.”

  Mab looked at her, weary and contemptuous. “Crawl back to Mayfair, you stupid deb.”

  Osla had never slapped anyone in her life. She slapped Mab now, and walked out of the room.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Their landlady again, mounting the stairs with an armload of towels.

  “Yes, quite.” Continuing downstairs, insides churning. That contemptuous stupid deb, from Mab of all people . . .

  But that’s all you are. Osla halted at the foot of the stairs. She was never going to be anything else, no matter how hard she tried. So why bother trying?

  She remembered meeting Mab on the train to Bletchley Park: two bright-eyed girls with their suitcases and questions, wondering what the mysterious Station X had in store. Girls who wanted to serve their country, make friends, read books . . . girls who were, above all, determined. Mab to get a husband, Osla to prove herself.

  Be careful what you wish for, Osla wanted to tell those laughing girls in the train compartment. Oh, be careful!

  She supposed she’d better choke down some tea, then make up a new post-invasion Bletchley Bletherings and head back on shift. She might be a silly socialite without friends, lover, or home, but she still had work to do: making people laugh, and translating horrors. Plenty of that would be needed, surely, in the months to come.

  Another long, slogging year and more, as it turned out. There were some bright points—billeting with the effervescent Glassborow twins after Mab moved out; going to hear Glenn Miller with Giles; getting the news that Hut 6 had broken the message for Germany’s unconditional surrender; sitting on the back of one of the Trafalgar Square lions on V-E Day getting sauced on Bollinger with a couple of American GIs. Writing message-in-the-bottle letters to J. P. E. C. Cornwell, wherever he might be; finally telling the Mad Hatters she’d been writing Bletchley Bletherings all along and relishing their groans and laughter. And oh, the day Valerie Glassborow was on duty to hear the word come in that Japan surrendered, and the news spread—Osla found herself on the lawn flinging rolls of loo paper into the trees with mad abandon, watching the white loops unroll against the sky and crying for happiness.

  But that was the epilogue, she thought later. The real Bletchley Park ended for Osla on D-Day. The day three friends last spoke to each other; the day Mab Gray received a transfer to London; the day Beth Finch disappeared into the blue.

  Nine Days Until the Royal Wedding

  November 11, 1947

  Chapter 68

  Inside the Clock

  Even the inmates of Clockwell had celebrated V-E Day and V-J Day. Hitler’s suicide, the German surrender . . . happy tears had been shed among staff and inmates alike. And then a few short months later, news came of the great bombs that brought Japan to her knees, and cheap wine was doled out in paper cups so everyone could toast to victory and peace.

  To Bletchley Park, Beth had toasted silently. Without BP,
there would be no victory or peace.

  She had wondered then—and she wondered now, wandering the rose garden looking to see if her Go partner was back yet from surgery—what became of Bletchley Park after the war was finally over. She imagined the Typex machines falling silent, the huts emptying. No more rounders played on the lawn, no more canteen kidneys on toast at three in the morning, no more Mad Hatter Tea Parties of bread and marg and library books by the lake. Where would they all go, that collection of strange and remarkable people assembled by wartime desperation? Go back to your old lives, Beth imagined everyone being told. Go back to your old lives, and never speak of this to anyone.

  Had Bletchley Park fallen into ruin, once the gates closed behind the last codebreaker? Would anyone ever know what had happened there?

  I’ll know, Beth thought, fighting off a fit of coughing, brass key to Dilly’s safe nestled in its customary hiding place in her shoe. If I’m locked here until I’m a hundred and three, I’ll remember what happened at BP. They can take everything else, but never that.

  She thought she knew who the traitor was, too. Something else that couldn’t be taken away.

  She’d had three and a half years, after all, to ponder the question. Three and a half years to hide her key and sift her memory. Over the last few days, in the agony of waiting for Osla and Mab to respond to her cipher message, she’d kept herself occupied by weighing every possibility over again, even the names that hurt. And her conclusion was the same.

  It came down to one very simple question: who had told Mab that Beth cracked the report about the Coventry raid?

  Because the timing had been too neat, too pat. The one piece of information that would turn her billet-mates against her, delay her, and strip her of supporters who might defend her against accusations of instability—who had dropped that perfectly timed nugget?

  Beth remembered herself whispering, How did you find out? Mab spitting, Your friend Peggy.