The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Hide under this,” Osla ordered, shoving a car rug over the partition.

  Beth squirmed under it, but she couldn’t resist a peek through the rear window as they turned off the asylum road. Just a big gray stone house behind a tangle of dead roses and high walls, receding into the distance. Sleeping Beauty’s crumbling castle. The air coming through the open window was freezing cold, fragrant with bracken. Free air . . .

  “Lie down,” Mab hissed, mashing the pedal.

  Beth lay down, head spinning. Mab and Osla were arguing, low voiced.

  “—once they realize we aren’t Beth’s sisters—”

  “—they have no blinking idea what our real names even are—”

  The question burst out of Beth from under the blanket. “Can you tell me what happened to Boots?”

  A startled pause. Beth shrank, dreading the answer. “He was returned to Aspley Guise after you were taken away,” Osla said. “Our landlady kept him. She mentioned him in her last Christmas card.”

  Beth squeezed her eyes shut. Her dog was alive, safe. That seemed like the best omen in the world.

  Mab spoke up then. “Where are we going, Beth?”

  Beth opened her mouth and closed it again. The first real decision she had been offered in three and a half years. The Bentley rocketed over the moor as Beth Finch shut her tear-filled eyes with a sob of joy.

  Alice escaped the looking glass, Giles. And now she’s coming for you.

  Chapter 75

  Why did Giles get mixed up with Soviets?” Mab wondered, changing gears. The Bentley was speeding past Blackpool now, well south of York, even further from Clockwell. “We had more than a few at BP who flirted pink on the political side, but Giles didn’t seem to have an ideological bone in his body.”

  “He thought BP wasn’t doing enough to help our allies.” Beth was sitting up in the backseat now, wearing a print dress from Mab’s traveling case; it sagged off her gaunt frame. Osla had pressed a comb on her too, and some scent: Not to put too fine of a point on it, darling, but you look like a dog’s dinner. “He saw an opportunity to help the Soviets win their war, so he did. In his eyes”—she spat the words—“he was a patriot.”

  “The PM was stingy about sharing our findings with the Soviets,” Osla pointed out. “I used to get in a wax about that, too.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t betray your country,” Beth said.

  Would I feel quite so defensive of my country if it had locked me up in a madhouse? Mab wondered. Because Giles might have planted the seeds, but it was BP’s obsession with secrecy that made Beth’s imprisonment possible . . . then again, Beth had always had that peculiar rigid streak. It didn’t matter that her country had betrayed her; she’d taken an oath to it, and she would uphold that oath until she died. Maybe that streak of unbending iron in her soul was what had kept her from crumbling, surrounded by lunatics.

  “We could contact Commander Travis first,” Osla began. “He’s living in Surrey now. He knows us, and with his connections, contact with MI-5 would—”

  “No.” Beth cut her off. “No Travis, no MI-5. Not yet.”

  Mab took her eyes off the road long enough to stare. “We need to regularize your position as soon as possible. We’ve already risked charges, breaking you out—”

  “You put me there to begin with,” Beth flared.

  The undercurrent that had been running through the Bentley snapped taut.

  “Beth.” Osla reached to touch Beth’s hand where it rested on the backseat partition, then apparently thought better of it. “We didn’t know they were thinking of sending you to a sanitarium. If we’d known that when we were questioned—”

  “I lost three and a half years of my life because you two were angry at me.” Beth’s fingers flexed and opened, flexed and opened. “Have I been punished enough to suit you? Do you have any idea what it was like in Clockwell?”

  “Of course I don’t.” Mab stamped on the brakes as they came to a four-way stop, harder than necessary so they all jolted in their seats. “And I’d never have wished it on you in a thousand years, no matter how much bad blood we had between us. All I’m saying is that if you want to sling blame, that goes both ways—so I suggest we don’t, because it doesn’t matter. The person guilty of a crime here, a real crime, is Giles Talbot, and Osla and I are here to help you deal with him. So why can’t we go to the authorities immediately?”

  Beth drew something from her pocket and swung it between two fingers: a small brass key. “Because I still need to break the Rose Code.”

  Chapter 76

  It was past ten by the time they motored through Buckinghamshire, the Bentley creeping along pitch-black country roads. They had all fallen silent some thirty miles back—at about the time, Beth knew, when they drew closest to Bletchley Park.

  “I haven’t seen it since I left for the Admiralty in autumn of ’Forty-Four,” Mab said abruptly. “It was still buzzing along like clockwork . . . we had thousands of workers by that point. Remember the early days, when everything felt so ramshackle and you knew every face at shift change?”

  “I was let go September ’Forty-Five,” Osla said. “That cool little form: ‘Owing to the cessation of hostilities, etc. etc., please bugger off and never talk about what you did here or you’ll be hanged, drawn, and quartered.’” A sigh. “The clear-out was starting even before I left. They sent a party of us back to the old Hut 4, made us crawl over every board. People used to jam bits of decrypts into the cracks in the walls when drafts were blowing; we had to find every scrap and burn them.”

  Part of Beth yearned to stop by Bletchley Park’s gates, and part of her was glad it was too dangerous to risk being seen so near her hometown. She didn’t know if she could bear to see BP empty and abandoned. We did such things there, and no one will ever know.

  They made the turnoff in silence and parked, unfolding stiffly from the car. Beth didn’t know when she had ever been so tired: this morning she’d wakened in her cell; by noon she was out; they had driven all afternoon and through the evening across most of England. Had all of that really happened in one day?

  Mab rang at the door of the darkened house for a long time; at last there was the creak of hinges. “What’s this about?” came the alarmed voice of Dilly Knox’s widow. “Has there been an accident?”

  “No accident.” Beth came forward, seeing the older woman’s eyes widen. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Knox, but it’s an emergency. Three and a half years ago, I locked something in your husband’s safe. I’ve come to retrieve it.”

  BETH COULD FEEL Dilly so strongly as she came into the library, she nearly broke down in tears. I didn’t fail you, she thought, moving past his battered wing chair. I didn’t give in. Osla and Mab stood back, watching as Beth went to the wall and opened the panel.

  A deep breath, looking at the safe door and inserting the key. Beth felt the quiet click at the base of her heart as well as in her ears. She heard the intake of breath from the others as she reached inside and took out the Rose file.

  “That’s it?” Osla whispered.

  Beth took the file to Dilly’s big oak desk and spread out the pages. The sight of the familiar five-letter blocks of Enigma brought a wave of memory that nearly knocked her off her feet. It made some feline, sleeping part of her brain uncoil, stretching and hungry. She laid out the pages, starting with the single message she’d broken and run through the Typex on her very last day at the Park, and realized her hands weren’t fumbling anymore but moving with swift precision. “Come look,” she ordered, and the others obeyed, reading over her shoulder the words she’d had memorized for years.

  Osla was the first to see the problem. “We,” she said succinctly, “are utterly graveled.”

  “It doesn’t name him.” Mab looked ready to spit nails. “Did he realize that?”

  “He didn’t know what I had.” Beth tapped the words: your source inside ISK. “Without a name, it’s not proof enough to take him down.”

 
; “But he moved against you as soon as you found this out. He got you locked up so you couldn’t bring this to Travis.” Mab picked up the decrypt. “That proves it’s him.”

  “He can say the source inside ISK was me. That I was the one about to move against him. If he flips it round, it doesn’t sound any less plausible than our version. And he’s the one with a respected career, not a twitching woman escaped from a madhouse.”

  “But the accusation would taint him.” Osla nibbled a varnished fingernail. “That’s the kind of thing that destroys careers. Especially after I cram his emerald down his throat and start ballyhooing his guilt to every influential connection I’ve got, and I have got heaps.”

  “He might lose his post. He might live under a cloud. But I’d still go back to Clockwell and face having my brain scrambled.” Beth looked up, certainty hardening. “We need more before we go to MI-5—I need more. I want something with his name on it, something he can’t lie his way out of. One of these”—she fanned the undecrypted messages out on the desk—“might have that.” I hope. “I need to crack them, and I need to do it now.”

  Mab’s fingers drummed. “How long before he realizes you’ve escaped?”

  “The asylum will notify MI-5 that I’m gone. But Giles wasn’t their contact on file; someone else is handling my case. So even though MI-5 will be casting their nets for me, Giles won’t be told I—”

  “He’ll find out,” Mab stated. “You know he’ll have your name flagged—any changes, any unexpected developments. Your handler will tell him you’re gone, and then what? He sits around waiting, gives you all the time you need to break this cipher?”

  “Maybe he won’t find out.” Osla looked thoughtful. “Just after Giles and I became engaged, I asked him if he could make inquiries at work, find out what had become of Beth—”

  “You did?” Beth asked, surprised.

  “You think I’ve gone three and a half years without once thinking of you? Of course I wanted to know. Giles did some digging, but they wouldn’t tell him anything. Something about ‘conflicting interests,’ given that he’d been your friend,” Osla quoted. “So, if he told you he could get reassigned to your case anytime he wanted, I think he was talking slush. He might have charmed the Clockwell doctors into giving him information about you, but it didn’t work on his superiors at MI-5. They didn’t tell him anything then, and I don’t think they’ll tell him you’ve escaped now—no matter what alerts he’s tried to put in place.”

  “Giles was lying to one of us.” Beth gnawed her lip. “What if it was you?”

  “I don’t think so. When he lies, it’s to make himself look better—and he didn’t like telling me he’d been dismissed like a schoolboy. He wants everyone to see him as a man who can pull strings, get anything.”

  “It’s still a risk,” Mab said. “Taking time to crack the rest of these messages—”

  “We have no choice. If we go to MI-5 now, without better evidence, he will squirm out of it.” Beth took a deep breath. “My surgery is scheduled for the day after the royal wedding. Giles said he’d telephone Clockwell that morning. If we count on MI-5 keeping him out of the loop until then—”

  “One week.” Osla looked at the other two. “The morning after the wedding, we go to MI-5 with whatever we’ve got.”

  Seven days to crack Rose and pin Giles Talbot to the wall. Beth had only broken the one message, and that had taken her months. The sheer cliff of the task loomed in front of her.

  They all jumped at the knock on the library door. Mrs. Knox came in, balancing a tray against her dressing-gowned hip. “Tea,” she said, yawning. “And I’ve opened up some bedrooms upstairs. Have at it, my dears, whatever it is. I’m going back to bed. Don’t tell me a thing.”

  Six Days Until the Royal Wedding

  November 14, 1947

  Chapter 77

  Is she making any headway?” Osla asked.

  “Hard to say.” Mab shook her head. Watching Beth work over the last two days had been fascinating and not a little disturbing. She’d taken over Dilly’s big oak desk, drawing up cardboard strips called rods and haphazard lists of cribs; she broke endless pencils and drank endless pots of coffee. She held long conversations with her former mentor as though he were actually sitting there—“What if . . .” “I tried that, Dilly . . .” “Did you ever try . . .”—and then fell into hours of abstracted silence.

  “Is this how the boffins did it during the war?” Mab couldn’t help asking dubiously. She’d worked so many stages of the intelligence chain at BP, but she’d never been part of the stage where human brains made the critical initial breaks. As Mab watched, Beth scribbled something, scratched it out, swigged all the coffee in her cup, and started over. She’d been going nearly thirty-six hours.

  “I can see why the intelligence swots thought BP people were all loons,” Osla said, then winced at that particular choice of words. But Beth hadn’t noticed. Mab wasn’t certain if Beth would notice if the house exploded. Her frayed hair had been pushed behind her ears, she had a flare of color in her cheeks, and her eyes glittered like shards of glass. Frankly, she didn’t look sane.

  Is she actually doing anything? Mab wondered. Or are we watching a madwoman shuffle paper?

  “Sometimes it takes months.” Beth spoke as if reading Mab’s mind, not looking up from some chain of letters she was diagramming.

  “Well, we haven’t got months,” said Mab. “Even if you get the wheel settings, how can you decrypt it without an Enigma machine or a Typex?”

  “The machines were all shipped out of BP at the end of the war,” Osla mused. “Broken up for scrap?”

  “With thousands of Enigmas and Typexes and bombes, you’d think at least some would have survived.” But Mab wasn’t sure how they’d find out. You couldn’t just go round asking where top-secret decoding machines were kept.

  “I wonder if my uncle Dickie can turn something up. He’s in India now, but maybe his old Admiralty aides . . .” Osla turned with a flip of her skirt, heading for the hall telephone.

  Beth looked up so abruptly Mab started. It took her a while to focus on Mab’s face. “Coffee?”

  “Coming right up, Your Highness,” Mab said a little sourly, but she supposed there wasn’t any other way she could help. She couldn’t decrypt Rose; she had no powerful relations who could pull strings; she might as well make the coffee. What am I even doing here? Mab wondered, heading for Courns Wood’s kitchens.

  “If that girl doesn’t need more coffee,” Mrs. Knox said from the kitchen sink, “I’ll eat my apron.”

  The woman certainly knew codebreakers. “She does.”

  “Fresh pot already brewing. Help me with the washing-up?”

  Mab tied a tea towel around her blue-sprigged cotton dress. “You put your feet up and let me do it, Mrs. Knox. It’s the least we can do, after invading your home.”

  “I like hearing the place lively again.” Mrs. Knox dried a teacup, looking pensive. “It’s been nearly five years since my husband died.”

  “I only met him in passing . . . I worked in another section. But I’ve heard he was a great man.”

  “He was. A great man, but maddening. Most great men are. The way he went through tobacco and pens . . . and dear me, the water bill for all those long hot baths when he was working through some problem!” Mrs. Knox shook her head, smiling. “I miss him.”

  A memory of Francis pierced Mab, his lathering up at the mirror in the Keswick hotel. She blinked it away with a hard swallow. “Do you have more soap?”

  “I’m afraid that little sliver is it. I’ll be that happy when soap isn’t rationed anymore.” Dilly’s wife scrutinized Mab, curious. “I keep thinking I’ve seen you before, Mrs. Sharpe. Did we meet at one of the Bletchley Park revues?”

  “Perhaps. I—I was Mrs. Gray, then.”

  “Ah.” Gently, Mrs. Knox took a cup from Mab’s hand. “My condolences, dear. I’m glad you’ve found happiness again.”

  Mab stared into the wat
er. Eddie, she thought. Lucy. But under the fierce wave of love for her babies welled an ocean of flat, blank nothing. She just didn’t choose to admit it was there, most of the time.

  “Dilly was my second love, you know.” Mrs. Knox’s voice was thoughtful. “I had a fiancé—he died in France, in the first war. My goodness, so long ago. When I got the telegram . . . I’ve never been so certain I was going to die. But one doesn’t, of course. I thought for a while that I’d never let myself grow so fond of anyone again. But one can’t really do that either. Being cut off from life is like being dead. It would have cut me off from a certain very absentminded papyri-translating professor with a gift for codebreaking and a mania for long baths. That would have been a great pity.”

  “Yes,” Mab made herself say, voice brittle. “There, that’s the last cup. I’ll see what’s keeping Osla . . .” Escaping into the corridor, Mab stood a moment, rubbing her hands up and down the towel over her dress, and then she saw Osla slumped against the telephone. Mab stiffened. “What is it?”

  Osla looked up, smile grim. “I’m dithering about whether I should ring Giles. Feed him a line or two why I’m away longer than planned . . . I can’t bear the thought of hearing his voice.” Her finger traced the telephone cord, emerald engagement ring glinting. “I’ve made a perfect mug of myself, trusting him.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Mab thought of the night she ended up drunk in his bed. “Thank God I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Lucky you. He’s a thumping bore between the sheets.”

  Mab’s lips twitched. Osla’s did too, and for a moment they were on the verge of laughter. Then Osla said, “No use putting it off,” and picked up the telephone, and Mab went into the library, where Beth was pacing.

  “You look like a gothic heroine about to pitch herself down a well,” Mab observed, but Beth just shook her head.

  “It’s no good. I’ll never crack it in time. I’m too rusty—”