The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

  “Mrs. Knox let me in.” He looked like he had a river of words begging to be released, but he kept his voice careful, quiet. Like a man trying not to spook a wild animal. “Mab and Osla, are they—”

  “Mab’s making coffee, Osla was called to London.” Harry had a fellowship at his old college in Cambridge now. Mab had tracked him down yesterday. Beth felt her hand stealing up to worry at her hair and made it stop.

  “My college owed me some days.” Harry took a step forward. “Beth—”

  “How is Sheila?” Beth blurted out. She wanted to know why he’d never come to Clockwell. She also didn’t know if she could bear to hear the answer. “And Christopher?”

  Harry pulled himself visibly back from some ledge. “Christopher’s—he’s well. My father’s come round a bit about us never darkening his doorstep; he sent Christopher to a specialist to have his ankle operated on. He walks quite a bit better now. Sheila’s over the moon.”

  “That’s good.” Beth took a deep breath. “Did Mab tell you about Giles?”

  “Yes.” Harry said something flat and filthy about Giles Talbot. “This cipher message you broke—how is it the Soviets were talking about Giles, in English, via an Enigma machine when they don’t use Enigma for their own traffic?”

  Beth had thought about that. “Probably a captured German army machine. Maybe they were communicating with his handler in England, asking more about its uses and operation. Who knows?”

  Harry pulled up a chair. “How can I help?”

  She pushed the Rose messages across the desk.

  He leafed through the sheets of Enigma traffic, a smile touching the corner of his mouth, and Beth’s heart plucked. “This takes me back.” He inhaled the smell of the decrypt paper. “I’m working theoretical mathematics now, the Poincaré conjecture—stuff I missed when I was at BP. Pure research, no lives at stake. But sometimes I look round my office and I miss the night shifts, the chicory coffee, the morning rush on the U-boat traffic . . .”

  “Working elbow-to-elbow in Knox’s section, everybody climbing over each other when the dispatch riders came in . . .” Beth could have had another year of that, if she’d worked to the end of the war. Yet another thing Giles had taken from her. She shook the anger off; there was no time for it. “We don’t have much in the way of cribs . . .” She walked Harry through how she’d broken the first Rose message. He fell into the work without another word; she fell into it too with another steadying inhale.

  “I looked for you as soon as I was demobbed.” He spoke perhaps an hour later, quiet words dropping into the stillness. “Your mother told me you’d died in an institution. She wouldn’t even tell me where you were buried.”

  Beth squeezed her eyes shut. Ah, Mother.

  “You never talked about her—I didn’t know enough to disbelieve her.” A ragged pause. “I loved you, and I left you in that place—”

  “Harry,” Beth broke in desperately. “Let’s stay focused, shall we? I can’t . . .”

  She trailed off. He blew out an uneven breath. “All right.”

  Beth looked at the cipher message before her, not seeing it for a moment. I loved you. Past tense.

  Well, three and a half years was a long time.

  She went back into the spirals of Rose, with something of an effort. Another hour limped by, working a potential crib that went nowhere. Beth sat back, eyes burning. “Why can’t I do this?” she heard herself whisper. “I’ve been going at it three days now, and there’s nothing. I can’t see it, the way I used to.”

  “You will.”

  “What if I don’t?” The words came out more despairing than she’d intended. “What if I can’t do it anymore?”

  The thing that terrified her most—being locked out. That headlong rush of falling down the spiral into Wonderland, the world of letters and patterns that she’d walked in with such starry-eyed enchantment. Now she was banging on Wonderland’s gates until her fists bled, and everything remained locked. “How much of my mind did I leave inside those walls?” In the asylum, she had felt like the sanest one there. Now she was out, and she felt like a caged lunatic on display at a circus.

  Harry’s big hand extended across the desk. Beth hesitated, then slid her bitten-raw fingertips into his palm. “Beth, you didn’t leave any part of your mind in that place.” His gaze was steady. “You can still do this.”

  Her eyes blurred. He was warm, he was sane, and he believed in her. “Just—don’t treat me like I’m made of glass, Harry. I don’t have time to be broken right now.” Later, when Giles was caught, she’d let herself shiver and sob, feel all the damage the asylum had inflicted on her. Not now.

  He squeezed her hand fiercely. “Then let’s get back to work.”

  ANOTHER HOUR LATER, Harry was reading through boxing chains as Beth tried to follow a Dilly-esque thought about crabs and turnovers—and they both looked up as heels clattered in the corridor. “We’re absolutely dished,” Osla called, stamping into the library in her Buckingham Palace finery. “I’ve had no luck—Harry!”

  “Hullo, gorgeous.” Harry rose, picking Osla up and out of her tiny patent-leather sling-backs. “I thought you’d be a duchess by now.”

  “Even worse, darling. I’m engaged to a traitor, hadn’t you heard?” Osla turned to Beth as Harry set her back into her shoes, and Mab came into the room drying her hands on a tea towel. “I tapped all my godfather’s people in London, discreetly. No luck figuring out where we might turn up an Enigma machine.”

  “Forget the Enigma machine for now. We still need a good break before we’ve got anything to feed into one.” Beth tugged at her frayed hair. “And we’re not getting there fast enough.”

  “We need more brains on this.” Harry considered, fingers drumming. “I’ll ring the Prof; he’s in Cambridge on a sabbatical year. And my cousin Maurice, he worked on ciphers in Block F and he’s at the Crédit Lyonnais in London now—if they could come and put a few days in—”

  “We can’t tell anyone about this,” Beth protested, panic beginning to lick through her veins. “We can’t trust—”

  “We can.” Harry’s voice was quiet but very sure. “Beth, not many people have friends with intelligence work clearance and the absolute ability to keep secrets, but we do. Christ, do we ever. And we have a traitor loose and only a matter of days to catch him. Let’s put out the call to the ones we can trust.”

  “We trusted Giles,” Osla pointed out.

  “We have to trust that he’s the only bad apple in our acquaintance. We were picked. We were vetted. Overall, we have to trust that the process worked. Or else BP would never have thrived.”

  A long pause. “What do we tell them?” Beth said, gnawing her thumbnail.

  “That it’s BP business,” Mab said. “They’ll drop everything and come running, just like us. They spent an entire war doing that. It’s in their blood.”

  “I’ll make up some more beds,” said Mrs. Knox, behind Mab. “Though I’ll wager there won’t be much sleeping. Goodness, how exciting.” Off she went, waving off help, and the others looked at one another.

  “Assemble the Mad Hatters.” Osla headed for the telephone. “Invitations are being issued for one last absolutely topping Tea Party.”

  Chapter 80

  Knock knock. “Mr. Turing,” Mab greeted the dark-haired, round-shouldered man she’d seen ramble through BP followed by admiring whispers. “Thank you for coming at such short notice. Take this . . .” Folding his hand instantly round a cup of coffee. She’d learned something these last few days about dealing with cryptanalysts: point them at the coffee, point them at the problem, then get out of the way. “Work’s over there, in Dilly’s library.”

  The Prof ambled to a seat opposite Beth and Harry, and Beth pushed over the stack of increasingly dog-eared messages. “Let’s see . . .” He began humming tunelessly, and Mab had to stop herself from snapping Stop that! She wasn’t going to snap at Alan bloody Turing just because she was missing her family and felt like
biting someone’s head off. Mab had rung home that morning to say she’d be away another few days; the conversation with Mike had contained a lot of thorny silences and questions she’d had no choice but to evade. Think about that later, she advised herself.

  Knock knock. “One of Dilly’s team?” Mab guessed, assessing the rosy-cheeked woman in the corridor.

  “Phyllida Kent. Look, I’m happy to help, but I need some sort of authorization or proof that what you’re doing here is on the up—”

  “We’re working on that. Come in, have a go . . .”

  Knock knock. A brisk blond broom handle of a woman in a home-knit jumper came straight in and kissed Mrs. Knox on the cheek. Mab barely knew her except that she’d been another of Dilly’s team. I thought she was the traitor, Beth had said. Thank God she’s not, because she’s as good a codebreaker as me. “Peggy Rock, came as soon as I could. What have you got, and why do I need to get us authorization to investigate it?”

  “We’re calling it Rose.” Harry pulled out a chair for her at what Mab was already thinking of as Boffin Island—the desk and two tables all pushed together, covered in decrypts, pencils, and rods. Like Puffin Island off the coast of Wales, where Mike had taken Mab on their honeymoon, but covered in weird cryptanalysts instead of weird birds.

  “Hullo, you,” Peggy greeted Beth. “I thought you’d had a breakdown.”

  “Frame-up,” Beth said succinctly.

  “Bastard.” Peggy surveyed everything, hearing the rest of Harry’s explanation. “All right, let me work up some official cover for all this through my office. Semi-sanctioned operation investigating remaindered code for purposes of research and security, maybe.” That, Mab thought, ought to satisfy any of the BP volunteers who wanted something more concrete than Beth’s word that they were working for legitimate purposes. “I’ll talk to my superior at GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters,” Peggy expanded when Beth looked blank. “Where I work now. The name’s changed from the GC & CS days, but it’s the same stuff. Codebreaking when we’re not at war.”

  “Is there any chance you could you get your hands on an Enigma machine through your office?” Mab broke in. “Surely they can’t all have been destroyed after the war.”

  Peggy reversed for the telephone. “Let me ring a chap . . .”

  It really was the most extraordinary thing, Mab thought. BP men and women came and went from Courns Wood—some of them Mad Hatters she had known like family, some vague acquaintances from night shifts or the canteen, every one vouched for. Peggy got them some mysterious authorizations, worked forty-eight hours round the clock, then departed looking elusive. The Prof came and went with an absent expression, two hours here, four hours there, whenever he could make the journey from Cambridge. A bespectacled fellow of Worcester College dropped in from Oxford and had a pencil in hand before “Asa, absolutely ripping—does everyone know Asa from Hut 6?” was fully out of Osla’s mouth. Harry’s cousin Maurice came, a cadaverous-looking man in the most expensive suit Mab had ever seen, then a fellow named Cohen with a Glasgow accent . . .

  No one said Giles’s name. No one discussed his treachery. No one had to be warned to say nothing when they departed. “I’ve missed this,” Phyllida sighed when she finally had to leave.

  Yes, Mab thought. I’ve missed it, too.

  Though the work still had its stresses. “Beth,” Mab said, noticing her former billet-mate had snapped two pencils in the last half hour, “take five minutes. I’m going to trim your hair.”

  “Why?” Beth blinked.

  “Because you need a spot of tending if you’re going to get your focus back.” Cryptanalysts, Mab had learned, needed a certain amount of care if they were to perform at their peak. Thinking of Mrs. Knox and her wry indulgence of Dilly’s quirks—and the way she kept supplying her sudden influx of visitors with coffee—Mab shooed Beth into the washroom, borrowed a pair of scissors, and began smartening up that butchered blond hair while Beth slowly blinked her way back into the world around her.

  “Why are you bothering?” Beth asked as Mab flicked a side part into place. “You hate me, even if you did break me out of the asylum.”

  “I don’t entirely hate you anymore, Beth.” That surprised Mab, and she worked through it as she did her best to clip that Veronica Lake wave back into shape. After what Beth had endured at the asylum, it felt like only a heart of stone could condemn her to unrelenting hatred. “When I look at you, I prickle. And I don’t think I’ll ever understand you. But no woman should walk around looking like she backed into a threshing machine.” And Beth went back to work, swinging her neatened hair in a pleased sort of way, and in another hour she’d broken out a wheel setting on one of the messages.

  “We’re in luck.” Peggy Rock blew back into the library with a wooden case in her arms. Mab felt her neck tingle. She’d never laid eyes on an Enigma machine before, only the much bulkier Typex. This had the same rows of keys, the same set of wheels on one side, but it was sleeker, more compact . . . more dangerous.

  “How?” Harry’s cousin Maurice breathed.

  “Let’s just say not all the machines were destroyed after the war,” Peggy said with GCHQ caginess. “There’s an underground bunker; never mind where. My superior pulled strings to get me a machine on loan from the bunker. He’s ex-BP, which helps.”

  “Is there any chance that bunker has a bombe machine as well?” Harry asked as Peggy shut the wooden case into Dilly’s wall safe. “It could cut days off the process.”

  “You think I can magic up a bombe machine as easy as an Enigma? Something twice as big as a wardrobe?”

  “Yes,” Beth, Osla, and Mab said in unison. Osla added, “I’ll eat my knickers if you haven’t already asked.”

  Peggy gave her closed-lipped smile. A bombe—Mab hated the beasts, but she wasn’t able to do much here at Courns Wood except refill the coffee. If they could get their hands on a machine . . .

  “I may have made inquiries with my GCHQ superior. There may be a few surviving bombes in storage, and there may be one on loan to a computational research project based in London.” Peggy dropped the hypothetical, seeing their impatient looks. “It’s in a repair lab at the moment, and there’s no way to get it out, but we just might be able to get to it. The lab’s closed up the last few days before the royal wedding. I could get us in, but we’d only have up until the wedding to work in privacy.”

  Mab could see Beth hunching into herself at the thought of leaving Dilly’s library. But she still nodded. “It would help.”

  “One more thing,” Peggy added. “If it’s in a repair lab, there’s no guarantee what shape the machine will be in.”

  “RAF engineers did bombe maintenance during the war,” the fellow named Cohen volunteered in his Glasgow burr. “I used to talk to them in the BP canteen. Let me see . . .” Disappearing toward the telephone.

  “We need more than a technician,” Harry argued. “We’ll need someone to operate the ruddy thing.”

  Mab felt a grin hook itself nearly behind her ears. “I can.”

  Some muffled wrangling from the corridor, and eventually Cohen swung back in. “Alfred’s in Inverness now and David’s on a jaunt to Penzance, but there’s another laddie who can join us tomorrow night.”

  “Have him meet us in London,” said Peggy. By morning they were all piling into assorted cars and waving goodbye to Mrs. Knox, Beth and the Enigma machine hidden under a blanket in the back of Mab’s Bentley. Their makeshift, miniature Bletchley Park was on the move.

  KNOCK KNOCK.

  Now the new arrivals had to come to a back door at the end of a complex of ugly warehouses clustered on the outskirts of London. The repair lab was echoingly empty, comprehensively locked; someone anonymous came to the rear entrance and spoke briefly with Peggy, and then they were setting up shop all over again in a big maintenance bay littered with tools and old tea mugs. “Let me guess,” Mab asked Peggy as Beth and the others began dragging tables together, unpacking the Rose files
. “We dinnae need to know what strings you pulled to make this happen.”

  Peggy looked bland, unpacking the Enigma machine. “We never leave the machines unattended, and no one comes in who isn’t vouched for.”

  Knock knock, came the rapping knuckles again, and Peggy let in Osla, staggering under a load of sandwiches, biscuits, and cigarettes. “Sustenance, darlings.” She laid out food, placed a sandwich actually in Beth’s hand because otherwise she wouldn’t eat, and came to where Mab was working on their prize: the bombe on loan from its mysterious bunker, towering in one corner like a pagan altar. “How’s it coming?”

  “The drums are a mess.” Mab shook out her fingers, sore and pinched from hours of teasing coiled wires apart with her eyebrow tweezers. “Where’s that bloody technician?”

  “Delayed, apparently. Let me see about getting some more hands to help with the wiring, in the meantime . . .”

  Knock knock. “Val Glassborow,” Mab said gratefully as Peggy ushered in a familiar face a few hours later.

  “Val Middleton now. You’re lucky I was in town for the royal wedding.” She brushed back a lot of glossy brown hair, sliding past Beth and the boffins hunched over their cipher messages. “Peggy gave me the gist; where do you want me?”

  “Grab a drum, darling,” Osla called from where she sat with a drum in her own lap. The Bletchley Park bubble had snapped into place around the drafty maintenance bay, and there was a ticking clock hanging over their heads as urgent as any they had slaved under at the Park.

  Knock knock. Long after sundown, Peggy ushered in the last arrival. “. . . sorry I’m late,” a man’s voice floated from the corridor. “Had to find a mate to take the kids.” The Australian drawl penetrated Mab’s ears belatedly, she was concentrating so hard on the drum before her. She frowned, straightening, just as a man’s voice said, “Mab?”