Chapter 85

*****SECRET: INTENDED RECIPIENT EYES ONLY*****

AS PER PENALTY OF PROSECUTION UNDER OFFICIAL SECRETS ACTS 1911 AND 1920

21 December 1947

Our red-haired chap has been very talkative. After we’ve finished picking his brain, I recommend our Kiloran Bay facility in Scotland—significantly more secure, if more bleak, than the sanitarium which failed to hold Miss Finch.

One final thought. . . there are hints that our red-haired chap is not the only compromised individual in our circles. Once the current matter is finished, I suggest we divert our efforts toward this new information. Time to settle accounts.

It looks dead, ” Mab said.

“Deader than Manderley after the fire, ” Osla agreed.

Beth gazed across the weed-choked lake at Bletchley Park’s mansion. The green copper dome and elaborate brickwork thrust against the gray winter sky, and a few people came in and out—but BP had changed. The long block buildings and old green huts were shuttered for Christmas, the grounds all but empty, but it was more than that. Beth shivered in her smart new tartan coat and scarlet scarf, bending down to rub Boots’s head. She was suddenly glad she hadn’t come alone.

“It’s not usually this empty. The space is rented out now, for training courses and so forth. ” Osla’s breath puffed in the cold; in her full-skirted ivory coat edged in silvery mink, complete with mink hood sitting on her dark hair, she looked like a Christmas tree fairy. “If it weren’t two days before Christmas, this place would be bustling. ”

“Not with our kind of bustle. ” Mab looked at the mansion. “Remember the day we arrived, and you called it Lavatory Gothic? ”

Beth still couldn’t say a word. The mansion’s double doors, which she’d pushed open in the dead of a rainy night with Matapan’s decrypted battle plans in her fist. . . the lakeshore where the Mad Hatters had discussed so many books. . . the Cottage, out of sight from here, whitewashed and homely. Mentally she opened the door to see Dilly Knox at his desk. Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking codes. . .

Tears blurred her eyes. “Let’s go. ”

Neither Osla nor Mab argued. They turned, meandering back toward the gates, which were no longer manned by stern guards. A faint sprinkling of snow frosted the ground.

“So we’re all done with our debriefings. ” Mab stalked along in forest-green trousers and a long jade-green coat, a fedora like a man’s slanted across her brow. “MI-5 isn’t going to call us in again, surely. ”

“Doubtful, darling, ” Osla said. “Did either of you find out just why the Russians were discussing Giles via Enigma traffic in the first place? I asked during my interview, but the chap got dreadfully snippy. ”

“Peggy told me after her debriefing, ” Beth said. “My guess was right. The Reds captured a German Enigma machine during one of those back-and-forths across Soviet territory. They passed a few messages through Giles’s contact in London, trying it out—Giles was hoping they’d adopt it for their own coded traffic. Our Y-stations were monitoring Soviet radio chatter, so it was flagged and Dilly saw it. ”

“What do you think happened to Giles? ” Mab stared at the lake, and Beth knew she was remembering when she and Osla first clapped eyes on him: wading out in his drawers, grinning and friendly.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to know, ” Beth said, indifferent.

“What’s more, I don’t give a toss, ” Osla pronounced. “As long as he’s gone. ”

They wandered clear of BP, not looking back. “Are we all going to the station? ” Osla asked at last. “I’m nipping back to London, Mab’s off to York. Don’t tell me you’re going to the village to see your family, Beth. ”

“No. ” The Finch family was in an uproar: first Beth’s escape from Clockwell, then her official release, then the news that her father had left Mrs. Finch out of the blue. He’d moved to a tiny flat and was refusing to come home; the house would apparently have to be sold; Mother had taken shrieking to her bed; none of Beth’s siblings wanted her to live with them. . . Beth had already decided the entire matter could be worked out without her. “I’m waiting here. Harry’s driving over from Cambridge. ”

Osla cocked her head. “You and Harry. . . is that still on? Don’t you want something more, I don’t know, usual? ”

Marriage, Beth supposed she meant. Children, a house, a man’s shoes to line up with hers. Beth shook her head but smiled. “It’s what I want, and it’s very much still on. ”

“Well, where are you going to live? You can bunk with me in Knightsbridge as long as you like, you know. ”

Bless Osla, Beth thought, but no. Three and a half years in the asylum; what she craved now was space to herself. Space to process what had happened to her, let the bad dreams come, get through it and out the other side. Harry understood that without a word needing to be said—he’d wangled her a clerk’s job at Scopelli’s Music Shop in Cambridge, and a room too: Mr. Scopelli says you can use the old bomb-shelter bedroom in the back, until you get digs of your own. Beth imagined mornings alone with Boots and a cup of tea, listening to Bach partitas; afternoons quietly working the counter; Sunday mornings in chapel, thinking of codes as hymns soared. Harry bringing lunch from his college every day, staying the night when his family could spare him. . . She smiled again. For now, that sounded fine.

“I still think MI-5 owes you compensation, ” Mab said tartly. “Locked up unfairly and still managing to bring a traitor to their door? A little cash to rent you a flat is the least they could do. ”

“There might be something, eventually. ” Beth knew she wasn’t going to work at the music shop forever. If you want the sort of job that uses our skills, come to GCHQ with me, Peggy had said after their final debrief. Even without a war, Britain needs people like us. They’d leap for joy to get you.

Yes, Beth thought. Her work was a drug she had no desire to ever purge from her blood; she wanted to go back to it. . . just not quite yet. She was no longer trapped inside the clock, but she didn’t feel like she’d entirely caught up with time outside it, either.

“To tide you over until those chintzy MI-5 snakes cough up”—Osla took out her cigarette case and extracted a flash of green from among the Gauloises—“here. Pawn it. ”

Beth looked at the ring with its emerald the size of a halfpenny. “You’re sure? ”

“I thought about throwing it in Giles’s face when we were arrested, ” Osla mused. “But really, why should he get it back? And outside novels, who really tosses emerald rings around like seashells, anyway? I’d far rather it went to rent you a flat. ”

Or maybe, Beth thought, it could pay for treatment for her Go-playing friend still locked in Clockwell. To see if anything might be done for her. “Thank you, Os. ”

“Give me one of those cigarettes? ” Mab asked before Osla put away the case. “And a light. . . ooh, what’s that? ” Examining Osla’s silver lighter. “JPECC? ”

“The Honorable John Percival Edwin Charles Cornwell, ” Osla said, lighting two Gauloises.

“How the hell do you walk into jail with a traitor and walk out again with a lord? ”

“He’s not a lord, yet. His father’s the seventh Baron Cornwell, that’s all. They have an absolutely topping place in Hampshire. I’m visiting over New Year’s, once I’ve negotiated my new post with my Tatler editor. ” Osla passed Mab’s cigarette over. “Christmas in York for you, my queen? ”

“I’ll be back in time to bundle Lucy and Eddie up for their first snowball fight. You wouldn’t believe how excited Mike gets about snow. It’s an Australian thing. ” Mab turned her wedding ring around her finger. “It’ll be good to be home. ”

“Funny thing about homes. ” Osla looked thoughtful, taking a deep draw off her cigarette. “I was always thinking I didn’t have one, not really. Houses, hotels, places to stay, but no home. No real family. Not really belonging anywhere. ” She looked back at Bletchley Park. “But there’s this place. ”

“This place is dead, ” Beth pointed out.

“We still belong here. All of us. Look how everyone answered the call, even people we barely knew like Asa and the Prof, Cohen and Harry’s cousin Maurice. All hurrying out to Courns Wood without a question asked. That’s a kind of family. ” Osla smiled, a few snowflakes catching in her dark lashes. “Not exactly the sort of family I was always dreaming about, but it still counts. ”

They stood in the softly falling snow, putting off the moment of departure. Osla returning to London, Beth thought, me to Cambridge, Mab all the way back to York. Despite Osla’s talk of family, what were the chances they’d ever meet up again without the work of Bletchley Park to draw them together? The three of them had nothing in common besides BP. In the normal course of life, they would never have crossed paths at all.

“Thank you, ” Beth blurted. “Both of you. Breaking me out of the asylum, hiding me. . . ” It had to be said, they had to be thanked. What if she never got the chance after today?

“I don’t need thanks. ” Mab took a last drag on her cigarette. “Duty, honor, oaths—they are not just for soldiers. Not just for men. ”

“I want to thank you anyway. ” Beth took a deep breath, eyes blurring. “And—and I’m sorry. Coventry. Not warning you. . . ”

She couldn’t hold their eyes. She looked away, back toward Bletchley Park.

“Bloody hell, Beth. ” Mab dropped her cigarette, grinding it out under one high-heeled boot. “There are things I don’t want to forgive you for, you or Os, and maybe I won’t ever be able to completely. But that doesn’t mean we don’t—” She stopped. Looked up, brows slanted at their most ferocious angle.

The rushed three-way hug was fierce, spiky, awkward. Beth felt the silkiness of Osla’s mink against her cheek, inhaled Mab’s familiar perfume.

“Look—” Mab scowled as they pulled apart. “Trains run all the way to York. Don’t be strangers, you two. ”

“We could pick a book, start up the Mad Hatters again. ” Osla swiped at her eyes. “Meet at Bettys, have a Tea Party with actual scones and jam. . . ”

Beth pushed her wave of hair behind one ear. “I’ve been reading the Principia Mathematica. ” She found Isaac Newton flat going, but sometimes she caught a glimpse of intriguing spirals round the edges of the complicated exercises Harry showed her. Spirals of numbers rather than letters.

“Oh, darling, don’t make us do maths, ” Osla groaned. “What about The Road to Oz? I’ve been devouring Baum. ”

“Too fantastical, ” Mab complained. “There’s a new Hercule Poirot coming out—”

“We never did agree about books, ” Osla said.

“We never agreed about anything, ” Mab snorted, and checked her watch. “I’m going to miss my train. ”

A final nod, and then Beth stood before the gates with Boots whuffling about the frozen ground, watching the ivory coat and the jade-green coat swing up the road.

“Osla! ” she called suddenly, almost shouting. “Mab! ”

They turned in unison, those two smart brunettes who had stalked with such style into the Finch kitchen and Beth’s life in 1940. Beth filled her lungs: “‘These have knelled your fall and ruin. . . ’”

Osla caught on first. “‘. . . but your ears were far away. . . ’”

Mab picked it up. “‘. . . English lassies rustling papers. . . ’”

They finished in a triumphant shout: “‘. . . through the sodden Bletchley day! ’”

And for the last time in decades, Bletchley Park resounded with the laughter of codebreakers.

Epilogue

Duchess of Cambridge Reopens Bletchley Park

June 2014

Job’s up, strip down! ” The replicated bombe machine stops, and the Duchess of Cambridge smiles at its demonstrator during her tour of Bletchley Park, Britain’s now-famous codebreaking center. During the Second World War, this stately home thrummed with top-secret activity as thousands of men and women worked to crack the unbreakable Axis military codes—a feat that according to many historians shortened the war by at least two years.

The former Kate Middleton, stunning in military-style navy-and-white skirt and blouse by Alexander McQueen, officially reopens Bletchley Park after a yearlong restoration project that has restored the mansion and its surrounding huts to their wartime appearance. The site deteriorated into near-dereliction after the war but now hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. The duchess has a personal reason for visiting BP: her grandmother Valerie Middleton, né e Glassborow, was employed in Hut 16. Retracing her grandmother’s footsteps, the duchess met with veteran codebreakers such as Mrs. Mab Sharpe, who works part-time at BP as a bombe machine demonstrator. Mrs. Sharpe—a gray-haired, unbent five foot eleven at age ninety-six—instructed her old colleague’s granddaughter in the art of intercepting and decoding a Morse code message.

“What an incredible story, ” the duchess said. “I was aware of it when I was a young girl, and often asked Granny about it, but she was very quiet and never said anything. ”

“We didn’t talk in those days, ma’am. We still don’t. ” Asked if women like herself were ever called to put their talents to use after the war, Mrs. Sharpe gave a noncommittal smile. “Oh, no. . . it’s enough to see the work appreciated today. ”

It’s not a view shared by all Bletchley Park veterans, even now that the term of secrecy has officially expired. Mrs. Sharpe, surrounded by six-foot children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, appears happy to reminisce with Bletchley Park visitors. Other veterans have refused to release their stories until after their deaths—view the spate of posthumous memoirs, such as Bletchley Bletherings by Lady Cornwell, né e Osla Kendall, the award-winning satirist and Tatler columnist whose droll, touching account of her time as a Hut 4 translator was not published until after her death in 1974. And other veterans consider the oath of secrecy binding in perpetuity. Miss Beth Finch, retired GCHQ, is known to have served as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts, but the white-haired ninety-eight-year-old in her rose-pink cardigan politely refuses to discuss her war work: “That would be a violation of my oath. ”

The code of secrecy upheld by Bletchley Park’s workers is fully as remarkable as their codebreaking achievements. In an age of instantaneous social media, jaws drop at the idea that thousands of men and women were simply handed the most incendiary secret of the war and kept it, to a man (or a woman). Churchill famously referred to them as “the geese who laid the golden eggs, but never cackled. ”

Despite the bustle of Bletchley Park today—the camera flashes of the royal visit, the millions of visitors come to marvel at the bombe machines—something of that golden silence still holds over these grounds in a hush of honored and unspoken secrets. There are stories here still untold, without a doubt: stories locked in steel-trap codebreaker minds, behind steel-trap codebreaker lips.

Bletchley Park’s walls have been renovated. If only they could speak. . .

But some codes will never be broken.

P. S. Insights, Interviews & More. . . *

About the Author

Meet Kate Quinn

About the Book

Author’s Note

Reading Group Guide

Further Reading & Entertainment

About the Author

Meet Kate Quinn

KATE QUINN is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the twentieth century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, and The Rose Code. All have been translated into multiple languages. She and her husband now live in California with three black rescue dogs.

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About the Book

Author’s Note

“The biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain. ”

A gate guard described Bletchley Park in those words—and to the bemused eyes of many, wartime BP more resembled a madhouse or a wacky university campus than a top-secret decryption facility. Codebreakers pitching tea mugs into the lake after fits of rumination; codebreakers cycling to work in gas masks to avoid hay fever; codebreakers playing rounders among the trees, sunbathing nude on the side lawn, and prank-riding laundry bins into unlocked loos—BP’s reputation for eccentricity was inevitable, given its tendency to recruit nerds and oddballs. The staff had an extraordinarily relaxed attitude toward weird personalities; square pegs weren’t required to fit into round holes, and in consequence worked spectacularly well at their nearly impossible job. Without the achievements of the people who so thoroughly cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma codes used by the Axis powers, the war might very well have have been lost. At the very least, it would have dragged on much longer and cost many, many more lives.

Before war was even declared, a handful of Oxford and Cambridge men were recruited into intelligence and set to work on Enigma, building on the genius work of Polish cryptanalysts Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Ró ż ycki, and Henryk Zygalski—brilliant men whose earlier Enigma breakthroughs made Bletchley Park’s success possible. The early BP cryptanalysts recruited trusted friends and acquaintances from college tutorial groups and university connections, eventually branching out to women’s colleges and secretarial pools as a scattershot organization flung across a few prefabricated huts grew into an intelligence factory employing thousands. Churchill relied heavily on Park intelligence to guide his public policy; he visited the grounds in September 1941, where he commended the codebreakers on their silence as well as their work. There was certainly some information-passing within the Park—wartime diaries and memoirs record that BP workers weren’t above discreetly trading news to keep an eye on friends and loved ones—but security to the outside was watertight: the Axis powers never found out how thoroughly Britain was reading their mail.

The burden of secrecy took its toll: illness, burnout, and breakdowns were common among BP staff. To combat the stress, a thriving social life grew up—off-duty codebreakers may not have had a Mad Hatters literary society reading books like Gone with the Wind (a bestseller of the time known for sparking controversial discussions even in the forties) or an anonymous weekly humor column, but they played in amateur dramatics, competed in chess tournaments, put on musical revues, practiced Highland dancing, and much more. The codebreakers worked hard and played hard, and veterans remember finding an open-mindedness at BP that was sorely lacking in ordinary life. Women enjoyed a level of equality with male coworkers that they were unlikely to get on the outside for years or decades; homosexual members tended to be tacitly acknowledged and accepted; people who would today be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder could work without being forced to mask their neurodivergence. BP might have appalled military personnel with its casual attitudes to dress, language, and first-naming, but it was in many ways a haven of acceptance.

Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend. I have renamed my Osla out of respect for Osla Benning’s still-living children; the real Osla was not at the famous bombing of the Café de Paris, was already married by the time her ex-boyfriend married Princess Elizabeth, and spent her life as a diplomatic wife rather than a columnist. But I have remained faithful to the broad strokes of her life in bringing my Osla to the page: lonely daughter to a frequently married society mother (who did maintain a suite at Claridge’s), irrepressible firebrand who finagled her way back to England on a purloined air ticket rather than sit out the war in Canada; polished debutante who gleefully got her hands dirty building Hurricanes before her fluent German landed her at Bletchley Park. She was introduced to Prince Philip at the beginning of the war by her friend (and fellow goddaughter of Lord Mountbatten) Sarah Norton, and the two promptly became inseparable. Philip and Osla bonded over similar privileged but lonely childhoods and a mutual penchant for pranks and fun; he gave her his naval insignia, took her out whenever he was in town, and wrote to her when at sea. The two drifted apart toward the end of the war, around the same time a young Princess Elizabeth appears to have caught Philip’s eye at a Christmas weekend following her fundraising Aladdin performance at Windsor (a performance he nearly missed after a bout of the flu while holed up at Claridge’s! ).

No one can know whether Osla’s oath of secrecy might have contributed to her estrangement with Philip, or if his German connections might have caused difficulties for Osla at BP, but there was certainly doubt about Philip of Greece’s familial background in the early days. Post-Philip, Osla Benning had a short-lived engagement to a cad whose emerald ring she removed with a flippant “Never liked green stones, anyway! ” before marrying John Patrick Edward Chandos Henniker-Major, a Rifle Brigade officer with a Military Cross won fighting beside Czechoslovakian partisans. He would eventually join the Foreign Office and become the eighth Baron Henniker, and he and Osla did indeed dine with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret before the royal wedding in some vague idea that Osla would give the royal bride tips on handling her husband-to-be. (No word on how or if that was discussed over the canapé s! ) Lord Henniker remarked wryly that the tabloids frequently tried to dig up dirt on the lifelong friendship between his wife and the Duke of Edinburgh, who stood as godfather to Osla’s eldest son. Anyone interested in the real Osla should read The Road to Station X, the memoir by her friend Sarah Baring (né e Norton) of their time together at Bletchley Park, from which I repurposed many of Osla Benning’s droll one-liners and high-wire pranks for Osla Kendall.

Beth Finch is a fictional composite of two very real women. One is nameless, a codebreaker who supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown after her love affair with a married BP colleague collapsed—the woman was sent to an asylum in fear that she would divulge secret information in her broken state. The other contributor to Beth’s character and achievements is Mavis Lever, one of Bletchley Park’s stars. Mavis was recruited in her teens and became one of “Dilly’s Fillies”; all of Beth’s codebreaking achievements—the breaking of “Today’s the day minus three, ” which would lead to the Cape Matapan victory; the all-L’s crib; the cracking of Abwehr Enigma—are pulled from records of Mavis Lever’s feats as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts. I dramatized Mavis’s achievements with a fictional character because I did not wish to imply that one of BP’s greatest legends went to an asylum when in the real historic record she married a Hut 6 codebreaker as brilliant as herself and served BP until the war ended. I was not able to discover what became of the nameless codebreaker confined to an asylum. Clockwell and the Kiloran Bay facility are both fictional, but institutions of that type certainly existed, functioning as dumping grounds for inconvenient women as well as mentally ill ones. Sadly, many lobotomies were performed on the mentally ill during this period—the procedure was eventually outlawed as medically barbaric, but not before thousands of patients were maimed. The most famous victim of the surgery is probably JFK’s intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy: subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy at twenty-three in an attempt to calm her emotional outbursts, she spent the remaining sixty years of her life institutionalized, reduced to the mental capacity of a toddler.

Mab is fictional, representing the many women who served as BP’s worker bees. Such women came from all walks of life, from shopgirls to lords’ daughters, and served as decodists, filers, and bombe machine operators, among many other jobs. Some found the work boring and some found it fascinating—but overall, their reminiscences speak fondly of the relaxed and egalitarian attitude at Bletchley Park. BP did not employ many women at the top levels of management and cryptanalysis, and women workers tended to be paid less than their male counterparts, but it was still a place where women’s voices were valued, and many missed its camaraderie and purpose once the war was over. Mab’s two husbands are both fictional as well; Francis Gray is modeled after Great War poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who immortalized the horror of trench warfare and lost innocence in verse, and Mike Sharpe is a tip of the hat to the hardworking RAF engineers who kept the bombe machines humming. The idea that a husband and wife could both work at Bletchley Park without realizing it at the time or telling each other afterward might seem like a soap opera twist, but it really happened, and more than once. Sometimes a couple only made the realization after decades of marriage!

Harry is based on two real-life Bletchley Park codebreakers: Maurice Zarb, a Hut 4 recruit of Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian descent who came to BP via a prominent London banking family (I included him as Harry’s cousin so as not to erase a real man from BPhistory), and Keith Batey, a brilliant Hut 6 mathematician who worked with Mavis Lever, fell in love with her over the rods and cribs, and married her. Keith, like Harry and indeed many male cryptanalysts, suffered keen guilt over not being able to enlist on the front lines, and wangled permission to join the Fleet Air Arm, where he served briefly before returning to codebreaking. Bletchley Park men were frequently subjected to social shaming, both from strangers and from their own unwitting family members, for their apparent refusal to join the fight—shaming they could not refute, since they could divulge no details of their service.

Most of the other Bletchley Park people mentioned here are real: Margaret Rock, Sarah Norton, Miss Senyard, Commanders Denniston and Travis, Asa Briggs, Michael Cohen, Olive Knox, Ian Fleming (of later James Bond fame, who liaised with BP from the naval intelligence division), and Valerie Glassborow, who would become Kate Middleton’s grandmother. Alan Turing, one of the great brains of the twentieth century, was the shining light of Hut 8 and would make history later with his contributions in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was prosecuted for homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration in the fifties, a hideous miscarriage of justice for which the British government has since issued an apology. Turing died of cyanide poisoning not long after, probably self-inflicted. Dilly Knox was one of the Park’s eccentric geniuses, notorious for his absentmindedness, his Alice-in-Wonderland approach to codebreaking, and his habit of recruiting only women for his team. He did not have the mania for keeping his codebreakers in ignorance that prevailed in the other huts, stating, “Such action cripples the activities of the cryptographer who depends on cribs, ” and so his ladies tended to be better informed about the nature of their work than their colleagues. Cancer forced Knox’s retirement midwar, but he worked at home until the end, reportedly on Soviet ciphers. The key to his library wall safe at Courns Wood was never found after his death, which gave me the idea to speculate what that safe could possibly have held.

Unlikely as it may seem, there really was a traitor at Bletchley Park who passed information to the Soviet Union during the war. John Cairncross worked in Hut 4 and then MI-6, and served as the basis for Giles Talbot: a red-haired individualist who became convinced that Britain was not sharing enough information with its Russian allies and took it upon himself to smuggle hundreds of decrypts out of BP to his Soviet contact. Such an activity was relatively easy, as Osla points out in The Rose Code, because the guardhouse effected no searches of departing shift workers (indeed, there would have been almost no way to efficiently search thousands of departing workers every day for tiny slips of paper). Cairncross’s spy activities were not exposed until years later when he was living abroad; thus he was never prosecuted. To the end of his life he maintained that he was a patriot and not a traitor; he claimed his actions saved thousands of Russian lives and denied ever passing intelligence to the USSR after the war. He was far from the only Soviet mole in MI-5, MI-6, and the Foreign Office: the ring known as the Cambridge Five (a group of Englishmen recruited during their university days) was uncovered in the highest reaches of British intelligence during the sixties. Some escaped to the Soviet Union and lived out the rest of their lives, others made deals; none were prosecuted. It has long been posited that there were more Soviet moles beyond Cairncross and the others—Giles Talbot was created to fill that unknown void. In my imagination, his discovery at the end of The Rose Code prompts the investigation that will eventually unearth the Cambridge Five. The Russians used their own methods of encryption during the war but definitely experimented with using captured Enigma machines, even finding ways to make them more secure postwar.

As always, I have taken some liberties with the historical record in order to serve the story. There may be some inaccuracies in the depictions of Osla, Mab, and Beth’s earliest shift work; Bletchley Park was still in its infancy in 1940, protocols changed constantly, and the day-to-day operating procedures of those early days in the huts proved very difficult to research. Osla’s indexing/filing section of Hut 4 was possibly not known as the Debutantes’ Den until 1942; the arrival of the Glassborow twins to Bletchley Park was moved up somewhat; Bettys in York didn’t lose their apostrophe until the sixties; the chemist in Bletchley village wasn’t a Boots; and although the bombe operators did receive a compressed lecture about how and why the machine functioned, that lecture wasn’t approved until later in the machines’ usage than depicted here. Mab as a civilian would probably not have worked long-term as a bombe machine operator since the bombes were serviced by Wrens (though they did need to be tall, hence my supposition that a tall civilian woman might have been called upon to fill in).

The real Osla did build airplanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory, though they may not have begun accepting women as early as I have depicted here, and she didn’t come to BP until 1941, arriving with Sarah Norton, with whom she billeted at Aspley Guise throughout her service. Osla and Philip’s romance is necessarily fictionalized, since we don’t know private details of their intimate moments. I have attempted wherever possible to use Philip’s real words (his stiff-upper-lip “I just had to get on with it” response to his own pain over his mother’s incarceration and his shattered family; his diary-entry accounts of what the Cape Matapanbattle and other naval engagements were like), but he was a self-contained man even when young, and Osla was even more bound by secrecy, so my imagination has had to put words in their mouths. I’ve done so with a respectful attempt to depict the heady first love of two young people destined to find happiness with others, who nevertheless must have shared something very genuine and important considering that they remained friends throughout their lives.

The heavy air raid on the town of Coventry in late 1944 is fictional, though the town’s devastation during an earlier raid (inspiring the German verb coventrieren) is true and became the foundation for one of Bletchley Park’s great real-life mysteries: the claim that Hut 6 broke the warning about that raid, but Churchill sacrificed the town to protect the safety of the code. To this day, some veterans insist the message break’s timing was fishy, while others insist news of the raid simply wasn’t cracked in time to effect a warning. I come down on the latter side of the argument, but when the time came to enact my own fictional drama of a raid being known in advance and no warning given, I placed it all at Coventry as a nod to the existing urban legend.

There is no evidence that the brilliant Margaret Rock, who enjoyed a long, illustrious, exceedingly secret career at GCHQ after Bletchley Park, knew about the hidden bunker where a stash of undestroyed Enigma machines and bombes were stored for a rainy day. . . but there was such a bunker until 1959, and it’s entirely possible that the machines were lent out to aid the postwar boom of computer science projects funded by many universities and corporations. Turing was involved with one such project in Manchester, and another was funded by Birkbeck College in London—but even if the Birkbeck College project borrowed a bombe from GCHQ’s bunker and had to send that machine to a maintenance lab, it was in all probability not used in an illicit off-the-books meeting of Bletchley Park codebreakers trying to catch a traitor on the eve of the royal wedding!

And yet. . . if there had ever been a dire need for BP’s brilliant personnel to dust off their skills postwar, I have no doubt that such a secret would have been flawlessly kept. Bletchley Park is at last receiving credit for its wartime achievements; the doors have been thrown open and matters that would have been unthinkable to whisper in 1941 are now discussed openly under the official Twitter handle @bletchleypark. But does that mean BP and those who worked there have shared all their secrets? Not by a long shot. There are undoubtedly stories—ciphers broken, off-the-books meetingsconvened, betrayals covered up—that have been taken to the grave.

I owe heartfelt thanks to many people who helped in the writing and researching of this novel: My mother, Kelly, this book’s first reader and invaluable critic. My husband, who has served with shipmates working in similar fields to the Bletchley Park women and advised me on portraying its stresses accurately, as well as the toll it takes on deployed personnel. My marvelous critique partners Stephanie Dray, Anna Ferrell, Lea Nolan, Sophie Perinot, and Stephanie Thornton, whose criticism helped whip this ungainly manuscript into shape—I would be lost without you all. My fellow historical fiction author Meghan Masterson, who named Francis Gray’s book of war poetry. My agent Kevan Lyon and editor Tessa Woodward; thank you for cheering this book every step of the way. Above all, I give my fervent thanks to Kerry Howard, Bletchley Park historian and author in her own right, who fact-checked every page of this manuscript and saved my bacon in flagging its historical errors prepublication—if any inaccuracies remain after her meticulous work, it’s entirely my own fault.

Thanks to historians, experts, and the indefatigable Bletchley Park Trust, BP’s legacy is preserved today in countless podcasts, articles, and nonfiction books, which do honor not only to the work done there but to the Park’s veterans. Donations, grants, and the unceasing labor of both scholars and volunteers have made Bletchley Park a superb historic visitors’ site—if you can manage a trip there, I highly recommend it, as the house, gardens, and surviving huts make for a fascinating walk into the past. Other sites mentioned in this book still make marvelous side trips today. Keswick, where Mab and Francis honeymoon, is beautiful if the weather is fine, and Surprise View over Derwentwater offers an astounding panorama of Lake District scenery. London is a dazzling mix of modernity and history, a far cry from its wartime, Blitz-cratered, blackout-curtained self, and Veeraswamy, where Mab and Francis had their first date, is still in business—the UK’s oldest Indian restaurant. Coventry has been rebuilt, although the roofless cathedral still stands in a poignant memorial to the attack that nearly destroyed it. York is sumptuous and historic—be sure to drop by Bettys (no apostrophe), which to this day offers up an unbeatable cream tea.

Bletchley Park

British bombe machine

Enigma machine

Kate Quinn

Reading Group Guide

1. Did you come to The Rose Code with any preconceptions about the Bletchley Park codebreakers? Or were their achievements and history completely new to you?

2. Very little physical danger threatens Bletchley Park throughout the war, but the strain of secrecy imposes a different kind of pressure on its workers. Discuss the impact of lying to friends and loved ones about work, keeping quiet when being taunted about the lack of wartime contribution, and being unable to seek outside help for the stresses of codebreaking. How do you think you would function under such pressure? Do you think you could keep such a secret, not just during the war but for the rest of your life?

3. Fun-loving Osla struggles continually to do something important with her life and skills, but is dismissed over and over again as just a silly girl. How have such stereotypes changed for modern women? How have they remained the same?

4. Self-made Mab sees a gentlemanly husband as her ticket out of East End poverty—not just for herself, but for Lucy. How do her goals shift over time, and why?

5. Shy Beth flowers from a bullied spinster to a star cryptanalyst. How did your opinion of her change throughout the book?

6. Books and literary discussions provide a welcome distraction for Mab, Osla, Beth, and the rest of the Mad Hatters throughout the war. How do book clubs and a love for reading remain important in troubled times?

7. Osla’s romance with Prince Philip is doomed to failure, given his ultimate fate as consort to the future Queen Elizabeth II. Did you root for them anyway? What about the other couples—Mab and Francis, Beth and Harry?

8. Dilly Knox, Alan Turing, Margaret Rock, Valerie Glassborow—Bletchley Park was stocked with many eccentric and interesting real-life figures from history. Which was your favorite and why?

9. Beth makes the decision not to warn Mab and Osla about the coming air raid on Coventry. Was she right to uphold her oath, or should she have found a way to warn her friends? Could you have forgiven her if you experienced what Mab and Osla did?

10. The traitor argues that giving information to the Russians was an act of patriotism, not treachery, because the Russians were Britain’s allies during World War II, the prime minister wasn’t sharing enough information with them, and passing intelligence saved Allied lives and ultimately helped defeat Hitler. Do you agree or disagree?

11. In the final confrontation, the Mad Hatters are able to unmask the traitor and turn them over to MI-5 for justice. Were you satisfied with their fate, or did you hope for something different?

12. The codebreaking process had many stages, from cryptanalysis (Beth’s job), to machine decoding (Mab’s job), to translation (Osla’s job), not to mention registraton, filing, and analysis. Do you think you could have been a codebreaker? What job do you think you would have been given, if recruited to Bletchley Park?