The Rose Code

Upon arriving at BP for her shift a few hours later, Beth is arrested by two men who force her into a car, then sedate her. On the way to Clockwell Sanitarium, one of the men, who was bribed, gives her an unsigned message threatening her with a lifetime in the sanitarium unless she reveals the location of the reports she took. Beth refuses to answer and swallows the key to Dilly’s safe.

Osla translates a series of increasingly panicked German messages during the invasion. At the end of her long shift, she learns that Mab is transferring to London. They part on unfriendly terms. Osla stays at BP through the end of the war, but it is never quite the same.

In November 1947, Beth reasons that, since Peggy was the one who let it slip that she knew about the Coventry raid, she must be the traitor.

Mab leaves her twins, Edward and Lucy, with her husband, Mike Sharpe, with whom she has a functional but emotionally distant relationship. Mab drives Osla to the sanitarium.

Beth’s board game partner returns following her surgery, but she is unresponsive when Beth tries to initiate a game.

Beth is surprised when Giles pays her a visit, and she realizes that he is the one who sold intelligence and framed her. Giles admits the truth and points out that Peggy only mentioned Beth’s knowledge of the Coventry raid to Mab after Giles turned the conversation in her direction. When Beth accuses Giles of treason, he insists that he shared information with the Soviet Union “in [the] country’s best interests” rather than blindly following the rules (525). Giles explains that his gossip and pretended crushes were ruses to gather more information. He was the one who reported Osla for stealing information to discredit her search for missing files. Beth guesses, correctly, that Giles, now an MI-5 agent, still sells state secrets to the Soviet Union. Giles offers to cancel the lobotomy and free Beth if she reveals the location of the files. In response, she attacks him.

On their way to the psychiatric hospital, Osla and Mab soften somewhat as they trade jabs. Mab explains that she settled in Yorkshire to get away from old memories and says that she tries “not to feel much of anything these days” (536).

Beth panics when a matron announces a “special treat” for her, thinking they will start the operation sooner than expected.

Arriving at the sanitarium the next morning after several mishaps along the way, Mab and Osla are admitted under the names of Beth’s married sisters. Sitting in the rose garden, they listen as Beth explains about Giles. Mab realizes that Giles used her keys to snoop around on the night she woke up in his bed. Mab and Osla agree to help Beth escape, and she shares a plan she formulated during her years in the psychiatric hospital.

Osla and Mab both distract psychiatric hospital staff, Osla by sharing royal wedding gossip and Mab by asking to discuss Beth’s treatment. Mab suggests that Beth might like to help with the gardening; at her request, the matron unlocks the gardening shed. When Osla fakes a seizure, Beth screams, and the distraction is enough for Mab to take a set of keys from the shed, which she slips to Beth.

Beth waits until Mab and Osla leave and the commotion dies down, then takes the keys to a small gate behind the psychiatric hospital. As she tries each of the keys, the staff member who accepted sexual favors in exchange for information appears. Filled with rage, Beth attacks him, biting his cheek, and knocks him out. She cycles through the keys until she finds the right one, then runs to meet Mab and Osla. As they drive away, she asks them what happened to Boots; they reveal that the landlady at Aspley Guise took him in.

Osla and Mab want to contact Commander Travis immediately to clear Beth’s name, but Beth tells them that she needs to decode the rest of what she calls “the Rose Code” first (553). She shows them the key to Dilly’s safe, which she hid in her shoes during her time at Clockwell.

They drive directly to Courns Wood, where Mrs. Knox welcomes them. Beth withdraws the files from the safe. Since the one she decrypted doesn’t mention Giles by name, she plans to decrypt the others, hopefully finding incriminating evidence before reporting Giles. They estimate that they have one week before Giles, who planned to call Beth just before her lobotomy, finds out that she is missing.

Mab and Osla watch Beth attempt to decrypt the other messages over the next two days. Mab waits on Beth but feels useless. She encourages her to call Harry for help. When Mrs. Knox learns that Mab remarried after her first husband’s death, she reveals that Dilly was her second husband.

Osla uses her connections to try to track down one or more of the codebreaking machines. When she calls Giles to keep him from getting suspicious, he tells her that the two of them received a summons from the palace.

Osla and Giles attend lunch at the palace with Princess Elizabeth, her sister Margaret, and a few other guests. Osla tries to hide her annoyance with Giles as she exchanges pleasantries with Elizabeth. When Margaret privately asks about Philip, Osla vouches for him.

Just as they are leaving, a footman calls Osla back and shows her into a room where Philip is waiting. They congratulate each other, and Philip tells her that he realized she must have done something important during the war, proving herself to be more than a “silly deb,” even if she can’t talk about it. He gives her his private number at the palace, and they part as friends.

Harry arrives at Courns Wood to help Beth. He tells her that Beth’s mother told him she was dead. When Beth wonders if she’s lost her knack for cryptanalysis, Harry takes her hand and encourages her. Realizing they need more help, Osla calls their trusted colleagues from BP to come to “one last absolutely topping Tea Party” (583).

Peggy, Alan Turing, and other BP alumni come and go from Courns Wood over the next few days. Peggy, who still works in government, secures an Enigma machine for temporary use. She also locates a bombe machine they can access in London, which needs repair.

They pack up and head to London. Mab is shocked when her husband arrives, called in as a technician. She learns that he became a bombe repairman after he was shot down. Realizing that she shut him out to shield herself from grief, Mab promises to be more open. Together, they prepare the bombe for use.

After the others trickle out, Beth falls asleep in the warehouse. She wakes a few hours later when Harry returns, bringing Boots with him. Beth invites him to stay, and they have sex, then return to work on the cipher. After another day of work, they plug their results into the bombe machine. In the early hours of the next morning, they use the bombe’s results to decrypt the messages, which provide clear evidence of Giles’s guilt.

After failing to contact MI-5, the group decides to catch Giles themselves. Osla arranges for him to pick her up on the way to the royal wedding. Mab drives Osla, Beth, Harry, and Mike to Osla’s apartment. Due to wedding traffic, they arrive shortly before Giles is supposed to arrive. When he fails to appear, they head to his apartment on foot rather than drive through the crowded streets. At his apartment, they see a newspaper with a photo of Beth, which tipped him off. Guessing that Giles intends to leave the city, they head for the nearest train station.

They scour the station for any sign of Giles as the wedding ceremony plays over the radio. When Beth spots him, he runs away. As he jogs up the stairs, Osla grabs a heavy book from a passerby and throws it at him. The book hits him, he stumbles, and Mab grabs his arm. He breaks free, only for Beth to tackle him just as the wedding ends. Seeing the scuffle, a nearby police officer arrests the entire group.

In jail, Osla is surprised by the arrival of Major John Cornwell, the man who assisted her after the Café de Paris bombing. The police officer called him after he saw his initials on the coat which Osla happened to be wearing. Through the bars, Osla kisses him and learns that he did receive her letters but only after she left BP for a different address. When the officer gives Osla permission to make a phone call, she calls Prince Philip’s private line, interrupting his wedding breakfast.

In December 1947, Giles is committed to a facility described as “more secure, if more bleak” than Clockwell Sanitarium (615).

After Beth is officially cleared, she, Mab, and Osla visit BP one more time and find it depressingly quiet. Osla recognizes BP and her colleagues as the home and family she never really had. They share their plans. Beth plans to live near Harry in Cambridge and take a job at the music shop before joining Peggy’s codebreaking team at some point. Osla, now dating Major Cornwell, whose father is a baron, plans to negotiate a better position at the Tatler magazine. Mab looks forward to a snowball fight with her husband and children. They consider restarting their book club but can’t agree on a book selection. As they separate, they quote Dilly’s poem to each other: “These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away. English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day!” (621).

An article dated June 2014 details the restoration of BP and reveals that Mab continued to demonstrate the bombe machine into her 90s, Osla became Lady Cornwell and earned accolades for her writing, and Beth enjoyed a lengthy career breaking codes for the government.