The Rose Code

Sometime after midnight, the air-raid sirens go off. Osla picks up Lucy out of her bed, and the four of them head for a nearby shelter. As the crowd thickens, Osla and Lucy are separated from Mab and Francis. In the confusion, Osla missteps and falls to the ground, waking Lucy. In a moment of shock following an explosion, Lucy breaks free of Osla and runs away.

Mab and Osla search the street for Lucy, while Francis backtracks toward the house. After the raid ends, they wander back to the house, where Mab is relieved to see Francis and Lucy; Francis explains that Lucy went to get her boots. Just as Francis and Lucy come forward to meet them, the house and wall next to Francis’s house, which were damaged during the raid, collapse on top of them, killing them both. Mab frantically digs through the rubble, resisting Osla’s attempts to pull her away.

Following the raid, Mab goes to London to bury Lucy and refuses to answer any calls. From Mab’s mother, Osla learns that Mab intends to bury Francis in the Lake District; she, Beth, and Giles attend the funeral. Beth repeatedly comments, as if to convince herself, that the town could not have been evacuated, even if they were warned beforehand. Beth and Osla look for a chance to speak with Mab, but she slips away to walk up the same hill she visited with Francis.

As she walks, Mab goes over the past in her mind. Thinking of a poem that Francis was working on, titled “The Girl in the Hat,” Mab rips the hat to pieces. When Beth and Osla catch up to her, she spits at Osla and blames her for Francis and Lucy’s deaths, openly describing Lucy as her daughter; Osla tearfully accepts responsibility and apologizes. Mab tells Osla never to speak to her again.

Beth resolves never to tell Osla and Mab that she knew about the Coventry raid beforehand. The night she decoded the air raid locations, news broke about the successful, intelligence-reliant Operation Torch, which reminded Beth of the need for secrecy.

Beth congratulates Harry after his team breaks through the submarine traffic at last. She and Harry share their first public kiss.

In November 1947, Beth learns that a woman with whom she played board games is undergoing surgery. As she loses hope that Mab and Osla will visit, Beth recalls her father’s visit a few weeks prior, which enabled her to smuggle letters out of Clockwell.

After considering the risks Beth took in sending her a letter, Mab decides to go with Osla to visit Beth.

Two days after Francis’s funeral, Mab returns to work at BP, if only to take revenge on the Germans. Months pass, but Mab remains bitter and avoids Osla. In October 1943, after Mab collapses in a fit of laughter while demonstrating a bombe machine’s functionality to a group of American soldiers, she is sent to the infirmary, where she rests for several days. She wakes up to find Harry and Giles at her bedside, and they offer her “the Mad Hatter’s topper” (297), an eccentric-looking hat they used as a dunce cap at book club meetings.

In November 1943, Beth visits Courns Wood several months after Dilly’s death. Before he died, Beth visited him regularly. At the time, Dilly was working on a “tricky” code that, in his view, resembled a “rose, petals overlapping downward to the core” (417). Now, Beth carries on imaginary conversations with Dilly while she breaks codes. As Beth leaves Courns Wood, Mrs. Knox asks Beth to take a few papers from Dilly’s safe back to BP. Beth plans to revisit Dilly’s final project if she can find the time.

Just outside BP, Beth encounters her father, who refers to rumors that Beth is involved with a “dark fellow” and begs her to return home. Beth confirms the rumors, describes her father’s neglect over the years, and tells him that she is a different person now.

With Mab’s coaching, Beth presents herself as an engaged woman in order to be fitted with a contraceptive device to simplify her trysts with Harry. At the same time, Mab meets with a journalist who is writing about Francis. When the journalist asks for a story, Mab laments that she and Francis “didn’t have time to create any” (425). Depressed, Mab gets drunk and relies on Beth to guide her home.

Osla goes to Claridge’s in London, hoping to surprise her mother, but she is not home. She runs into Philip, who is staying at the hotel. Seeing that he is ill, Osla attends to him as a nurse. They share their experiences from the past year and reflect on how the war changed them. Though Osla offers to have sex with Philip, he stops short of doing so. When he asks why she stopped writing to him, Osla asks him to trust her.

A few days later, Osla receives a phone call from one of Philip’s friends, who informs her that Philip and Princess Elizabeth “sparked like a bonfire” during the Christmas holiday (440).

In January 1944, Beth ponders Dilly’s unsolved cipher while listening to music at the record store. She is surprised when Harry appears, since it is his son Christopher’s birthday. Harry tells Beth that Christopher asked him to leave to keep his guests from teasing him about having an un-enlisted father. When Harry expresses his regrets at not fighting, Beth suggests that their work is just as important. Harry expresses his love for Beth, and when she struggles to formulate a response, he tells her, “You don’t know what to do with it because it doesn’t come in five-letter clusters” like the codes she decrypts (446).

In February 1944, Mab, who now fills a secretarial position in BP headquarters, drinks heavily in the Recreation Hut after each shift. One night, Giles joins her to exchange gossip. The next morning, she wakes up in Giles’s bed. While she struggles to remember, he assures her that they did not have sex and that she dropped off her keys to BP’s filing system with the watchman on the way out. Trying to comfort Mab, Giles says that he used to have a crush on her but that he now has feelings for Beth.

In March, Osla meets Philip in London. Despite his insistence that his feelings for Osla have not changed, Philip admits that his family favors a potential marriage to Elizabeth and that he remains confused by Osla’s apparent unwillingness to write to him.

In April, Beth arrives at the Zarb home for a Mad Hatters Tea Party meeting and finds boys from the neighborhood bullying Christopher. Harry tells Beth that he convinced Commander Travis to let him enlist in the naval air service, which carries no risk of live capture, and therefore no security risk. He is to leave the following week, and resists Beth’s angry attempt to convince him not to go. Fearing that Harry will die, Beth leaves before the meeting starts and tells him not to write.

In November 1947, Beth wonders what became of Harry and considers the possibility that he was the traitor.

Osla’s boss at the magazine she writes for calls to suggest she take time off until the royal wedding. Just as Osla is leaving to catch the train to Clockwell, she spots Mab.

In May 1944, anticipation mounts for the Allied invasion of German-occupied France. Beth appeals to Osla for information related to Harry’s odds of survival; Osla agrees to “bend a rule just a little” to look it up (479).

Beth works on the code Dilly was working on when he died, which she nicknames Rose. After obtaining additional radio traffic on the same Soviet channel, she manages to break the code the night before the invasion. Beth is surprised to find that the messages are in English. Recognizing that they reveal the presence of a traitor at BP, she attempts to contact Commander Travis, but his secretary refuses to let Beth wake him. She decides to take the decoded messages to Courns Wood.

Waiting at a bus stop, Mab runs into Peggy and Giles. Giles mentions that he intends to ask Beth out, and Peggy shares her surprise that Mab and Osla are so “forgiving” towards Beth despite her failing to warn them about the Coventry raid.

Mrs. Knox welcomes Beth into her home. Beth hides the messages in Dilly’s safe, including one that refers to “your source inside ISK” (489), which stands for Illicit Services Knox, another name for Dilly’s section at BP. Feeling her period starting, Beth heads to her apartment.

Mab confronts Beth as soon as she arrives home. When Beth defends her choice not to warn them before the raid at Coventry, Osla turns on her as well, calling her a “hypocrite” for seeking information about Harry. Mab and Osla leave on a sudden summons to BP as Beth collapses in a fit of mixed laughter and crying.