The Rose Code by Kate Quinn #Extract

Today we are travelling back to the 1940's with an extract from Kate Quinn's The Rose Code.

 It is described by the publishers, Harper Collins, as:

The Crown meets The Imitation Game in a riveting wartime epic of three friends who meet at Bletchley Park

 

1940.  Three  very  different  women  answer  the  call  to  mysterious  country  estate  Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious  debutante  Osla  is  the  girl  who  has  everything—beauty,  wealth,  and  the  dashing Prince  Philip  of  Greece  sending  her  roses—but  she  burns  to  prove  herself  as  more  than  a society  girl,  and  puts  her  fluent  German  to  use  as  a  translator of  decoded  enemy  secrets. Imperious   self-made  Mab,  product  of  east-end  London  poverty,  works  the  legendary codebreaking  machines  as  she  conceals  old  wounds  and  looks  for  a  socially  advantageous husband.  Awkward   local  girl  Beth,  whose  shyness  conceals  a  brilliant  facility  with  puzzles beneath her shy exterior.

1947. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter–the key to which lies buried in the long-ago betrayal that destroyed their friendship and left one of them confined to an asylum. A mysterious traitor has emerged from the shadows of their Bletchley Park past, and now Osla, Mab, and Beth must resurrect their old alliance and crack one last code together...As the nation prepares for the royal wedding they must race against the clock to save one of their own.

 Extract

 

CHAPTER 1

 

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty- six, dressed in black satin with a string of pearls,’ ” Mab Churt read aloud. “That’s the first sen-sible thing you’ve said, you silly twit.”

 

“What are you reading?” her mother asked, flipping through an old magazine.

 

“Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.” Mab turned a page. She was taking a break from her dog- eared list of “100 Classic Literary Works for the Well- Read Lady”— not that Mab was a lady, or particularly well- read, but she intended to be both. After plowing through number 56, The Return of the Native (ugh, Thomas Hardy), Mab figured she’d earned a dip into something enjoyable like Rebecca. “The heroine’s a drip and the hero’s one of those broody men who bullies you and it’s supposed to be appealing. But I can’t put it down, somehow.” Maybe just the fact that when Mab envisioned herself at thirty- six, she was definitely wearing black satin and pearls. There was also a Labrador lying at her feet, in this dream, and a room lined with books she actually owned, rather than dog- eared copies from the library. Lucy was in this dream too, rosy in a plum-colored gym slip, the kind girls wore when they went to some expensive day school and rode ponies.

 

Mab looked up from Rebecca to watch her little sister canter her fingers over imaginary fences: Lucy, nearly four years old and too skinny for Mab’s liking, dressed in a grubby jumper and skirt, forever pulling off her socks. “Lucy, stop that.” Tugging the sock back up over Lucy’s foot. “It’s too cold to be running around barefoot like a Dickens orphan.” Mab had done Dickens last year, numbers 26 through 33, plowing through chapters on her tea breaks. Blech, Martin Chuzzlewit.

 

“Ponies don’t wear socks,” Lucy said severely. She was mad for horses; every Sunday Mab took her to Hyde Park to watch the riders. Oh, Lucy’s eyes when she saw those burnished little girls trotting past in their jodhpurs and boots. Mab yearned to see Lucy perched on a well- groomed Shetland.

 

“Ponies don’t wear socks, but little girls do,” she said. “Or they catch cold.”

 

“You played barefoot all your life, and you never caught cold.” Mab’s mother shook her head. She’d given Mab her height, an inch shy of six feet, but Mab stretched into her height with lifted chin and squared shoulders, and Mrs. Churt always slouched. The cigarette between her lips waggled as she murmured aloud from an old issue of the Bystander. “ ‘Two 1939 debs, Osla Kendall and the Honorable Guinevere Brodrick, had Ian Farquhar to chat to them between races.’ Look at that mink on the Kendall girl . . .”

 

Mab cast an eye over the page. Her mother found it all enthralling— which daughter of Lord X curtsied to the queen, which sister of Lady Y appeared at Ascot in violet taffeta— but Mab studied the society pages like an instruction manual: what ensembles could be copied on a shopgirl budget? “I wonder if there’ll be a Season next year, what with the war.”

 

“Most debs’ll be joining the Wrens, I reckon. It’s the Land Army or the ATS for folks like us, but posh girls all go for the Women’s Royal Naval Service. They say they got the uniform designed by Molyneux, him who dresses Greta Garbo and the Duchess of Kent . . .”

 

Mab frowned. There were uniforms everywhere these days— so far, the only sign there even was a war. She’d been standing in this same East London flat, smoking tensely alongside her mother as they listened to the radio announcement from Downing Street, feeling chilly and strange as Chamberlain’s weary voice intoned, “This country is at war with Germany.” But since then, there’d hardly been a peep from the Huns.

 

Her mother was reading aloud again. “ ‘The Honorable Deborah Mitford on a paddock seat with Lord Andrew Cavendish.’ Look at that lace, Mabel . . .”

 

“It’s Mab, Mum.” If she was stuck with Churt, she wasn’t ruddy well putting up with Mabel. Plowing her way through Romeo and Juliet (number 23 on Mab’s list), she had run across Mercutio’s “I see Queen Mab hath been with you!” and plucked it out on the spot. “Queen Mab.” That sounded like a girl who wore pearls, bought her little sister a pony, and married a gentleman.

 

Not that Mab had any fantasies about dukes in disguise or millionaires with Mediterranean yachts— life wasn’t a novel like Rebecca. No mysterious moneyed hero was going to swoop a Shoreditch girl off her feet, no matter how well- read. But a gentle-man, some nice, comfortable man with a decent education and a good profession— yes, a husband like that was within reach. He was out there. Mab just had to meet him.

 

About the Author 

 

Kate  Quinn  is  a  native  of  southern  California.  She  attended  Boston  University,  where  she earned  a  Bachelor's and  Master's  degree  in  Classical  Voice.  A  lifelong  history  buff,  she  has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga, and two books in the Italian Renaissance detailing the early years of the infamous Borgia clan. All have been translated into multiple languages.  She  and  her  husband  now  live  in  Maryland  with  two  black  dogs  named  Caesar and Calpurnia.

You can follow Kate here: Website  |  Facebook   |  Twitter

Book link: Amazon UK 

Thanks to Kate Quinn, Harper Collins and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the extract and a place on the tour.

Check out these great bloggers!