The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” Osla plucked a scone off Mrs. Finch’s second-best china. “No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to. Curl up with us and have a chin-wag …”

“Jumpy,” said Mab from the bed. “Like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner gong due any minute.”

“Cambridge is lovelier than Oxford,” Harry said. “Don’t let any of the Oxford blokes tell you different.”

“Goddamn,” a visiting American colonel had whistled last week. “If this were the Pentagon, there would be rows and rows of shiny filing cabinets with nothing in them, and you do it all in goddamn shoeboxes.”