The Rose Code

by Kate Quinn

Mab studied the society pages like an instruction manual:

“No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to.

Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life,

that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?

Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen.

This is why they don’t want us talking to each other,

We all just see one piece of the puzzle, but when we start talking and put them together …

They were enemies, but they bled, too. They died.

But like a child terrified of a monster in the closet, you could only laugh at the fear when the light was switched on.

Grief didn’t make you noble. It made you selfish and hateful.

never got to realize all the ways he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get to reach the point where the song he whistled while shaving drove me mad or learn how rainy days made him short tempered. He never got to realize that I’m not some great wartime love, just a shallow cow who lives for pretty shoes and library novels. We never got to quarrel over the milk bill or whether to buy strawberry jam or marmalade …”

If you were a man and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it satire. If you were a woman and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it fluff.

Trains and train stations—what a thing they become in wartime. How many heartbreaks and homecomings, ecstasies and agonies, have we experienced with a rocking floor, a platform crowd, and a sweaty ticket clutched in hand?

“You know what they do in those palaces? They drink tea and listen to the gramophone, and laugh while dogs flop about on everyone’s shoes. Margaret reads a magazine while her mother talks horses and Lilibet and her father go walking

So far the plan of utterly ignoring a broken heart on the theory that it wasn’t important during wartime was not really working terribly well.

“I know you had a bad war, but you’re still frozen there. And I’m bloody tired of sitting back and hoping you’ll defrost.”

“It wasn’t our job to decide what the right thing was.” “It’s every thinking human being’s job, especially in war, and don’t tell me differently. Letting a wrong happen because the rules forbid you from acting—that was the defense of a good many Germans, after the war.

The best lies have the most truth.”

“What are the three fastest means of communication?”

“Telegraph, telephone, tell a woman!”