Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  MADDIE

  I pulled the eiderdown over my head, sobbing at his feet.

  Then he stopped very abruptly. He bent down and uncovered my head gently, without touching me.

  ‘Eva Seiler,’ he breathed. ‘You might have spared yourself a great deal of suffering if you had confessed this sooner.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t have been able to write it all down if I’d done that,’ I wept. ‘So it was worth it.’

  ‘For me as well.’

  (I suppose Eva Seiler must be a huge catch! He thought he’d reeled in yet another brown trout and it turns out he’s got a 30-pound salmon struggling to wrench itself off his barbed fishhook. Perhaps he is hoping for a promotion.)

  ‘You have redeemed me.’ He straightened up and bowed his head courteously. Almost a salute. Finally he said goodnight politely, in French: ‘Je vous souhaite une bonne nuit.’

  And again I gratified him by gaping.

  He slammed the door shut behind him.

  He has been reading the Vercors – he has read Le Silence de la Mer, The Silence of the Sea – the French Resistance tract, at my recommendation! How else –?

  He may get in trouble for it. He baffles me. I suppose it is mutual.

  —

  This time I know where I was, I know exactly where I left off. I know exactly where we were. Where Maddie was.

  For the Nth time, four different people checked over the ration books and parachutes and papers. They briefed Maddie, let her know who she’d be collecting for the return trip, checked over the maps and the routes, gave her a call sign to use on the radio until she got to France (‘Wendy’, naturally). The police sergeant tried to give her a revolver. All the SD pilots carry pistols when they fly to France, he said, just in case. But she wouldn’t take it.

  ‘I’m not RAF,’ said Maddie. ‘I’m a civilian. It’s a breach of international agreement to arm civilians.’

  So he gave her a pen instead – it’s called an Eterpen, a truly wonderful thing, no messy ink to refill and it dries instantly. He said they have ordered 30,000 of them for the RAF to use in the air (for navigation calculations) and a grateful RAF officer recently smuggled out of France had given one of the samples to Peter, who’d given it to the sergeant, who gave it to Maddie. The sergeant told her to pass it on to someone else when she had successfully completed her mission. He likes us very much.

  Maddie was ridiculously pleased with her pen. (I did not appreciate then why it pleased her so much, the infinite supply of quick-drying ink, but I do now.) She also liked the idea of passing it on as a gift after a successful operation – a variation on the Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle. She confessed in a whisper to her passenger, ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a revolver anyway.’ Which was not entirely true, since on her second and third trips to Craig Castle Jamie had taken her shooting and she had actually bagged not one but two pheasants with Queenie’s 20 bore. But Maddie was – is? Was, all right, was. Maddie was a modest sort of person.

  ‘Ready to do some practice landings?’ Maddie asked her passenger casually, as though Ormaie were as ordinary a destination as Oakway. ‘They’ve lit the mock flares over at the training field. I’ve not often landed on the flare path at night, so we’ll hop over there before we set sail.’

  ‘All right,’ her passenger agreed. It was impossible for either of them to be anything but elated – one of them on her way to France, the other flying the plane. Everything was loaded except Queenie – the sergeant offered her a hand up the ladder to the rear cockpit.

  ‘Wait, wait!’

  She threw herself at Maddie. Maddie was rather startled. For a moment they held on to each other like shipwreck survivors.

  ‘Come on!’ Maddie said. ‘Vive la France!’

  An Allied Invasion of Two.

  Maddie made three perfect daisy-cutter landings on the flare path, and then her stomach began to nag at her about losing the moon just the way it sometimes nagged at her about losing the weather over the Pennines. She set her course for France.

  Southampton’s barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos. Maddie crossed the silver Solent and the Isle of Wight. Then she was over the war-torn Channel. The drone of the engine mingled with her passenger humming over the intercom – ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’.

  ‘You are far too jolly,’ Maddie scolded sternly. ‘Be serious!’

  ‘We are told to smile all the time,’ Queenie said. ‘It’s in the SOE instructor’s handbook. People who are smiling and singing don’t appear to be plotting a counter-attack. If you go around looking worried someone will start to wonder what you’re worrying about.’

  Maddie did not answer, and after half an hour of flying over the serene, smooth, silver and black eternity of the English Channel, Queenie asked suddenly, ‘What are you worrying about?’

  ‘It’s cloudy over Caen,’ Maddie said, ‘and there’s light in the clouds.’

  ‘What d’you mean, light?’

  ‘Flickering light. Pinkish. Could be lightning. Could be gunfire. Could be a bomber squadron going up in flames. I’m going to change course a bit and go round it.’

  This was a lark. Light in the clouds, who cares? Let’s change direction. We were tourists. Maddie’s alternative route over the Normandy coast went straight over Mont St Michel, the island citadel glorious in the moonlight, casting long moonshadows over the swelling tide in a bay that shone like spilt mercury. Searchlights swept the sky, but missed the grey-bellied Lysander. Maddie set a new course for Angers.

  ‘Less than an hour to go at this rate,’ Maddie told her passenger. ‘Are you still smiling?’

  ‘Like an idiot.’

  After that – this is hard to believe, but it was a dull flight for some time after that. The French countryside was not as stunning by moonlight as the English Channel, and after a long time of staring into indistinguishable blackness, Queenie fell trustingly asleep, curled among the cardboard cases and baled wires on the floor of the rear cockpit with her head on her parachute. It was a bit like sleeping in the engine room of Ladderal Mill – noisy beyond belief, but stupefyingly rhythmic. She had been keyed to fever pitch these past few weeks and it was well past midnight now.

  She woke when her relaxed body was suddenly slammed against the back end of the fuselage along with all eleven crates. She was not hurt or even frightened, but she was hugely disorientated. Her subconscious mind held the reverberating echo of a hell of a bang, which had in fact been the thing that woke her rather than being tossed about. Bright orange light rimmed the windows of the rear cockpit. Just as she figured out that the Lysander was plunging earthwards in a screaming dive, the increased gravity knocked her cold again. And when she woke up a second time, some moments later, it was dark and the engine was still throbbing reliably, and she was heaped uncomfortably among the tumbled cargo.

  ‘Can you hear me? Are you all right?’ came Maddie’s frantic voice over the intercom. ‘Oh bother, there’s another one –’ And a lovely white ball of fire arched gracefully over the top of the Perspex canopy. It made no noise and lit the cockpit beautifully. Limelight, limelight. Maddie’s night vision was instantly ruined again.

  ‘Fly the plane, Maddie,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Fly the plane.’

  Think of her three years ago, a weeping jelly of fear under fire. Think of her now, guiding a wounded aircraft through the unfamiliar fire and darkness of a war zone. Her best friend, untangling herself in the back of the plane, shivered with dread and love. She knew that Maddie would land her safely or die trying.

  Maddie was battling the control column as though it were alive. In the brief phosphoric flashes her taut wrists were white with exertion. She gasped with relief when she felt her passenger’s small hand gripping her shoulder through the gap in the armour-plated bulkhead.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Queenie asked.

  ‘Dratted anti-aircraft guns in Angers. The tail’s been hit. I think it was flak, not a night fig
hter, or we’d be dead. We don’t stand a chance against a Messerschmitt 110.’

  ‘I thought we were falling.’

  ‘That was me screaming downhill to put out the fire,’ Maddie said grimly. ‘You just dive as fast as you can till the wind blows it out. Like blowing out a candle! But the tailplane control’s come disconnected or something. It’s –’

  She gritted her teeth. ‘We’re on course. We’re still in one piece. We lost a bit too much height in that dive, but all the dratted plane wants to do now is climb, so, well, that’s not a problem. Only if we go much higher the Jerries might be able to see us on their Radar. The plane’s still flyable, just, and we’ve made such good time we’re not even behind schedule. Only, I think you should know that it’s going to be – um – a bit of a challenge for me to land. So you might have to do another parachute jump.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Well, I might too, I suppose.’

  Maddie had not ever practised jumping out of a plane, but she had practised landing broken planes more times than she could count – had, indeed, landed broken planes on plenty of occasions – both girls knew that if it happened a thousand times Maddie would every time die with her hands on the flight controls rather than trust in a blind plunge into darkness.

  Especially as, like most shot-down British airmen, she spoke only the most basic schoolgirl French and had no clever forged identity to fall back on in Nazi-occupied France.

  ‘I might drop you out and try to fly home,’ Maddie said casually, hopeful words spoken through clenched teeth.

  ‘Let me help! Tell me something to do!’

  ‘Look for the landing site. Less than half an hour to go. They’ll flash at us when they hear us – Morse for Q. That’s long-long-short-long.’

  The small hand did not let go.

  ‘You’d better put your parachute on,’ Maddie reminded her passenger. ‘And make sure you’ve got all your gear.’

  There was a lot of crashing and cursing in the rear cockpit for a while. After a few minutes Maddie asked with a gasp of fearful laughter, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Tying everything down. I’m responsible for this lot whether or not I see it again tomorrow morning. If we bounce, I don’t want to be strangled in electric wire. And if I have to jump out before you try to land, I jolly well don’t want it trailing out after me and smacking me in the head.’

  Maddie said nothing. She was peering into the dark and flying the plane.

  ‘Should be getting close,’ she said at last. Her voice, faintly distorted over the crackling intercom, was neutral. There was nothing of either relief or fear in her tone. ‘Descending to 700 feet now, all right? Look for those flashes.’

  Those last fifteen minutes were the longest. Maddie’s arms ached and her hands were numb. It was like holding back an avalanche. She hadn’t looked at the map for the past half an hour and was navigating wholly by memory and the compass and the stars.

  ‘Hurrah, we’re in the right place!’ she said suddenly. ‘See the confluence of those two rivers? We land right in between.’ She gave a shiver of excitement. The small, comforting hand gripping her shoulder suddenly let go.

  ‘There.’

  Queenie pointed. How she’d spotted it through the page-sized gap in the bulkhead was a mystery, but she’d seen the signal, a little to the left of them. Clear and bright flashes in fixed series – Q for Queen, long, long, short, long.

  ‘Is that right?’ Queenie asked anxiously.

  ‘Yes. Yes!’

  They both gave spontaneous yells.

  ‘I can’t let go to give them the answer!’ Maddie gasped. ‘Have you got an electric torch?’

  ‘In my kit. Hang on – What’s the letter to answer them?’

  ‘L for Love. Dot-dash-dot-dot, short-long-short-short. You’ve got to get it right or they won’t light up for us –’

  ‘I’ll get it right, silly,’ Queenie reminded her fondly. ‘I can flash Morse code in my sleep. Remember? I’m a wireless operator.’

  Ormaie 25.XI.43 JB-S

  Hauptsturmführer von Linden says he has never known any educated person so foul-mouthed as I am. No doubt it was extraordinarily stupid of me to bring his daughter’s name into the catfight we had last night. This morning I am to have my mouth swabbed with carbolic – not carbolic SOAP, like they do in school, but actual carbolic ACID – phenol – which is the same stuff they use for lethal injections at Natzweiler-Struthof (according to Engel, my ever-flowing source of Nazi minutiae). She has diluted it with alcohol – she wore gloves to do the mixing, as it is incredibly caustic. But she won’t come near me with it because she knows I will battle her and it will go everywhere. Even with my arms tied behind me (which they aren’t, obviously) I would have a good go at getting it everywhere. I am hoping the whole situation will evaporate if we postpone it long enough and I think she is too.

  The catfight started over the heartbreaking French girl (I think she is the only other female prisoner here), whom they have been stubbornly and persistently questioning day and night all week, and she, just as stubborn and persistent as they are, refuses to answer their questions. Last night she was weeping noisily for hours, in between shrieks of genuine heart-stopping agony – I have actually torn out chunks of my hair (it is that brittle) whilst trying to endure her shrieking. At some point deep in the middle of the night I broke – she did not, but I did.

  I jumped up and began to scream at the top of my lungs (en français pour que la résistante malheureuse puisse me comprendre):

  ‘LIE! Lie to them, you stupid cow! Say anything! Stop being such a damned martyr and LIE!’

  And I started wrestling insanely with the iron stub where the porcelain door handle used to be (before I unscrewed it and threw it at Thibaut’s head), which is pointless, because of course the door handle and its attendant hardware are purely decorative and all the bolts and bars are fixed to the outside.

  ‘LIE! LIE TO THEM!’

  Oh – I got a result I did not expect. Someone came and pulled open the locks so suddenly that I fell out of the door, and they picked me up and held me blinking in the sudden bright lights, while I tried not to look at the wretched girl.

  And there was von Linden, in civilian clothes, cool and smooth as a new frozen curling pond and sitting in a cloud of acrid smoke like Lucifer himself (no one smokes when he is around, I don’t know and don’t want to know what they were burning). He didn’t speak, merely beckoned, and they brought me over to him and threw me to my knees.

  He let me cower for a few minutes.

  Then:

  ‘You’ve advice for your fellow prisoner? I’m not sure she realises you are addressing her. Tell her again.’

  I shook my head, not really understanding what the hell he was playing at this time.

  ‘Go to her side, look in her face, speak to her. Speak clearly so we can all hear you.’

  I played along. I always play along. It is my weakness, the flaw in my armour.

  I put my face alongside hers, as though we were whispering. So close it must have seemed intimate, but too close for us to actually look at each other. I swallowed, then repeated clearly, ‘Save yourself. Lie to them.’

  She is the one who used to whistle ‘Scotland the Brave’ when I first came here. She couldn’t whistle last night, it’s a wonder they thought she could even speak, after what they had done to her mouth. But she tried to spit at me anyway.

  ‘She doesn’t think a great deal of your advice,’ said von Linden. ‘Tell her again.’

  ‘LIE!’ I yelled at her.

  After a moment she managed to answer me. Hoarse and harsh, her voice grating with pain, so that everyone could hear her. ‘Lie to them?’ she croaked. ‘Is that what you do?’

  I stood trapped. Perhaps it was a trap he had laid for me on purpose. All was very quiet for a long time (probably not so long as it seemed), and finally von Linden directed with disinterest, ‘Answer her question.’

  That was when I l
ost my senses.

  ‘You fucking hypocrite,’ I snarled at von Linden unwisely (he may not have known what the word meant in French, but still, it wasn’t a clever thing to say). ‘Don’t you ever lie? What the hell do you do? What do you tell your daughter? When she asks about your work, what truth does the lovely Isolde get out of you?’

  He was white as paper. Calm though.

  ‘Carbolic.’

  Everyone looked at him uncertainly.

  ‘She has the filthiest tongue of any woman in France. Burn her mouth clean.’

  I fought. They held me down while they argued about the correct dosage because he hadn’t made clear whether or not he actually wanted them to kill me with the stuff. The French girl closed her eyes and rested, taking advantage of the shift in attention away from her. They’d got out the bottles and the gloves – the room became a clinic suddenly. The truly frightening thing was that not one of them seemed to know what he was doing.

  ‘Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!’

  He stopped them.

  He couldn’t do it.

  I choked with relief, gasping.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘After she’s eaten. Fräulein Engel knows how to prepare the phenol.’

  ‘Coward! Coward!’ I sobbed in hysterical fury. ‘Do it now! Do it yourself!’