Code Name Verity(41)

Craig Castle is a small castle – I mean, compared to Edinburgh or Stirling Castles, or Balmoral where the King lives in the summer, or Glamis where the Queen’s family lives. But it is a proper castle, bits of it nearly 600 years old, with its own well in case of siege, and cellars you can use as dungeons or wine stores, and four different endless spiral stairways so that not all of the rooms on every level actually connect. There is a room lost behind a sealed wall (there is also a window missing on the wall outside, and an extra chimney, so we know the room used to be there). Also, there are gunrooms and a billiard room and a smoking room, two libraries, innumerable retiring and drawing rooms, etc. At the moment most of these are under dustsheets because everyone is off doing War work including the staff.

When Maddie arrived, it looked deserted – blackout of course – but she staunchly rattled the iron ratchet at the main door and eventually a Very Grubby Glaswegian Evacuee with egg smeared from the left corner of his mouth right across to his left ear opened the door. He was carrying a candle in a tin candlestick.

‘Jack-be-nimble,’ Maddie said.

‘Me name’s Jock,’ retorted the evacuee.

‘Have I interrupted your tea?’

Jock responded in a garble of excited Glaswegian syllables. He might as well have spoken German for all Maddie understood.

He wanted to touch her gold wings. He had to point to them to get her to understand.

She let him.

‘Come alang through,’ he said firmly, beaming, as though she’d passed a test. He shut the massive oak and iron door behind them, and Maddie followed him into the labyrinth where I was born.

They emerged in the below-stairs kitchen – with four sinks and three ovens and burners enough to cater meals for 50 guests, and a deal table big enough to seat all the staff if there were any. Around this table were seven young lads – properly young, primary school age, Jock being the eldest at about 12 – all wearing hobnailed boots and short trousers (to save on cloth) and patched-over school pullovers in varying states of grottiness, all their faces smeared with egg, all consuming toast soldiers at an alarming rate. Standing at the great black Victorian stovetop, presiding over a bubbling iron cauldron, was the Honourable youngest son of the Laird of Craig Castle – looking every inch the modern Highland hero in a faded kilt of Hunting Stewart tartan, hand-knitted woollen kilt hose and a machine-knitted woollen RAF airman’s sweater. His boots exactly matched Maddie’s.

‘Three minutes, who’s up?’ he announced, upending an extraordinary ormolu-gilt hourglass and displaying a boiled egg with a pair of silver sugar tongs.

His maimed hands, two fingers and thumb remaining on each, were deft and quick. He sniffed the air. ‘Oi, Tam, you flip that toast before it burns!’ he barked, then turned and saw Maddie.

She wouldn’t have recognised him as Jamie – tonight he was the picture of rosy health, nothing like the grey-faced, grieving invalid she’d last seen slumping bandaged and unresponsive in a bath chair. But she’d never have doubted he was her best friend’s brother. Same sleek fair hair, same small, light build, same quick, bewitching features with a faint hint of lunacy behind the bright eyes.

He saluted her. The effect was incredible. All seven young lads (and Jock) joined him smartly, leaping to their feet and scraping back chairs.

‘Second Officer Brodatt of the Air Transport Auxiliary,’ he introduced her. The boys reeled off their names like a row of cadets: Hamish, Angus, Mungo, Rabbie, Tam, Wullie, Ross and Jock.

‘The Craig Castle Irregulars,’ Jamie said. ‘Would you like to join us in a boiled egg, Second Officer Brodatt?’

Maddie’s egg allocation amounted to one per week. She usually donated it to her gran for baking, or for the Sunday morning fry-up, and she often had to miss that anyway.

‘There’s hens all over the grounds,’ Hamish told her as she sat down with the boys. ‘We get to eat every egg we find.’

‘Keeps ’em busy too, lookin’ for ’em,’ said Jamie.

Maddie took the top of her egg off with her spoon. The hot, bright yolk was like a summer sun breaking through cloud, the first daffodil in the snow, a gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it.

‘You lads,’ she said slowly, looking around at the grubby faces, ‘have been evacuated to a magic castle.’

‘It’s true, miss,’ said Jock, forgetting she was an officer. He gabbled at her in Glaswegian.