Code Name Verity(62)
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!’
Elizabeth Wein's Books
- Archenemies (Renegades #2)
- A Ladder to the Sky
- Girls of Paper and Fire (Girls of Paper and Fire #1)
- Daughters of the Lake
- Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker
- House of Darken (Secret Keepers #1)
- Our Kind of Cruelty
- Princess: A Private Novel
- Shattered Mirror (Eve Duncan #23)
- The Hellfire Club