Code Name Verity(97)

When I woke up they made me go with the chauffeur up to the villa. I felt like hell warmed over, stupid and faintly sick and absolutely famished, and I think I probably wouldn’t have cared if the old woman who lived there had turned me over to the police. ISN’T THAT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU KILL YOUR BEST FRIEND?

But no, the chauffeur took me into a dark and elegant oak-panelled hall and the woman came to meet me – she is one of those beautiful, porcelain-perfect people of the last century, with snow-white hair done up in exactly Julie’s chignon – I noticed that. She took my hand without saying a thing and led me upstairs into a bathroom the size of a ballroom, where there was a dead boiling bath drawn up and waiting, and she sort of pushed me into the room and left me there to get on with it.

I thought about putting Etienne’s pocket knife to use by slitting my wrists, but it seemed rather unfair on the frail, heroic woman whose house it was, and also – ALSO I WANT REVENGE, BLAST IT

So I had a bath. Which, I confess, was heavenly. Dried off in a huge fluffy towel obviously left for me, feeling sinful. And a bit unreal.

The old woman – I should say elderly, not old, she is a refined sort of person – she met me at the door when I came out. I was clean underneath, but my hillwalking trousers were caked with mud and my wet hair was standing on end and I felt shabby as a street urchin. Didn’t seem to matter – once more she took me by the hand, and this time led me to a small parlour where she had a fire going, and a kettle on the hob. She made me sit down on the frayed silk of her eighteenth-century settee while she made me a little supper, with bread and honey and coffee, and tiny yellow apples, and a boiled egg.

The tray went on a small, marble-topped side table and she knocked the top of the egg off for me with a pretty silver spoon as though I were a baby and needed feeding. Then she dipped the spoon into the egg and the yolk came up golden like the sun popping out of a cloud bank. It made me think instantly of eating supper with the Craig Castle Irregulars the first time I went there. Then I realised that Julie and I had never been there at the same time and now we never would, and I bent over and began to cry.

The old woman, who didn’t know who I was and whose life was in danger just because she had me in her house, sat down beside me on the old settee and stroked my hair with thin, wrinkled hands, and I sobbed hopelessly in her arms for nearly an hour.

After a while she got up and said, ‘I will make another egg for you, three minutes only – how the English like it. This one is cold now.’

She did another and she made me eat it while she ate the cold one herself.

When I left to go back to the stables she kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘We share a terrible burden, chérie. We are alike.’

I am not sure what she meant.

I kissed her cheeks too and said, ‘Merci, Madame. Merci mille fois.’

A thousand thanks is not really enough. But I haven’t anything else to give her.

—

Her gardens are full of roses – sprawling, old, tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering Damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. The old woman is the one the circuit is named for. Mitraillette says that before the war the woman was quite a noted horticulturalist and that the chauffeur/ groundskeeper is in fact a skilled gardener, and she has bred and named a few of the roses herself. I hadn’t noticed the roses when we arrived last night, or even walking up to the villa in daylight in a stupor, but I noticed them on my way back to the stables after my bath. The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful some day in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square. For no good reason they made me think of Paris and ever since then I have had that song stuck in my head yet again.

None of the rest of us was given a bath or a hot soft-boiled egg, though cold hard-boiled ones were passed around. I think I was sent up to the house as a diversion while they were getting rid of the lad I’d tried to murder that morning and the other chained man. Anyway I never saw them again. I don’t know how they got their leg irons off, or where they went, or if they are safe. I hope so. I really do.

Everybody else left in stages over the next two days. Mitraillette says it is actually safer to travel by day than at night if you are a fugitive, since daytime is when people are out and about and there isn’t any curfew – don’t think I’d realised that, since I am always trying to get on a plane that arrives after midnight at some distant airfield.