Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(18)

Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before – words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

If this message ever reaches you – I know you have family in England and plenty of loving friends and family back home in America – but my mother-in-law, Esmé Beaufort-Stuart, says that you have got a home from home with her as well and please to contact her without hesitation. It is a better address to leave than mine – at the moment I am still being sent all over everywhere with work, and I don’t know where I’ll be by the time this ever catches up with you. Esmé’s address, you probably know, is Craig Castle, Castle Craig, Aberdeenshire. That is pretty much also her telephone number, which I don’t actually know – I just ask the operator for Craig Castle when I ring them.

Esmé has always been generous about giving a home to waifs and strays and other exiles. There is a band of tinkers who stop on their riverbank every year for a month – Julie and Jamie were so familiar with them as children that they picked up their strange dialect! And then there are the evacuee lads from Glasgow, whom you’ve met – Esmé has actually adopted two of them now, though the others have gone home. She has also got a dozen wounded airmen convalescing there. For Esmé, I think, the war effort will continue for a while after the war has officially ended.

And, of course, there is me. I am one of her waifs and strays too. She would do anything for me, I think, so on my behalf and by her own invitation, you must consider Craig Castle one of your homes from home. Bring your friends.

That’s given me hope – a vision of you and a lot of other Rose-like people drinking coffee and singing songs from Girl Guide camp, while Esmé plays the piano, in the morning sunlight of the Little Drawing Room at Craig Castle.

Your fellow pilot and loving friend,

Maddie





PS Fliss and I had to go through your things like we did with Celia’s, and I kept your fuse – I wanted to keep something of yours. I don’t suppose you’ll ever want it back, but it seemed a bit horrible to return it to your Aunt Edie.

Oh, Rose – What happened to you?





Part 2


Ravensbrück


Rose Moyer Justice



Handwriting Sample, April 17, 1945

Paris, France



When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They told me to stop after I listed the ‘unalienable Rights’. By then I had written enough for them to tell it really was my handwriting, and I was crying so hard I could barely see the page. Life. Liberty. Happiness. Unalienable rights.

I can write again. Oh God! I can write again. All those months of not being able to write! Of not being allowed to write. More than six months of hiding pencil stubs in the hem of my dress, hiding chips of charcoal in my cheek, hiding torn shreds of newsprint in my shoes. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught with any of it. And SO MUCH that I wanted to write. It seems like I have been a prisoner for so long.

I can write!

It feels dangerous – like stealing a plane. But it is my unalienable Right. And this is my own notebook, which they gave back to me in the American Embassy this morning, along with an enormous pile of cash from Uncle Roger and a temporary passport. The passport is made out in the name of Rose Moyer Justice; date of birth, 22 October 1925; place of issue, Paris; date of issue, 17 April 1945, today. I mean yesterday. And a photograph that Aunt Edie had sent them, a wallet-sized copy of my portrait in ATA uniform from last spring.

I have changed so drastically since then that no one at the Embassy could tell this photograph was really me. That’s why they made me write out the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence – so they could compare it to my handwriting in the rest of this notebook. My handwriting has not changed. My signature matches too. Mother had sent them my Pennsylvania driver’s licence as a sample.

That has convinced even me that I am still Rose – my handwriting has not changed. It is the only physical thing about me that looks exactly the same. I can still write.

In fact it is the only thing I can do. I can’t even sleep. The Embassy people checked me in here at the Paris Ritz and left me in this gigantic room Aunt Edie has reserved for me, but I sat on the floor for three hours because I didn’t dare to touch any of the beautiful furniture. Then I got up and spent another hour pacing, checking the Place Vend?me every time a car or truck went by just in case it was Bob Ernst coming back. But now it is nearly three in the morning and nothing is going by any more. My brain won’t let me go to sleep – my internal clock is tensed for the 4 a.m. siren. I tried to get dressed again, but I can’t bear to put those dead women’s clothes back on, not if I have to go naked for the rest of my life. It’s not that cold here. Anyway, I’m used to being cold. And also used to being wide awake when all I want to do is collapse.