Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(70)

‘Bad luck. There isn’t anything special about your transport!’

I wanted to kill her.

‘Micheline is special. Elodie is special,’ I hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Kiss your wool hose goodbye, you miserable Rabbit.’

We curled against each other in the dank, stinking underground in silence after that, trying to breathe and not kick anybody and waiting to be found and shot. I knew I had to stop crying and the only way to do it was to recite poetry to myself, moving my lips without speaking, clinging to words, to sense and beauty –

‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow

Bark of yellow birch and yellow

Twig of willow.’





Ró?a knew what I was doing, even in the silent dark. I felt her familiar thin arms wind round my waist and hold me tight.

I don’t know how she held out there for a week – I don’t know how any of them did. I think I was there for two days. You could hear the Screamer, muffled, telling us when the roll calls and meals and work details came. That was the only way to count the time passing. We ate stolen bread – no soup – and nothing hot, ever – we had to eat lying down.

‘Tell us something warm and sunny. Tell us a Lake Story,’ Ró?a whispered.

‘We are all wearing red bathing suits. But all different, with flowers on yours and stripes on mine. Big white polka dots on Karolina’s, like Minnie Mouse, and Irina’s is silver with red stars, like a Soviet aircraft. You are all staying in our summer cottage with me, and we are going to lie on the beach in the sun and drink Coca-Colas, in frosty green bottles right out of the ice box – one by one, boys will come and ask us to go for a canoe ride with them. And when we are each in a different canoe with a different boy, we will line up at the rental dock and have a race across the lake.’

‘Lisette too.’

‘Gosh, yes, Lisette too. There is a very handsome famous actor from the Summer Rep Theatre at the Chautauqua Playhouse who’s come to the lake for the afternoon and he spots Lisette right away. So we race the canoes and your team will win. And we’ll all be annoyed so we’ll gang up on you and tip your canoe. Then everybody will tip each other’s canoes and we’ll all fall in the water, and it’ll feel wonderful because we’ll be hot and sweaty from racing, and while we’re splashing around, there will be belted kingfishers scooting overhead and scolding each other –’

The only thing that makes this a fairy story is the idea that we could ever all be there together.

The Nick Stories were all these ridiculous rescue dramas, Hollywood hero antics that could never happen in a million years. But the Lake Stories – I didn’t even bother to pretend the staff at the refreshment stand would bring us our drinks in a Lake Story. We’d help ourselves and pay, just the way anyone would. Even the boys asking us for a canoe race really happened last summer – I mean the summer before last, 1943, on that wonderful weekend before Labor Day when I’d nearly finished at the boring old paper box factory and I spent the day at the lake with Polly and Fran.

And that is what makes it so unfair. It is such a simple fairy story.

Lisette dragged me and Ró?a out of the pit during breakfast on the third morning and helped us change into clothes I knew had been organised by Elodie – plain, respectable stuff – navy skirt and stockings, and incredibly good coats, with wool cuffs and collars and lining still attached, though the elbows were threadbare. Numbers stolen from dead women were attached to the right sleeves, and there was no evidence of yellow star patches on the fronts. Warsaw coats, not Auschwitz coats. Lisette’s hands were cold and her face was drained and grim. I knew something terrible had happened, something that had changed her world.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Irina came back to that roll call wearing your coat,’ Lisette said. ‘And Karolina fought her for it.’

‘They fought over my coat ?’ I repeated dumbly, astonished. They wouldn’t do that, either one of them.

Ró?a understood instantly. ‘They didn’t fight over your coat, you turnip head,’ she said coldly. ‘They fought over your number.’

Lisette looked away from me, her cold hands still helping me into the warmest clothes I’d worn for months and months.

‘Did Irina win?’ I whispered.

‘Karolina won.’

I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done – lie weeping in a hole in the ground while Karolina –

I can’t write it.

Karolina on the beach at the Lake in a red bathing suit, sunbathing under a blue sky.



‘Now pay attention, my dear,’ Lisette said, holding me fiercely by the shoulders. ‘You are going with Ró?a.’ I know that’s why Karolina did it – for Ró?a, not for me. Everyone Ró?a’s age was already gone, but she was so crippled she couldn’t go by herself. Karolina and Lisette were counting on me to get her out, to get her scrawny mutilated legs out where someone might see them – because Ró?a was a better piece of evidence than Karolina, who could walk to her death without limping.



‘You have one task only this morning and that is to keep anyone from noticing Ró?a’s legs. Hide her, hold her up – if she falls over, make it look like you have knocked her down. Irina is going to be on the same transport, so look for her and she will help you. There can be one of you on each side of Ró?a when you get to the other end, but you will be on your own until you find Irina.’