Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(96)

I’d never heard her talk about her mother either.

There weren’t any passenger seats in the plane – just benches along one side and plenty of room for cargo. Ró?a clutched my hand as we approached the plane. Dakotas are big.

‘Don’t worry!’ I told her. ‘It’s like getting in a bus. You’ve never flown in daylight, but it really is beautiful in the air. If you close your eyes while we’re taking off –’ I stopped abruptly, remembering Polly’s reaction to the same words.

‘I’m not a baby,’ Ró?a snapped, holding her head up, her china doll cheeks rosy with the brisk December wind. ‘I said I’d do it and I’m doing it with my eyes open. Are you going to close your eyes in Hamburg?’

‘You really are the world’s worst pain in the neck,’ I complained. But my heart ached for her bravery.

I hadn’t actually thought about our route when I’d set up the trip. I’d thought we’d see a lot of bomb-damaged cities – I’d seen so much bomb damage from the air. I’d wondered, briefly, when I first got the idea of taking Ró?a flying, if I could find someone who’d fly us over Ravensbrück. After I’d hung up talking to Chuck the night before, I’d had to go hide in the ladies’ powder room and sob for a while. Oh, Karolina.

But I hadn’t actually realised that this flight was going to give both me and Ró?a our first sight of the Alps.

The first part of the trip was mostly just snowy fields and forest, gleaming swathes of white and increasingly huge tracts of black-green pine. Then, as we made our way further south, the landscape grew rockier and steeper and we could see the crags of the Austrian Alps climbing ahead of us. They don’t pressurise the C-47s and they didn’t have oxygen hooked up in the back, so the highest we flew was about 10,000 feet. That meant that there were moments when we were flying between mountain peaks. Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain, was blinding in the midwinter’s day sunlight, glittering white and gold and rising 2,000 feet higher than we were flying. It was like flying over another planet – over another world, Oz or Wonderland or the moon.

Honestly – there were moments, many of them, when we were between peaks, with snowbound crags and rock all around us, when Ró?a really was so enchanted that she forgot to be scared. We were surrounded, as far as we could see, by our world’s sheer unspoiled majesty. It was unspeakably, indescribably beautiful. It wasn’t even barren. We could see glimpses of valleys and farms; there far below a touch of green where it hadn’t snowed yet; there a river; there a fairy-tale village.

We were both pressed to the windows on opposite sides of the empty cargo plane.

‘Did you know?’ Ró?a gasped. ‘Did you know it would look like this?’

‘I didn’t even think about it! We just got lucky!’

‘Even without the beach it is worth it. I won’t mind so much getting work sewing on laundry tags if I remind myself about this.’

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that driblet of self-pity.

I asked cautiously, ‘Ró?a, what are you doing for Christmas?’

‘There’s a party at the Institute. It was fun last year – Poles and Swedes all mixed up. I don’t know how much fun it’ll be this year though, since the funding is finished and nobody has work in 1947.’

‘Do you actually have a real possibility of spending the next few years sewing on laundry tags?’

‘No. I haven’t looked for that job yet.’

‘For the love of Pete.’

No wonder she seemed so beaten.

‘What are you doing for Christmas, Rose?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to Pennsylvania?’

‘How could I? It takes a week. I’d be on the boat on Christmas Day!’

Ró?a gave one of her raucous hoots of laughter. ‘Fly. Did you go last year?’

‘No, I had an awful Christmas with my Aunt Edie and Uncle Roger in England. I did nothing but cry all Christmas Day. It was worse than the year before. All of you were gone. And the next day, the 26th, they have this big annual party and there were about a hundred people in the house and I just felt like a freak. So this year –’

Throughout this entire conversation we’d had our backs turned to each other, standing on opposite sides of the bowels of the plane, glued to the small windows. There was frost on the rivets and the grey ribs of the plane’s interior walls. But outside it was fairyland.

I said, ‘Ró?a, come back to Scotland with me on Monday. I’m going to stay with my friend Maddie for a week with her husband’s family. Maddie told me to bring my friends. I know I promised you the Hotel Hershey, but I swear that Craig Castle will be just as nice.’

‘Oh, how could I!’

‘Easy! The place is always full of orphans and soldiers with missing arms – they won’t notice you. I mean –’

She giggled evilly. ‘The soldiers will, I bet.’

‘Yes, they definitely will, but I meant that one more –’

‘– One more crippled orphan.’

‘Oh, STOP. You know what I mean.’ I drew a shaking breath. ‘And anyway, we are in the same family. That won’t change.’

Ahead of us, the mountains dropped away and the black-green forest gave way to duller and brighter green ahead. The Italian fields were tiny and patchwork – you could tell you were in another country. Far, far away on the horizon was an astonishing stripe of sapphire that we knew, but couldn’t quite believe, must be the Adriatic Sea.