Code Name Verity

Maddie circled once over the field. She didn’t know how long the flare path would stay lit and didn’t want to waste the light. She began to descend in the oblong flight pattern she’d used earlier. Over her shoulder, through the opening in the bulkhead, her friend watched the faintly illuminated dial on the instrument panel that showed the altitude – they weren’t losing much height.

‘Can’t do it,’ Maddie gasped, and the Lysander floated rapidly upward like a helium balloon. She hadn’t even added power. ‘I just can’t do it! Remember what I told you about the first Lysander I ever landed, how the handwheel for adjusting the tailplane was broken, and the ground crew thought I wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the control column forward without trimming it? Only I was able to set it neutral before I got in. Well, it’s not neutral now, it’s stuck in the climb – for the last hour it’s taken every ounce of strength I have to stop us climbing – and I’m just not strong enough to hold it far enough forward that we can land. I keep dropping power and it doesn’t make any difference. If I turn the engine off and try to dump the dratted thing down in a dead stall I think it’ll still try to climb. And then it’ll fall into a spin and kill us. If I could stall it, that is. It’s impossible to stall a Lizzie.’

Queenie didn’t answer.

‘Going round,’ Maddie grunted. ‘Going to have another go anyway, try a shallower descent. Still have quite a lot of fuel, don’t really want to crash and go up in flames.’

They’d soared up to two and a half thousand feet in the time it took Maddie to explain all this. She flexed her wrists and wrestled the control column forward again. ‘Bother. Drat. Double drat.’ (‘Double drat’ is the most fearsome oath Maddie ever swears.)

She was getting tired. She didn’t manage to descend as far as she had the first time, and overshot the field. She turned back steeply, lost no height and swore again as the airframe shuddered, automatic flaps clattering alarmingly as the plane tried to decide what speed it was flying.

‘Perhaps not impossible to stall!’ Maddie gasped. ‘Jolly well don’t want to stall at five hundred feet or we’re dead. Let me think …’

Queenie let her think, watching the altimeter. They were gaining height again.

‘Climbing on purpose now,’ Maddie said grimly. ‘I’ll take you up to 3000 feet. Don’t want to go higher or I’ll never get back down. You’ll be able to jump safely.’

—

That horrid trio of guards has just come to fetch me somewhere – Engel chatting with them in annoyed tones just beyond my range of hearing, outside the door. They did not appear to be gloved, so perhaps they are not here to administer the phenol. Please God. Oh why am I so coarse and thoughtless. Whatever it is now, I dread not being able to finish almost more than I dre

I have fifteen minutes.

The battered French girl and I were taken together down through the cellars and out to a little stone courtyard that must once have been the hotel’s laundry. She proud & limping, her pretty bare feet hideous with open wounds and her white face swollen with bruising, ignoring me. We were tied to each other, wrist to wrist. In that small stone space open to the sky they have erected a guillotine. It is the usual way a woman spy is executed in Berlin.

We had to wait while they prepared this and that – threw open a gate to the lower lane to shock & entertain passers-by, hoisted the blade & ropes in place, etc. I don’t know how the mechanics of it work. It had been used recently, blood still on the blade. We stood tied together mutely, and I thought, They will make me watch. They will kill her first and make me watch. Then they will kill me.

I knew she knew it too, but of course she would not look at me or speak to me, though the backs of our hands were touching.

5 minutes.

I told her my name. She did not answer.

They cut the cords that tied us together. They pulled her forward and I did watch – I did not look away from her face. It was all I could do.

She called out to me just before they pushed her into position on her knees there.

‘My name is Marie.’

—

I cannot believe I am still alive; I have been brought back here to this same table and made to pick up the pencil again. Only it is von Linden who sits across the table from me now, not E. or T. He is watching me, as I requested him to do.

When I rub my eyes, my hands come away from my face with Marie’s blood still red and fresh on my knuckles.

I asked v.L. if I could write this down before I continue the day’s work. He said I indulge too much in the detail of what happens to me here – an interesting record, but not to the point. He’s allowed only 15 min. for this – he’s timing it.

I have 1 min. left. I wish I could have told more, done her justice, given her something more meaningful than my worthless name.

After my fiasco last night, I think they killed her for no reason other than to scare me into confessing that I have lied to them. It is my fault she is dead – one of my worst fears realised.

But I have not lied.

Von Linden says to me now: ‘Stop.’

—

He leans back, watching me coolly. The phenol is still sitting there where Engel left it, but I do not think they are going to use it. I told him to watch me and he is watching.

‘Write, little Scheherazade,’ he says. It is a command. ‘Tell of your last minutes in the air. Finish your tale.’

Marie’s blood stains my hands, figuratively and literally. I must finish now.

—

‘You tell me when to go,’ Queenie said. ‘Tell me when you’re ready.’

‘I will.’

The small hand on Maddie’s shoulder didn’t let go, all through the climb. Maddie glanced down at the flare path far below, three pinpoints of light beckoning, welcoming, calling – and she made up her mind to try to land. But not with a passenger, not with anyone else’s life in her hands – not with anyone she might fail.

‘All right,’ Maddie said. ‘You’ll be all right here. It’s a bit windy, so keep your eye on the lights and try to land on the flare path! They’re waiting for you. You know how to get out?’

Queenie squeezed Maddie’s shoulder.

‘Better do it quick,’ Maddie said. ‘Before the blooming plane goes any higher.’

‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ Queenie said.

Maddie gave a sobbed gasp of laughter. She bent her head to the cold hand on her shoulder and kissed it warmly. The small fingers brushed her cheek, gave her shoulder one last squeeze and retreated through the bulkhead.

Maddie heard the rear canopy slide open. She felt the faintest dip in the aircraft’s balance as the weight shifted. Then she flew alone.

Ormaie 28.XI.43 JB-S

You know Mary Queen o’ Scots (whose grandmother, incidentally, was French, like mine; as was her mother) – Mary Queen of Scots had a little dog, a Skye terrier, that was devoted to her. Moments after Mary was beheaded, the people who were watching saw her skirts moving about and they thought her headless body was trying to get itself to its feet. But the movement turned out to be her dog, which she had carried to the block with her, hidden in her skirts. Mary Stuart is supposed to have faced her execution with grace and courage (she wore a scarlet chemise to suggest she was being martyred), but I don’t think she could have been so brave if she had not secretly been holding tight to her Skye terrier, feeling his warm, silky fur against her trembling skin.

I have been allowed to use the past three days to re-read all I’ve written and check it over. It makes sense and it’s almost a good story.

Fräulein Engel will be disappointed though that it doesn’t have a proper ending. I am sorry. She’s seen the pictures too; there’s no point in making up something hopeful and defiant if I’m meant to be telling the truth. But be honest yourself, Anna Engel, wouldn’t you rather Maddie hit the ground running, as the Yanks say, and made it safely back to England? Because that would be the happy ending, the right ending for a jolly girls’ adventure story.

This pile of paper doesn’t stack together very well – pages and pages of different widths and lengths and thicknesses. I like the flute music that I had to write on at the end. I was careful with that. Of course I have had to use both sides and write over the music, but I wrote very lightly in pencil between the notes because someone may want to play it again some day. Not Esther Lévi, whose music it was, whose classically biblical Hebrew name is written neatly at the top of each sheet; I’m not stupid enough to think she’ll ever see this music again, whoever she is. But perhaps someone else. When the bombing stops.

When the tide turns. And it will.

One thing I have noticed, reading over this story, which not even Hauptsturmführer von Linden has noticed, is that I have not put my own name down on anything I have written in the past three weeks. You all know my name, but not, I think, my full name, so I am going to write it down in all its pretentious glory. I used to like to write my full name when I was small – as you will see, it was quite an accomplishment for a small person:

Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart

That is what it says on my real papers, which you have not got. My name is a bit of a defiance against the Führer all on its own, a much more heroic name than I deserve, and I still enjoy writing it out so I will write it again, the way I write it on my dance cards:

Lady Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart

But I don’t ever think of myself as Lady Julia. I think of myself as Julie.

I am not Scottie. I am not Eva. I am not Queenie. I have answered to all three, but I never introduce myself by those names. And how I have detested being ‘Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart’ these past seven weeks! That is what Hauptsturmführer von Linden usually calls me, so polite and formal – ‘Now, Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart, you’ve been very cooperative today, so if you have had enough to drink, let’s begin on the third set of codes. Please be accurate, Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart; no one wants to have to ram this red hot poker through your eyeball. Could someone please sluice out Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart’s soiled knickers before she is taken back to her room?’

So even though it is my name, I don’t think of myself as Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart either, any more than I am Scheherazade, the other name he’s given me.

I am Julie.

That is what my brothers call me, what Maddie called me always, and that is what I call myself. That is what I told Marie my name is.

Oh God – if I stop writing now they will take this paper away, all of it, the yellowed recipe cards and the prescription sheets and the embossed stationery from the Château de Bordeaux and the flute music, and I will be left with nothing but to wait for von Linden’s judgement. Mary Stuart had her Skye terrier – what comfort will I take with me to my execution? What comfort for any of us – Marie, Maddie, the cabbage-stealing scullion, flute girl, the Jewish doctor, alone at the guillotine or in the air or in the suffocating freight wagons?