Code Name Verity (15 page)

Maddie's heart soared at the idea of helping Jamie make tea for eight Glaswegian evacuees.

‘Can I walk there?'

‘Aye, half a mile along the main road to the gate, then a mile down the drive.'

Maddie thanked him, and he raised his cap to her.

‘How'd you know me for a friend of Jamie's?' she asked.

‘Yer boots,' the station master said. ‘All you RAF lads wear the same boots. Never seen young Jamie take his off. Wish I had a pair.'

Maddie walked through the windy dark to Craig Castle, bubbling over with giddy laughter and relief and anticipation.

I'm an RAF lad!
she thought, and laughed aloud in the dark.

Craig Castle is a small castle – I mean, compared to Edinburgh or Stirling Castles, or Balmoral where the King lives in the summer, or Glamis where the Queen's family lives. But it is a proper castle, bits of it nearly 600 years old, with its own well in case of siege, and cellars you can use as dungeons or wine stores, and four different endless spiral stairways so that not all of the rooms on every level actually connect. There is a room lost behind a sealed wall (there is also a window missing on the wall outside, and an extra chimney, so we know the room used to be there). Also, there are gunrooms and a billiard room and a smoking room, two libraries, innumerable retiring and drawing rooms, etc. At the moment most of these are under dustsheets because everyone is off doing War work including the staff.

When Maddie arrived, it looked deserted – blackout of course – but she staunchly rattled the iron ratchet at the main door and eventually a Very Grubby Glaswegian Evacuee with egg smeared from the left corner of his mouth right across to his left ear opened the door. He was carrying a candle in a tin candlestick.

‘Jack-be-nimble,' Maddie said.

‘Me name's
Jock
,' retorted the evacuee.

‘Have I interrupted your tea?'

Jock responded in a garble of excited Glaswegian syllables. He might as well have spoken German for all Maddie understood.

He wanted to touch her gold wings. He had to point to them to get her to understand.

She let him.

‘Come alang through,' he said firmly, beaming, as though she'd passed a test. He shut the massive oak and iron door behind them, and Maddie followed him into the labyrinth where I was born.

They emerged in the below-stairs kitchen – with four sinks and three ovens and burners enough to cater meals for 50 guests, and a deal table big enough to seat all the staff if there were any. Around this table were seven young lads – properly young, primary school age, Jock being the eldest at about 12 – all wearing hobnailed boots and short trousers (to save on cloth) and patched-over school pullovers in varying states of grottiness, all their faces smeared with egg, all consuming toast soldiers at an alarming rate. Standing at the great black Victorian stovetop, presiding over a bubbling iron cauldron, was the Honourable youngest son of the Laird of Craig Castle – looking every inch the modern Highland hero in a faded kilt of Hunting Stewart tartan, hand-knitted woollen kilt hose and a machine-knitted woollen RAF airman's sweater. His boots exactly matched Maddie's.

‘Three minutes, who's up?' he announced, upending an extraordinary ormolu-gilt hourglass and displaying a boiled egg with a pair of silver sugar tongs.

His maimed hands, two fingers and thumb remaining on each, were deft and quick. He sniffed the air. ‘Oi, Tam, you flip that toast before it burns!' he barked, then turned and saw Maddie.

She wouldn't have recognised him as Jamie – tonight he was the picture of rosy health, nothing like the grey-faced, grieving invalid she'd last seen slumping bandaged and unresponsive in a bath chair. But she'd never have doubted he was her best friend's brother. Same sleek fair hair, same small, light build, same quick, bewitching features with a faint hint of lunacy behind the bright eyes.

He saluted her. The effect was incredible. All seven young lads (and Jock) joined him smartly, leaping to their feet and scraping back chairs.

‘Second Officer Brodatt of the Air Transport Auxiliary,' he introduced her. The boys reeled off their names like a row of cadets: Hamish, Angus, Mungo, Rabbie, Tam, Wullie, Ross and Jock.

‘The Craig Castle Irregulars,' Jamie said. ‘Would you like to join us in a boiled egg, Second Officer Brodatt?'

Maddie's egg allocation amounted to one per week. She usually donated it to her gran for baking, or for the Sunday morning fry-up, and she often had to miss that anyway.

‘There's hens all over the grounds,' Hamish told her as she sat down with the boys. ‘We get to eat every egg we find.'

‘Keeps 'em busy too, lookin' for 'em,' said Jamie.

Maddie took the top of her egg off with her spoon. The hot, bright yolk was like a summer sun breaking through cloud, the first daffodil in the snow, a gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it.

‘You lads,' she said slowly, looking around at the grubby faces, ‘have been evacuated to a magic castle.'

‘It's true, miss,' said Jock, forgetting she was an officer. He gabbled at her in Glaswegian.

‘Speak
slowly
,' Jamie commanded.

Jock spoke loudly instead. Maddie got the gist of it. ‘There's a ghost that sits at the top of the tower stairs. You go all cold if you walk through him by accident.'

‘I've
seen
him,' said Angus proudly.

‘Aw, ye hav'nae,' mocked Wullie with deep scorn. ‘An' ye sleep wi' a teddy, ae. There's nae ghostie.'

They broke into an incomprehensible argument about the ghost. Jamie sat down across from Maddie and they beamed at each other.

‘I feel dead outnumbered,' Maddie said.

‘Me too,' Jamie agreed.

—

He was more or less living in the kitchen and the smaller of the two libraries. The Craig Castle Irregulars mostly lived outside. They slept three to a bed in our ancestral four posters. The laddies were happy to crowd in together as that's what they were used to at home, and it saved on sheets, leaving Ross and Jock to share on their own (Ross being Jock's wee brother). Jamie had them all wash up and brush their teeth military-style (or school-style) at the four kitchen sinks, 2 boys per sink, very efficient. Then he literally marched them all up to bed, installed Maddie in his fox's den of a library on the way, and came back to her 20 minutes later carrying a steaming silver coffee pot.

‘It's real coffee,' he said. ‘From Jamaica. Mother hoards it for special occasions, but it's starting to lose its flavour now.' He sank into one of the cracked leather armchairs in front of the fire grate with a sigh. ‘How did you ever get here, Maddie Brodatt?'

‘Second to the right, and then straight on till morning,' she answered promptly – it did feel like Neverland.

‘Crikey, am I so obviously Peter Pan?'

Maddie laughed. ‘The Lost Boys give it away.'

Jamie studied his hands. ‘Mother keeps the windows open in all our bedrooms while we're gone, like Mrs Darling, just in case we come flying home when she's not expecting us.' He poured Maddie a cup of coffee. ‘My window's closed just now. I'm not flying at the minute.'

He spoke without bitterness.

Maddie asked a question she'd wanted to ask him when she'd first met him, only she hadn't had the courage.

‘How did you ever manage to save your hands?'

‘Popped my fingers in my mouth,' Jamie answered readily. ‘I swapped hands over every thirty seconds or so. Couldn't fit any more than three fingers at a time and thought I'd better concentrate on the ones I'd miss the most. My big brothers and little sister have all started to call me The Pobble Who Has No Toes, which is a very silly poem by Edward Lear.' He sipped his own coffee. ‘Having something to concentrate on probably saved more than just my hands. My navigator, who came down with me, just gave up, only about an hour after we'd been in the water. Just let go. Didn't want to think about it.'

‘You going back?'

He hesitated a little, but when he spoke it was with determination, as though he had a puzzle to solve. ‘My doctor says they might not want me in a bomber crew. But – you've got a chap with one arm flying in the ATA, don't you? I thought they might take me. Ancient and Tattered Airmen, isn't that what they call you?'

‘Not me,' Maddie said. ‘I'm one of the Always Terrified Airwomen.'

Jamie laughed. ‘You, terrified! My eye.'

‘I don't like guns,' Maddie said. ‘Someday I'll be fired on in the air, and I'll go down in flames just because I'm too blooming scared to fly the plane.'

Jamie didn't laugh.

‘Must be awful,' Maddie said quietly. ‘Have you flown at all – since?'

He shook his head. ‘I can though.'

From what she'd seen of him that night, she thought he probably could.

‘How many hours have you got?'

‘Hundreds,' he said. ‘Over half of them at night. Mostly on Blenheims – that's what I was flying all the time I was operational.'

‘What did you train on?' Maddie asked.

‘Ansons. Lysanders at first.'

He was watching her intently over his coffee, as though she were conducting an interview and he were waiting to hear if he'd got the job. Of course it was none of her business, and she had no authority. But she'd landed Lysanders herself too many times at that odd RAF Special Duties airfield, you see, even spent a night in the Moon Squadron's private ivy-covered cottage hidden in a small wood at the edge of the normal airfield (there hadn't been any other place to put her and she'd been very carefully segregated from the other visitors). She had some idea of the difficulties that peculiar squadron had in finding and keeping pilots. Hundreds of hours' night flying required, and fluent French, and though they could only take volunteers, they were such a secret operation that they weren't allowed to actively recruit anyone.

Maddie has a rule about passing on favours which she calls the ‘Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle'. It is very simple. If someone needs to get to an airfield and you can get them there, by taxi Anson or motorbike or pony trap or pig-aback, you should always take them. Because someday you will need a ride to an airfield too. Someone different will have to take you, so the favour gets passed on instead of paid back.

Now, talking to Jamie, Maddie thought of all the little things Dympna Wythenshawe had done or said on Maddie's behalf, things which had cost Dympna nothing, but which had changed Maddie's life. Maddie knew she could never repay Dympna; but now, according to the Aerodrome Drop-Off Principle, Maddie had a chance to pass the life-changing favours on.

‘You should ask your C.O. about Special Duties flying,' Maddie said to Jamie. ‘I think you'd have a good chance of getting in with them.'

‘Special Duties?' Jamie echoed, just as Maddie had echoed Theo Lyons a few months back.

‘They fly dead hush-hush missions,' Maddie said. ‘Short-field operations, night landings. Lysanders and sometimes Hudsons. It's not a big squadron. Volunteer for RAF Special Duties, and if you need a reference ask to talk to –'

The name she gave Jamie was the alias of the intelligence officer who recruited me.

It was probably the most daring thing she'd ever done. Maddie could only guess at what he was. But she'd remembered his name – or rather, the name he'd used when he bought her a whisky in The Green Man – and she'd seen him
more than once
on the secret airfield (and he thought he was so clever too). Plenty of odd civilians came and went from that airfield, but Maddie didn't see many of them, and when she recognised the one she
did
see, it stuck in her head as a most peculiar coincidence.

(Bloody Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer playing God.)

Jamie repeated the name aloud to fix it in his head, and leaned forward to peer at Maddie more closely in the firelight from the library grate.

‘Where the devil have you come by
that
sort of information?'

‘“Careless talk costs lives,”' Maddie answered sternly, and The Pobble Who Has No Toes laughed because it sounded so like his little sister. I mean his younger sister. (I mean me.)

How I would love to stay in the library at Craig Castle with them all night. Later Maddie slept in my bed (Mother always keeps our beds made up, just in case). It was cold with the window open but, like Mother and Mrs Darling, Maddie left the window as she found it, also just in case. I wish I could indulge in writing about my bedroom, but I must stop early today so von Linden can prep me for this radio interview tomorrow. Anyway my bedroom at home in Craig Castle, Castle Craig, has nothing to do with the War.

This bloody radio interview. All lies, lies and damned lies.

Ormaie 20.XI.43 JB-S

I'm supposed to use this time to make my own notes on the radio interview yesterday – as a kind of backstop in case the actual broadcast doesn't match up with what v.L. remembers of it. I would have written about it anyway, but BUCKETS OF BLOOD, WHEN DO I GET TO FINISH MY GREAT DISSERTATION OF TREASON?

They really made an effort to make me presentable, as though I were a débutante to be presented to the King of England all over again. It was decided (not by me) that my beloved pullover makes me look too thin and pale, and is also getting a wee bit ragged, so they washed and pressed my blouse and temporarily gave me back my grey silk scarf. I was flabbergasted to find they still had it – I suppose it must be part of my file and they are still hunting for unrevealed code in the paisley.

They let me put my hair up, but made a lot of fuss over how to fix it because no one trusts me with hairpins. In the end I was allowed to use PENCIL STUBS. MY GOD they are petty. I was also allowed to do it myself because A) Engel could not make it stay, B) she could not hide the pencils as well as I did. And even after soaking my fingertips in kerosene for an hour (who suspected kerosene has so many uses?) they have failed to get rid of the ink stains beneath my fingernails. But that just adds credibility to the stenographer story, I think. Also, because afterwards my hands positively reeked of kerosene, I was then allowed to scrub myself all over with a lovely creamy little bar of curious American soap which
floated
in the basin when you let go of it. Where in the world did
that
come from? (Apart from the obvious, ‘America'.) It looked like hotel soap, but the wrapper was in English and it couldn't have been from this hotel.