Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity, #1)

by Elizabeth Wein

I AM A COWARD. I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. I have always been good at pretending.

The warmth and dignity of my flannel skirt and woolly sweater are worth far more to me now than patriotism or integrity.

I’m just damned. I am utterly and completely damned. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do, because that’s what you do to enemy agents.

You really think I know a damned thing about where the Allies are planning to launch their invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe? I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.

Of course that was in 1938 and they have all been bombed to bits since, so perhaps Beryl and her kiddies are dead already, in which case my tears of envy are very selfish.

They pushed the bike over. It took Maddie down with it. Because bullying is what idiot Fascists like best.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

It is so easy to wind Miss Engel up. She always wins, but only because my ankles are tied to my chair.

Queenie, Maddie knew, was given to fits of madness such as stealing malt whisky from the RAF officers’ mess, and Maddie was sure that anyone bold enough to impersonate an enemy radio operator on the spur of the moment was entirely capable of mocking someone who burst into tears every time she heard a gun fired. On a military airfield. In a war.

I just want to thump my old self in the face when I think about her, so earnest and self-righteous and flamboyantly heroic. I am sure other people did too. I am someone else now.

“‘Kiss me, Hardy!’ Weren’t those Nelson’s last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don’t cry. We’re still alive and we make a sensational team.”

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.

A battle of wit, and a test, too. But he was playing God. I noticed, I knew it, and I didn’t care. It was such a thrill to be one of the archangels, the avengers, the chosen few.

I am lost. I have lost the thread. I was indulging myself in details as if they were wool blankets or alcohol, escaping wholly back into the fire-and-water-filled early days of our friendship. We made a sensational team.

The horror and humiliation weren’t in that you were stripped to your underthings and being slowly taken to pieces, but in that nobody seemed to give a damn.

I am sure that part of the reason I am treated as such a dangerous lunatic, apart from biting that policeman when I was arrested, is because I am always so foul-mouthed and foul-tempered.

Von Linden really should know me well enough by now to realize that I am not going to face my execution without a fight. Or with anything remotely resembling dignity.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

(I don’t believe it for a minute—that we wouldn’t have become friends somehow—that an unexploded bomb wouldn’t have gone off and blown us both into the same crater, or that God himself wouldn’t have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn’t have been likely.)

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.

The hair was a small mistake. They took the nerves of steel into account, but not the small mistake. They didn’t notice that he’d hurt me and they didn’t notice that I do make fatal small mistakes from time to time. But Maddie noticed both.

Perhaps a few weeks on the Continent, where she could put her sangfroid and multiple languages and wireless operator’s skills to much-needed use in Nazi-occupied France. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending.

He knows now. Nacht und Nebel, night and fog. Eva Seiler is going to fry in hell.

At any rate I didn’t miss a beat—this is how I operate. This is what I am so good at. Give me a hint, just one hint, and I will fake it. It’s the thin end of the wedge for you, me laddie.

Think of her three years ago, a weeping jelly of fear under fire. Think of her now, guiding a wounded aircraft through the unfamiliar fire and darkness of a war zone. Her best friend, untangling herself in the back of the plane, shivered with dread and love. She knew that Maddie would land her safely or die trying.

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? And why?

But I have told the truth. Isn’t that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.

“Patriotism is not enough—I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”

These were my first words on French soil: “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!”

There is only one reason I did not go down in flames over Angers, and that is because I knew I had Julie in the back. Would never have had the presence of mind to put that fire out if I hadn’t been trying to save her life.

I wish I had the words to describe the rich mixture of fear and boredom that I have lived with for the past 10 days, and which putters on indefinitely ahead of me.

I understand now why her mother plays Mrs. Darling and leaves the windows open in her children’s bedrooms when they’re away. As long as you can pretend they might come back, there’s hope.

I’m afraid I will be caught. I’m afraid Julie is dead. But of all the things I’m afraid of, there’s nothing that frightens me so much as the likelihood—the near certainty—that Julie is a prisoner of the Ormaie Gestapo.

I handed both photos back—the one that will break Julie and the one that could save her. “Give them these.”

I hate him. I know he is the organizer, the keystone of this Resistance circuit. I know my life depends on him. I know I can trust him to get me out of here. But I still hate him.

“I know what they’ll say. Silly girl, no brains, too soft, can’t trust a woman to do a man’s work. They only let us fly operational aircraft when they get desperate. And they’re always harder on us when we botch something.”

If Julie is not already dead—if she is not already dead she is counting on me. She is calling me, whispering my name to herself in the dark.

I don’t recognize my emotions anymore. There’s no such thing as plain joy or grief. It’s horror and relief and panic and gratitude all jumbled together.

I hate myself for ever having thought any of it was worth envying. Now all I can think of is where she is and how much I love her. And I start to cry again.

Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

Godless as I am, I pray she’s got away with it. It’s like ripples in a pond, isn’t it? It doesn’t stop in one place.

Her face—Julie’s face—her face suddenly lit up like a sunrise. Joy and relief and hope all there at once, and she was instantly lovely again, herself, beautiful. She heard me.

I bent over with my head on my knees, my heart in pieces. It is still in pieces. I think it will be in pieces forever.

Don’t know how I kept going. You just do. You have to, so you do.

I am dangerous too, sometimes. That morning I was an antipersonnel mine, a butterfly bomb, unexploded and ticking, and he touched the fuse.

It made me think instantly of eating supper with the Craig Castle Irregulars the first time I went there. Then I realized that Julie and I had never been there at the same time and now we never would, and I bent over and began to cry.

What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true—Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us.

With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here.

“I KNOW,” I whispered. She glanced over at me curiously, frowning, sweeping my face with her sharp, pale eyes. “Do you so?” “She was my best friend,” I said through my teeth.