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It would be easier, she thinks, to just start over. Move to the continent, or Wales, and be someone else. Like Julie was Eva Seiler, Maddie could be - well, Maddie couldn’t be anyone but Maddie. She remembers the horror and stress of being Kathe, how hard it was, how she felt she didn’t know up from down. And Maddie cries (blubbers) for Julie, who for so many weeks wasn’t Julie, but Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart, or Queenie, or Scottie, or the English traitor.
Julie managed to hold on to herself, even when she was someone else.
It’s how Maddie knew what to do. It’s why Maddie made her gun kiss her, quick.
*
Later Maddie wonders how she knew that was her only choice, that Julie would never come back. Was it the look in Julie’s eyes? Was it the stress of the gunfire, of the unknown? The thought of some German monster deciding when and where without giving thought to who Julie was?
When she went to visit the wounded and recovering in the hospitals, something she didn’t do often, she heard them talk about killing. And she thought about Isolde von Linden, safe in Switzerland, and how her father was probably someone else all the time, like Julie. Maddie hopes Isolde knows what type of her person her father was, but she doesn’t know if that is Julie’s version, Maddie’s version, or Isolde’s version.
Somewhere, between all these names and truths and lies, there are people who lived and breathed and dreamt and died.
And somehow, Maddie is just Maddie, as always.
*
Julie, writing feverishly at the end, Julie with her leaky pens and small nubs of pencil, writing until they made her stop, “I have told the truth I have told the truth I have told the truth” and she had, she told it all, but she also told the truth they wanted to hear.
Maddie can’t bear to have the writings with her. It was enough to have them in France, in Ormaie, in the hay loft with her pistol. The music sheets, the recipe cards, they are all too much for her now, a jumbled history of herself mixed with the lies that kept Julie alive. Those papers are what remain of Julie now, clever, brilliant Julie. Her final story, her last gasps of air. Julie’s tears stain some of the pages and Maddie’s always been prone to blubbering. Somehow this is Julie’s, and Julie’s alone, even if it is their story. These tightly written words don’t belong to Maddie, or the Revolution, or anyone, Maddie thinks, except perhaps Mrs. Darling.
They weigh on her, crush against her chest, and when she presses them into Jamie’s hands, she wonders if their weight will bring the plane down.
She flies the plane anyway.
*
Of course, Julie’s writings aren’t the whole story. Maddie finds herself wondering why Julie chose the ones she did, if it was purely strategic, or if somehow those stories brought her comfort. Not stories, memories. What she and Julie had was real, that is the truth.
Maddie remembers another one:
There was always too much to do during war, and the WAAF was no exception. As such, the women were part of the Land Army effort. There were plots of lands around the airfield devoted to agricultural endeavors. Maddie tried, she really did. Potatoes were hard to kill, she heard, so she planted some of those, and then some English beans. Tomatoes seemed far too complicated.
After a session in the dirt, digging and wondering why nothing was sprouting, Julie, acting every bit Queenie then, not a hair out of place, her carefully tended nails clean and painted, bustled up to her. Maddie couldn’t help it.
“How come you never have dirt under your nails? How do you do it? I always look like a piece of rubbish the Jerry bastard had his way with, and you – I’ve seen your plot! You have tomatoes!”
Maddie is half crying, half laughing.
Julie links her arm through Maddie’s, so they are hooked together at the elbow. “Don’t tell anyone,” she mock whispered, “But I give the cook my cigarettes in exchange for her working my little plot of pain. As if the war will be won for want of a single tomato!”
Then Julie frowns. “A tomato is much less valuable than a horse, is it not? Besides, I doubt Hitler would care about our tomato situation. I just had a flashback to Richard III – at the time, I thought him the finest villain Shakespeare had ever created, but now I wonder if that bard wasn’t a bit naïve –“
Maddie’s laughing.
“Besides,” Julie said in a low voice, “the secret to plants is talking to them. I talk to my plants in French all the time. Helps me keep my skills up. I don’t suppose you can sing, can you? Play an instrument? I wonder how peas would respond to Bach . . .”
And they are in the mess hall and it doesn’t matter that Julie is related to royalty and Maddie’s grandfather is an immigrant.
Tomatoes and potatoes in the midst of a war feed everyone just the same, and there is more to friendship than things in common.
Soon there wouldn’t be time for them to tend to gardens. Maddie loves the blooms on tomato plants, just the same, even years later.
*
When Maddie first returns to England, she tries to fly again right away. After the fear of court martial passes (it never quite passes), she waits for more chits to appear. The ATA is short staffed, more planes are being shot every day. There is no lack of work for a pilot, even a female one.
In the air she doesn’t think of Julie; or, rather, she remembers fearless Julie’s upset stomach and the way her small hand clutched Maddie’s shoulder on that flight to France. But maybe because the air is lighter, Maddie feels like she can breathe. Maddie defies the laws of gravity that say she should have two feet firmly planted on the ground. She doesn’t know if she is more herself in the air, or only herself inside the cockpit, but she doesn’t think on it much.
It is easier to just fly the plane.
*
Was Julie’s life a sacrifice? If so, what for? To destroy one Nazi headquarters when there were so many? Why Ormaie? Why Julie? Why why why?
The questions are enough to drive one mad. Instead, Maddie flies. She sleeps in her planes, in Jamie’s boots, and leaves as soon as her assignment is over. She is careful not to make ties. The sounds of guns no longer terrifies her.
She stops blubbering, at least during the day. In her dreams, she has no control, and she sees Julie in her sweater, lying on the bridge. She dreams about being in a garden of roses. Maddie picks the flowers, one by one, until her hands are full with the blooms, and her palms and arms are streaming with blood from the thorns. When she notices the blood, she wakes up.
*
But she does answer a telegram. Jock, it seems, keeps asking for her. As much as the thought of visiting Craig Castle makes Maddie’s stomach drop, she straightens her shoulders and takes the train, straight on til morning.
Only later will Maddie come to resent Peter and his ability to stay frozen in time.
*
Only later will she realize the selfishness of the whole story. Only later will she find herself angry at Julie, angry that for all her brilliance she was caught right away and for such a STUPID reason - looking the wrong way!
Maddie did her job. She got Julie to Ormaie in one piece. She landed the plane, she didn’t get caught. But Julie, caught up in all her spy stuff, forgot. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been to France before! Was she overconfident? Was she nervous? Were Julie’s famous nerves of steel rattled like they had been that night with the German officer, when she was Eva Seiler? Why hadn’t Maddie asked?
Jamie later tells her he went through the same thing. That he was angry at his sister, so angry he punched walls, but then he decided he’d better not do anything to damage his remaining fingers. So he cried, and that, he said, was that.
His handwriting is so different from Julie’s ornate royal cursive. He crams his letters together, so one word takes up the least amount of space, as if space is something that is limited, rationed like sugar.
*
Julie is not dead in lab somewhere. She is buried in her grandmother’s garden, though Maddie is not sure if the woman knows who exactly Julie is yet. Julie was not a specimen for the Nazi war effort. She died by Maddie’s hand, but she asked. She survived imprisonment. She survived the Gestapo headquarters. She finished her mission. She was not part of nacht und nebel, nuit et brouillard.
She is dead all the same.
Is it the same?
*
This time, Maddie stays in the small library. She refuses to venture upstairs, refuses to trace the path she had taken before, that Julie had tread a thousand times over. Mrs. Darling (so hard to think of her as anything else) was out for the week end with some of the boys to get them new shoes for school, and so the house was quieter than she remembered.
She doesn’t hear the Castle Craig Irregulars, so she pushes open the door the library. The shelves are stuffed with books, there’s no other way to describe it. These people, these Wallace Beaufort-Stuart Darlings, they loved words. They believed they had some power, some purpose. Maddie feels her face turning red and instructs herself not to blubber. She bites the inside of her cheek until the urge passes.
Running her hand along the spines, she notices that there is no seeming apparent organization - Issac Newton next to Oscar Wilde, thick volumes of history shoved between serials of Dickens. Maddie’s hand comes to rest on a slender volume that she pulls, rather roughly, out of the dust and neighboring books which don’t seem to want to give up its company. She stays standing, because after all, she is a guest, even if unannounced, and she does have some manners.
It turns out to be a book of poetry, by the American poetess, Emily Dickinson. Maddie has never been one for poetry, though the short pages comfort her. She flips through rather quickly, until her eye alights on something familiar.
A poem about truth. Verity – vérité in French, meaning truth. Julie, scribbling under the watchful eye of Etienne Thibaut and Anna Engel, writing the truth. Maddie takes a breath.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
Maddie sits down. She sits right on the cold castle floor and wonders if this is a message from Julie. She’s never been good with poetry (nuts and bolts are more straightforward) but she thinks she understands this one.
And if so, in a way, Maddie’s been the selfish one, just going around throwing her emotions and feelings everywhere. Julie had to temper herself, temper everything, even her love for the acting part of it. And oh, aren’t Julie’s last writings more than just a masterful work of dazzling gradually? So gradually that only she knew the whole picture until the very end? Did she know that this was it, or did she hope, even a little, that she would be saved?
*
The Irregulars come thundering into the castle. Maddie takes a deep breath, dog ears the page, and stands up.
The boys are muddy, their hair tousled and cheeks bright red from the brisk Scottish air.
“Second Officer Brodatt!” Maddie forces a smile.
“Maddie,” she says. After all, the war is over.
“Miss Brodatt,” says a deeper voice, and Jamie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart walks in behind them, four fingers on each hand.
Maddie wants to run, run far away. She shouldn’t have come, not here, not the place that belonged to the best friend she’d killed, her one kill during the entire war – Lady Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart – her best and dearest friend. And it hadn’t been an accident. It wasn’t a causalty of war (as if anything about war was casual), but deliberate. She pointed her gun and she fired, just like Paul and Jamie taught her. She still doesn’t know how she made the shot, but that’s beside the point. Julie is dead, and Maddie killed her.
She slaps her hand over her mouth and turns, but Jock and Hamish are wrapped around her legs and there is nowhere for her to run.
“Eggs?” Jamie asks with a half-smile, and all she can do is stare.
“Clean up boys! Let’s not be tracking the whole of Aberdeen through the place, shall we?” And just like that Jamie and Maddie were alone in the grand entrance to Craig Castle, Castle Craig, the sound of small feet pounding down hallways and Glasgowian gibberish bouncing off the walls.
It is the first time they have seen each other since their return after Julie’s death, after Maddie’s blubbering confession. She wonders why she is here.
There was a telegram, she remembers. A telegram, she came because of a telegram.
“The boys miss you,” Jamie says, not looking her in the eye. “I think they are proper fed up with me.”
Maddie stares at his feet. He no longer wears the standard RAF boots. She has a moment of sheer panic, wondering where she is, who she is, and who this is. She once flew planes. She once had a friend named Julie. She once was a girl in a factory town, living with her grandfather, tinkering on machines.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she says abruptly, and goes to grab her coat, her return ticket, her things. Jamie grabs her arm.
“I’m glad you did,” he says, and she hears something she doesn’t recognize in his voice, and it scares her.
“Stop it,” she says, pushing him away. “Stop pretending nothing’s changed! I changed everything! I did it! It was me! I knew what I was doing and I did it and I can’t take it back!”
Jamie looks at her sadly. “No, you can’t.” He runs a hand through his hair. “But war is war. You,” and here his voice breaks, “you saved her.”
Maddie looks at him sadly. “That isn’t enough for me.” She looks down at his feet again, imagining his missing toes, the pobble who has no toes, and now no sister. “It can’t be enough.” Because she’d killed Julie, no matter the reason, no matter the outcome. She had killed Julie, and she needed to take responsibility.
“I should go,” she says quietly.
“Please, at least stay for eggs,” and Jamie’s voice has a bit of pleading.
Maddie put her hand on his shoulder. “I can’t.” She straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eye. “But I will soon.”
He pressed the book of Dickinson poems in her hands and told her to be safe. He said, you’ll always be welcome here. Maddie smiled at him, as best she could. “Give the boys my best,” and she pushed out the heavy front door of Craig Castle and into the foggy, damp Scottish eve. She thinks she can hear Jamie asking, "You'll be back, won't you?" but she doesn't have the words to answer. Tell all the truth/But tell is slant" and she will be back,somewhere, Maddie knows this, but Maddie doesn't have Julie's way with language and so she leaves.
Maddie is a pilot with no plane, and the first step, she thinks, is to fix that. The air is cold in her lungs, but it makes her feel alive. As Maddie walks away from the castle, she looks back. There are low lights lit on the first floor.
The windows are all closed.
Maddie turns away and starts off the path toward the train station.
Peter Pan was a lost boy who never had to change. He found a new Wendy when he needed to. It is selfish not to grow, not to change. It was unfair to Wendy. Unfair to all the Darlings, really. Maddie knows she will never find another Julie, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Castle Craig disappears behind her as Maddie's boots echo in the blanketing mist. She can't tell if it's the mist or tears wet on her face. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hands, shoves them in her pockets, and strides off, with purpose.
As Julie said, it all starts with a game of pretend.