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Lift your head and look out the window
Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go
Listen! The birds sing! Listen! The bells ring!
All the living are dead, and the dead are all living
The war is over and we are beginning
***
When she was six years old, Maddie stole a piece of candy from the store down the street on a dare. She slipped it into the pocket of her dress and tried to walk calmly out of the store like her friend had not five minutes earlier, but her nerves jittered and feet stomped too loudly and her grandmother was friends with the shop owner and would surely find out and--
She walked up to the shopkeeper and burst into tears, holding the candy piece out.
Margaret Broddatt is capable of many incredible things. Lying is not one of them.
So when she returned to England with trembling hands and borrowed boots and Jaime Beaufort Stewart at her side for silent support, Maddie squared her shoulders against jittering nerves and heavy steps and the weighty fear of court martial and familial disappointment and handed over a collection of cards and papers full of lies.
Julie should be in the air by now, smuggled out of France by the rescued Jamaican pilot from Ormae and with Anna Engel to tend to the gunshot wound still healing in her side.
***
It happened in flashes:
- The gestapo shot people in chains, crippling them, mutilating them, until their bodies gave up.
- Julie laughed, beautiful and broken and desperate, at the sound of Maddie’s sobs.
- Maddie shot her best friend dead.
A blank space grew, empty and cold, between the moment Maddie shot Julie in the chest and the creeping increase of guilt quaking in her chest turning her back to that cursed bridge to bury her.
- Julie was alive, a deceptively small hole tunneling into her abdomen below one breast and one that Maddie swore was the size of her hand blasted out of her back.
- Maddie’s hands froze and suddenly Mitraillette was at Julie’s side, ripping her shirt into a bandage and kicking Maddie in the shin and pulling a bloodied and bandaged and unconscious Julie up to hang between them for the trek back to the boat.
- Maman doused her hands in brandy before cauterizing the wound, and the burn was enough to yank Julie into consciousness, screaming and fighting and landing punches and kicks on everyone until Maddie fought her way through and talked to her, nothing more than her name over and over and over again until Julie finally relaxed long enough to swallow a glass full of brandy and fall unconscious once more.
***
There are lies to tell, so many lies, when the SOE and the ATA bear down on Maddie, and she clutches the bloodstained pullover she’s not let go of since sending Julie off with a stitched-up side and too little time for goodbyes. They take it from her, brandish it at Jaime for confirmation of his sister’s death, and he stands solid with his narrow shoulders and mangled hands, the poor Pobble With No Toes masking his grief for the loss of his sister as grief for her death.
First Flight Officer Julie Beaufort-Stewart goes down as confirmed killed in action and the SOE officers sulk for days at the verified loss of one of their most capable operators. Jaime is given leave to deliver the news to what’s left of his family in person, and Maddie is released to the ATF with no court martial, no reprimand, and no commendations, but the full incident report from her flight to France, her crash landing, and her return notated in her record.
The story of her time in France spreads through the ATA, part myth and part disbelief and all behind her back because no one dares speak to her about it. The first time a swaggering ferry pilot, fresh off his hospital stay after his fighter plane was shot down tries to coax the story out of her she almost flips a table over trying to violently to get away from him.
She ferries planes for the rest of the war. No one ever asks her to fly a Lysander again, and when the war finally ends she goes home to her grandparents.
***
It took four days before Julie stayed awake long enough to speak. She spent four days sleeping, chugging the water and brandy offered to her when she woke up in pain and clutching Maddie’s hands, silent and trembling and frail. Four days of Maddie laying at her side in the loft in the barn, crammed into a space that barely fit one person and now had to accommodate two.
One and a half.
The sounds of provincial life in occupied France and the distinctly uneasy, careful silence of a resistance plan forming trickled up to their loft when Mitrailette delivered food and water and fresh bandages. At one point, Gabrielle snuck up the ladder when Maddie was changing Julie’s bandages and nearly fell from the top rung at the burns on Julie’s neck, the lacerations on her wrists, the gaunt spikes of cheekbones pushing from under her sallow skin.
It was Gabrielle’s strangled whimper that finally drew words from Julie.
“I was the prettiest girl in the WAAF, you know,” she drawled, and it might have been a smile she was trying for but the cracks in her lips protested and bled and she coughed on the words.
Gabrielle scampered back down the ladder to receive her scolding from Maman and Julie laid her head back down onto the pillow, half watching Maddie’s trembling hands and half falling back to sleep.
“Hello, Maddie darling,” she mumbled as she fell back asleep. One hand, bony and damaged, fell onto Maddie’s wrist, and Maddie barely managed to finish the bandages before curling up at Julie’s side and running the sound of her name on Julie’s voice through her head, over and over and over, a sound she’d be so certain she would never hear again.
***
At the end of the war, Maddie gets a pat on the back and is sent back to Stockport for good. She’ll have a flight instructor’s post at Oakway, her pay less than a man’s but her time in the air guaranteed. Her room at her grandparents’ house is the same as always, same as before the war and same as when she kept nights there when she wasn’t ferrying planes, but a despondent measure of dust coated her bookshelves, her desk, her chair. There’s a small stack of mail waiting for her-- final paperwork from the ATA and a letter from Beryl (married now, to an infantryman wounded early in the war, and looking to start a family) and a misaddressed brochure for ice fishing trips-- and Maddie shoves it all in a desk drawer.
On one bookshelf was a book about William Wallace, dog eared and dropped in a few too many puddles and riddled with notes in Julie’s cramped hand, the script a mess of elegant cursive and animated scribbles smeared by an anxious left hand. Julie had presented it to her with a bow fit for a queen when she’d stayed with Maddie and her grandparents, a useless gift to thank them for letting her stay on a spare of the moment trip.
She dumps her flight bag-- a souvenir, left by accident to Maddie by a paperwork error and a lazy clerk-- by the door and curls up under the blankets. The last time she’d been in this bed she’d shared it with Julie, the two of them pressed together, shoulders to knees, on the narrow mattress, all sleepy laughter and Maddie prodding at Julie’s side to quiet her.
Maddie had half-woken sometime before sunrise to find Julie awake, blonde plait and halcyon gaze and one hand curled around Maddie’s bicep. “Go back to sleep, Maddie darling, it’s still early” she’d said, pausing to land a kiss somewhere between Maddie’s cheek and the corner of her mouth, and Maddie had slipped back to sleep without a word.
After five minutes in the bed-- too big, too empty, too lacking in all things Scottish and blonde and home-- Maddie kicks the blankets away and tiptoes back downstairs to where her boots waited. She shoves her feet angrily into the boots and laces them too tight and clomps out to the workshop where her old Silent Superb waits.
***
Julie didn’t speak of her experience to anyone.
Her experience, she called it, correcting anyone who phrased it differently and staring them down from her deep-set and blackened eyes until they amended it.
Days passed and Julie recovered slowly, so slowly, too slowly for Maddie’s liking and too quickly for the nagging concern that a healthy Julie would be sent back into the field by the SOE. Once she started speaking finally, she conversed easily in French with the family and spoke English only at night when Maddie laid down carefully at her side in the barn loft to sleep.
“The SOE will send me back,” Julie said one night.
“You can’t.” Maddie twined her own fingers together, knotting them over her stomach and staring at the dull shape of the beams above them.
“I know,” was all Julie said before turning carefully on her side and resting her head on Maddie’s shoulder. “Before we leave we have to get Anna out, too.”
It brought a storm down onto them, what with the intent of the whole operation being to drive the Nazis from Ormae as much as possible and there stood Maddie and Julie, demanding the rescue of a German officer. Maman, finally, was the one who agreed with Julie’s pleading; no one else dared defy her, and they made a plan.
A day later, they staged the death of Anna Engel, blowing a grenade in her apartment in the early hours of the morning. Anna’s only request when they brought her to the farmhouse was to see Julie, and it brought about the first real smile Julie had offered to anyone but Maddie since her rescue.
***
She spends her days taking thrill-seeking rich folks who dodged any real contribution to the war on flights and her nights in the workshop, dismantling the Silent Superb piece by piece and then rebuilding it, over and over and over.
“Maddie,” her gran says one evening as she settles a plate with Maddie’s reheated dinner and the evening post on the workbench. “How many times are you going to do this?”
“It keeps me busy,” Maddie says around the screwdriver clenched between her teeth.
“I know this is so hard for you,” her gran says. “But that Julie was such a wonderful girl, and she loved you so. Do you really think she’d want you to waste away in this shed?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Maddie grumbles.
Her gran runs a hand over Maddie’s hair and sighs. “You’ve some mail. Don’t work too late.”
It’s more than an hour after Maddie surfaces from her rebuild of the carburetor to take a bite of the sandwich her gran had left. There’s a letter from Dympna and a postcard advertisement for flights to Canada and--
Maddie pauses, mouth half full, before reaching for the letter from Castle Craig. The meticulous penmanship has traces of Julie in it, elegant and formal and unmistakably Julie’s mother’s. The paper is fine and heavy and the letter long, full of news of Jaime’s newest paramour and how Jock grew four inches in one summer.
Please do come visit soon, my dear. The boys all ask when you’ll be by again, and it’s just me and Jaime here to care for them. You’re still family to us and we do so wish to see you again.
Maddie clutches too tightly to the paper and it crumples between her fingers. She drops it to the workbench, shaking fingers trying to smooth the wrinkles away, but all she succeeds in is tearing a corner and smearing grease all over it.
She sleeps in the workshop, the letter carefully folded and back in its envelope, and rings Dympna in the morning to ask for coverage at her shift at the airfield. She takes two days off before finally dragging herself back to work. The letter sits in the breast pocket of her coat as she flies a newly engaged couple all over England, settling heavily over her heartbeat.
***
At first, they didn’t have anything resembling a real plan to get Julie or Anna out of Ormae. The focus was on bombing the hotel, and Anna fed them more information than they would ever need to complete the mission. Maddie finally left Julie’s side, reluctant and unwilling, to participate in the raid; it took Julie gripping her hands and pressing a kiss to the inside of her wrist for Maddie to agree.
They returned with a pillar of black smoke behind them to mark a triumphant demolition of the hotel and two survivors, a boy with two broken legs and a downed Jamaican airman with an accent thicker than any Scottish burr Julie had ever had. Maddie went directly to the loft, squeezing her way in and sending Anna to the house with barely a look.
“We did it,” she said, laying down at Julie’s side.
“Of course you did,” Julie said, flicking gently at Maddie’s ear. “I heard the whole dreadful explosion up here. I do hope that nothing survived that place.”
“Nothing did,” Maddie promised, knotting her fingers with Julie’s carefully. Julie smiled, stretched and tired and familiar, and pressed forward to kiss Maddie, gentle and tired and familiar.
“I can’t go home,” Julie said as she pulled back from Maddie just enough to speak.
“We’ll go somewhere else.” Maddie moved forward to kiss her again, impatient and rash as always, and Julie let her, kissing her again and again and again.
***
Maddie drifts eventually into a routine, passing her days at the airfield and her nights in the workshop. Her grandfather bans her from mangling and reassembling the Silent Superb and instead sets her to repairing neighbors’ cars and the occasional shop truck. She sleeps most nights in the workshop and sometimes in her bed, but always restlessly. She could reach out to Jaime, take a trip to Castle Craig, see if he’s heard anything to confirm that Julie made it to safety, but instead she dreams of flying with Julie in clear and cold nights with no artillery or gunners to worry about.
Beryl’s husband Alfred, a slender fellow with sandy hair and a permanent limp, comes over some nights when Maddie’s working and brings along a bottle of brandy to split. He lost his best friend to the same mortar round that killed him and, like the whole town, he’s heard the stories surrounding Maddie’s time in the war. Boys after a war are still boys, and boys gossip endlessly; there are pitying looks haunting every step Maddie takes through town.
He never asks for details and she never offers, but they drink and she teaches him what she can of mechanics. He’s a bit helpless with an internal combustion engine, but it gives her something to do, explaining and demonstrating and eventually escorting him to her grandparents’ living room to sleep off his memories. Beryl comes by every morning to pick him up and thanks Maddie for watching over him, leaving with her hand in his and a basket of fresh muffins as a thank you in Maddie’s kitchen, perched on the counter next to the newspaper and letters and mislabeled magazines about skiing in Montreal.
One morning Beryl isn’t there, and Alfred wakes to sleepy confusion and Maddie shaking his shoulder. It only takes a moment for his eyes to widen and he splutters out “The baby!” and leaps to his feet.
Maddie gives him a ride to their house on the Silent Superb, only to find it empty. The neighbor scolds him, scandalized as his appearance and Maddie’s presence, and pauses only long enough to tell him that Beryl went into labor two weeks early just before sunrise and her parents took her to the closest hospital.
They sprint to the hospital on the Superb, the suspension protesting against every cobblestone and pothole that Maddie doesn’t slow down for, and make it there halfway through the labor. Maddie chews on her thumbnail in the waiting room, rings her grandparents to tell them where she is, and waits for hours until he emerges.
“It’s a girl,” Alfred says with a broad smile, and he tugs her in to see Beryl and the baby.
“Hi there,” Beryl says sleepily. There’s a tiny sleeping bundle in her arms.
“Hi,” Maddie says, twisting her hands together behind her back. “Everyone alright in here?”
“Just about,” Beryl says with a giggle. “Come meet Elizabeth.”
Maddie unties her fingers and steps forward, her feet stutter-stopping with a squeak on the floor twice before she makes it to the bed.
Elizabeth has a short tuft of black hair and bright blue eyes, and Maddie smiles as she takes a seat beside Beryl. It’s not much of a smile, but it stretches a little wider when Elizabeth yawns and it’s more of a smile than she’d managed since returning from France.
***
The answer to Julie’s escape came in the form of Anna Engel the day before the next SOE flight to Ormae was scheduled, and it snapped Maddie in half.
“I can get her to America,” Anna said. “But just her.”
Maddie punched her.
“Maddie,” Julie said quietly. It was her first afternoon in the house, her strength having finally returned enough for a trip down the ladder and a few hours in the kitchen with a cup of tea and everyone else.
“No,” Maddie said. Blood leaked out of her knuckles and out of Anna’s nose, but Julie curled a hand around Maddie’s wrist, holding her back while handing a napkin to Anna.
“Are you really prepared to never go home again?” Julie asked sharply. “To never fly again. To never see your family again.”
“Julie,” Maddie started, but her throat closed around any argument. Julie tugged at her wrist, pulling her from the crowded kitchen to the empty stairway. Maddie stumbled to a stop with a squeak from her boots on the hardwood, and Julie climbed up a step. The height put her eye level with Maddie and she dropped Maddie’s wrist to press her hands to Maddie’s cheeks.
“Julie,” Maddie whispered again, her throat too tight to allow any volume or strength in her voice. “Don’t.”
“I have to.” Julie’s voice broke in all the same places, and her fingertips dug weakly into Maddie’s skin. “If I go back, I’m expendable. I can’t-- I won’t give them any more of me, not this time. Eva Seiler died on that bridge, and she gave me a way out.”
“But your family--Jaime--”
“I need you to tell them for me, Maddie darling, please.”
“That’s not fair.” Maddie’s eyes welled up and she gripped too tightly to the fragile remains of Julie’s wrists. “Why can’t I--”
“Because,” Julie said. “Because I need you to be safe, and once you go home, you will be. You’ll tell them I was captured, you’ll tell them I died, and you’ll tell them you finished my mission. You’ll be able to ask for anything, including out of the SOE ferries, and you’ll get it.”
“I’m not leaving you again,” Maddie said, quiet and violent and heavy, and Julie smiled-- a real smile, gaunt and pained but honest and warm-- and kissed her.
“You aren’t,” Julie said softly. Her breath brushed, hot and teary, against Maddie’s mouth. “This time I’m leaving you.”
“How is that fair?” Maddie’s voice came out sharp, and Julie’s smile turned tight and sad.
“You already saved me from them,” Julie said. “Now I’m saving you.”
“From what? We haven’t done anything wrong, Julie, there’s nothing to save me from.”
“From throwing away everything else you love,” Julie said. “So please, Maddie, please. Promise me you’ll go home.”
Maddie clenched her jaw tight, holding the promise back against the desperation in Julie’s voice until Julie whispered a final please and she relented.
That night, after Anna’s plans had been laid out and failsafes had been planned, Maddie followed Julie up to the loft and silently undid all of Julie’s buttons until she could touch and memorize and catalog every scar, every burn, every cut and bruise and bullet hole and poorly healed lump of bone.
After her second inventory of Julie’s damage, she finally kissed Julie and allowed her to fumble with Maddie’s buttons, to scramble on top of Maddie, to silently apologize over and over and over again.
***
Sometimes when Beryl needs to catch up on sleep Alfred rings Maddie and asks if he and Elizabeth can come over for a few hours. The bassinet Maddie slept in as a baby is dug out of her grandparents’ attic and set up in the workshop, along with a small heater. Maddie papers over all of the drafty cracks in the workshop with layers of old newspapers and the abundance of catalogs for Canadian companies that have arrived over the past year, and Maddie teaches Alfred the finer points of engine tuning in hushed tones while a music box runs on repeat in the background.
By the time Elizabeth is a year old, Alfred has become a passable mechanic and he and Maddie have started scavenging for parts in the airway’s junkyard and are ambitiously building another motorcycle from the pieces. It’s a project doomed to fail, but it’s a project, and the grease on Maddie’s fingers and the exhaustion that drives her to sleep every night distracts her from the weekly letters she now receives from Castle Craig, all stacked unopened on a meticulously clean corner of her workbench.
One day, Maddie is struggling with breaking out a stripped screw, grumbling quietly at it to avoid waking Elizabeth, when there’s a knock on the workshop door. She starts at the sound and the wrench slips, her hand slamming into the clutch casing and a gash tearing between her knuckles.
The metallic clang wakes Elizabeth, who promptly starts to cry, and Maddie looks up, dumbfounded, to where a gaping Jaime Beaufort-Stewart can’t settle his gaze on Maddie or Elizabeth.
“Drat,” Maddie mumbles. “Well, come on, you woke the girl, go give her a rock and see if she’ll go back to sleep.”
“What--”
“Don’t act like you’ve never seen a baby before, Peter Pan,” Maddie says tartly. She sets to digging through a box of rags in search of a clean one for her hand, and watches hawkishly as Jaime tiptoes over to the bassinet and pokes at it gently to set it to rocking.
Elizabeth calms by the time Maddie’s found a clean rag and wrapped her hand in it, and she’s sucking on her thumb and staring up at Jaime with wide eyes when Maddie make it over to his side.
“Elizabeth,” Maddie says, soft and sing-song and with a small smile. “Meet the Pobble with No Toes.” It draws something of a smile from Jaime as well, and he elbows Maddie gently in the side.
“You can carry a baby, yeah?”
“I--yes?”
“Let’s take her inside, then. Al should be here soon to pick her up.”
“Al?”
“Come on now,” Maddie says. She waves her bandaged hand in his face. “I can’t carry her and I’m not leaving her, so come along. Hand under her head--there you go.”
She leads him into the kitchen, where her gran is making a stew.
“Hi Gran.” Maddie kisses her on the cheek. “Had a bit of a scrape. You remember Jaime, right? Can you take Elizabeth before he has a heart attack?”
As her grandmother fawns over the baby and Jaime, Maddie sets to cleaning her hand and bandaging it. She’s fumbling with settling a bandage properly with one hand when Jaime’s mangled fingers come into view, gently taking over the process.
“Is she--”
“She’s my goddaughter,” Maddie says quietly. “I’ve known Beryl my whole life, and Alfred is a friend of mine.”
“Oh,” Jaime says. He finishes the bandage and sits back in his chair. “How are you, Maddie?”
“Well enough.” Maddie looks somewhere past his left ear. “What are you doing here?”
“Mother asked me to come see you.” He smiles, crooked and easy and it’s nothing like Julie’s perfect and symmetrical grins but it touches his eyes the same way hers did and Maddie grinds her teeth together. “She wants you to come visit.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“I can see that.” Jaime leans forward, kicking at her shin gently. “Come on, Maddie, please. We just--want to see you. You’re family.”
“How on earth can your family want to see me when I let--”
“That was never your choice and you know it damn well, Margaret Broddatt,” he says. “Julie’s more headstrong than the lot of us and not even you could have stopped her.”
“But--”
“Maddie, please,” he says. “Just for a week. If I come home without you my mother will cane me, and I’m far too fragile to handle that.”
“Oh, please.” Maddie laughs in spite of herself. “Shot down over the ocean and survived a war and you’re afraid of your mother?”
“Yes,” Jaime says, all wide eyes and earnest nods. “Of course I am.”
“I’m not--”
“I’ll tell your grandparents that you’re turning my mother down. It’s a last resort, but I’ll do it, and you know just as I do that your grandmother will cane you if you refuse to visit your best friend’s grieving mother.”
“Jaime,” Maddie says. Her voices weighs heavily with warning, but he crosses his arms over his chest and throws his chin out stubbornly and the familiarity kicks into Maddie’s ribs.
“Do you think I would make threats if I didn’t have reason to?” he asks quietly. “Please, Maddie. One week, and then you can come back and we’ll leave you alone.”
“Margaret,” her grandmother says, thin and dark and cutting, from the doorway to the dining room, Elizabeth sleeping in her arms. “Go pack a bag.”
“I--”
“Now, Margaret,” her grandmother says. “When Alfred picks up Elizabeth you’ll tell him you’re going on a trip, and he’ll arrange for a replacement at the airway until you return, and you’ll go with Jaime.”
Maddie crumbles under her grandmother’s glare and sighs, throws her hands up, slumps into the chair.
Jaime smirks all the way to the train station and their seats on the train.
“It’ll be so good to have you there again, even for a little bit,” he says with a broad smile as the train sets off. “My cousin is visiting, too, and she’ll be right pleased to have another girl to talk to who isn’t my mother.”
Maddie stares out the window the whole trip, ignoring Jaime’s chatter, and watches England slide into Scotland until the highland mist Julie loved to complain about swallows the scenery.
***
Anna’s plan was too simple for Maddie’s liking, but she ground her teeth silently and stood at Julie’s side as they prepped the car. It was salvaged from the hotel explosion, an officer’s transportation, and it combined with one of Anna’s uniforms and a fudged gestapo rank insignia was Julie and Robert’s-- the Jamaican pilot; the boy with the broken legs was too wounded to move even then-- way out. It involved some shackles and forged papers, and Anna would drive them right out to the shore where the resistance will smuggle them onto a refugee boat bound for America.
They loaded the car and dressed Anna to fit the part of a surviving gestapo interrogator and Julie and Robert to the part of prisoners of war. It wasn’t hard, sliding the three of them back into the roles they’d all occupied for too long.
Maddie stood, silent and tight-shouldered, as the final preparations were made, curling her toes in her flight boots and clenching her fists. Behind the barn waited the bicycles for the rest of them to take to the airfield for the incoming SOE flight home. Julie said her goodbyes to Maman and the rest, perfect French rolling off her tongue, the eloquence of her gratitude standing in sharp contrast to her wounded body, before she pulled Maddie around the corner of the house by the hand.
“Maddie,” she said quietly.
“I don’t like this,” Maddie said.
“I know you don’t.” Julie kissed her, hands curled around the back of her neck tightly. “But it’s the best option.”
“Why do I have to--”
“Because you have to tell my family what happened,” Julie said. “Because you have to be with your family. You’re everything to your grandparents.”
“I want to be with you,” Maddie said, too loud for the hushed air surrounding the farmhouse. “You’re everything to me. Why doesn’t that matter?”
“Oh, Maddie,” Julie said, and she pressed a kiss to Maddie’s mouth. “We went to war. People who go to war don’t get what they want.”
She pulled close to Maddie, pressing against her and burying her forehead in Maddie’s neck. “Promise me you’ll go home, Maddie, please. Tell my family I’m alive and that I’ll find my way home one day.”
“This isn’t fair.” Maddie’s fingers dug into Julie’s sweater, holding tight enough to leave fresh bruises over the healing ones that covered her body still.
“I know,” Julie said into her collarbone. “And I’m sorry. But I’ll come home one day. I promise.”
“Is that your way of asking me to wait for you to come home from war?” Maddie wrapped her arms even tighter. “Because--”
“I’m asking you to keep flying, Maddie Broddatt, because you belong in a plane and not on the ground with me, always looking over your shoulder to see if someone is coming for us.”
Julie pulled back just enough to kiss Maddie, hot and angry and sad. “Goodbye, Maddie darling.”
She pulled out of Maddie’s arms abruptly and spun away, marching to the driveway. Maddie stood haplessly, arms still out to reach for Julie, as the car engine started and the sound of the engine disappeared down to the road.
“Fly the plane, Maddie,” she muttered to the empty air in front of her, and she scrubbed her tears away and stalked over to pack for her own trip home.
***
“Oh, Maddie, dear,” Julie’s mother says. She starts to cry when Jaime drags Maddie into the sitting room where she’s reading to the orphans they’ve taken in, and her hug pushes all of the air out of Maddie’s lungs. “I’m so glad you finally came to see us.”
Jock appears in the library, blabbering excitedly in his anxious Glaswegian accent, and half-tackles her as well.
“Jock,” Lady Beaufort-Stewart says. “Why don’t you show Maddie up to my daughter’s room?”
“What?” Maddie pulls back quickly. “I--no, I couldn’t.”
“Go on,” Jaime says with a broad smile. “My cousin’s been staying in there, but she’ll understand. She spends all her time in the library anyways.”
“I can’t take her place, I can just sleep in another room, honestly,” Maddie says.
“Nonsense,” Lady Beaufort-Stewart says with a smile to match Jaime’s. “Go along now, the both of you. We’ll have supper soon, so I’ll see you all then.”
She and Jaime shoo Maddie out of the room with Jock, who huffs heavily with each step as he carries Maddie’s bag with all of the posture and pride of an infantryman. Maddie follows him, focusing on matching Jock’s steps instead of the halls full of old portraits of royalty and newer portraits of Julie and Jaime and all of their brothers.
Jock mumbles something the Maddie can’t understand and deposits her bag in front of the bedroom door, then salutes Maddie and dashes off down the hall.
Maddie sighs and swings her bag up onto her shoulder with one hand and opens the door with the other. She settles the bag just inside the door and sighs, rubbing a hand over her eyes and trying desperately not to look too hard at any of the details of Julie’s room.
“Oh, goodness,” Maddie says. There’s a woman sitting in the window seat, wrapped in a blanket and curled against the wall as she stares outside. “So sorry, miss, you must be Jaime’s cousin. He said you were in the library and I could stay in here and--”
“It’s quite alright,” she says, and Maddie cuts off abruptly and grabs onto the closest table edge for support. Julie looks over her shoulder with a small smile. “It’s quite wonderful to see you, Maddie darling.”
“You--Julie, you’re-- here?” Maddie sways and slumps back against the door. “What are you--”
“Well, you see.” Julie extricates herself carefully from the blanket and makes her way over to where Maddie still stands staring. She’s gained some of the weight back and her hair is glossy and perfectly pinned up once more, and the dark circles have disappeared from under her eyes. “I’ve been in Canada for some time now, trying to reach out to you to tell you I’m doing well, but you’ve never responded.”
“Canada-- what? You did what?”
“I had to be careful.” Julie stops two steps away from Maddie, hands linked behind her, and tilts her chin up to hold Maddie’s gaze. “It seems unlikely that the SOE or anyone would be monitoring you, especially since from what I understand they retained you for the rest of the war with the ATA, but I had to be sure.”
“The junk mail,” Maddie says slowly. “Ice fishing and all of that nonsense. That was you?”
“I suppose you never did bother to read through any of them, then.” Julie sighs and shrugs, smiling all the while. “It would have been rather obvious to you if you had, I imagine; there were plenty of very clear references to our various adventures, you know. I spent several hours drafting every one of those.”
“You’re here,” Maddie says weakly. “Home. You came back.”
“I always said I would, Maddie,” Julie says. She takes another step forward, one hand coming out to reach for Maddie but holding back, hovering, inches from Maddie’s cheek. “I knew I would, my family has the resources to allow me to get fake papers. But I didn’t know how long it would take, so God knows I never would have asked you to wait.”
“You have new papers now?”
“I do,” Julie says, smiling a little wider and clearing her throat. Her posture relaxes, her head tilting, and her accent shifts. “Julie Davis, Canadian university student, reporting for duty.”
“Oh,” Maddie says. “Oh.”
“Maddie,” Julie says quietly. She snaps back into Julie Beaufort-Stewart just as abruptly as she’d become Julie Davis. “If I may, I should really like to kiss you for a moment.”
“Oh,” Maddie says again. “I--drat, Julie, how can you just stand there and say that after--after you left. I’d just gotten you back, and then you left, except this time you chose to leave, and I had no idea if you’d make it out of France alive, or wind up back in the UK, or drown in the Atlantic, or--”
Julie steps forward and presses a hand over her mouth.
“Maddie, please,” she says, scant inches between them. “I fully and completely acknowledge that you have dozens of questions, and an abundance of anger and annoyance directed squarely at me for leaving, and I accept that and will answer all of them, I promise. But I have also been sitting in that window seat since sunrise and thinking about kissing you, so can I please, please, please do that and then you can yell at me all you want?”
Maddie stares down at her, Julie’s hand still warm over her mouth. Julie is here, alive and healthy and home, with a new life to live, a new life she used to travel across an ocean to see Maddie, and Maddie refuses to blink because she may disappear for a third time. She nods, slow and afraid, and Julie pulls her hand away, stepping in and skimming her fingertips over Maddie’s cheeks to curl around the back of her head and pull her down for a kiss.
“I’ve missed you so very much, Maddie darling,” Julie mumbles against Maddie’s mouth when they come up for air, her fingers tangled into Maddie’s hair and Maddie’s vise-like around Julie’s arms.
“You came home,” Maddie whispers. “You came back.”
“To you,” Julie says. “I came back for you.” She surges up on her toes and her weight, small as it may be even after she’s recovered from near starvation, pushes Maddie into the door with a thump.
Maddie kisses her, over and over and over, and her feet are securely planted on the ground but she’s in the cockpit of a plane with Julie, flying and flying and flying, stuck in the climb with no reason to come back down.