“I’m glad I didn’t meet him,” Finn answered quietly. “I’ve seen enough monstrous things. But I still wish I could have been there. Protected you both.”
I was glad he hadn’t been. He was the one with a prison record; he’d have been in even more dire danger of ending up behind bars if we’d been caught. Eve and I had been enough, in the end, to take care of René—but I didn’t say so. Finn had his pride, after all. “Shall we go tell Eve she’s probably safe?” I said instead.
“Might stop her hurling insults at us.”
Eve listened without comment. Instead of calming her, the news seemed to redouble her restlessness, as she picked at the splints around her broken knuckles and complained about her shoulder bandages. I thought she’d be pestering me with questions about her trial in 1916, the evidence Violette had dug up on my urging, but she never touched the subject.
And ten days after she’d been shot, I knocked on the door with a breakfast croissant and found nothing but a note on the pillow.
Finn let loose with every curse in the book, but I just stared at the terse words. Gone home. Don’t worry.
“‘Don’t worry.’” Finn tore a hand through his hair. “Where in hell would that dunderheaded battle-ax take off to? Violette, you think? Trying to find out more about the trial?”
He sprinted downstairs to put a telephone call through to Roubaix, but I stood staring at Eve’s note with a different suspicion mounting. I ransacked the room, but both Lugers were gone.
Finn was back quickly. “Violette’s seen or heard nothing from Eve, she swears.”
“I don’t think she went to Lille or Roubaix,” I whispered. “I think she’s going home to die. Gone where we can’t stop her from pulling a trigger.”
I’d had such foolish faith that if Eve knew she hadn’t betrayed Lili, it would fix the old wound she’d carried for so long. She’d learned she wasn’t a betrayer, and her enemy lay dead by her own hand—I’d hoped all that would be enough. I’d hoped she would now look to her future, not her tainted past. But maybe Eve had looked in the mirror and still seen nothing to live for, once hatred and guilt were gone. Nothing but the barrel of a gun.
Just like my brother.
My breath began to hitch in my throat. “We need to go, Finn. We need to get back to London now.”
“She might not be headed for London, lass. If she wants to kill herself, she could have rented another room two streets down; we’d never know where. Or she could have gone to Lili’s grave, or—”
“Her note said home. She’s had no home but London for more than thirty years. If she wants to die there . . .”
Please, no. No.
That second drive across France was very different from the first. The car seemed empty with no acerbic presence in the backseat, and there were no detours to Rouen or Lille. Just a straight, fast drive in a matter of hours from Paris to Calais, then the ferry carrying us back into a bank of English fog. By the following morning, the Lagonda was chugging toward London. My throat closed, and I realized in sudden shock that today was my twentieth birthday. I’d forgotten all about it.
Twenty.
At nineteen, not even two months ago, I’d gotten off the train in the rainy dark with my photograph of Rose and my impossible hopes. Evelyn Gardiner had just been a name on a piece of paper. I hadn’t known Eve or Finn or René Bordelon. I hadn’t even known myself.
Not even two months. How much had changed in such a short time. I rubbed my just-rounding stomach, and wondered when the Rosebud would start to move.
“Number 10 Hampson Street,” Finn muttered, steering the Lagonda through the pitted streets. London still had its scars of war, but the people strolling along those pocked streets had more swing in their steps and cheer on their faces on this warm summer day than they had when I’d first arrived. Finn and I had the only grim faces to be seen. “Gardiner, you’d better be home.”
Home and safe, I prayed, because if I came through the door of Eve’s house and saw her lying there with a pistol in her stiffened hand, I was never going to forgive myself. I won’t let go, I’d told her in Grasse. I can’t lose you. If I did—
But number 10 Hampson Street was empty. Not just empty; there was a new sign posted. FOR SALE.
Six weeks later
Ready?” Finn asked.
“Not really.” I turned for his inspection. “Do I look grand enough for Park Lane?”
“You look like a bonny wee thing.”
“Not that wee anymore.” I was very obviously pregnant now, rounding stomach hugged tight by my black dress. It wouldn’t fit me much longer, but I’d squeezed into it today for luck. It made me look very elegant and adult, and I needed that this afternoon. Because my mother and father had come to London, and they were waiting for me at the Dorchester on Park Lane.
My mother and I had been telephoning a good deal since I’d come back to London. No matter what she’d said to me when we were last together, she was my mother and I knew she worried about me. “Chérie, you must have some kind of plan,” she’d ventured a few weeks ago. “We’ll meet, we’ll all talk—”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to come back to New York.”
It was a sign of just how nervous my mother was that she didn’t argue. “Then we’ll come to London. Your father has business there very soon, anyway. I’ll come with him, and we’ll all sit down and make some plans.”
I already had plans. I’d been refining them these past weeks while sharing Finn’s little bed-sit. We worried about Eve, going almost every day to her house to knock, but it wasn’t just Eve we talked about over our one-pan breakfasts. It was the Rosebud, for whom I was slowly acquiring a proper layette. It was the future and how we could manage it, Finn outlining ideas and me scribbling figures on my bank statements to see how those ideas could be made a reality (and the bankers had no trouble allowing me to withdraw my own money, once I came in with my false wedding ring on). But I wasn’t sure how interested my parents were going to be in my plans. So I prepared for them to tell me what course of action they had decided on, and prepared to say no. Whether I was still underage or not, they were going to find out I was not nearly as easy to push around as I used to be. Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.
Still, I was afraid this meeting would go awry once I put my foot down, and I didn’t want it to go awry. In spite of everything, I missed my parents. I wanted to tell them I was sorry I’d caused so much trouble, that I understood better now how losing James had wrecked them so utterly. I wanted to say how much I wanted them back.
“You’re sure you want me to come?” Finn wore the charcoal gray suit he’d worn in Grasse as Donald McGowan, solicitor. (My Donald!) “Your mother didn’t have a very good first impression of me in Roubaix.”