“Yes, yes, I’ve got it here somewhere.” Eve thumped an enormous handbag onto the counter, sending the jeweler’s glass scattering. “There—no, that’s not it. My eyeglasses, Charlotte—”
“In your bag, Grandmother,” I weighed in, finally managing to squeeze some words past my astonishment.
“I thought you had them. Do check that bag. No, hold this. Is this it? No, that’s the bill for that Chinese shawl, let me see . . . Provenance, it must be here . . .”
Pieces of paper cascaded over the pawnbroker’s counter. Eve plucked through each one like a magpie, chattering in that immaculate drawl like she’d just tripped out from tea with the queen, fumbling for nonexistent eyeglasses, holding each scrap of paper painstakingly against the light. “Charlotte, do check your bag again, I am positive you have my eyeglasses—”
“Ma’am,” the pawnbroker said, clearing his throat as another set of customers came in. Eve took no notice, braying away like a dowager in an Austen novel. “Lud, sir, don’t fuss at me. This is it, yes—no, well, it’s in here somewhere—” Her osprey wobbled dangerously, shedding a little shower of feathers that smelled like mothballs. The pawnbroker tried to move to the next set of customers, but she rapped him on the knuckles with his own glass. “Don’t wander off on me, my good man, we’re not finished with our business! Charlotte, dear, read this for me, my old eyes . . .” The customers who’d walked in stood there for a while, then finally wandered back out.
I stood there like a bit player in a movie as the pawnbroker finally gave a little moue of impatience. “Never mind, madam. Provenance is not required—I am not so little a gentleman that I cannot take the word of so obvious a lady.”
“Good,” Eve said. “Let’s hear your price.”
They wrangled for a while, but I knew who was going to win. A moment later the defeated pawnbroker was counting a great many crisp banknotes into my hand, and my pearls disappeared behind his counter; we turned to see Finn holding the door with a grin that only showed around his eyes. “My lady?” he said, straight-faced, and Eve swept through like an old duchess, osprey bobbing.
“Ah,” she said as the shop doors closed behind us, and the Mayfair drawl was utterly gone from her voice. “I enjoyed that.”
She looked entirely different from the drunk old bat of last night, with her teacup of whiskey and her Luger. For that matter, she looked entirely different from the hungover crone of this morning. She looked sober, crisp, savagely entertained, her gray eyes sparkling and her bony shoulders shedding the age and the aura of threadbare gentlewoman as though it was an inconvenient shawl.
“How did you do that?” I demanded, still clutching my handful of notes.
Eve Gardiner tugged off a glove, revealing that monstrosity of a hand again, and tugged her ever-present cigarettes out of her bag. “People are stupid. Stick a halfway d-decent story and a random bit of paper under their nose, and with plenty of self-possession one can always get through.”
She sounded like she was quoting someone. “Always?” I parried.
“No.” The sparkle disappeared from her eye. “Not always. But this wasn’t m-much of a risk. That pompous arse knew he was getting a b-bargain. I just made him want to shovel me out of the shop a little faster.”
I wondered why her stammer came and went the way it did. She’d conducted that charade in the shop as smooth and cool as cream. And why had she gone through with that charade in the first place? I studied her as she held her cigarette out to Finn and he struck a match for her. “You don’t like me,” I said at last.
“No,” she said, and gave me that hooded glance again, like an eagle looking down from her aerie. An amused glance, but I saw no liking there at all, no softness.
I didn’t care. She might not like me, but she spoke to me like an equal, not a child or a slut. “So why did you help me in there?” I asked, matching her bluntness. “Why are you helping me at all?”
“How about money?” She looked at my fistful of notes, and named a chunk of it that made me gasp. “I c-can take you to someone who might know something about that cousin of yours, but I’m not doing it for free.”
I narrowed my eyes, wishing I didn’t feel so short, tucked as I was between the tall Scotsman and the tall Englishwoman. “You don’t get a penny till you tell me who you were calling this morning.”
“An English officer currently stationed in Bordeaux,” she said without hesitation. “We go back thirty years, he and I, but he’s on holiday. So I tried another old acquaintance, a woman who knows a thing or two. I asked her about a restaurant called Le Lethe, and the man who ran it, and she hung up on me.” A snort. “The bitch knows something. If we go talk to her in person, I’ll g-get it out of her. And if we can’t get it out of her, I can certainly get it out of my English officer once he’s back from duck hunting in Le Marche. So, is that worth a few quid to you?”
She was asking for a lot more than just a few quid, but I let that go. “Why did your interest prick up when I mentioned Monsieur René?” I shot back instead. “How can you know him when we don’t even have a last name? Or was it the restaurant’s name that hooked you?”
Eve smiled through a haze of smoke. “Fuck off, Yank,” she said sweetly.
No stammering on that. It wasn’t a word I’d ever heard a woman say before Eve Gardiner. Finn looked at the sky, carefully blank faced.
“All right,” I said. And counted banknotes one by one into her hand.
“That’s only half what I asked.”
“You’ll get the rest after we talk to your friends,” I said just as sweetly. “Or else you’d probably go on a bender and leave me high and dry.”
“Probably,” Eve agreed. But I wondered, despite my own words. She wanted something more than my money. I was sure of it.
“So, where do we find this old friend of yours, the woman?” I asked as we all squashed into the Lagonda convertible, Finn behind the wheel, Eve in the middle with her arm slung carelessly around his shoulder, me squashed up against the door stuffing the rest of the banknotes into my pocketbook. “Where are we going?”
“Folkestone.” Eve reached to stub her cigarette out in the dashboard, but Finn snatched it from her and tossed it out the window, glaring. “After Folkestone—France.”
CHAPTER 4
EVE
May 1915
France. That was where Eve would be going to work as a spy. A spy, she thought experimentally, probing the thought the way a child probed the hole left by a missing tooth. Her stomach fluttered, part in nerves and part in excitement. I am to be a spy in France.