Despite Captain Cameron’s recruiting preference, Eve found herself the only woman. The instructors overlooked her, eyes going to the men in the room before they let Eve answer anything, but that didn’t trouble her because it gave her time to evaluate her classmates. Just four of them, and how different they were from each other. That was the thing that struck Eve most. Any recruiting poster for the fighting troops showed you a line of identical Tommies, stalwart and sturdy, faceless in their similarity. That was the ideal soldier: a line, a regiment, a battalion of strong men all exactly alike. But a recruitment poster for spies, she realized, would merely show you a line of people, all different, who did not look like spies.
There was a burly Belgian with a graying beard; two Frenchmen, one with a Lyonnais accent and the other with a limp; and a slender English boy burning with such incandescent hatred for the Huns that he almost glowed. He won’t be any good, Eve judged. No self-control—and she wasn’t sure about the limping Frenchman either; his hands balled into fists whenever he encountered the least frustration. The whole course was an exercise in frustration, fiddly skills to be learned with infinite patience: the picking of locks, the writing of codes, and the learning of ciphers. The various types of invisible ink, how it could be made and how it could be read. How to read and draw maps, how to conceal messages—the list went on and on. The Belgian swore softly when they learned how to compile reports on the smallest possible scraps of rice paper, because his huge fists were like hams. But Eve quickly mastered the system of tiny letters, each no bigger than a comma on a typewriter. And her instructor, a lean Cockney who had barely looked at her since she arrived, smiled at her work and began to watch her more closely.
Just a fortnight, and Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was? She felt like she was being burned, sloughing away every extraneous layer, every scrap of ballast from mind or body that could possibly weigh her down. Each morning she woke with alacrity, tossing the covers aside and springing from bed, her mind one long hungry scream for what the day had to offer. She manipulated her fingers around those tiny scraps of paper, those deft manipulations that would persuade a lock to give up its secrets, and she thrilled with more sheer, fierce pleasure the first time she sensed a lock’s tumblers click than she had ever felt when a man tried to kiss her.
I was made for this, she thought. I am Evelyn Gardiner, and this is where I belong.
Captain Cameron came to see her at the end of the first week. “How’s my pupil?” he asked, strolling unannounced into the stuffy, makeshift classroom.
“Very well, Uncle Edward,” Eve said demurely.
His eyes laughed. “What’s that you’re practicing?”
“Hiding messages.” How to swiftly slit a seam on her cuff and poke in a tiny rolled message, and how to quickly pluck it back out. It took speed and deft fingers, but Eve had both.
The captain leaned against the edge of the table. He was in uniform today, the first time she’d seen him in khaki, and it suited him. “How many places can you hide a message, in what you’re wearing now?”
“Cuffs, hems, fingertips of a glove,” Eve recited. “Pinned into the hair, of course. Rolled around the inside band of a ring, or inside the heel of a s-shoe—”
“Mmm, better forget that last one. I hear the Fritzes have caught on to the shoe-heel trick.”
Eve nodded, filing that away. She unrolled her tiny blank message and began swiftly threading it through the hem of her handkerchief instead.
“Your classmates are taking target practice,” the captain observed. “Why not you?”
“Major Allenton did not think it necessary.” Can’t see a woman ever being in a position to fire a pistol had been his words, and so Eve was left behind while her classmates tramped off to the targets with borrowed Webleys. Only three classmates now—the slender English boy had been deemed unfit, and left weeping and swearing. Go join the Tommies if you want to fight Germans, Eve thought, not without sympathy.
“I think you should learn to fire a pistol, Miss Gardiner.”
“Isn’t that g-going against the major’s orders?” Cameron and Allenton didn’t like each other; Eve had seen that on the first day.
Cameron merely said, “Come with me.”
He didn’t take Eve to the range, but to a deserted stretch of beach, far down from the bustle of the docks. He set off toward the water, shoulder-slinging a knapsack that clinked with every step, and Eve followed, her boots sinking into the sand and the wind tugging at her neatly rolled hair. The morning was hot, and Eve wished she could take off her jacket, but this tramping off alone to an isolated beach with a man who most certainly wasn’t her uncle was already improper enough. Miss Gregson and the rest of the file girls would all think me no better than I should be. Then Eve pushed that thought aside and stripped down to her shirtwaist, reasoning that she wouldn’t get far as a spy if she thought too much about propriety.
The captain found a driftwood log, unpacked a series of empty bottles from his clinking knapsack, and lined them up on the log. “This will do. Step ten paces back.”
“Shouldn’t I be able to shoot from farther than that?” Eve objected, dropping her jacket on a patch of sea grass.
“If you’re taking aim at a man, odds are it’s up close.” Captain Cameron paced off the distance, then took his pistol from its holster. “This is a Luger nine-millimeter P08—”
Eve wrinkled her nose. “A German p-pistol?”
“Don’t sneer, Miss Gardiner, it’s far more accurate and reliable than our English ones. Our lads get the Webley Mk IV; that’s what your classmates are training with, and they might as well not bother because you need weeks to get good with a Webley, the way they jump on firing. With a Luger, you’ll be hitting your targets with just a few hours of practice.”
Briskly, Captain Cameron broke the pistol apart, named the parts, and had Eve assemble and reassemble it until she lost her clumsiness. When she caught the trick of it and saw her hands moving with deft speed, she thrilled with the same liquid excitement she’d been feeling ever since she arrived, whenever she managed to decipher a map or decrypt a message. More, she thought. Give me more.
Cameron had her load and unload, and Eve could tell he was waiting to see if she’d beg to shoot and not just fiddle with the pistol’s parts. He wants to see if I have patience. She pushed a wind-whipped lock of hair back behind one ear and took the instruction mutely. I can wait all day, Captain.
“There.” At last, he pointed at the first of the bottles lined up on the driftwood log. “You have seven shots. Sight down the barrel, so. It doesn’t kick like a Webley, but there’s still recoil.” He tapped a finger to her shoulder, her chin, her knuckles, correcting her stance. No attempts to make this intimate—Eve remembered the French boys in Nancy whenever she appeared on a duck hunt. Let me show you how to aim that! And then they’d start wrapping their arms around her.
The captain nodded, stepping back. The stiff salt breeze tugged at his short hair and ruffled the slate blue of the Channel water behind him. “Fire.”
She emptied out her seven shots, the reports reverberating around the empty beach, and didn’t hit a single bottle. Disappointment stabbed, but she knew better than to show it. She just reloaded.