“Why do you want this, Miss Gardiner?” the captain asked, and nodded for her to fire again.
“I want to do my part.” She didn’t stutter at all. “Is that so strange? Last summer when the war began, every young man in England was burning to join the fight, make something of himself. Did anyone ask them why?” She lifted the Luger, squeezing off another seven shots carefully spaced. Clipped one of the bottles this time, sending a chip of glass flying, but didn’t shatter it. Another stab of disappointment. But someday, I will be the best, she vowed. Better even than your prize recruit in Lille, whoever she is.
The captain’s voice continued. “Do you hate the Fritzes?”
“They weren’t far from Nancy, where I grew up.” Eve began to reload. “I didn’t hate them then. But they invaded France, tore it to pieces, took everything g-g-good about it for themselves.” Snapping the last bullet in. “What gives them the right?”
“Nothing.” He studied her. “But I think it’s less patriotism with you than the urge to prove yourself capable.”
“Yes,” she admitted, and it felt good. That was what she wanted above all. Wanted it so badly it hurt.
“Relax your grip a touch. You’re pulling the trigger rather than squeezing it, and it’s throwing your aim to the right.”
On her second shot a bottle exploded. Eve grinned.
“Don’t think of this as a game.” The captain looked down at her. “I see so many young men on fire to beat the German swine. That’s all right for the rank and file; they’ll lose that illusion the first week in the trenches and no harm done to anything but their innocence. But spies cannot be on fire for anything. Spies who think it a game will get themselves killed, and likely their fellows as well. The Germans are clever and they are ruthless, regardless of anything you have heard about the stupid Boches, and from the moment you set foot in France they will be determined to catch you. As a woman, you might not be stood up against a wall and shot, as happened to a boy of nineteen I sent to Roubaix last month. But you could be shoveled off to rot in some German prison, starving slowly among the rats, and no one could help you—not even me. Do you understand, Evelyn Gardiner?”
Another test, Eve thought, her heart beating hard. Fail, and she’d get nowhere near France. Fail, and she went home to a rented room and filing letters. No.
But what was the right answer?
Captain Cameron waited, eyes steady on hers.
“I never thought this was a game,” Eve said at last. “I don’t play g-games. Games are for children, and I may look sixteen, but I have never been a child.” She began to load the pistol again. “I can’t promise I won’t fail, but it won’t be because I think it’s all a lark.”
She returned his gaze fiercely, heart still thumping. Was that the right answer? She had no idea. But it was the only one she had. “You will be sent into German-occupied Lille,” Captain Cameron said at last, and Eve’s knees nearly buckled in relief. “But you go to Le Havre first, to meet your contact. Your name will be Marguerite Le Fran?ois. Learn to respond to that name as if it were your own.”
Marguerite Le Fran?ois. In English it would translate to something like “Daisy French,” and Eve smiled. A perfect name for an innocent girl, a girl to be ignored and talked over. Just a harmless little daisy, lurking fresh-faced in the grass.
Captain Cameron smiled back. “I thought it would suit.” He pointed at the row of bottles, just six left—he had lean, tanned hands, and Eve saw the gold flash of a wedding ring on the left. “Again.”
“Bien s?r, Oncle édouard.”
By the end of the afternoon all the bottles were smashed. With a few more days of practice under his tutelage, she could pick off seven bottles in seven shots.
“Making a great deal of time for you, Cameron is,” Major Allenton observed one afternoon when Eve came back to class after practice. He hadn’t bothered speaking to Eve since her arrival, but now he gave her a speculative glance. “Be careful there, m’dear.”
“I can’t imagine what you m-mean.” Eve settled back down behind her desk, first to arrive for a practice session on code breaking. “The captain is a perfect gentleman.”
“Well, not perfect, perhaps. There was that nasty business that sent him to prison for three years.”
Eve nearly fell out of her seat. Cameron, with his gentlemanly voice lilting its faint hint of Scotland and his impeccable public school grammar, the mild gaze and lanky grace. Prison?
The major fingered his waxed mustache, clearly waiting for her to press for juicy details. Eve straightened her skirts and kept silent. “Fraud,” he said at last, satisfaction evident to be dishing on a subordinate. “If you’re curious. His wife tried to claim her pearl necklace had been stolen, which made it insurance fraud and a very dodgy business. He took the blame for her, but who knows what really happened?” The major looked rather pleased at Eve’s expression. “Don’t suppose he told you about the prison sentence, eh?” A wink. “Or the wife.”
“Neither,” Eve said frostily, “is any of my b-business. And since he was reinstated to His Majesty’s army in a position of trust, then it is not my p-p—my place to q-question his authority.”
“Wouldn’t call it a position of trust, m’dear. War makes for strange bedfellows; we need all hands on deck, even the soiled ones. Cameron got his pardon and his reinstatement, but that doesn’t mean I’d want any girl of mine off walking the beach alone with him. Once a man’s been behind bars, well . . .”
Eve imagined Cameron’s long hands loading the Luger for her. She could not imagine those hands thieving anything. “W-w-will that be all, sir?” She was aching to know more, of course, but she’d be hanged before she asked this spiteful walrus with his ridiculous mustache for another word. The major wandered off, clearly disappointed, and Eve eyed Cameron covertly the following day. But she didn’t ask him anything, because everyone in Folkestone had secrets. And on the day the training course ended, he tucked the Luger into her neatly packed carpetbag as a gift, and said, “You leave for France in the morning.”
PART II
CHAPTER 5
CHARLIE
May 1947
I don’t know how long the Channel crossing took. Time stretched on forever when you spent it vomiting.
“Don’t shut your eyes.” Finn Kilgore’s Scottish burr sounded behind me as I clung grimly to the railing. “Makes your stomach worse if you can’t see which direction the swells are coming from.”
I screwed my eyes shut tighter. “Please don’t say that word.”
“What word?”
“Swells.”