“Alice,” the captain said in amusement. “Alice Dubois. Not her real name, of course. And if you can best her, you will end the war in six months.”
He’d stood for a long time on the dock, watching Eve’s boat recede into the choppy surf. She gazed steadily back until the tweedy figure disappeared. She felt a twinge to see him gone—the first person ever to have faith in her, to believe she could be something more, not to mention her last contact with everything left behind. But excitement soon won over loneliness. Eve Gardiner had left England; Marguerite Le Fran?ois had arrived in Le Havre. And she waited, sipping lemonade and concealing a curiosity that could fairly be called ravenous, for the mysterious Alice.
The café was crowded. Sour-faced waiters squeezed past with dirty plates and bottles of wine, customers came in from the street shaking off their rainy umbrellas. Eve scrutinized every woman in sight. A stout matron with a brisk manner had the heavy anonymity and the competent air of a master organizer of spies . . . Or perhaps the raw-boned young woman who leaned her bicycle outside and then had to stop in the doorway to clean her spectacles. She might be concealing eyes like a hawk that had read German plans by the dozen . . .
“Ma chère Marguerite!” a woman’s voice shrieked, and Eve’s head jerked around at the name she’d trained herself like a puppy to respond to. She had the impression of a hat bearing down on her—not just any hat, but a hat the size of a wagon wheel covered with pink organza and silk roses—and then the hat’s owner enveloped her in a cloud of lily-of-the-valley scent and kissed her soundly on both cheeks.
“Chérie, look at you! How is dear Oncle édouard?”
It was the phrase she was told she would hear first, but all Eve could do was stare. This is the organizer of the Lille network?
The little Frenchwoman was perhaps thirty-five, bird boned, hardly up to Eve’s chin. She wore a dashing suit in a violent shade of lilac, topped by the mountainous pink hat. Shopping bags piled up around her as she settled chattering behind the table, switching from rapid French into equally rapid English. In this part of France, English voices were common thanks to soldiers and nurses on leave from the front. “Mon Dieu, this rain! My hat is sure to be ruined. Perhaps it should be ruined. I couldn’t decide if it was utterly ghastly or utterly magical, so of course there was nothing to do but buy it.” She extracted a few pearl hat pins and hurled the hat to the spare chair, revealing blond hair rolled into a pompadour. “I always buy a morally questionable hat whenever I come through this area. I can’t take them back north with me, of course. Wear a nice hat, and a German sentry will just confiscate it for his latest whore. So in Lille I go about in last year’s serge and a dismal little boater, and anything fashionable gets abandoned as soon as I return. I must have left morally questionable hats all over France. Brandy,” she said to the waiter appearing at her elbow, and unleashed a ravishing smile as he reared back. “It’s been an absolute pisser of a day,” she said frankly. “So make it a double brandy, monsieur, and never mind looking sour. So—” She turned back to Eve, sitting silent and rather wide-eyed through this introductory monologue, and looked her up and down, suddenly all business. “Merde. Uncle Edward sends me babies from the cradle now?”
“I’m twenty-two,” Eve said with a touch of frost. No fluffy Parisienne who matched pink with purple was going to make her feel like an infant. “Mademoiselle Dubois—”
“Stop right there.”
Eve froze, looking around the rackety café. “Is someone listening?”
“No, no, we’re safe. If anyone understands English, which I doubt, we’re in the corner of a room too full of noise for anyone to hear a useful word. No, I meant stop calling me that horrid name.” An extravagant shudder. “Alice Dubois. What sin did I commit to earn a name like that? I shall have to ask my confessor. Alice Dubois sounds like a skinny schoolmistress with a face like a bin. Call me Lili. It’s not my real name either, but at least it has some dash. I gave Uncle Edward hell until he started using it too. I think he likes it, because he started giving flower names to the rest of his ‘nieces,’ like Violette—you’ll meet her soon; she’ll hate you, but she hates everybody—and now you: Marguerite, the little daisy. We’re his garden, and he fusses over us like an old maid with a watering can.” Alice/Lili had been speaking with her head close to Eve’s so their conversation would be inaudible, but she still broke off the instant the waiter approached with her brandy. “Merci!” she beamed, ignoring his disapproving look.
Eve had never in her life seen a well-bred woman drink spirits, except perhaps medicinally, but she kept silent, rotating her glass of lemonade. Captain Cameron warned her against thinking of this work as a game, but his prize agent seemed to consider everything a joke. Or does she? Under the breezy chatter, Lili showed an instinctive caution: her words paused the moment anyone brushed even remotely close to their table, although her voice was already so low Eve had to bend confidentially near to catch every word. They looked like two women sharing a cozy secret—which of course they were.
Lili didn’t seem to mind Eve’s scrutiny. She scrutinized right back, her deep-set eyes almost liquid in their movement. “Twenty-two years old?” she repeated. “I’d never believe it.”
“And that’s why my papers say I’m seventeen.” Eve opened her eyes to their widest, fanning her lashes in sweet confusion, and Lili gave a laugh of sheer merriment, clapping her hands.
“Maybe our mutual uncle is a genius after all. What a morsel you are, chérie—fresh from the schoolroom and dumb as a daisy, I’d swear it!”
Eve lowered her lids demurely. “M-m-most kind.”
“Yes, Uncle Edward said you had a hitching tongue,” Lili said frankly. “I imagine that’s hell in normal life, but it will stand you in good stead now. People talk around women, and they talk even more around girls, and they’ll chatter like geese around a girl who seems half witted. I advise you to play it up like mad. Let’s order baguettes! You won’t be getting good bread in Lille. All the good white flour goes to the Boches, so whenever I come south I gorge on good bread and fashionable hats. I love this city!”