I slammed my fists into the beech tree, wishing I could cry, wishing I could wrap myself in my old insulating numbness. But the tears were tied up tight inside me in a huge ugly knot, and stabs of fury and pain cut me too deep for numbness. So I just hit the tree until my knuckles were stinging through my gloves.
My eyes were hot and burning when I finally turned away. My aunt stood watching from the back door, frail and hunched. “Tell me the rest,” I said, and she did, her voice flat. My uncle had sent Rose to a little town outside Limoges to give birth away from anyone she knew. She didn’t write when the baby was born, told them nothing about it, and they didn’t ask. Four months later, Rose sent a brief note saying she was going to work in Limoges, and would pay her parents back for every franc they’d spent on her confinement. Money had come, and two more sets of letters had been exchanged: announcement of first her father’s death and then her brothers’, and Rose’s awkward tear-splotched condolences. No, Tante Jeanne couldn’t remember Rose’s address; she hadn’t saved the letters or the envelopes—and after mid ’44, no more had come. “I don’t know if she’s still in Limoges,” my aunt said, and paused. “I asked her to come back, you know. Rose’s father would never hear of it while he was alive, but after he . . . well, I asked. She never answered me.”
I didn’t ask if Rose’s baby had been included in that offer of hospitality. I was trembling too hard.
“Are you staying the night?” Tante Jeanne sounded mournful. “It gets very lonely here.”
Whose fault is that? I wanted to lash out. You’re the one who threw Rose away like trash. You should have left her in that café in Provence. The words burned at my lips, aching to come out, but I bit them down. My aunt was so thin a breeze could blow her away, finally looking like the invalid she’d always claimed she was. A husband and two sons dead. She’d lost so much.
Be kind.
I didn’t want to be kind, but at least I managed not to say the things I was thinking. I just said stiffly, “No, Tante, I can’t stay. I have to go to Roubaix.”
Tante Jeanne sighed. “Well, then.”
I couldn’t make myself hug her. I couldn’t bear it. I jerked out a stiff good-bye and moved unsteadily across the weedy lawn, back to the dark blue shape of the Lagonda.
Finn looked up from The Autocar’s tattered pages. I don’t know what expression he saw on my face, but he sprang out of the car. “Miss?”
“Why’d you go to prison?” I heard myself ask.
“Stole a bearskin hat off a Buckingham Palace guard,” he said with no expression. “Are you all right?”
“You’re lying about the hat.”
“Yes. Get in the car.”
I moved toward the convertible, but tripped in the graveled path. Finn caught me around the waist before I could fall, lifted me up and helped me into the front seat.
Eve was awake, regarding me with those hooded eagle eyes of hers. “Well?”
I rubbed my hot cheek with a cold hand as Finn slid back behind the wheel. “I found out why Rose left. Because—because she was pregnant.”
The silence was deafening.
“Well,” Eve said at last, aiming a deliberate glance at my stomach. “Unless I miss my guess, so are you.”
CHAPTER 8
EVE
June 1915
Eve was brought up short not by any of Lille’s various horrors—and there were certainly horrors—but by a poster. It was tacked outside a church, flapping in the breeze, and it said in both French and German:
ANY CIVILIAN, INCLUDING THE CIVILIAN STAFF OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT, WHO HELPS TROOPS WHO ARE ENEMIES OF GERMANY, OR WHO ACTS IN A WAY INJURIOUS TO GERMANY AND HER ALLIES, WILL BE PUNISHED BY DEATH.
“Oh, those.” Lili sounded matter-of-fact. “They went up late last year. I don’t think anyone really believed them at first. Then in January a woman was shot for harboring two French soldiers, and that drove the point home nicely.”
Eve remembered the recruitment poster she’d lingered in front of in London, watched all the while by Captain Cameron. The stalwart Tommies, the blank space in the middle: There is still a space available for YOU! WILL YOU FILL IT?
Well, she’d filled it. And now she was standing in front of a poster that promised to kill her if she was caught, and it had all become very, very real. More real than Captain Cameron’s promise on a windy Folkestone beach that the Boches did not shoot women.
Eve looked into Lili’s sunken eyes in the mobile smiling face. “We’re in the m-m-mouth of the beast now, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” Lili put her arm through Eve’s, moving her away from the flapping poster. She looked very different here than she did in Le Havre: no outrageous hat or elaborate pompadour. She stood neat and subdued in a plain serge suit, her gloves mended and re-mended, a bag over her arm. Her papers, giving yet another false name, proclaimed her to be a seamstress, and her bag carried reels of thread and needles. It also carried a set of maps sewn into the lining—maps marked with target points. Thank goodness Eve didn’t learn that until after they passed the checkpoints into Lille. She nearly fainted when Lili chuckled, “The Fritzes would have been pleased to find that lot! I’ve marked out all their new artillery positions for bombing.”
“You were m-m-making jokes with the German sentries as they were g-going over your papers, and all the while you had that in your bag?”
“Oui,” Lili said serenely, and Eve stared at her in a mix of admiration and horror. She knew right then that her boasting to Captain Cameron about how she would surpass his prize agent was destined to be unfulfilled, because nobody, ever, would beat Lili when it came to sheer nerve. Eve both wondered if her superior was a little mad, and admired her violently.
So, clearly, did Violette Lameron, who greeted them both in a dismal rented room somewhere off the Grand Place. Violette was sturdy and glowering, with neatly knotted hair and plain round spectacles; she hugged Lili with visible relief even while scolding her. “You should have let me fetch the new girl. You make too many crossings, you’re going to get noticed!”