“Why am I here? Violette knows the region better, shouldn’t she be helping c-compile the report?”
“She already has. But you’re the one who first heard about the kaiser’s visit, little daisy. You deserve to be kept in the loop.” Lili’s hand darted hummingbird quick, noting the ground, the irregularities, the tracks, the trees. “When I deliver my report to Uncle Edward, he’s asked me to bring you.”
“M-me?”
“He wants to interview you, see if there’s any more detail he can possibly milk out of your recollections. For something this big, they take no chances. We’ll leave in two days.”
Seeing Captain Cameron in two days. The thought should have been a balm, but it just made Eve feel strange. He seemed so far away, he might as well be in a different world. And the logistics of such a visit made her stomach flip far more than the thought of his warm eyes. “I c-can’t possibly travel to Folkestone. I don’t dare miss any work.”
“We don’t have to travel all the way to Folkestone.” Lili calmly finished her jotted notations. “Uncle Edward has agreed to meet us across the border in Brussels. We’ll be back within a day.”
“The way I t-talk—I’ll be noticed too much at a checkpoint. I’ll get you c-caught.” If Lili got arrested because of Eve’s stammering tongue, she’d cut it out with a rusty razor.
“Je m’en fou!” Lili ruffled her hair. “Let me do the talking! I’m used to wheedling my way in and out of train stations. You just give that look of splendid wide-eyed innocence; it’ll all be right as rain. How right is rain, anyway? What peculiar expressions you English have.”
Lili was lightening the mood deliberately, Eve knew that. All the airy chatter as she stepped back into her charcoal-mapped petticoat was intentional. “You should take more care,” Eve said, collecting the picnic things. “Don’t take it all as such a j-joke. You’ll laugh yourself right into a f-firing squad.”
“Bah.” Lili gave a wave of her hand, a hand so thin it was nearly transparent in the sunlight. “I know I’ll be caught one day, but who cares? I shall at least have served. So let’s hurry, and do great things while there is yet time.”
“There isn’t m-much time,” Eve groaned, following Lili down the hill. “Two d-days and we’re off to Brussels. How am I supposed to get away for a day?”
“See if you can make some excuse at Le Lethe.” A sidelong glance as they trailed down the slope back in the direction of town. “How is your beastly suitor?”
Eve didn’t want to think about René Bordelon. She’d been trying to keep out of his way since the night he walked her home; at Le Lethe she whisked away plates, poured schnapps, and listened. She even managed to compile a report on this German ace pilot Max Immelmann—all while trying to keep out of her employer’s sight. But he let her know he was still watching her, waiting for an answer. Sometimes it was a wordless stare at her neck, where she could still feel his tongue savoring her skin. Sometimes it was the gulp of wine he offered her from a lip-printed glass at closing time. What a world it was, when a few swallows of wine from a stranger’s glass could be a courtship gesture to a girl presumed half-starved and desperate. “He’s persistent,” Eve said at last.
Lili pushed a strand of hair behind one ear. “Have you been able to put him off?”
“For n-now.”
And really, in the life she led was there anything else besides now? Seeing Captain Cameron in two days—the kaiser’s arrival in ten—it all existed in the same gray area. There was the past and the now. Nothing else was certain. Nothing else was real.
At Le Lethe that night, the chatter seemed brighter than usual, the bustle of the officers noisier, the laughter of the women on their arms more giddy. “Whores,” Christine whispered as she and Eve stood against the wall, waiting to be summoned by a lifted finger. “That’s Fran?oise Ponceau over there, preening in a new silk dress and pressing herself up against that captain. You know the baker makes special bread for sluts like that. He pisses on the dough before he rolls it out—”
“They d-deserve it,” Eve agreed, though her stomach churned. The girl had anxious eyes over her smiles, and she’d been slipping rolls into her pocketbook all night when her captain’s back was turned. She was feeding someone at home, more likely several someones, and in return she got piss-soaked bread and epithets. But it was safer to agree with Christine’s whispered opinion because, frankly, most of Lille shared it.
René looked up then at his waitresses, candlelight catching a glitter from his eyes. Look at Christine, Eve begged inside. Pretty and blond and dense as a post; why won’t you look at Christine? But he crooked his finger at Eve, and she came forward to pour the after-dinner drinks, and René’s lips curved in appreciation for her unhurried silence, the exact arc of her arm.
“Can someone else take the l-ledger up?” Eve asked the other waiters at the end of the night, but they just laughed.
“That’s your duty now, Marguerite! He’s always in a better mood if you take it up, and we like Monsieur René in a good mood.”
They snickered, and Eve realized that René’s eyes on her hadn’t gone unnoticed. “You’re all p-pigs,” she snarled, and stamped up the back stairs. A curtsy, and his fingers whispered dryly over her own as she handed over the nightly account.
“Are you in a hurry, Mademoiselle Le Fran?ois?” Flicking through the neat lines.
“No, monsieur.”
He took his time, rustling pages. In the heat of the summer night he’d discarded his jacket and sat in his snow-white shirtsleeves, hair as sleek as his leather shoes with brilliantine. His cuff links were unexpected spots of color, ruby red and flakes of gold.
“Art nouveau glass,” he said, observing the direction of her gaze. Did he notice everything? “In the style of Klimt. You have heard of Klimt? I had the good fortune to see some of his paintings in Vienna, before the war. Extraordinary work. There was one called Dana?, the woman of myth visited by Zeus in a shower of gold . . . Klimt shows she is aroused by the gold as it pours between her legs.”
Eve had no desire to discuss any kind of arousal in this room, artistic or otherwise. “No, I have n-not heard of it.”
“It is abandon.” He unbuttoned his cuffs, dropping the cuff links into her hand to examine. He proceeded to turn back his sleeves, displaying lean forearms, pale skinned and smooth, and Eve avoided the sight by holding the little molded glass objects to the light and watching the play of colors. “Gilt-edged abandon. People thought it obscene, but what of it? They thought Baudelaire obscene too.”
Eve placed the cuff links carefully beside the bust of the poet, studying the brutal marble profile and wondering if Baudelaire’s mistress had despised him as Eve despised René. “May I ask a favor, m-monsieur?”