Eve imagined Violette sitting across a rickety table from a German interrogator, turning her head so the light flashed, impenetrable, off her spectacles. No, Violette would not be an easy subject for questioning. As long as they do not torture her.
“If I could do something,” Lili fumed. “Get out and start culling some new information—and there will be reports to collect.” Her voice was steely. “I will not lose anyone else to the Huns. I’d rather be stood against a wall and shot myself than lose one more.”
“Don’t be foolish.” Eve found herself adopting Violette’s bossy sternness, taking her wayward leader in hand since their spectacled lieutenant wasn’t here to do it. “Let me see what I can f-find out at Le Lethe.”
You might not be at Le Lethe much longer, the thought whispered. With the network compromised, Eve and Lili might very easily find themselves recalled from Lille. It would be the logical step, but Eve couldn’t stop now to fantasize about leaving Lille and never seeing René Bordelon again. For the moment you’re still here, so keep listening.
But there was nothing about Violette to be heard in the sea of gossip. No one could talk of anything but the Cavell execution. German officers were either grim-faced or blustering over their schnapps. “Dammit, the woman was a spy!” Eve heard a captain sputter. “We’re supposed to drench our handkerchiefs over a filthy spy, just because she was female?”
“War is not what it used to be,” a colonel countered. “Spies in skirts—”
“Putting a woman in front of a firing squad, it’s shame on the fatherland. This is not how we conduct war . . .”
“Spying is a craven business. There must be spies in Lille, the entire region is cursed. There was one uncovered in Brussels weeks before Cavell’s execution, that one a woman too—”
Eve pricked up her ears, but nothing more was said of Violette. Please, do not let her end up like Cavell.
It all made René chuckle later that night as he stood naked at the sideboard before a carafe of liquid as green as a peridot. Recently, he had introduced Eve to absinthe. “What romantics Germans are, going on as if there is any honorable way to conduct a war! War merely happens. The only thing that matters at the end of a war is who is alive, and who is dead.”
“Not only that,” Eve said, cross-legged in the soft bed with a sheet drawn around her shoulders. “It also m-matters who comes out p-poor and who comes out rich.” That earned her an approving smile, as Eve had planned. Marguerite had had to evolve from the wide-eyed country girl he first took a fancy to. She’d gained a veneer of sophistication; she no longer spluttered when she drank champagne; she’d developed a grateful appreciation for the finer things in life that her lover took such pleasure in showing her. She was supple and eager in bed, and she adopted some of René’s cynicisms, which made him smile because she parroted them so earnestly. Yes, Eve had grown Marguerite up in precisely calculated stages, and René seemed pleased with what he saw as his creation. “I don’t see why it’s so t-terrible to want to prosper in wartime,” Eve continued a bit defiantly, as if trying on René’s profiteering airs and trying to justify them. “Who w-w-w—who wants to be hungry? Who wants to be dressed in rags?”
René balanced a silver-grated absinthe spoon and a sugar cube across each glass. “You’re a clever girl, Marguerite. If the Germans think women are not clever enough or cunning enough to be spies, then they are dupes and fools.”
Eve steered the conversation away from her own cleverness. “They say the English are f-furious over Cavell’s execution.”
“Furious, perhaps.” René dripped ice water over the sugar, so the cubes dissolved slowly into the absinthe. “But even more grateful, I imagine.”
“Why?” Eve took her glass. La fée verte didn’t make her hallucinate or chatter, as she feared—René said that was nonsense from French vintners jealous of losing business—but she still made sure to sip sparingly.
“You haven’t seen the casualty lists the English are facing, my pet. All those men dying in the trenches every month . . . Their splendid little war is into its second year now, and people are getting weary of blood. But when the Huns gun down an Englishwoman of good birth and unstained reputation—can there be anything more wholesome than a nurse?—then that’s a jolt that will galvanize the home front nicely.” René sipped his absinthe, sliding back beneath the sheets.
“So will the Germans execute that other s-spy?” Eve dared to ask. “The woman c-caught in Brussels.”
“Not if they are clever. They won’t want to feed the bad press. I wonder if this one is young and pretty?” René mused, looking at the light through the green jewel of his glass. “If she is, the English should hope the Huns shoot her. Even better than a middle-aged martyr like Cavell is a pretty martyr. Nothing to get public outrage fired up like a girl who’s young, lovely, and dead. Swallow that down, Marguerite, and come here . . . You’ve never had opium, have you? We should try it sometime; coupling in an opium dream can be rather eye-opening . . .”
But the spectre of Edith Cavell wasn’t finished with them yet. When Eve returned to her own room that night, Lili sat awake at the rickety table, great purple shadows under her eyes. “Interesting news from Uncle Edward, little daisy.”
“Have we been recalled?” Eve’s head was still lightly buzzing from absinthe, though she’d managed to duck the prospect of opium. She wasn’t taking any substance that might cause her to babble in front of René. “Are they pulling us from Lille?” Her head buzzed even more with hope, now that the moment had come.
“No.” Lili hesitated, and Eve’s heart fell. “And at the same time . . . maybe.”
Exasperated, Eve unbuttoned her coat. “Talk sense.”
“Antoine brought the message direct from Uncle Edward. The decision to recall us was bruited about, but his mustachioed superior”—that would be the bluff, gossip-leaking Major Allenton Eve remembered from her Folkestone days—“came down on the side of letting us continue.”
“Even though the Boches will be looking to unravel the network now they have one of us?”
“Even so.” Lili unwrapped a stub of cigarette from a handkerchief, fumbling for matches. “It is Mustache’s opinion that our excellent placement here makes it worth the risk. So we are ordered to keep our heads low and continue our work, at least for a few weeks longer.”
“Risky,” Eve admitted. Even foolhardy. But wars were won by taking risks, and soldiers were the ones who shouldered the dangers. As soon as Eve agreed to take this job, she’d given the Crown her life to spend—what was the use complaining now, much as she yearned to leave Lille and René behind? She dropped down on the edge of the bed, rubbing the grit from her eyes. “So we continue,” she said a trifle bitterly.
Lili lit her cigarette stub. “Perhaps not.”