by Kate Quinn
But before France, Folkestone.
“You think I can pluck you out of a file room and drop you straight into enemy territory?” Captain Cameron said on the train, carrying Eve’s stuffed carpetbag for her. It was just a day after he’d recruited her over a pot of tea in that boardinghouse parlor—she’d have gone with him that night in the clothes she stood up in, hang propriety, but the captain insisted on collecting her very properly the following afternoon, giving her his arm to the station as though they were off on holiday. The only one to see Eve off was the tabby cat, whom she had kissed on the nose and whispered to, Look to Mrs. Fitz next door; I made her promise to feed you extra scraps while I’m gone.
“Should anyone ask,” Captain Cameron said as they settled into their empty compartment, “I am a fond uncle taking my favorite niece to Folkestone for the sun.” He closed the doors firmly, making sure they had the compartment to themselves, and did another check for eavesdroppers.
Eve tilted her head, surveying his lean face and rumpled tweeds. “Rather young to be my uncle, aren’t you?”
“You are twenty-two and look sixteen; I am thirty-two and look forty-five. I am your uncle, Edward. That’s to be our cover, now and in future.”
His real name, she had learned, was Cecil Aylmer Cameron. Prep schools, Royal Military Academy, a stint serving in Edinburgh which must have added the faint Scottish mist to his English voice—Eve knew his public credentials now, listed meticulously when she accepted his offer. The private credentials would be given only as necessary in this very private business . . . And now she had the first of them: a code name. “Uncle Edward it is.” Another flutter rippled through Eve’s stomach. “What will my c-code name be?” She’d read Kipling and Childers and Conan Doyle—even in silly books like The Scarlet Pimpernel, spies had code names, disguises.
“You’ll find out.”
“Where will I be g-g—where will I be going in France?” She no longer minded stuttering in front of him.
“Wait and see. Training first.” He smiled, the lines about his eyes crinkling. “Careful, Miss Gardiner. Your excitement is showing.”
Eve smoothed her face into porcelain innocence.
“Better.”
Folkestone. A sleepy coastal town, before the war. Now a bustling port, ferries crammed with refugees arriving every day, more French and Belgian heard on the docks than English. Captain Cameron didn’t speak until they were out of the busy station and heading down the boardwalk in some measure of privacy. “Folkestone is the first stop from Vlissingen in the Netherlands,” he said, setting their pace to keep well out of earshot of the other strolling couples. “Part of my job is to see that the refugees are interviewed before they are allowed farther into Britain.”
“Looking for people like me?”
“And those like you who work for the other side.”
“How many have you f-found of each?”
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
“Are there many women?” Eve wanted to know. “Among the—the recruits?” What did one call them? Apprentice spies? Spies-in-training? It all sounded absurd. Part of Eve still couldn’t believe this was happening at all. “I never thought women would be considered for such a role,” she said honestly. Captain Cameron (Uncle Edward) seemed able to hook the truth out of her in odd ways. He must be a marvel in an interrogation, she thought. He slipped information out of you so gently, you were hardly aware it crossed your lips.
“On the contrary,” the captain said. “I like to recruit women. They frequently have the ability to pass unnoticed where a man would be suspected and stopped. I recruited a Frenchwoman, some months ago”—he gave a sudden, fond smile as if at a particularly good memory—“who now manages a network covering more than a hundred sources, and makes it look simple. Her reports on artillery positions come so quickly and accurately, we can see them bombed in a matter of days. Quite remarkable. She’s the best we have, male or female.”
Eve’s sense of competition stirred hungrily. I will be the best.
He hailed a cab—“Number 8, the Parade.” A shabby little place, not much different from the boardinghouse where Eve had lived, and a boardinghouse was probably what this address passed for if neighbors proved curious. But when the captain ushered Eve inside and she came to stand on the faded parlor rug, it wasn’t a starchy old maid with a pinched mouth who greeted her, but a tall major in full uniform.
He gave Eve a dubious look, fingering the waxed points of an impressive mustache. “Very young,” he disapproved, looking her up and down.
“Give her a chance,” Captain Cameron said mildly. “Miss Evelyn Gardiner, meet Major George Allenton. I leave you in his hands.”
Eve experienced a moment’s fear, seeing Cameron’s tweedy back disappear, but she banished it. I must not fear anything, she reminded herself. Or I will fail.
The major looked unenthusiastic. Eve guessed he did not share Captain Cameron’s preference for female recruits. “The first room on the second floor is yours. Report back here in fifteen minutes.” And as easily as that, the secret world opened.
The Folkestone course lasted two weeks. Two weeks in stuffy low-ceilinged rooms with windows sealed against the May warmth. Rooms full of students who did not look like spies, learning strange and sinister things from men who did not look like soldiers.
Despite Captain Cameron’s recruiting preference, Eve found herself the only woman. The instructors overlooked her, eyes going to the men in the room before they let Eve answer anything, but that didn’t trouble her because it gave her time to evaluate her classmates. Just four of them, and how different they were from each other. That was the thing that struck Eve most. Any recruiting poster for the fighting troops showed you a line of identical Tommies, stalwart and sturdy, faceless in their similarity. That was the ideal soldier: a line, a regiment, a battalion of strong men all exactly alike. But a recruitment poster for spies, she realized, would merely show you a line of people, all different, who did not look like spies.
There was a burly Belgian with a graying beard; two Frenchmen, one with a Lyonnais accent and the other with a limp; and a slender English boy burning with such incandescent hatred for the Huns that he almost glowed. He won’t be any good, Eve judged. No self-control—and she wasn’t sure about the limping Frenchman either; his hands balled into fists whenever he encountered the least frustration. The whole course was an exercise in frustration, fiddly skills to be learned with infinite patience: the picking of locks, the writing of codes, and the learning of ciphers. The various types of invisible ink, how it could be made and how it could be read. How to read and draw maps, how to conceal messages—the list went on and on. The Belgian swore softly when they learned how to compile reports on the smallest possible scraps of rice paper, because his huge fists were like hams. But Eve quickly mastered the system of tiny letters, each no bigger than a comma on a typewriter. And her instructor, a lean Cockney who had barely looked at her since she arrived, smiled at her work and began to watch her more closely.
Just a fortnight, and Eve wondered how much it was possible to change in two weeks. Or was it not change, but becoming what she already was? She felt like she was being burned, sloughing away every extraneous layer, every scrap of ballast from mind or body that could possibly weigh her down. Each morning she woke with alacrity, tossing the covers aside and springing from bed, her mind one long hungry scream for what the day had to offer. She manipulated her fingers around those tiny scraps of paper, those deft manipulations that would persuade a lock to give up its secrets, and she thrilled with more sheer, fierce pleasure the first time she sensed a lock’s tumblers click than she had ever felt when a man tried to kiss her.
I was made for this, she thought. I am Evelyn Gardiner, and this is where I belong.
Captain Cameron came to see her at the end of the first week. “How’s my pupil?” he asked, strolling unannounced into the stuffy, makeshift classroom.
“Very well, Uncle Edwa
rd,” Eve said demurely.
His eyes laughed. “What’s that you’re practicing?”
“Hiding messages.” How to swiftly slit a seam on her cuff and poke in a tiny rolled message, and how to quickly pluck it back out. It took speed and deft fingers, but Eve had both.
The captain leaned against the edge of the table. He was in uniform today, the first time she’d seen him in khaki, and it suited him. “How many places can you hide a message, in what you’re wearing now?”
“Cuffs, hems, fingertips of a glove,” Eve recited. “Pinned into the hair, of course. Rolled around the inside band of a ring, or inside the heel of a s-shoe—”
“Mmm, better forget that last one. I hear the Fritzes have caught on to the shoe-heel trick.”
Eve nodded, filing that away. She unrolled her tiny blank message and began swiftly threading it through the hem of her handkerchief instead.
“Your classmates are taking target practice,” the captain observed. “Why not you?”
“Major Allenton did not think it necessary.” Can’t see a woman ever being in a position to fire a pistol had been his words, and so Eve was left behind while her classmates tramped off to the targets with borrowed Webleys. Only three classmates now—the slender English boy had been deemed unfit, and left weeping and swearing. Go join the Tommies if you want to fight Germans, Eve thought, not without sympathy.
“I think you should learn to fire a pistol, Miss Gardiner.”
“Isn’t that g-going against the major’s orders?” Cameron and Allenton didn’t like each other; Eve had seen that on the first day.
Cameron merely said, “Come with me.”
He didn’t take Eve to the range, but to a deserted stretch of beach, far down from the bustle of the docks. He set off toward the water, shoulder-slinging a knapsack that clinked with every step, and Eve followed, her boots sinking into the sand and the wind tugging at her neatly rolled hair. The morning was hot, and Eve wished she could take off her jacket, but this tramping off alone to an isolated beach with a man who most certainly wasn’t her uncle was already improper enough. Miss Gregson and the rest of the file girls would all think me no better than I should be. Then Eve pushed that thought aside and stripped down to her shirtwaist, reasoning that she wouldn’t get far as a spy if she thought too much about propriety.
The captain found a driftwood log, unpacked a series of empty bottles from his clinking knapsack, and lined them up on the log. “This will do. Step ten paces back.”
“Shouldn’t I be able to shoot from farther than that?” Eve objected, dropping her jacket on a patch of sea grass.
“If you’re taking aim at a man, odds are it’s up close.” Captain Cameron paced off the distance, then took his pistol from its holster. “This is a Luger nine-millimeter P08—”
Eve wrinkled her nose. “A German p-pistol?”
“Don’t sneer, Miss Gardiner, it’s far more accurate and reliable than our English ones. Our lads get the Webley Mk IV; that’s what your classmates are training with, and they might as well not bother because you need weeks to get good with a Webley, the way they jump on firing. With a Luger, you’ll be hitting your targets with just a few hours of practice.”
Briskly, Captain Cameron broke the pistol apart, named the parts, and had Eve assemble and reassemble it until she lost her clumsiness. When she caught the trick of it and saw her hands moving with deft speed, she thrilled with the same liquid excitement she’d been feeling ever since she arrived, whenever she managed to decipher a map or decrypt a message. More, she thought. Give me more.
Cameron had her load and unload, and Eve could tell he was waiting to see if she’d beg to shoot and not just fiddle with the pistol’s parts. He wants to see if I have patience. She pushed a wind-whipped lock of hair back behind one ear and took the instruction mutely. I can wait all day, Captain.
“There.” At last, he pointed at the first of the bottles lined up on the driftwood log. “You have seven shots. Sight down the barrel, so. It doesn’t kick like a Webley, but there’s still recoil.” He tapped a finger to her shoulder, her chin, her knuckles, correcting her stance. No attempts to make this intimate—Eve remembered the French boys in Nancy whenever she appeared on a duck hunt. Let me show you how to aim that! And then they’d start wrapping their arms around her.
The captain nodded, stepping back. The stiff salt breeze tugged at his short hair and ruffled the slate blue of the Channel water behind him. “Fire.”
She emptied out her seven shots, the reports reverberating around the empty beach, and didn’t hit a single bottle. Disappointment stabbed, but she knew better than to show it. She just reloaded.
“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 François. Learn to respond to that name as if it were your own.”
Marguerite Le François. 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.
&n
bsp; 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 sûr, 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 . . .”