by Kate Quinn
“After the winter holidays, I finally had to go back to school, and when I didn’t have anyone to take care of anymore, I just—stopped, like a broken clock. I couldn’t feel anything. I was dead inside. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. I’d just lie there thinking about James and Rose and my parents, and then back to James again. Crying and crying.”
It was around then that I’d started seeing Rose everywhere. Little girls with bouncing braids turned into the young Rose, tall sorority girls sauntering off to class turned into the older Rose—I saw her everywhere, superimposed on the faces of complete strangers. I imagined her so often I started thinking that I was going crazy . . . Or that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t dead.
“I lost my brother,” I said hoarsely. “I failed him. If I’d just been able to help when he was falling to pieces, maybe he wouldn’t have died like that. I wasn’t going to lose my cousin too, if there was any chance she was alive. I was already blowing off all my classes—I couldn’t drag myself out of bed for algebra, but I could do it for Rose. I wrote letters, telephoned people, talked to refugee bureaus. I’d worked so many summers in my father’s law office, I knew what kind of overseas calls to make, what kinds of papers to ask for. What there was to find, I found.” That bored English clerk, telling me that the last report on Rose Fournier had been handled by one Evelyn Gardiner, currently residing at 10 Hampson Street. Digging up the original tip about Le Lethe.
Finn was silent. My cigarette was almost done. I drew a last long drag, and flicked the glowing end out the window. “You’d think someone would have contacted my parents about my skipping so much class, but no one cared. Everyone knows girls like me aren’t in college to make the dean’s list, we’re there to hang around Ivy League boys and find a husband. I didn’t date much—mostly I was the go-to double date if someone’s boyfriend had a roommate they couldn’t ditch—but around this time, I got set up on a blind date. Carl, I think his name was. Dinner and a drive-through movie. He’s got his hand under my sweater the minute the show starts. I know how this goes: we kiss awhile, and then I push him back when he goes too far. Only this time around, I just couldn’t see the point. I was too numb to go through the whole song and dance. I wondered what it would be like if I just—went along. I didn’t like Carl all that much, but I thought maybe he’d make me . . . feel something.” Something that wasn’t guilt or pain, anyway. It hadn’t worked out that way; it had just been more numbed, empty nothing. “Carl kept giving me startled looks afterward. He couldn’t believe I didn’t stop him. Good girls didn’t do that, and I was a good girl.”
Nothing from Finn. I wondered if I disgusted him.
“He asked me out the next week. I said yes. It hadn’t been anything special the first time, but everyone knows the first time is terrible. I hoped maybe it would get better.” Still just more nothing. “He probably talked to the other boys in his fraternity, because I started getting dates all of a sudden. I went ahead and screwed them too. It didn’t feel like much, but I still did it because—” I stopped, swallowed down a bone-deep lash of shame, and made myself go on. “Because I was lonely.” Breathe. Breathe. “I was—I was tired of being numb and alone, and rolling around in a backseat with Tom or Dick or Harry was better than staying in my room weeping and telling myself I could have stopped my brother from killing himself.” I drew another ragged breath. “After a while there got to be quite a few Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. Word got around that Charlie St. Clair was a cheap date. You didn’t need to buy her a milk shake and a movie ticket. All you had to do was show up with a car.”
My throat was thick with unreleased sobs. I put my palm out the window and let the night breeze waft over my fingers, still avoiding Finn’s eyes.
“So there I was, spending all my time either huddled in bed, telephoning refugee bureaus, or screwing boys I didn’t really like. By spring, I had to come home and tell my parents I was knocked up, ringless, and probably flunking out of Bennington. In the middle of all my mother’s screaming, my father asked me who the boy was—almost the only thing he said through the whole thing. I had to tell him, ‘There are six or seven possibilities, Dad.’ He hasn’t really talked to me since.”
He’d have to, once I came home minus the Little Problem. Wouldn’t he?
Finn cleared his throat softly. I waited in brittle misery for condemnation, maybe for an involuntary “Thank God I didn’t touch you.”
“Are you the one who wants to go to Vevey? Or is it your parents?”
I couldn’t have been more surprised, so surprised I turned to face him for the first time. “Do I seem like I’m in any shape to be anybody’s mother?”
“I’m not judging that. I’m just asking if all these arrangements are what you want, or what they want.”
I don’t know what I want. No one had really asked. I was underage; my parents had made the decisions for me and taken it for granted I’d do as I was told. With that nasty little voice in my head telling me I failed at everything, that I’d failed to help James and Rose and now myself, I hadn’t even tried to figure out if I wanted something different. What did it matter what I wanted when I’d just fail if I tried to get it? I wanted Rose back, I wanted my future back, I wanted to save someone I loved for once instead of watching them disappear into grief or war or death, and I didn’t know how to make any of those things happen.
Suddenly I was floundering, Finn’s soft words lighting a flare of anger in me because they got under the brittle protective shell I’d put up. I could bounce insults off that shell all day—tramp, whore, slut, I’d heard them all, and I’d turn those words on myself to save anyone else the trouble. I could pretend all day that I didn’t care, because caring left me thrashing and vulnerable. “Why are you being so nice to me, Finn? Don’t you think I’m a murderer for wanting to get rid of it?”
“I’m an ex-convict,” he replied quietly. “I haven’t got the right to sling names at anybody.”
“You’re so strange,” I said, close to tears, and Finn reached out to pull me against his shoulder. I turned my burning eyes into his shirt, breath hitching. Before the Little Problem I did nothing but cry—since the day I’d told my parents, I hadn’t cried a drop. I couldn’t start again now, or I’d never stop. Finn smelled like smoke and engine grease and a fast wind; I sat with my cheek against his chest and my shoulders heaving, and he smoked his cigarette down to the filter.
Distantly I heard bells chime the hour. Three in the morning. Finn flicked the butt out the window and I sat up, pressing at my eyes with the heel of my hand. They hadn’t quite overflowed, but it had been a near thing.
He lifted his arm, and I slid across the backseat of the Lagonda toward the door. “Charlie lass,” he said, and my name in his deep soft voice arrested me, made me look back over my shoulder. He was gazing at me full on, and maybe my eyes were used to the dark by now, because I could see his eyes under their straight black brows clear as day. “Do what you want,” he said. “It’s your life and your bairn. You might be underage, but it’s still your life. Not your parents’.”
“They mean well. Even when I’m furious at them, I know they mean well.” Why was I talking so frankly? I hadn’t talked about the Little Problem with anyone, not like this. “Finn . . .” I started to say good-bye, but we’d already said good-bye in the hotel’s court. This whole late-night interlude hadn’t really happened at all.
He was still waiting.
“Thank you,” I said at last, my voice hoarse. And I slid out of the car and turned back toward the hotel. Finn didn’t say anything at all that I could hear. I heard his voice anyway.
Do what you want.
CHAPTER 14
EVE
July 1915
The biggest secret in Lille dropped into Eve’s ear like a diamond. Kommandant Hoffman and General von Heinrich had their usual table, and Eve was just gliding up to clear away the remains of the chocolate mousse when she heard it: “—private inspection at the front,” the general said
, sounding anxious. “The kaiser will pass through Lille in two weeks’ time.”
Eve continued to clear dessert plates without a flicker.
“A suitable welcome should be prepared, even if the inspection is clandestine. He must not find our attentions wanting. A small deputation to greet his train—what line will he be traveling?”
Please, Eve begged silently. The train and the date!
The general listed both, peering fussily at a notebook to check that he had it all correct. So German, this attention to tiny details, and Eve thanked God for it. She withdrew before it looked like she was dawdling, feet barely touching the ground. She knew when the kaiser—the kaiser!—was coming to the front. Lili would whoop like a banshee. “Parbleu, little daisy, well done! We will bomb that shit-brained bastard into bits, and this war will be finished!”
“What are you smiling at?” the other waitress whispered. A dim-witted corn blonde named Christine who had long since replaced the heavy-footed Amélie. “What have we got to smile about?”
“Nothing.” Eve took her place against the wall, wiping her face of emotion, but her heart was leaping like love at first sight. This war could be over. The trenches filled with dying men and glue-like mud; the starvation and the humiliation of poor abused Lille; the drone of aeroplanes and the muffled explosion of artillery over the horizon—all ended. Eve imagined yanking down the German street sign nailed up over the French one on her block, and stamping it to bits as victory bells pealed.
The clock had never moved so slowly. “Can you take up the books to Monsieur René?” Eve pleaded with Christine as they finished their final sweep-up. “I need to g-get home.”
Christine shivered. “He scares me.”
“Just look at the f-floor and say yes and no until you’re d-dismissed.”
“I can’t. He scares me!”
Eve wanted to roll her eyes. Why on earth did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway? Why were so many women such timid ninnies? She thought of Lili’s lion-hearted swagger, Violette’s dour and ferocious endurance. Now those were women.
She put the ledger off on the headwaiter and was out the door. Past midnight, the moon very high and nearly full—a bad night for sneaking across borders. Lili would be back through Lille soon . . .
“Fraulein!” The bark of a German voice, German boots behind her. “It is past curfew.”
“I have an exemption.” Eve scrabbled in her handbag for her identity cards and the various other bits of paper. “I work at Le Lethe; the shift has j-j-just ended.”
The German was young, officious, his face marked with acne. “Let’s see this exemption, Fraulein.”
Eve cursed silently, pawing through her bag. It wasn’t here—she’d had to empty everything out on the bed this morning so she could unpick the bag’s lining and make a better smuggling space for her coded messages. The card with her curfew exemption must be sitting on her counterpane. “I’m sorry, I don’t have it. The restaurant is just there, they can c-confirm that I—”
“Do you know the penalty for breaking curfew?” the German snapped, looking pleased to have someone to write up, but a smooth metallic voice sounded from the darkness behind Eve.
“I assure you, the girl works for me. Her papers are in order.”
René Bordelon came to stand beside Eve, his silver-headed cane gleaming in the moonlight. He tipped his hat at the perfect angle of courtesy and carelessness. He must have foregone tonight’s look at the ledger for a walk under the summer moon.
“Herr Bordelon—”
René smiled in polite contempt, taking Eve’s arm. “You may take the matter to Kommandant Hoffman if you wish. Good night.”
He moved Eve along, and the breath that had stuck in her throat let out. “T-thank you, monsieur.”
“Not at all. I have no objection to serving Germans when they are civilized, but I enjoy putting the rude ones in their place.”
Eve tugged her arm from his hand. “I would not d-dream of delaying you further, s-sir.”
“Not at all.” He took hold of her elbow again. “You are without papers; I will see you to your door.”
He was acting the gentleman. But he wasn’t one, so what did he want? It had been two nights since their last conversation which had so unnerved Eve; her pulse thrummed, but as much as she wished to avoid her employer, she knew she couldn’t refuse. She fell into step beside him, preparing to ratchet up her stammer. If he wanted to probe her further, this was going to be the slowest conversation in history.
“You’ve had stars in your eyes all evening,” he observed. “Can you be in love, Mademoiselle Le François?”
“No, m-m-m-monsieur. I have no t-t-time for such things.” I have a kaiser to kill.
“Still, something has put a light in your eye.”
Incipient regicide. No, don’t think that. “I am g-g-grateful for all I have, monsieur.” They made the turn away from the river. Just a few more blocks—
“You are very silent,” he said. “I have met few quiet women. It makes me wonder what you are thinking. That’s curious to me. I don’t normally care what goes on in a woman’s head, because it’s usually banal. Are you banal, mademoiselle?”
“I’m very ordinary, m-m-m-monsieur.”
“I wonder.”
Do not wonder that. She should chatter the way thoughtless, witless Christine did. Bore him with inanities. “W-why do you call it L-L-Le Lethe, monsieur?” Eve asked the first thing that came to mind.
“More Baudelaire,” he answered. “‘Nothing can match the abyss of your bed, potent oblivion lingers on your lips, and Lethe flows in your kisses.’”
That was a great deal more sensuality than Eve felt comfortable introducing into this conversation. “P-p-pretty,” she murmured, speeding up her steps. Just a block more—
“Pretty? No. But potent.” His hand at her elbow held her back from rushing, his fingers so long they entirely circled her arm. “Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness. That is what a restaurant like mine offers in a time of war—an oasis of civilization where one may forget the horrors outside for a few hours. There is no horror that cannot be forgotten, mademoiselle, given the right drug for the senses. Food is one. Drink is another. The pull between a woman’s thighs is a third.”
He said it so casually, the vulgarity in his perfect toneless voice, that Eve blushed scarlet. Good, she managed to think. Marguerite would blush. Dear God, get me home!
“Are you blushing?” He tilted his head to look down at her, the silver threads at his temples glinting in the moonlight. “I wondered if you would. Your eyes don’t give much away. Windows to the soul? Not so much with you. ‘My girl has eyes, deep, profound, and immense,’” he quoted to Eve’s growing unease. “‘Their flames are thoughts of love mingled with faith, which glitter in their depths—voluptuous or chaste.’” His own eyes were unblinking as they held hers. “I have been wondering about that last part, Mademoiselle Le François. Voluptuous or chaste?” He touched a fingertip to her hot cheek. “From the blush, I would say the latter.”
“A lady does not d-d-discuss such things,” Eve managed to say.
“Don’t be bourgeois. It doesn’t suit you.”
Thank God, they had reached Eve’s door. She stepped into the deep overhang and fumbled for her key, feeling a trickle of sweat run the length of her spine under her dress. “G-good night, monsieur,” she said brightly, but he stepped into the shadow of the overhang with her, crowding her unhurriedly back against the door. She couldn’t see his face, but she smelled expensive cologne and hair oil as he bent his head. His narrow mouth brushed lightly, not over her lips but over the hollow at the base of her throat. His tongue was cool as he tasted her skin.
She stood pinned against the door by that feather-fine touch, too stunned to move.
“I wondered how you’d taste,” he said at length, step
ping back. “Cheap soap, sweetness beneath. Lily-of-the-valley soap would suit better. Something light, sweet, fragrant, young.”
There was nothing in Eve’s training at Folkestone, her reams of advice from Lili, or her previous lives in London or Nancy that suggested any kind of response. So she said nothing, standing still as an animal caught in bright light. He will leave. He will leave, and you can sit on the bed and compile your report for Lili. The kaiser is coming to Lille. But the glory of that golden information had left her for the moment. She didn’t dare even bring it fully into her mind with René Bordelon’s razor-sharp eyes so close to hers.
He hooked his silver-headed cane over his arm, tipping his hat to her. A perfect gentleman’s farewell. “I would like to have you,” he said conversationally. “An odd choice for me; I don’t normally like raw virgins or cheap soap, but you have a certain ungroomed elegance. Consider it.”
Oh, sweet God, Eve thought. And didn’t move until he replaced his hat and began his elegant saunter back down the street.
One of her neighbors must have been awake, because a window creaked open two houses down. Eve had a moment to be glad of the deep overhang—no one could have seen her getting her throat licked by a man who was known to take brandy with the Kommandant. Bile rose in Eve’s throat, and she reached up to scrub at the moistened hollow in her collarbone.
Safely hidden by darkness, Eve’s neighbor called down at René Bordelon’s retreating figure. “Collaborator!” the hiss came, and spittle landed in the street.
He turned and raised his hat to his unseen assailant. “Bon soir,” he said with a small bow, and his soft chuckle sounded through the night.
Parbleu, little daisy, well done!” Lili grinned at Eve’s report. “Two more weeks and a lucky air raid, and this war could be done!”
Eve smiled, but her triumph tonight was muted. “The kaiser’s councilors, his industrialists, anyone profiting from the fight would press to continue.” A machine like a war was a vast thing, not easily stopped once set in motion; Eve knew that.