The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  “You’re not going to look for Rose, are you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Because Rose is dead!” she snapped at last. “You know that, Charlotte!”

  “Possibly. Maybe even probably.” I tried to be fair, even in my anger. “But that isn’t good enough for me, and you promised I could run it to the end. For peace of mind, if nothing else.” A pause. “If Dad won’t pick the search up again, can you honestly tell me you’ll push him for me?”

  She exhaled sharply. “I’m going to pay for our rooms. Try to compose yourself.”

  Off she marched in angry little steps, heels clicking. I stood with the luggage, feeling strange and brittle as glass, and when I looked across the hotel court I saw Rose. Not really, of course—it was just a sullen pimple-pocked girl leaning against the broad window waiting for her parents to finish checking in—but the French sunlight made a halo out of her blond head, shadowing her face, and for a moment I let myself believe it was Rose. Rose looking right at me, shaking her head a little.

  You’re not a child, Charlie, I imagined her saying. Or a coward.

  She’d always been brave. Even when she was afraid of being alone, of being abandoned, like that day in the Provençal café, she was still brave. She must have been terrified when she found out she was in the fix I was in now, and yet she hadn’t given in when her parents tried to “arrange things” for her. She’d had her baby and then gone off to support it alone, much as that must have scared her.

  Finn’s voice echoed from last night. What do you want?

  To be brave, I thought.

  Do you know what that is? asked the Little Problem. Break it down like an equation. Solve for X. X = brave.

  I watched my mother close her pocketbook and move back toward me. I felt ill. I knew absolutely nothing about babies. They were little and helpless, greedy and breakable, and they terrified me. This one terrified me. I wasn’t ready for it. Not one bit.

  I took a deep breath as my mother joined me. “I’m not going to Vevey.”

  “What?” Her plucked brows arched. Over her shoulder, the pimply girl I’d momentarily turned into Rose went trailing off after her parents, shattering the illusion.

  “I’m not going to the Appointment,” I said.

  “Charlotte, we are done arguing about this. Done. You agreed to go—”

  “No.” I heard my words as though they were coming out of someone else’s mouth. “I’m not getting rid of it. I’m keeping it.”

  You’d think a decision that momentous would come with some sense of relief or catharsis. Not one bit. I felt so sick and so scared. But I was also hungry. Starving, in fact. And I told the Little Problem, rather experimentally, I’m going to feed you up.

  It seemed to like that idea. Bacon, it said.

  I should probably come up with a name for it other than the L.P.

  “Charlotte, we both know this is the only option, so—”

  “It’s not the only option.” I had never interrupted my mother, but I interrupted her now. “It’s the option that makes the least amount of trouble for you. I get taken care of, and that means Dad doesn’t have to tell his partners anything embarrassing, and you don’t have to tell your bridge club. I know you mean well, but this is not the only option. I don’t have to take it.”

  Her face tightened with fury, and her voice sank at last to a venomous whisper. “And how are you going to live, you ungrateful little tramp? No respectable man will ever marry a girl with a bastard. How do you think you’re going to manage?”

  “I have money, Maman. Money I have earned, not just my trust fund. I can work. I can take care of myself. I am not helpless.” I repeated it stubbornly because it was true, dammit, no matter how much the murmur of failure failure failure sounded in my head. I could balance a checkbook better than my mother and I could mount a search for Rose better than my father, and maybe I’d failed James but that didn’t mean I’d fail at everything. “I am not. Helpless.”

  “Yes, you are! How do you think you are going to take care of a baby?”

  “I guess I’ll have to learn.” There was a vast mountain of things piling up that I was going to have to learn, but just because that was terrifying didn’t mean I wasn’t up to it. “I don’t know much about babies, but I’ve got six months to figure it out. And I know one other thing. I know that right here, right now, I’m going to keep looking for Rose.”

  I picked up my traveling case. Maman’s hand flashed out, seizing my wrist. “If you walk away now, don’t even think about coming home.”

  That hit me like a kick. But I set my chin at her, and said, “You never noticed when I was home. I don’t think this will make much of a difference.”

  I tugged against her grip, but her fingers tightened. “You are not going anywhere, Charlotte St. Clair, except to the train station. You are underage, and I can make you—” She was shouting. My very proper mother, so concerned with what people would think, shouting like a fishwife. All over the hotel court, people stared. I shouted right back.

  “You just threw me out, Maman. I’m not going anywhere with you.” I gave a yank, but she held fast.

  “Do not take that tone with me!”

  A soft, angry voice sounded behind me. The soft, angry voice of a Scotsman. “Is there trouble here, miss?”

  “None at all, Finn.” I yanked my arm again and this time got loose. I looked up at him. He had Eve’s satchel over one shoulder and the convertible’s keys in his hand—he and Eve must be checking out. “Is there room in the Lagonda for me?”

  He grinned and picked up my traveling case.

  My mother stared at him, taking in his rumpled shirt and rolled-up sleeves, the dark stubble of his jaw. “Who—” she began, but that was when Eve came stamping up.

  “Christ, Finn,” she said in her raspy pre-noon snarl. “I see you found the Yank.”

  “She comes or you don’t,” Finn said.

  “You work for me!”

  “It’s my car.”

  Something warm vibrated in my stomach. I’d had some thought of going to Limoges by train, but the idea of being able to hop back into that wonderful car—! I loved that car. It comforted me more than the home I’d just been thrown out of. I looked up at Finn and my throat was thick as I said, “Thank you.”

  “Didn’t believe we’d seen the last of you in any event.” Eve, surprisingly, sounded more approving than irritated. “Americans are harder to scrape off than barnacles.”

  “Who is this?” My mother managed to get the entire question out this time.

  Eve looked at her. What a pair they made: my fashionable wasp-waisted mother in her exquisite hat and spotless gloves; tattered Eve with her old dress and lobster-claw hands. Eve gave that imperious raptor gaze down her nose until Maman’s eyes flickered. “You must be the mother,” she said at last. “I don’t see any resemblance.”

  “How dare you—”

  “Eve,” I plunged in. “I’m going to look for my cousin, and somewhere in that whole mess is a man you’re afraid of. I think you should find out if he’s alive or dead. I think you should come with me.”

  I don’t know why I said it. Eve and her moods and her pistol complicated everything; I’d move faster without her. But I’d made myself be brave today, no matter how much it terrified me, and I wanted Eve to be brave too—to be the unflinching, swearing woman who’d lied her head off to a pawnbroker so I could hock my pearls, and demanded answers from a china-shop clerk who hated her guts. I didn’t want Eve running back to England to hide in number 10 Hampson Street. It seemed beneath her, somehow.

  I wanted something for myself too. I wanted to know what had happened to Eve during the occupation of Lille, not just to her hands but to her soul.

  I tried to think of an eloquent way to say all that, but I couldn’t think of one. All I could say was, “I want to hear the rest of your story.”

  “It’s not a pretty story,” she said. “And it lacks an ending.”

  “So write the
ending now.” I planted hands on hips, challenging. “You’re half-cocked, but you’re no coward. So what do you say? In or out?”

  “Who are these people? Charlotte!”

  I took no notice of my mother. She’d gone from directing my life to being utterly outside it. But Eve spared her a glance.

  “I’m not coming if Mumsy is. I’ve spent all of thirty seconds in her company, and she is twice as bloody annoying as you. A day on the road and I’d probably shoot her.”

  “She’s not coming.” I looked at my mother, and a last stab of tangled anger and love rippled through me, the final dying urge to do whatever she wanted. Then it was gone. “Good-bye.” I probably should have said something more. But what was there to say?

  Her eyes were traveling wildly from Finn to Eve and back again. “You can’t just drive off with—with—”

  “Finn Kilgore,” Finn spoke up unexpectedly. He reached out a hand, and automatically my mother shook it. “Lately of His Majesty’s prison in Pentonville.”

  She dropped his hand like it had grown thorns, lips parting.

  “And before you ask,” Finn added in polite tones, “assault. Chucking annoying Americans in the Thames. Good day, ma’am.”

  He shouldered my luggage and headed for the doors. Eve lit a cigarette, turning to follow, and looked over one shoulder. “You want to hear this story of mine or not, Yank?”

  One last look at my mother. She just stared at me as if she didn’t know me. “I love you,” I said, then walked out of the hotel onto the busy streets of Roubaix. I was light-headed. Sick. Elated. Overwhelmed. My palms were sweating, and my whole mind was a whirling roar of noise. But one thing was very clear.

  “Breakfast,” I said when Finn brought the Lagonda around with the top down. I gave the old girl’s dashboard a pat as I climbed in. “We’re aiming for Limoges, but first we get the biggest breakfast we can find in Roubaix. This baby is telling me she wants to be fed.”

  “It’s a she?” Eve asked.

  “So she tells me.”

  What a lot of things I was learning today. And so many still to go.

  CHAPTER 16

  EVE

  July 1915

  In ten days, the kaiser would be dead. That was what Eve told herself.

  “Hurry up!” Lili urged, quickening her pace up the hill. Eve’s hair was sticking to her neck, but Lili seemed impervious to the summer heat, striding with her skirts kilted up, hat slung back. “Slow-coach!”

  Eve hitched the bundled blanket under her arm as she lengthened her stride. Lili knew the countryside around Lille like the back of her hand. “Mon Dieu, but it’s nice to be tramping these hills in daylight for once, and not in the dark of the damned moon with bedraggled pilots in tow! There, one more hill—”

  She broke into an outright sprint, straight up the slope. Eve glared, bathed in sweat and realizing how the past six weeks of scant food had cut into her stamina, but her spirits rose as she came out onto the brow of the hill. The day was cloudless, the grassy slope green-gold in the sunlight. They were only a few miles outside Lille, but it was like slipping out from under a dark cloud to get away from the German signs and the German soldiers. Not that things were all roses in the countryside. Each of these small farms Eve and Lili passed had their share of hunger and hopelessness as well, pigs and butter and eggs confiscated by requisition parties. But up on this low hill, it was possible for a moment to pretend the hovering invaders were gone.

  And perhaps soon they would be gone. If the RFC did its job.

  The two women stood on the brow of the hill with identically folded arms, staring down at the train tracks stretching toward Germany. Ten days until the kaiser rattled down those tracks. Ten days, and the world could be a different place.

  “There,” Lili nodded down to the tracks. “I’ve been scouting the area, and so have Violette and Antoine.” Antoine was a deceptively meek-faced local bookseller who forged identification cards and passes under the table for Lili, besides Violette the only other member of the Alice Network Eve had met—a necessary introduction, in case she ever needed new papers in an emergency. “We all agree this stretch is the best spot for the strike.” Lili lifted her skirt and began unlacing her top petticoat. “God knows if the brass will take the suggestion.”

  “Spread a b-blanket,” Eve reminded her. “We’re on a picnic, remember?” Their cover story, if any German scouts found them here: Marguerite Le François and her seamstress friend, taking their meager sandwiches out to enjoy the fine weather. But when Eve spread the threadbare blanket, Lili didn’t bother with sandwiches. She produced a stick of charcoal and began mapping the surrounding ground in her quick notation on the spread-out petticoat. “It’s getting harder to get written papers through,” she said with a touch of her usual twinkle through the fierce concentration. “But those guards have no idea how much information can be written down on a woman’s petticoat.”

  “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 Françoise 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.