The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  Something in me started to shriek.

  “Please,” I begged, and my voice cracked. “Tell me she wasn’t here. Tell me she was in Limoges. Tell me she wasn’t here.”

  A long silence from Madame Rouffanche. She looked at the photograph, Rose’s laughing face, and I saw her sinking again—back down to the endless loop of JunetenthJunetenthJunetenth. “Inside the church,” she said, “there were three windows high in the wall—I went to the middle one, the biggest, and pulled up the stool the priest used to light the candles. I heaved myself up, and flung myself out. I fell about ten feet.”

  Almost exactly the same words she had used telling it the first time, I realized in my daze of horror. How many times had she told this story to people like me, people looking for loved ones, that her tale had hardened into such a rigid sequence, the same words in the same order? Was that how she kept herself sane while she raked over her memories every day for our benefit? “Madame, please—”

  She was walking again, back the way we’d come, her steps uneven and mindless. I ran to keep up. “A woman tried to follow me out the window.” Pause. Blink. Then the tale changed, as we came back to the dark broken window where Madame Rouffanche had jumped three years ago. “When I looked up—” She looked up now, and my eyes flew to follow hers. I saw what she described. I saw what she’d seen. “I’d been followed by a woman, who was holding out her baby to me from the window.”

  I saw a blond head, pale arms reaching down from that window. Here.

  “I took the child—it was screaming in fear.”

  I saw the wailing bundle, the waving fists.

  “The woman jumped, falling down next to me. She seized her baby from me and turned to run.”

  I saw the slim figure jump, graceful even in terror. I saw her white dress against the grass as she gathered herself up, grass stained and bloodstained, snatching the screaming bundle in her arms and darting toward safety—

  “But the Germans fired at us, dozens of shots. We fell.”

  I saw the fusillade of bullets, the hazy drift of gunsmoke. The chips of stone flying as the church wall was hit. The drops of blood on blond hair.

  “I was hit five times. I was able to crawl away.” Madame Rouffanche put the photograph gently back into my shaking hand. “But your friend—la belle Rose, and baby Charlotte—they were killed.”

  I heard a rustle then, and I closed my eyes. It was the rustle of a summer dress rippled by warm wind. Rose was standing right behind me—if I turned, I would see her. I’d see her white dress stained red, I’d see the bullets that had gone through her soft throat and her sparkling eyes. I’d see her lying crumpled, legs twitching as she still tried with all her brave heart to flee. I’d see her child in her arms, the baby I’d never meet, the baby who would never grow up to be a big sister to mine. The baby she had named Charlotte.

  Rose stood behind me, breathing. Only she wasn’t breathing. She’d been dead three years. She was gone, and all my hopes were lies.

  CHAPTER 24

  EVE

  October 1915

  She died in a hail of bullets. The details blared from smuggled newspapers, and everyone read them, sickened and fascinated. She was executed by firing squad in Belgium: a Red Cross nurse and English spy, instantly famous, heroine and martyr to all. Her name was everywhere.

  Edith Cavell.

  Not Violette Lameron. Edith Cavell was dead, but Violette, from what the Alice Network could glean, was still alive.

  “Cavell looks like Violette,” Eve said, devouring the forbidden newspaper in private. Cavell had been arrested in August, but only now had the execution marched to its brutal conclusion. “It’s the eyes.” Most of the pictures of Edith Cavell were romanticized; she was drawn swooning before the row of guns, her photographs touched up to make her look fragile and feminine. But Eve thought the eyes were anything but fragile. Edith Cavell had helped smuggle hundreds of soldiers from Belgium—it was no job for the fragile. She had hard matter-of-fact eyes like Violette, like Lili, like Eve herself. Another fleur du mal, Eve thought.

  “This is good. Not to be brutal, but Cavell’s death is nothing but good for Violette.” Lili was pacing the room—since Violette’s arrest nearly three weeks ago she’d been lying low, hiding out with Eve. Hiding didn’t suit her. She paced like a caged tigress, her small face tense. “The Germans are being so condemned for Cavell’s execution, they won’t dare march another female out before a firing squad.”

  What are they doing to her instead? Eve wondered, full of dread. Torture wasn’t common among the Germans and their prisoners, even for spies. Interrogation, beatings, imprisonment, yes—and of course there was the looming fear of execution. But though you might be shot, you wouldn’t have your fingernails pulled out first; everyone in the network knew that.

  Yet what if they had made an exception for Violette?

  Eve didn’t voice that thought, knowing Lili was already in agony. So was Eve whenever she remembered Violette’s hands tending to her so gently, trying to warm the steel instruments. Without Violette, Eve would be stuck right now with René’s seed consuming her. Or she would be dead, because without Violette’s expertise she’d have been mad enough to try any potion, any poison that would do the job. Eve owed Violette so much.

  “They’ll be questioning her.” Lili’s shoulders sagged as she paced. “Antoine says they have nothing definite. She wasn’t caught with papers. Her name was given up when a Brussels boy in the network got taken; all he knew was her name. So the Huns will question her, but if they dig for a weak spot on Violette, all they’ll find is bedrock.”

  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.”

  “Talk sense, Lili.”

  “Uncle Edward would never contradict a superior openly, but he has . . . ways of making his disagreement known. Clearly he fought the decision to keep us in place. Fought it hard. Without quite putting it into words, he makes it clear that he thinks it far too dangerous for us to continue in operation here. He fears that Violette will be executed like Cavell, and that we’ll be caught and suffer the same fate.”

  “We might.” Eve had lived with that fear so long, it seemed normal. “The Fritzes are cracking down. It’s not as if they’ve failed to notice that they have dozens of kilometers of front here where they can’t keep artillery functioning longer than a fortnight.”

  Lili let out a long sigh of smoke. “Uncle Edward thinks Mustache is an idiot, but can’t countermand his direct orders. However, the hint has come very obliquely that if we were to request a transfer from Lille, pleading exhaustion or nerves, he could make it happen.”

  Eve stared. “As if soldiers can simply beg off their orders—”

  “Ordinary soldiers, no. Those in our line of work are different. An asset on the verge of emotional breakdown cannot be relied upon. We’d just cause damage in place; it’s far safer to yank us. So . . .”

  “So.” For a moment Eve let the heady vision swamp her. No more semistarvation and German clocks and cool-skinned hands on her body. No more dreams of bullets in the back. No more danger—but that too carried a flip-side consequence. “If we p-plead out, would they re-establish us elsewhere to work? Belgium, or—”

  “Probably not.” Lili flicked ash from her cigarette. “We’d be the girls who fell apart under pressure. No one puts a cracked cup back on the table and trusts it to stay in one piece.”

  Go home now, and the fight would be done. However long this war went on, Eve’s chance to contribute would be over.

  “We should probably do it.” Lili’s tone was objective. “Beg out. I trust Uncle Edward’s instincts over Mustache’s any day. If he thinks the danger is too great, he’s probably right.”

  “Yes,” Eve acknowledged. “But we have a direct order to stay, regardless. An order. And it’s just for a few more weeks. If we keep our heads down, then once we’re recalled we’ll be sent somewhere new to work.”

  “And we have been lucky so far.” Lili shrugged thin shoulders. “Better than lucky, we have been good.”

  Eve let out a long breath, releasing the heady vision of home. “Then I say we stick it out. At least a little l-longer.”

  “I’d decided that for myself already, but I didn’t want to unfairly influence you. You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s settled, then.” Lili inspected her cigarette butt. “Damn. I’ve been saving this for a fortnight, and all I got out of it was two good puffs. I can’t tell you how I love this primitive life . . .”

  Eve reached out, gripping Lili’s free hand. “Promise me you will be more careful. I worry about you.”

  “What’s the use of worrying?” Lili wrinkled her nose. “Back in September, you know, I let the worrying get to me. I had a premonition of sorts, so strong I went to visit my family. I was convinced I had to see them while I could, one last time . . . When I left, I kept thinking, ‘It’s all over now; I’m going to be caught and shot.’ And nothing happened, nothing at all. Worry is wasted time, little daisy.”

  Eve paused, choosing her words. “What if Violette is forced to give up your name?”

  “Even if they force her to tell about me, they cannot find me. I’m a handful of water, running everywhere.” Lili smiled. “I’ll vary
my routine, change my routes. I promise.” The smile faded. “Mustache is right about one thing: this won’t last much longer, of that I’m sure. There’s been a big push through Champagne; they’re sure to break through by the New Year. We’ve only to hold on a little while more.” Softly. “And then Violette will be released. If they’ll only give her a prison sentence—she can survive that.”

  “What if it isn’t just a few m-months?” Eve had only been in Lille for a matter of months, but it might as well be an eternity. “What if this war lasts years?”

  “Then it’s years,” Lili said. “What of it?”

  What of it indeed? And neither of them gave any more thought to pleading their way home.

  The news dropped into Eve’s ear just a few days later via Kommandant Hoffman and a pair of colonels, all well into their brandies. Not quite a nugget like the news of the kaiser’s visit, but important enough to make Eve’s ears prick up.

  “You’re certain?” Lili was back on her rounds, having had new identity cards made in case her old names had been disclosed.

  Eve nodded, perching on the edge of the rickety table. “The Germans mean to launch a massive assault in January or February of the new year. Confirmed.”

  “The target?”

  “Verdun.” Eve shivered slightly. There was something about the name of that place she’d never seen. A flat finality. It sounds like a killing ground. But it wouldn’t be if the generals were forewarned. Perhaps Verdun would mark the end to the killing.

  “It’s a risk to you, passing this on,” Lili judged. Not all Eve’s information could be passed, not if acting on it might expose a leak in Le Lethe.

  “This is important,” Eve answered. “It’s for information like this that we didn’t beg to go home.”

  Lili weighed that, but finally assented. “I was already scheduled to meet Uncle Edward in Tournai in two days. You’ll have to come with me. For something like this, they’ll question us both, as they did for the kaiser report.”