by Kate Quinn
Herr Rotselaer seized her by the arms and began to shake her then, so hard her head snapped back and forth. “You are a spy, a filthy spy, you are going to talk—”
But Lili said nothing. And then Eve was marched out of the room, sobbing so hard she could not speak. This time, the sobs were very real.
The captain gave her a stern lecture on the dangers of sharing official documentation, then seemed to relent in the face of her ceaseless tears. Partly in exasperation, partly in pity. “This is no place for a young girl,” he said, snapping his fingers at the clerks to issue a new safe-conduct pass. “You were very foolish, mademoiselle, but I’m sorry about all this unpleasantness.”
Eve couldn’t stop weeping. Lili, she thought wretchedly, oh, Lili! She wanted to wrench her arm away, turn and sprint back into that room where she could hear Rotselaer still ranting. She wanted to tear his throat out with her teeth, but she stayed where she was, crying into her hands as the German captain fussed and fluttered.
“Go home,” he said again, pressing the new safe-conduct pass into her palm, clearly wanting her out of his hair as fast as possible. “Go to Tournai, back to your parents. Go home.”
And Eve, clutching her new pass and feeling like Judas, turned her back on her friend and walked out of German captivity.
The meeting house in Tournai was small, dingy, indistinguishable from the houses stretching off on either side. Eve wearily climbed the steps and gave the prearranged knock. Her knuckles had barely dropped when the door was wrenched open. Captain Cameron stared at her in a split second’s shock, then yanked her inside the house and into his arms. “Thank God you had the sense to come,” he muttered. “Even after Violette was arrested, I thought you’d be too stubborn to leave.”
Eve inhaled the scents of tweed, pipe smoke, tea—he smelled so English. She was used to a man’s embrace smelling like Paris cologne, Gauloises cigarettes, absinthe.
Cameron pulled away, remembering himself. He was tieless, his collar unbuttoned, and great shadows of exhaustion showed under his eyes. “You had a safe journey, no trouble passing?”
Eve gulped a shaky breath. “Cameron, it’s Lili—”
“Where is she, delayed trying to get news of Violette? She risks too much—”
Eve almost screamed it. “Lili has been arrested.” Agony kicked her in the gut again. “She’s not coming. The Germans have her.”
“Oh, Christ.” Cameron said it very quietly, like a prayer. In a single breath, his face aged years. Eve began to spill explanations, but he silenced her. “Not here. This will need to be official.”
Of course. Everything had to be official, even utter disaster. Eve followed Cameron numbly into a cramped parlor, its fussy little tables shoved against the wall to make room for utilitarian file cabinets bursting with papers. Two men sat going through files, one a weedy clerk in his shirtsleeves, one an aggressively military sort with a waxed mustache who looked Eve up and down as she entered. Major George Allenton, aka Mustache. He was the one who’d made sure she knew all about Cameron’s prison record.
“This can’t be the famous Louise de B,” he said with heavy gallantry, clearly not remembering Eve from Folkestone. “Too young and pretty—”
“Not now, Major,” Cameron snapped, pulling up a chair for Eve, dismissing the clerk. “The Alice Network has been compromised.” Turning back as the door closed behind the clerk, Cameron sat across the table from Eve, moving like an old man. “Tell me.”
Eve told him, speaking in short flat sentences. By the time she finished, Cameron’s face was gray. But his eyes were full of taut anger, and he looked over at Allenton. “I argued,” he said quietly, “that it was too much of a risk to keep the women in place.”
Allenton shrugged. “Risks have to be taken in wartime.”
Eve nearly leaned across the table and slapped him, but restrained herself as she saw Cameron biting back what were clearly hot words. Allenton picked at his thumbnail, oblivious, and Cameron scrubbed his hands over his lined face. “Lili,” he said, and shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m shocked. She always took too many chances. But she got away with so much . . . I suppose I thought she would keep getting away with it forever.”
“She didn’t get away with it this time.” Eve felt so weary she didn’t know how she would ever rise from this chair. “They have her now, her and Violette. I hope the Fritzes will put them together. They can take anything together.”
Major Allenton shook his head. “Those Boches, letting you walk out—!”
“They th-thought I was a half-wit.” All that histrionic crying. Eve was nothing but a long shriek of grief inside, but she didn’t think she could summon a single tear now. She wanted to curl up in a ball like a dying animal, but she had a job to finish, so she recited the full report about Verdun, watching as Cameron’s eyes went from exhausted to alert. He began jotting notes, visibly pushing aside his grief. Major Allenton kept interrupting Eve with questions, to her irritation. Cameron always let her make her report in one long recitation, then combed back over it to expand on the particulars, but Allenton interrupted every other sentence.
“Verdun, you say?”
“Verdun.” Eve imagined ripping his waxed mustache off. “Confirmed.”
Allenton gave Cameron a rather down-the-nose glance. “This is why I made the call to leave her in place.”
“Of course.” Cameron exhaled. “I think you’ll agree Miss Gardiner should go to Folkestone now, however. There can be no option but to dissolve the Alice Network.”
“Why?” Allenton looked at Eve. “I say send her back to Lille.”
Eve’s heart sank, but she nodded weary assent. Cameron looked astonished, eyebrows climbing toward his sandy hair. “You cannot be serious.”
No one had addressed Eve, but she answered anyway. “I’ll go where I’m ordered. I have a job to do.”
“Your job is done.” Cameron turned back to her. “You’ve done top-class work, but the Lille area is far too dangerous to keep running informants. Without Lili the entire network will come apart.”
“Someone else could run it.” Allenton shrugged. “This girl’s keen as mustard.”
Cameron’s voice was flat. “Allow me to register my disagreement in the strongest possible terms, Major.”
“Oh, it won’t be for long. A few more weeks.”
“However long I’m needed.” Eve pushed the dread away. She wasn’t going to cry off when there were lives at stake, no matter how much she wanted to. “I’ll catch the train back tonight.”
Cameron rose. His jaw was taut with fury, and his hand as he raised Eve from her chair wasn’t gentle. “Major, I’d like a word with Miss Gardiner in private. We’ll discuss this upstairs, if you don’t mind.”
Eve let him march her out of the parlor to the sound of Allenton chuckling. Up a flight of stairs to a makeshift bedroom, nothing but a narrow iron-framed bed piled with a few blankets. Cameron came into the room with her and banged the door behind him.
“C-coming into a lady’s bedroom uninvited?” Eve said. “You are upset.”
“Upset?” He was nearly whispering, voice vibrating with tension. “Yes, I am upset. You are refusing to beg out of an order that is clearly pure idiocy. I can only conclude you want to get yourself shot.”
“I’m a spy.” Eve set down her bag. “Some might say it’s my job to g-get shot. It’s certainly my job to follow orders.”
“I am telling you that order is absurd. You think there are no idiots in the intelligence business, that your superiors are all brilliant men who understand the game?” A furious hand waved in Major Allenton’s direction. “This business is rife with idiots. They play with lives and they play badly, and when people like you die as a result, they shrug and say, ‘Risks have to be taken in wartime.’ You’d really march yourself into a firing squad for that kind of fool?”
“I want to plead out, believe me.” Eve touched his sleeve, halting his furious outburst. “But I won’t claim to be b
-broken when I am not. If I get myself transferred out of Lille due to breakdown or exhaustion, I will never find more war work elsewhere.” She paused. Cameron raked a hand through his hair, but didn’t contradict her. “It’s just for a few more weeks,” Eve continued. “I can survive a few more weeks and then—”
“You know what he said when Edith Cavell was executed?” Cameron’s voice lowered, and he made another angry gesture in Allenton’s direction. “That it was the best thing that could have happened, because it got everyone on the home front angry at the right time. I do not like speaking ill of a fellow officer, but you must understand me: he wouldn’t care if you got caught like Violette and Lili, because dead girls mean more newspapers sold and more support for the boys in the trenches. I, however, am not in the habit of risking my people needlessly.”
“I’m not doing this needlessly—”
“You want revenge for Violette and Lili, because you love them. You want revenge, and if you can’t get it, you just want to die trying. Believe me, I know that feeling very well.”
“If I were a man you’d be calling me patriotic for wishing to continue in my duty to my country.” Eve folded her arms. “A woman wants the same thing and she’s suicidal.”
“An emotionally compromised asset is not an asset to her country. And your emotions are running far more wild than you let on. Anyone’s would be, in a situation like this one. You keep a calm face on, but I know you.”
“Then you know I will put emotion aside in the face of duty, just like any other soldier with orders to carry out. Like any man who takes the oath.”
“Eve, no. I forbid it.”
Calling her Eve—now there was a slip. She gave a wintry inner smile. He should know better than to give himself away like that.
“You will convince Allenton you’re unfit to return to Lille,” Cameron ordered, straightening his cuffs. “And then I’ll send you to Folkestone. I do not like circumventing a superior, but I see no other way. This matter is closed.”
He was turning, heading for the door. He’d go down and tell Allenton she was pleading breakdown, and that could not happen. Eve seized his hand, stopping him. “Stay with me,” she whispered.
He pulled back, his anger dropping away to something shuttered, wary. “Miss Gardiner—”
She reached up and tangled her hands in his undone collar, pressing her lips to the hollow of his neck. He smelled of Lifebuoy. “Eve.”
“I should not be here, Miss Gardiner.” His hands covered hers. Eve went up on her toes, whispering into his ear with a catch in her voice.
“Don’t leave me alone.”
It was a low blow, and she knew it. Cameron stopped, his hands warm on hers. She pressed, knowing just what to say.
“I saw Lili dragged away by Germans this morning. I . . . Please don’t leave me alone right now. I can’t b-bear it.”
Oh, but this was a dirty trick. It would only work because Cameron was a gentleman, a man who couldn’t bear to see a woman in distress. It wouldn’t work on René in a thousand years.
Cameron’s voice thickened. “I’ve lost friends too, Eve. I know what you’re feeling—”
“I want to be warm,” she murmured back, her hands slipping through his hair. How long had she wanted this? “I want to lie down, and be warm, and forget.”
“Eve—” He began to pull away again, his hand at her bare throat. The gold wedding band on his fourth finger warmed against her skin. “I can’t—”
“Please.” The grief stabbed her like a living thing. Even if just for a few minutes, she wanted to forget. She leaned up and kissed him, and the bed was at the back of her knees.
“I won’t take advantage of you,” he said, but he murmured it against her lips.
“Make me forget,” Eve whispered. “Make me forget, Cameron—” And he broke. He broke like a wall collapsing, pulling Eve against him with a stifled groan, and then they were drinking each other down, openmouthed and frantic. Eve pulled him to the bed before he could come to his senses, slipping the shirt from his shoulders. This was underhanded and wrong; she knew that. She didn’t start this out of passion, but because she meant to stop him from blocking her return to Lille. But that didn’t mean passion wasn’t there alongside the calculation, because truth was what made the best lies real. And the truth was that Eve had wanted Cameron for a very long time, since he looked at a stuttering file girl and saw a spy.
“Christ, Eve,” he said with agony in his eyes as he peeled her shirtwaist and chemise away and saw the bruises marking her bare arms from where the German guards had seized her. “Those filthy brutes—” He kissed each bruise, his hands spanning her ribs. “You’re too thin,” he breathed between kisses. “You poor brave girl—”
Eve pressed up to meet him, twining her legs through his, pulling him deep. She could probably fool him into thinking he was her first—she probably should fool him, act shy and awkward. It would be the wise thing, but she could not stand to act out another lie, not here. She didn’t act for René when it was his cool-skinned marble weight moving over her, and she wouldn’t act now when the man in her arms was freckle-shouldered and lanky, with a voice like a mist from Scotland, a man who actually closed his eyes when he kissed her. She wrapped herself around him, closing her own eyes and losing herself, and when it was done she found herself weeping silently in his arms.
“I know,” he said in a quiet voice, fingers stroking through her loose hair. “Believe me, Eve—I know. I’ve seen people I cared for captured too.”
She looked up at him, letting the tears fall. “Who?”
“A boy named Léon Trulin, one of my recruits. Not even nineteen . . . Arrested a few weeks ago. And there have been others.” Cameron passed a hand slowly through his gray-salted hair. “I never get used to it. This is a filthy business.”
It was a filthy business, and Eve was going right back to it, but hopefully she could distract him from that for a few hours yet. She turned in his arms, so close that her damp lashes brushed his cheek. “Is there tea?” she asked earnestly. “All I’ve had for months is boiled walnut leaves.”
He smiled, and it made years fall away from him. Soon he’d be guilt-torn and conscience-struck, Eve knew, lashing himself for taking advantage of his subordinate’s innocence and his wife’s absence, but for the moment he was content. “Yes,” he said with another smile. “Tea, and real sugar to put in it.”
She groaned, almost pushing him out of bed. “Then make some!”
He pulled on his trousers and slipped out, bare feet slapping the floorboards. So different from the way it usually was after bed: René’s cigarettes, his brocade robe, his pillow talk that Eve was busy parsing and filing . . . She didn’t want to think about René here, so she took the tea mug Cameron offered on returning and sipped, letting out a moan. “I could d-d-die right here.”
Part of her wished for that. Die now, sitting up in bed, her back against Cameron’s chest, and she wouldn’t have to think about Lille or the job that still waited, crouching implacable as a troll under a bridge. She turned the thought aside, but Cameron seemed to catch it.
“What are you thinking?” He pressed a lock of hair back behind her ear.
“Nothing.” Eve sipped her tea again.
Cameron hesitated, his hand stilling against her neck. “Eve . . . Who is he?”
Eve didn’t pretend not to understand. She had been a very innocent girl when he sent her to Lille, not the same girl who coiled herself so fiercely around him between these sheets. “He’s no one,” she said matter-of-factly. “Just someone who drops useful information over a p-pillow.”
Cameron said almost inaudibly, “Bordelon?”
A nod. She didn’t quite dare look up at him, but her heart lodged in her throat. He would have read the reports on René, who and what he was. If Cameron recoiled from her . . .
Well, it hardly mattered. She still had a job to do.
“You don’t have to go to him anymore.” Cameron set his tea mug
down and folded both arms tight around her. “I’ll be taking you to Folkestone tomorrow morning. You don’t ever have to see him again.”
Clearly he assumed that since she had stopped arguing, she’d agreed to beg out of her orders to return to Lille. For a moment Eve surrendered to that temptation. Go home, back to safety, England. Back to tea.
Then she sighed and let it go, putting aside her own mug and turning to rest her cheek against Cameron’s shoulder. He made some noise about getting up, but she pulled him down into the sheets. They made love one more time, tender and slow, Eve stifling her cries in his shoulder, and afterward Cameron dropped into exhausted sleep. Eve waited until his breathing settled into a deep rhythm, then slipped noiselessly out of bed and into her clothes. She looked at him for a moment, and wondered with a wrench if he would ever forgive her for this. Maybe he shouldn’t, she thought. He can’t afford to love me. Though she certainly loved him. She smoothed his sandy hair off his forehead, which was lined even in sleep as though he worried through his dreams, and then she headed downstairs.
Major Allenton smirked as she entered the makeshift file room. He undoubtedly suspected what had happened upstairs. Eve didn’t care. He was already committed to sending her back, whore or not. “I’ll need a pass,” she said without preamble. “I’m ready to catch the train back to Lille.”
That surprised him. “I thought Cameron might be trying to talk you out of obeying that order. He can be sneaky that way. It happens, you know, when military men mess about too long in a dirty business like spying. They get underhanded.”
Real dislike flickered across his face. After having to parse René’s minuscule facial expressions, watching the major’s thoughts work their way across his features was like watching a dog lumber around a city block on the end of a leash. Eve gave the leash just the tug it needed, dropping her lashes in doe-eyed obedience.
“You outrank Captain Cameron, sir. Of course I obey your orders. You want me to return, and I w-w-will.”
“You really are keen as mustard, aren’t you.” Pleased, the major reached for a pen. The weedy clerk had gone home; it was almost nightfall. The cheap lamps showed up all the places where the wallpaper was fading. “I can see why Cameron’s . . . fond of you.” His eyes roved over her again. “He’s been climbing the walls worrying over the network gels, but it’s really you he obsesses about.”