“Good evening, Evelyn. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve already eaten.” He tapped his wristwatch. “I need to be at the Savoy by ten to brief the Home Secretary on your investigation.”
After the waiter had brought over two coffees, Evelyn described her first encounter with the women of the Lion Society. “To be honest, it was all rather anodyne, sir,” she said. “Most of the night I felt like I had stumbled on a WI meeting, not the latest collective of the Valkyrie. Still, Nina put in a request, as you predicted: a list of typists from the War Office. She’s obviously eager to recruit.”
“Good,” White said. “I think half a dozen names should do it. Won’t be too tricky for the Ministry of Supply to rustle that up. And the next meet?”
“Sunday. Nina invited me along to Caxton Hall for the Chesterfield rally.”
White nodded. “You’re making progress, Evelyn.”
“I had also hoped to arrange an introduction to your old agent, Posey? I’m keen to pick her brains about the Woolwich Arsenal case.”
White stirred some sugar into his coffee then licked the spoon. Wind groaned at the glass. “Susanna? I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“Has she moved departments?”
White leaned back in his chair. He studied Evelyn as she drank from her small cup, something bleak moving across his features.
“She’s no longer in the Service,” he said. “In fact, she doesn’t live in London anymore. She emigrated to Australia after the trial.” There was a long pause and White’s eyes grew wide. “Didn’t I say?”
Evelyn stared at the grainy silt left in the bottom of her cup and shook her head. White spread his hands, a shrug his only apology. Outside, the wind had died away and the snow began to collect on the sill. As White sat there quietly, fiddling with the pewter candlestick holder, Evelyn wasn’t quite sure what to say. Finally he pushed out his chair and stood up.
“You don’t need to talk to Posey,” he said. “Everything you need to know about her, all her methods, was in that file. Even, if you needed reminding of it, the toll such an investigation can take on a person. Focus on that membership list, Evelyn—and on exposing the leaks.”
“All right.” Evelyn watched him turn toward the door. “By the way, do I have one, sir?”
White turned back. “One what?”
“A code name. In the reports that Ted is compiling from my investigation?”
“Oh, yes . . .” White tugged at his collar. “It’s Chameleon. Rather apt, wouldn’t you say?”
After he’d gone, Evelyn sat alone at the table, the coffee churning in her stomach. She had always thought it strange for Posey’s portrait to be in the file, but she wondered now if it had been an oblique message. Or perhaps even a warning.
Fourteen
AFTER A VISIT to the fruit and vegetable stalls at the Berwick Street market, Evelyn got changed back at the flat and made her way to Panton Street. She had arranged to meet Julia at the theater. They had tickets to the Saturday matinee of They Walk Alone by Max Catto, a play set to music about a servant girl who begins murdering young men from her village.
“It’s a comedy, then?” Evelyn asked as they found their seats in the loge.
“Do keep an open mind. I’ve heard terrific things, especially about the lead, Emmy.” Julia rubbed her hands together as the curtains rolled back. “I really did miss the West End when I was in Berlin,” she whispered. “Of course, they have plenty of theater and music too, but they go for all that feverish Mahler and Wagner, which I don’t like at all. And you know I can’t bring Sally to anything. She’s like a child, forever asking when she can be taken out for her ice cream.”
Evelyn smiled. “How is old Sal? She’s gone awfully quiet.”
Julia rolled her eyes as the lights dimmed. “She’s hardly been quiet at Curzon Street, I can assure you. Let’s just say if I hear the word wedding again I may go on a killing spree myself.”
Evelyn enjoyed the play. It was melodramatic, which was unsurprising, and the austere orchestral music was rather jarring alongside the high-pitched dialogue, but it was fun sitting up there in the box with Julia laughing at her side, aware of the admiring looks from the other theater-goers; Julia, dressed as she was in a gray pantsuit, a heavy necklace of jade against her slim throat, looked a little like an actress herself, Evelyn thought.
Afterward they walked over to Regent Street. Julia may not have wanted to hear about Sally’s wedding, but it was only six weeks away and Evelyn needed to find herself an outfit. They visited a few department stores, and then found a small modiste, Laurent & Co., down Regent Lane on Warwick Street, near the Catholic church. Evelyn had a look through the dresses, growing more and more dispirited, until she found what she wanted hanging on the end of the rack. It was made of pale blue silk, with silver buttons down the front and an apricot sash tied in a loose bow at the back. She checked the label—House of Worth—and asked the proprietress the price. It was twenty-five pounds, more than she could ever hope to afford.
“We’ll take it,” Julia said, sweeping past Evelyn toward the counter.
“What? No, Julia, we won’t.”
Julia brought out her checkbook. “What else should I spend my allowance on?”
“I don’t know. Certainly not on me.”
Julia looked at her and frowned. “But you’re my friend,” she said, as though she were explaining something very simple. “And it will give me pleasure.”
Evelyn felt her cheeks burn. She didn’t want to be Julia’s charity case. But the dress really was exquisite, the silk slipping through her fingers as cool and sleek as a stream. She’d never owned anything so fine, and with a pang she wondered what her mother would do in this situation.
Such an opportunity . . .
“I really can’t,” she said. “Please.”
But Julia put her hand on Evelyn’s arm. “Don’t think on it too much. Sometimes life gifts us beautiful things—and all we must do in return is enjoy them. Do be careful, though . . .” She bent over the counter to scribble her signature on the check. “You might just upstage the bride.”
“Goodness, don’t say that!” Evelyn covered her mouth. Sally could be capricious when she least expected it.
“Come on.” Julia handed over the large box tied with a lilac ribbon. “You can buy the wine at dinner to say thanks.”
They strolled the half-mile over to Covent Garden. The streets were quiet: it was that lull of the late afternoon, the sky a swatch of color as the sun sank, right before the evening roared to life. They headed up Southampton Street and stopped at Boulestin, a restaurant decorated with circus-themed murals, and took a table inside by the windows.
“It’s just like being in Paris.” Julia sighed happily. “You know André Groult did the decorations?” She snapped the menu shut. “Why am I looking at that? I know exactly what I’m having!”
They ordered a bottle of wine, a white from the Loire Valley, and Julia ordered the Basque piperade for herself, the escalope de veau Choisy for Evelyn, and the tarte Tatin to share for dessert. It was strange seeing Julia with an appetite; Evelyn wasn’t sure she had ever seen her eat.
“Hans and I used to go to Paris in the autumn,” she said, tearing into a fresh bread roll. “We’d stay in this little hotel in the fourth arrondissement around the corner from his favorite jazz club on Rue de Rivoli. It’s built into a twelfth-century vaulted cellar.” She paused, chewing. “We did have some good times together.”
“The fourth arrondissement,” Evelyn said. “That’s in the Marais, isn’t it?”
“Yes, the Jewish quarter.” Julia reached for her wine, watching Evelyn curiously. “Have you been to Paris?”
Evelyn shook her head. “Actually, I’ve never been out of England.”
Julia set down her glass. “Not even with your parents?” She stared, incredulous. “But you are so worldly, so clever.”
Evelyn laughed. “Is that something only achieved through travel?”
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p; “I think so. If I had stayed in England, I probably would have ended up in a gutter somewhere, penniless and disgraced.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, disgraced, certainly.” Julia rested her chin on her hand. “I don’t think I knew myself until I went to Berlin, and in an odd way I came to better understand others too. What we want as people, what we desire. What happens if we can’t get it.”
“Don’t we all desire the same sort of thing?” Evelyn said, drinking some wine. “Good health, an education and vocation, opportunity for our family.”
“Yes, I think so,” said Julia. “But what frustrates me is that we don’t need wealth for all that.”
“We do in England,” Evelyn murmured. “There is a great divide between the rich and the poor.”
“I agree. And that is the fault of government, isn’t it? We need strong leadership to bring about more opportunity, and stronger controls around our economy. It’s unbelievable what I’ve seen during my time at the Benevolent Society. The squalor of the Peabody Estate in Shadwell, for instance, where English children are literally starving to death. What kind of country can live with that on its conscience?”
Some people, Evelyn’s father included, would think Julia frivolous, spoiled even. Yet though it was true that Julia had led a privileged life, she seemed to Evelyn like someone willing to test the structures that shaped the world they all lived in rather than simply accepting them. Evelyn knew enough to understand how rare that was, and raising her eyes to the silk balloon lights hanging from the ceiling, she felt a warm spread of happiness.
“We must go,” Julia was saying as the waiter brought over their meals. “To Paris. When this ridiculous war is over. We’ll stay in the Marais and we’ll go to that jazz club.” She clapped her hands, excited. “Wouldn’t that be splendid?”
“What about your navy man?” Evelyn asked. “Wouldn’t he like to travel with you?”
“Yes, I imagine he would.”
“Is he coming to Sally’s wedding?”
“I don’t know.” Julia turned her face toward the window, squinting a little. “I haven’t decided.”
“And your father?”
“Oh, yes. He’ll be there.” Julia’s mouth twitched. “Along with his child bride.”
Evelyn glanced down at the table. Here was a sore point. She had heard from Sally that Julia’s stepmother was young—younger, even, than Julia.
“How long have they been married?”
“Two years. Being in Germany meant I missed the wedding. Everyone was relieved about that, especially my father.”
“You don’t get along, then—you and your stepmother?”
Julia picked up her knife and spread some butter on the roll. “She’s not my mother,” she said. “Why should I pretend to have any affection for her? Or for my father. I only ever loved him because my mother did.”
Evelyn stared at the glint of Julia’s knife. “How old were you when she died?”
“Ten.”
“And you were close?”
Julia blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I ever really knew her. I had a nanny, then a governess, and then I went away to school. I never spent more than an hour at a time in her company. She never visited me at school, barely wrote, but she did summon me home before she died. She knew, I think, how sick she was, even if my father didn’t. I was there in the room with her at the end . . .” Julia smiled faintly, but her eyes had grown glassy. “We’re told from childhood to love our parents. That it is unconditional, that it must never waver. A bit like love of one’s country, isn’t it? Oh, but what am I like!” she suddenly cried, dabbing at her eye with the corner of the napkin. “Did you put a truth serum in the wine, Evelyn? I never talk about my mother, not to anyone!”
“It’s quite all right,” Evelyn said, pleased that Julia had confided in her, and she signaled for the waiter to refill their glasses.
When he was gone, Julia began spooning the piperade into her mouth, and after a minute she sat back, her hands folded in her lap, a look of contentment returning to her face. Evelyn thought about her own mother standing at the kitchen sink, the slope of her shoulders, that fragile bun. She could see the course of their estrangement like footprints trailing down the hallway and out the front door, but for once it didn’t feel as though she had done something wrong.
Fifteen
ON SUNDAY, EVELYN walked through St. James’s Park and took the path alongside Horse Guards Road into Westminster. It had been a cold morning, the low, gray sky threatening rain, but some blue had now crept in among the clouds. Crowds of well-dressed men and women in dark suits and coats were swirling beneath the marquee signage of Caxton Hall as though arriving for a gala or theater show.
Evelyn met Nina by the front steps and they went inside, pausing to inspect the pamphlets being sold from a trestle table on the edge of the foyer before heading up the wooden staircase beneath the long stained-glass window. Their seats were in the western parterre box where Mrs. Randall already sat, her opera glasses out, smiling and waving as she recognized faces in the crowd. Mrs. Guthrie and Miss de Crespigny from the Lion Society sat in the row behind.
Evelyn gazed over the expanse of the hall, craning her neck to take in the stalls. The venue was full, there must have been three thousand people there, and the room vibrated with the cacophony of shrill voices. All of a sudden, the main lights went out, a spotlight pierced the stage, and a man shuffled out to the microphone by the stalls on the right. After thanking the Anglo-German Fellowship for sponsoring the lecture, he introduced B. L. Chesterfield, an unremarkable-looking man in a brown suit. The audience clapped excitedly as he brought out his notes.
“Some of you are probably wondering if this war will ever start in earnest,” he began, squinting into the black sea before him. “And you have a right to wonder. We have been kept in this purgatory for months now and are still no closer to breaking free. Of course, we all know how the tension began. Herr Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; there is no denying that. But invasion and colonization are the story of empire. Of our empire. They are what make nations like ours great powers of this world. And so what should have been considered as an inevitable, even favorable, expansion by our friends in Berlin was taken up as an emblem of fear by the hysterical left-wing press.” He paused, dropping the papers to stare into the audience, and when he spoke again it was without his notes. “I am not alone in this belief. Not only is this war a needless one, it is an immoral one. And whom should we blame when our sons are killed in battle? The Jew, my friends, who has stoked tensions here and on the Continent, hindering our efforts to secure peace with Germany.”
The crowd cheered and stamped their feet. In the dark, Evelyn could make out Mrs. Randall’s furious nodding, while Nina was leaning forward, her hands gripping her knees as she stared down at the stage. A smile fluttered on Chesterfield’s thin lips as he held up a hand for quiet.
“Let me give you an example of their lies,” he cried. “Some of you may have heard of Kristallnacht, when the Nazi stormtroopers entered Jewish quarters across Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland. It was a bloody affair, to be sure, with Germans and Jews both killed in equal numbers. The newspapers, your Mirrors and your Daily Heralds, blamed the Sturmabteilung, which was to be expected, since our press is almost entirely run by Jews and their supporters. But what these newspapers didn’t tell us was the truth: that the Germans only acted in retaliation; that the pogroms began after the German official Ernst vom Rath was murdered in Paris—not by a deranged Pole, but at the behest of a secret Jewish cabal based right here in London. The conspiracy starts on our very doorstep, my friends, and we must stand together to rid our country and our people of this pernicious, filthy stain, and seek peace with Germany to end this war.”
The crowd roared again, louder and more febrile.
It’s mad, Evelyn thought, peering into the stalls. The worst kind of propaganda, trawling the sewers of a depraved mind. But
his audience didn’t care, she realized, her blood running cold. Truth didn’t matter. These people had come because they knew they would have their insane beliefs confirmed.
Evelyn could sense Nina’s gleaming eyes searching out hers in the dark, her small hands finally coming together in vigorous applause. Tears pricked Evelyn’s eyes as she joined in, louder and more raucous than the rest of them, her thoughts fixed on Vincent and his mother, and that haunted look in the photograph, as if Anna had had some terrible knowledge not only of her own fate but of the place to which she had sent her sons.
Chesterfield continued, lambasting Fleet Street, the War Office, and Westminster itself for harboring the enemy, people he called “greasy little Jew-boy pornographers.” It went on like this, growing wilder and more vulgar, until the crowd were on their feet, screaming, “The King, the King,” and giving Nazi salutes. The hall seemed to swell like a dreadful tide, and then everyone started singing along to a recording that blasted through the speakers mounted beneath the empty house seats, and it took a moment for Evelyn to recognize the trumpets of “Das Lied der Deutschen,” the German national anthem.
As row after row of men and women stood with hands over their hearts, Evelyn could not look away, as if she herself were in a weird trance, and for some reason she recalled a bonfire night when her father took her to watch the procession from the Waterloo site in Lewes. It had been bitterly cold—Evelyn recalled the whip of wind at her cheeks and the end of her nose, and how her father had wrapped her in his great woolen coat as they stood with a few hundred other townsfolk in the lush field next to the Ouse. When the procession approached, Evelyn had seen how the leaders of the carnival club, each dressed in the red coats of the British regiments with rifles slung across their shoulders, bore an enormous flaming cross. Behind them came a drum platoon, sounding a throbbing beat that Evelyn felt in her back teeth, stirring up something deep and unfathomable. Soon enough the pack of spectators began to swell and push, and she was torn loose from the shelter of her father’s coat.
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