clipped mustache. He didn’t speak French. She’d heard him say so, just this morning.
“Bien sûr,” she replied. “Continuez en Français, s’il vous plait.”
He went on in French. “Your eavesdropping landlady hovering in the hall will be going mad.”
Eve sat, arranging her blue serge skirts, and leaned forward for the flowered teapot. “How do you take your tea?”
“Milk, two sugars. Tell me, Miss Gardiner, how good is your German?”
Eve glanced up sharply. She’d left that skill off her list of qualifications when she was looking for a post—1915 wasn’t a good time to admit to speaking the language of the enemy. “I d-don’t speak German,” she said, passing him his cup.
“Mmm.” He regarded her over the teacup. Eve folded her hands in her lap and regarded him back with sweet blankness.
“That’s quite a face you have,” the Captain said. “Nothing going on behind it, nothing to show, anyway. And I’m good with faces, Miss Gardiner. It’s mostly in the tiny muscles around the eyes that people give themselves away. You’ve got yours mostly under control.”
Eve stretched her eyes wide again, lashes fanning in innocent perplexity. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“Will you permit a few questions, Miss Gardiner? Nothing beyond the bounds of propriety, I assure you.”
He hadn’t leaned forward and tried to stroke her knee yet, at least. “Of course, C-C-Captain.”
He sat back. “I know you are an orphan—Sir Francis mentioned it—but would you tell me something of your parents?”
“My father was English. He went to Lorraine to work in a French bank; he met my mother there.”
“She was French? Doubtless that explains the purity of your accent.”
“Yes.” And how would you know if my accent is pure?
“I would think a girl of Lorraine would speak German as well. It’s not far from the border.”
Eve cast her lashes down. “I did not learn it.”
“You really are a rather good liar, Miss Gardiner. I would not like to play cards with you.”
“A lady does not play c-cards.” Every nerve she had sang in warning, but Eve was quite relaxed. She always relaxed when she sensed danger. That moment in the reeds, hunting ducks, before squeezing off a shot: finger on the trigger, the bird freezing, a bullet about to fly—her heartbeat always slowed at that moment into utter placidity. It slowed now, as she tilted her head at the captain. “You were asking about my parents? My father lived and worked in Nancy; my mother kept house.”
“And you?”
“I went to school, home for tea every afternoon. My mother taught me French and embroidery, and my father taught me English and duck hunting.”
“How very civilized.”
Eve smiled sweetly, remembering the roaring behind the lace curtains, the coarse slurs and vicious arguments. She might have learned to put on gentility, but she’d come from something far less refined: the constant shrieking and throwing of china, her father roaring at her mother for frittering away money, her mother sniping at her father for being seen with yet another barmaid. The kind of home where a child learned quickly to slide unseen around the edges of rooms, to vanish like a shadow in a black night at the first rumble on the domestic horizon. To listen to everything, weigh everything, all the while remaining unnoticed. “Yes, it was a very instructive childhood.”
“Forgive me for asking . . . your stammer, have you always had it?”
“As a child, it was a trifle more p-p-p—more pronounced.” Her tongue had always hitched and tripped. The one thing about her that wasn’t smooth and unobtrusive.
“You must have had good teachers, to help you overcome it.”
Teachers? They’d seen her get so hung up on words that she was red faced and close to tears, but they’d only moved on to someone else who could answer the question more quickly. Most of them thought her simpleminded as well as hitch tongued; they could barely be bothered to shoo the other children away when they circled around her taunting, “Say your name, say it! G-g-g-g-g-gardiner—” Sometimes the teachers joined in the laughter.
No. Eve had beaten her stutter into submission with sheer savage will, reading poetry out loud line by faltering line in her bedroom, hammering on the consonants that stuck until they unspooled and came free. She remembered taking ten minutes to limp her way through Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal introduction—and French was her easier language. Baudelaire had said he’d written Les Fleurs du Mal with rage and patience; Eve understood that perfectly.
“Your parents,” Captain Cameron continued. “Where are they