But all Lili did was smile. Her small face flashed one of its mischievous looks as though she didn’t sit ringed about by hostile guards, as if she was still a free woman—and she put two fingers to her lips and blew Eve a kiss.
Eve flinched as though the kiss were a blow.
They were questioned one at a time, not allowed to hear each other’s testimony. Violette first, her real name of Léonie van Houtte spoken for the first time in Eve’s hearing, though she still couldn’t think of Lili’s lieutenant by any name but Violette. She at least viewed Eve as the traitor she was; the other woman’s stare was hate filled as Eve filed out under guard. Eve was brought in to be questioned next, and she didn’t bother with a defense. Everyone here knows what the outcome will be. She stood silent under the harangue of German, feeling her hands throb, breathing the stale smells of hair oil and shoe polish, and soon enough she was led out again. Lili was the one they wanted most; she could sense the liquid ripple that went over the room in anticipation, almost savage, and wondered if such a ripple had gone over the viewers in the Colosseum before the lions were released. The lions in this room were gold and carved, but they could still levy death.
The judges disappeared; half an hour ticked past measured by a deliberate clock—and it was over. Eve, Lili, Violette, and several lesser defendants were all arrayed before the court, and a vast silence fell. Eve’s mouth went dry as paper, and she could feel herself trembling. At the corner of her eye, she saw Violette’s fingers twitch as though she wanted to reach for Lili’s hand. Lili stood like a statue.
The words rolled out in nasal German.
“For Louise de Bettignies, death.”
“For Léonie van Houtte, death.”
“For Evelyn Gardiner, death.”
Ripples crossed the room, and Eve felt as though she had been kicked in the chest. Not by dread.
Relief.
She looked down at her mangled hands with blurring eyes and thought, as she’d thought while weeping on the floor of René’s green-walled study, I want to die.
No more months of cells and monotony, pain and morphine and guilt. Just the mouths of the guns, arrayed before her. The imagined sight was beautiful. A ripple of gunfire and then—nothing.
But before her heart could squeeze in relief, Lili stepped forward. She spoke in soft, perfect German, the only time in the entire trial she spoke in the language of the enemy.
“Gentlemen, I ask you not to shoot my friends. They are young, and I implore your mercy for them.” Her blond head tilted. “Me, I want to die well.”
“I accept my sentence.” Violette spoke in clear, contemptuous tones, cutting her leader off. “You can shoot me. But I ask you before I die, and you cannot refuse me: do not part me from Lil—from Louise de Bettignies.”
Eve heard her own voice. “Or me.”
A row of German faces looked down at them, and Eve saw blank confusion there. She’d seen the same expression from their guards at Saint-Gilles: bewilderment, looking at tiny Lili and stuttering Eve and Violette with her glasses like a schoolteacher, wondering how any of them could possibly be spies.
The Boches have held us for months, Eve thought, and they still don’t know what to make of the fleurs du mal. The thought gave her a flicker of savage pride for a moment, something to straighten her shoulders before the guilt flattened them again.
The three women of the Alice Network were allowed to stand as further discussion carried on in whispers among the German officials. Another hour crept past. Eve’s hands throbbed. Another announcement. Another kick resounding dully through her chest, only this was not relief. This was despair.
The trial was done.
So,” Lili said. “They will not shoot us.”
Violette was still shivering in reaction as they waited in the courtyard between their guards. Eve stood numb and upright, but the news seemed to have nearly shattered Violette, who had looked braced for a bullet right then and there in the courtroom. “They will send us to Germany . . . ,” she muttered.
The sentence had been amended: they were all to suffer fifteen years’ hard labor in Siegburg Prison.
“Fifteen years?” Lili wrinkled her nose. “No. We labor until the victory of France, that is all.”
“I w-w-wish it was the line of guns,” Eve heard herself saying.