Eve’s satchel, but her gnarled hand lashed out like a whip and knocked mine away. “Keep it.”
The photograph went into my pocketbook, and I could feel that man’s empty eyes staring at me through the leather, so I turned around and looked back at Eve. She looked steadier, lighter than the hunched guilt-consumed figure in the windowsill last night, reciting her tale of torture and self-loathing. I reached out and touched her hand gently.
“You wouldn’t tell us about your trial last night,” I said, “or what happened to you and Lili and Violette afterward.”
“Not a tale for dark nights.”
I tilted my head up at the hot sun above. “No shadows now.”
She let out a long breath. “I suppose not.”
Finn and I listened as she told us of the trial: the Belgian lions, the hammering questions in German, the reduced sentences. Violette spitting in her face. I remembered the older Violette in Roubaix doing the same, and shivered at the echo. Violette . . . an idea pricked me there, an insistent little thought I’d had last night as well—an equation that didn’t balance out—but I pushed that aside for now as Eve said, “Then we came to Siegburg.”
CHAPTER 34
EVE
March 1916
After the war ended, Eve was surprised by how little impression Siegburg’s endless flow of days had made in her memory. Her time as a spy in Lille had stretched not even six months, yet she remembered it all in diamond-edged clarity. Two and a half years in Siegburg passed like a foul gray dream, every day the same as the one before.
“Take her to her cell.”
That was her welcome to Siegburg, in the spring of ’16—a brusque order and then a heavy hand in the middle of her back, shoving her down a dark corridor after Lili and Violette. None of them had had a look at the prison’s outside; it was far too dark by the time the rattling van pulled into the courtyard. “Never mind,” Lili whispered. “We shall have a good look at it over our shoulders, the day we’re released.”
But it was hard to think of release when being shoved along a corridor that smelled of piss and sweat and despair. Eve found herself shivering, pressing her teeth together so they would not rattle. The creak of a key being turned, hinges squealing, and then a massive door yawned. “Gardiner,” the guard barked, and that same brusque hand shoved Eve forward.
“Wait—” She turned, frantic for a glimpse of Lili and Violette, but the door had already slammed. The blackness was absolute, a pool of stifling, freezing darkness.
Everyone breaks down the first night. Eve would hear that later from her fellow prisoners. But Eve came to Siegburg already broken. The blackness was not nearly as terrible as the inside of her own mind, so she merely unlocked her chattering teeth and felt her way around the cell with misshapen fingers. Stone walls, smaller in dimension than her cell at Saint-Gilles. A foul bed, hard as wood and stinking of old sweat, old vomit, old terror. Eve wondered how many women had slept and cried and stifled their screams in that bed. Dimly through the door she heard cries, once a burst of shrill laughter, but no guard answered the calls. Once the cells were locked for the night at Siegburg, Eve learned soon enough, they weren’t opened until morning. A woman might be dying slowly of fever or blood poisoning, shrieking with pain over a broken bone, writhing in the agony of giving birth—the door still wouldn’t open until dawn. A good many died that way. That was, Eve supposed dully, the entire point.
She couldn’t lie down on that foul bed. She curled in the corner on the stones, shaking with cold, waiting for morning. Dawn arrived in the company of a hard-faced guard marching in with a stack of clothes—rough blue stockings, dirty white frock with a great prisoners’ cross on the chest—and the endless string of captive days began.
Hunger. Cold. Lice. Slaps from the guards. The daily labor: rough sewing with pricked fingers, polishing latches with abrasive cleansers, pushing together little caps of metal. Whispered conversations with the other women: Was it true there had been a battle at Mont Sorrel? The Somme? Was it true the British had captured La Boisselle? Contalmaison? Even more than food, the prisoners craved news. All they heard from the guards was that the Germans were winning.
“Liars,” Lili snorted. “Such liars! They’re losing and they know it. All we