feet, hastening Lili along, and her voice faltered in its calm recitation. For a moment Eve thought Lili would finally break—that she would collapse and weep, have to be carried off prostrate to her operating table.
No. She straightened between the orderlies, lifting her chin in the old impish gesture, eyes darting along the line of her friends. The dull light struck her hair, coiled around her head in matted blond braids, and it had the look of a crown. “Mes amies,” she said softly, and as she passed Violette, she reached out and pressed her rosary into those trembling hands. “Je vous aime—”
And she was gone past them, tiny as a child between the two orderlies, almost floating as she went light-footed, lighthearted, down the long corridor toward the operating room. Eve felt her own heart beating sickly, somber as a drum. Lili . . .
Just before she disappeared, Lili turned her head back one final time and gave her swift mischievous glance. She blew a kiss to the fleurs du mal, and it hit Eve like a physical blow. Then Lili disappeared into the operating room, but her voice still floated out, merry and serene.
“You must be the surgeon. I wonder if I can have some chloroform? Because it’s been an absolute pisser of a day.”
That was when Eve’s knees buckled. That was when she knew.
“She’ll be fine,” Louise Thuliez was saying. “It would take more than a lung abscess to bring down our Lili—”
“Nothing at all . . .”
More murmurs of agreement, assurances spoken over eyes full of worry. Violette clutched the rosary so hard its looped beads cut into her fingers. “She’ll be out of bed within a week. Less than a week . . .”
But Violette wasn’t there in the infirmary for the next four hours, as Eve was. The guards shooed the prisoners away, but Eve was still under observation for typhus symptoms. She was just a corridor and a locked door away when the moans came, and the whimpers, and the strangled screams. The sounds of a woman being operated upon without ether, without chloroform, without morphine. Eve sat huddled on her cot as all her stubborn hope drained away, sobbing so hard she almost drowned out the noise of Lili’s agony—but not quite. Eve heard it all, start to finish. By morning she had sobbed herself mute; her voice was gone.
And so was Lili.
Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron:
She finished as she had lived, a soldier.
CHAPTER 35
CHARLIE
June 1947
My heart hurt.
I’d so hoped that the queen of spies was still alive, that we might meet her on this journey as we’d met Violette. A white-haired woman now, but still small and gallant and merry. Someone I’d ached to know—but she’d never had the chance to grow old.
Eve, I wanted to say to the figure hunched in the backseat, I’m so sorry—but words were just air, useless after a tale like that. Finn had pulled the Lagonda over to the side of the road twenty minutes before as we listened, and now we sat in the summer silence, utterly still.
I reached out for Eve’s knobbed hands as she lowered them from her face, but she was speaking again, looking pale and ravaged in the merciless sunlight. “There it is. You know it all. Lili died the ugliest death a b-brave woman ever suffered. And it was all thanks to me. I sent her inside those walls, and I failed to bring her out again.”
Denial boiled in me furiously. No. No, you were not to blame. You cannot think that. But she did think that, and all the words in the world from me would not shift her self-loathing. I knew that much about Evelyn Gardiner. As much as I was always yearning to fix what was broken, I could do nothing to fix Eve.
Or could I?
She passed a gnarled hand across her mouth; both were trembling. “Get this car moving, Scotsman,” she said hoarsely. “We aren’t getting to Grenoble by sitting on a roadside.”
Finn steered the Lagonda back onto the road, and we finished the long drive in silence, worn out from the stark, ugly end of Eve’s confession. Eve sat in back with her eyes closed. Finn drove like a chauffeur, looking front and center, only speaking up to ask for a map. As for me, I sat turning over