brown throat. All the café girls were eying that triangle of skin at his neck like they wanted to eat it, but he had one arm around his wife and the other reaching down to pick up the baby. “Och, Evie Rose,” he said in his broadest Scots. “You’re a braw handful, you wee bairn you.”
“She’s horrible,” Charlie said as her daughter let out a yell that could cut sheet iron. “One cranky baby minus one afternoon nap equals tantrums to the power of ten. Let’s put her down to bed early tonight . . .”
They hadn’t seen Eve yet, tucked at the farthest table under the shade of the awning. She waved one gnarled hand overhead. Her hands still got their share of stares, and they still weren’t too good at anything but pulling a trigger, but that was all right. Any fleur du mal who lived to be old was entitled to a little wear and tear.
Seeing the figure waving under the awning, Charlie shaded her eyes and then let out a shout, pelting toward Eve. “You’re g-going to hug me, aren’t you,” Eve said to no one in particular. She sighed, and rose, and went grinning to be hugged. “Goddamn Yanks.”
Author’s Note
Louise de Bettignies is a historical figure little known today—and undeservedly so, for the courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness of the woman christened the queen of spies needs no exaggeration to make for thrilling reading. Recruited by one Captain Cecil Aylmer Cameron, who had already set up intelligence operations in Folkestone and who had an eye for talent, former governess Louise de Bettignies took the code name of Alice Dubois (among several, though the nickname of Lili was my own invention) and turned her facility with languages and her organizational flair to the intelligence business. The result was one of the war’s most spectacularly successful spy rings.
The Alice Network was supplied by Louise’s many sources based in the Lille area, and reported on the local stretch of German front with a speed and accuracy that made British intelligence and military men gush. “The services Louise de Bettignies rendered are inestimable.” “A regular modern day Joan of Arc.” “If anything happened to her, it would be nothing less than a calamity.” The Germans were equally impressed (if incensed) by the uncanny accuracy of the underground information flow, so efficient that new artillery placements were often bombed within days of being set up. Bigger intelligence prizes were unearthed by the Alice Network as well: the Kaiser’s visit where his train narrowly escaped being bombed, and the Verdun objective, which was one of Louise’s last reports (which, tragically, went unbelieved at the command level).
The leader of the Alice Network was constantly on the move between German-occupied France, free France, Belgium, England, and the Netherlands as she passed reports, collected information, and checked on her agents, and her methods of information smuggling (coded messages wrapped around rings or hairpins, tucked below cakes in cake boxes, slipped between the pages of magazines) are all true as recorded here. Her physical courage was remarkable—she routinely sneaked across the hostile border under German searchlights and armed sentries, the ground littered with the bodies of refugees who had been spotted and shot, and she remained undeterred even after seeing a pair of escapees blown up by a mine scant yards ahead. Perhaps even more remarkable was her ability to think on her feet: Louise de Bettignies had an uncanny ability to bluff her way past checkpoints, whether by juggling packages until an exasperated sentry waved her through, or by utilizing local children in a game of tag to smuggle her a pass (both true incidents). Also true is the remarkable occasion when she was recognized on the way to a rendezvous by a German general who knew her from a chess match played during her governess days, and who gallantly put his car at her disposal.
Eve Gardiner is a fictional character, but two things about her are very real. One is her stammer—my husband has struggled with a stutter all his life, and his struggles are Eve’s: the periodic difficulty with ordinary conversation, the moments of anger or high emotion that smooth out speech, the frustration and fury at being interrupted, talked over, or automatically assumed to be less intelligent. It was my husband’s idea to give my young WWI spy a stutter and to see her turn it into an asset, to weaponize a weakness and use it against those who would underestimate her.