He took the blame for her, but who knows what really happened?” The major looked rather pleased at Eve’s expression. “Don’t suppose he told you about the prison sentence, eh?” A wink. “Or the wife.”
“Neither,” Eve said frostily, “is any of my b-business. And since he was reinstated to His Majesty’s army in a position of trust, then it is not my p-p—my place to q-question his authority.”
“Wouldn’t call it a position of trust, m’dear. War makes for strange bedfellows; we need all hands on deck, even the soiled ones. Cameron got his pardon and his reinstatement, but that doesn’t mean I’d want any girl of mine off walking the beach alone with him. Once a man’s been behind bars, well . . .”
Eve imagined Cameron’s long hands loading the Luger for her. She could not imagine those hands thieving anything. “W-w-will that be all, sir?” She was aching to know more, of course, but she’d be hanged before she asked this spiteful walrus with his ridiculous mustache for another word. The major wandered off, clearly disappointed, and Eve eyed Cameron covertly the following day. But she didn’t ask him anything, because everyone in Folkestone had secrets. And on the day the training course ended, he tucked the Luger into her neatly packed carpetbag as a gift, and said, “You leave for France in the morning.”
PART II
CHAPTER 5
CHARLIE
May 1947
I don’t know how long the Channel crossing took. Time stretched on forever when you spent it vomiting.
“Don’t shut your eyes.” Finn Kilgore’s Scottish burr sounded behind me as I clung grimly to the railing. “Makes your stomach worse if you can’t see which direction the swells are coming from.”
I screwed my eyes shut tighter. “Please don’t say that word.”
“What word?”
“Swells.”
“Just look at the horizon and—”
“Too late,” I groaned, and leaned over the railing. I had nothing left to bring up, but my stomach turned itself inside out anyway. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a pair of Frenchmen in dapper suits wrinkling their noses and edging farther down the deck. A stiff gust of wind whipped across the deck, and my dark green hat with its horrid rolled brim went cartwheeling away. “Let it go,” I gasped between heaves as Finn made a swipe over the rail. “I hate that hat!”
He smiled, reaching to gather my whipping hair and hold it out of my face as I retched one final time. I’d been hideously embarrassed the first time I vomited in front of him, but now I was too ill for humiliation. “That’s a delicate stomach you’ve got for a Yank,” he observed. “Judging from their hot dogs and their coffee, I thought Americans didn’t get sick at anything.”
I straightened, probably looking as green as an old can of peas. “Please don’t say hot dogs.”
He dropped my hair. “As you wish.”
We were standing at the opposite end of the boat from Eve, because she’d found my misery enormously amusing, and I’d had to retreat before I killed her. Eventually Finn had joined me. He must have gotten tired of her swearing and her smoke fumes, though it was hard to imagine they were worse than my endless nausea.
He leaned back on his elbows against the rail, tipping his head back to look at the boat’s squat upper deck. “Where do we go once we get to Le Havre, miss?”
“Eve says the woman we need to talk to is in Roubaix, so we may as well go there before Limoges. But I was thinking . . .” I trailed off.
“Thinking what?”
“Rouen first?” It came out as too much of a question, and I kicked myself for that. I didn’t have to ask permission for where we went next; this was my quest, though that was far too grandiose a word. My mission? My obsession? Well, whatever you called it, my money was funding everything so I was the one in charge. Finn and Eve seemed to take that for granted, something I couldn’t help but enjoy after so many weeks of feeling like a leaf on the surface of a whirlpool. “We’ll go to Rouen,” I said firmly. “My aunt left Paris and moved to the summer house for good after the war. Rose’s mother. She wasn’t very forthcoming in her letters, but if I turn up on her doorstep surely she’ll talk to me.”
I thought of my French aunt with her endless rattling handbag full of pill boxes for all the illnesses she was convinced she was