“No. You think he works for a bad-tempered bitch like me for fun? Nobody else was about to give him a job. I probably shouldn’t have either, but I have a weakness for good-looking men with Scottish accents and prison terms.”
I nearly fell off my high heels. “What?”
“Haven’t you figured it out?” She cocked an eyebrow. “Finn’s an ex-convict.”
CHAPTER 6
EVE
June 1915
Marguerite Le François came in out of the rain and sat down at an isolated corner table in a café in Le Havre: a respectable girl, hatted and gloved, timidly asking the waiter in her northern-accented French for a lemonade. If you looked in Marguerite’s pocketbook you would find all her identity cards in immaculate order: she was born in Roubaix, she had work papers, she was seventeen. Just what else Marguerite was, Eve wasn’t sure yet—the identity was filmy, not yet fleshed out with the details that would make it real. When Captain Cameron—Uncle Edward—put Eve on the boat from Folkestone, all he’d given her was the immaculate packet of false papers; a respectable if threadbare traveling suit and a battered case full of more respectable, threadbare clothes; and a destination. “In Le Havre,” he said on the dock, “you will meet your contact. She will tell you what you need to know, going forward.”
“Is she your shining star?” Eve couldn’t help ask. “Your best agent?”
“Yes.” Cameron had smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. Out of his immaculate khaki uniform and back into his anonymous tweeds. “I can think of no one better to prepare you.”
“I will be just as good.” Eve held his eyes fiercely. “I will make you p-proud.”
“You all make me proud,” Cameron said. “The moment a recruit accepts an assignment, I am proud. Because this isn’t just a dangerous job, it’s dirty and distasteful. Not very sporting, really, to listen at doors and open a man’s mail—even an enemy’s. No one really thinks gentlemen should do such things, even in a time of war. Much less gentlewomen.”
“Rubbish,” Eve said tartly, and Cameron laughed.
“Consummate rubbish. Still, the kind of work we do isn’t much respected, even among those who rely on our reports. There’s no acclaim to be had, no fame, no praise. Just danger.” He tweaked her drab little hat to a better angle over her neatly rolled hair. “So, never fear that you have failed to make me proud, Miss Gardiner.”
“Mademoiselle Le François,” Eve reminded him.
“Quite.” His smile faded then. “Be careful.”
“Bien sûr. What is her name, this woman in Le Havre? Your shining star, who I am going to replace?”
“Alice,” the captain said in amusement. “Alice Dubois. Not her real name, of course. And if you can best her, you will end the war in six months.”
He’d stood for a long time on the dock, watching Eve’s boat recede into the choppy surf. She gazed steadily back until the tweedy figure disappeared. She felt a twinge to see him gone—the first person ever to have faith in her, to believe she could be something more, not to mention her last contact with everything left behind. But excitement soon won over loneliness. Eve Gardiner had left England; Marguerite Le François had arrived in Le Havre. And she waited, sipping lemonade and concealing a curiosity that could fairly be called ravenous, for the mysterious Alice.
The café was crowded. Sour-faced waiters squeezed past with dirty plates and bottles of wine, customers came in from the street shaking off their rainy umbrellas. Eve scrutinized every woman in sight. A stout matron with a brisk manner had the heavy anonymity and the competent air of a master organizer of spies . . . Or perhaps the raw-boned young woman who leaned her bicycle outside and then had to stop in the doorway to clean her spectacles. She might be concealing eyes like a hawk that had read German plans by the dozen . . .
“Ma chère Marguerite!” a woman’s voice shrieked, and Eve’s head jerked around at the name she’d trained herself like a puppy to respond to. She had the impression of a hat bearing down on her—not just any hat, but a hat the size of a wagon wheel covered with pink organza and silk roses—and then the hat’s owner enveloped her in a cloud of lily-of-the-valley scent and kissed her soundly on both cheeks.
“Chérie, look at you! How is dear Oncle Édouard?”
It was the phrase she was told she would hear first, but all Eve could