to g-g-g—to go. But you’d better be gone by morning, Yank.”
“But—but you know something.” She picked up her pistol and moved past me. I grabbed her bony arm. “Please—”
Eve’s maimed hand whipped up faster than I could follow it, and for the second time that night I had a gun pointed at me. I recoiled, but she advanced half a step and pressed the barrel right between my eyes. The cold circle of it made my skin tingle.
“You crazy old cow,” I whispered.
“Yes,” she rasped. “And I will shoot you if you are not gone when I wake up.”
She moved off unsteadily, out of the sitting room and down the uncarpeted hall.
CHAPTER 2
EVE
May 1915
London
Opportunity walked into Eve Gardiner’s life dressed in tweed.
She was late for work that morning, but her employer didn’t notice when she slipped through the law office doors ten minutes after nine. Sir Francis Galborough rarely noticed anything outside his racing pages, Eve knew. “Here are your files, m’dear,” he said as she came in.
She took the stack in slim unmarked hands: a tall girl with nut-brown hair, soft skinned, deceptively doe eyed. “Yes, s-s-sir.” S was a hard letter to get out; only two stops on it was good.
“And Captain Cameron here has a letter for you to type in French. You should see her rattle away in Frog,” Sir Francis said, addressing the lanky soldier sitting across his desk. “She’s a gem, Miss Gardiner is. Half French! Can’t speak a word of Frog myself.”
“Nor I.” The Captain smiled, fiddling with his pipe. “Entirely over my head. Thank you for the loan of your girl, Francis.”
“No trouble, no trouble!”
No one asked Eve if it was any trouble. Why should they? File girls, after all, were a kind of office furniture, more mobile than an umbrella fern, but just as deaf and dumb.
You’re lucky to have this job, Eve reminded herself. If not for the war, a post in a barrister’s office like this would have gone to some young man with better recommendations and brilliantined hair. You are lucky. Very lucky, in fact. Eve had easy work, addressing envelopes and filing papers and typing the occasional letter in French; she supported herself in relative comfort; and if the wartime shortage of sugar and cream and fresh fruit was starting to pall, well, it was a fair exchange for safety. She could so easily have been stuck in northern France starving under German occupation. London was frightened, walking about now with its eyes trained on the sky, looking for zeppelins—but Lorraine, where Eve had grown up, was a sea of mud and bones, as Eve knew from the newspapers she devoured. She was lucky to be here, safe away from it.
Very lucky.
Eve took the letter silently from Captain Cameron, who had been quite a regular visitor to this office lately. He wore rumpled tweeds rather than a khaki uniform, but the straight spine and the soldierly stride shouted his rank better than any bank of ribbons. Captain Cameron, perhaps thirty-five, a hint of a Scottish lilt in his voice, but otherwise so entirely English, so utterly lanky and graying and rumpled he could have appeared in a Conan Doyle serial as the Quintessential British Gentleman. Eve wanted to ask, “Do you have to smoke a pipe? Do you have to wear tweed? Must you be that much of a cliché?”
The captain leaned back in his chair, nodding as she moved toward the door. “I’ll wait for the letter, Miss Gardiner.”
“Yes, s-sir,” Eve murmured again, backing out.
“You’re late,” Miss Gregson greeted her in the file room, sniffing. The oldest of the file girls, inclined to boss the rest, and Eve promptly turned on a wide-eyed look of incomprehension. She loathed her own looks—the soft, smooth face she saw looking out of her mirror had a kind of blank unformed prettiness, nothing memorable about it except a general impression of youth that had people thinking she was still sixteen or seventeen—but her appearance served in good stead when she was in trouble. All her life, Eve had been able to open her wide-spaced eyes and blink her lashes into a perfect breeze of innocent confusion, and slide away from consequences. Miss Gregson gave an exasperated little sigh, bustling away, and later Eve caught her whispering to the other file girl. “I sometimes wonder if that half-French girl is a bit simple.”
“Well”—a whisper and a shrug replied—“you’ve heard her talk, haven’t you?”
Eve folded her hands around each other, giving two