sharp, precise squeezes to stop them from forming fists, then bent her attention to Captain Cameron’s letter, translating it into impeccable French. It was why she’d been hired, her pure French and her pure English. Native of both countries, at home in neither.
There was a kind of violent boredom about that day, at least as Eve remembered it later. Typing, filing, eating her wrapped sandwich at midday. Trudging through the streets at sunset, getting her skirt splashed by a passing cab. The boardinghouse in Pimlico, smelling of Lifebuoy soap and stale fried liver. Smiling dutifully at one of the other boarders, a young nurse who had just got herself engaged to a lieutenant, and sat flashing her tiny diamond chip over the supper table. “You should come work at the hospital, Eve. That’s where you find a husband, not a file room!”
“I don’t m-much care about finding a husband.” That earned her blank looks from the nurse and the landlady and the other two boarders. Why so surprised? Eve thought. I don’t want a husband, I don’t want babies, I don’t want a parlor rug and a wedding band. I want—
“You’re not one of those suffragettes, are you?” Eve’s landlady said, spoon paused in midair.
“No.” Eve didn’t want to check a box on a ballot. There was a war on; she wanted to fight. Prove that stuttering Eve Gardiner could serve her country as capably as any of the straight-tongued thousands who had dismissed her throughout her entire life as an idiot. But no amount of suffragette bricks through windows would ever get Eve to the front, even in a support role as a VAD or an ambulance driver, because she had been turned down for both posts on account of her stammer. She pushed back her plate, excusing herself, and went upstairs to her single neat room with its rickety bureau and narrow bed.
She was taking down her hair when a mrow sounded at the door, and Eve smiled as she let in the landlady’s cat. “Saved you a bit of l-liver,” she said, fishing out the scrap she’d taken from her plate and wrapped in a napkin, and the cat purred and arched. He was kept strictly as a mouser, subsisting on a sparse diet of kitchen crumbs and whatever he could kill, but he’d spotted Eve as a soft touch and had fattened up on her supper scraps. “I wish I were a cat,” Eve said, lifting the tabby onto her lap. “Cats don’t have to sp-sp—have to speak except in fairy tales. Or maybe I should just wish to be a man.” Because if she were a man, she could at least hit anyone who mentioned her stuttering tongue, not smile at them with polite forbearance.
The tabby purred. Eve stroked him. “Might as well wish for the m-m-moon.”
A knock sounded an hour later—Eve’s landlady, so tight-lipped her mouth had almost disappeared. “You have a caller,” she said accusingly. “A gentleman caller.”
Eve set the protesting tabby aside. “At this hour?”
“Don’t give me those innocent eyes, miss. No male admirers to visit in the evenings, that is my rule. Especially soldiers. So I informed the gentleman, but he insists it is urgent. I have put him in the parlor, and you may have tea, but I expect you to leave the door ajar.”
“A soldier?” Eve’s puzzlement increased.
“A Captain Cameron. I find it most irregular that an army captain would seek you out, at home and in evening hours!”
Eve agreed, rolling up her loosened nut-brown hair and sliding her jacket over her high-necked blouse again as if she were going to the office. A certain kind of gentleman looked at any shopgirl, or file girl—any woman who worked—and saw her as entirely available. If he’s here to make advances, I will slap his face. Whether he reports me to Sir Francis and gets me fired or not.
“Good evening.” Eve struck open the door of the parlor, deciding on formality. “I am most surprised to see you, C-C-C—” Her right hand clutched into a fist, and she managed to get it out. “C—Captain. May I be of ass—assistance?” She held her head high, refusing to let the embarrassment color her cheeks.
To her astonishment, Captain Cameron replied in French. “Shall we switch languages? I’ve heard you speaking French to the other girls, and you stammer much less.”
Eve stared at this consummate Englishman, lounging in the stiff parlor chair with his trousered legs loosely crossed, a faint smile showing under his small