them a tour of the grounds, of our chambers and the sanctuary. We knew what they were really there for.’
‘What now?’
‘We make a rendezvous.’ She checked her watch. ‘And hope our funds are secure, and pray the mole didn’t know about the big transfer today. We’ll have to walk.’
She pointed into the reedy birch forest off the convent grounds, a place I’d never been before, and we walked the bank of a curvy stream that ran through it into the country. ‘Wait.’ She stopped me with a stiff arm, and she searched the sky, listening. Her face went pale. ‘Hear that?’ she said, and as soon as she said it, I heard an engine sputtering.
We crept up the way just a bit more and found a road.
Marguerite gasped, sucking a mouthful of air through her teeth when she saw a truck with its driver’s side door flung open. She bolted a few steps, but stopped abruptly when we heard a woman’s voice telling the driver to be quiet and die over the scrape of his boots digging at the floorboards.
Marguerite pulled a revolver from her pocket. ‘Hands!’ She aimed the gun. ‘Let me see your hands!’ Her face instantly perspired.
The woman backed slowly away, two white legs behind the open door and the lavender hem of a delinquent’s peasant dress.
My heart stopped. ‘Claire?’
A pink welt puffed on her cheek and her hair had been pulled from its bun and lay unkempt in a tousled mess. ‘Help,’ she said, voice shaking unlike anything I’d ever heard before. ‘This man needs help!’
‘I’m on to you, Claire,’ Marguerite said, cocking the trigger.
‘Please,’ Claire said. ‘I—’
‘Arrêtez!’ Marguerite blasted.
Claire backed up further, this time with bloody hands in the air. ‘I don’t understand. I found him while on a walk. I’m trying to help.’ Her voice was weepy, and she looked to me for help. ‘Mademoiselle?’
‘What’s going on?’ I cried, but she kept walking backward until her heels met the pebbly edge of the stream, where water rushed over large boulders and white foam pooled in the eddies. ‘Claire?’ Tears welled in her eyes and then spilled over her cheeks, her gaze rolling over the both of us and the man who lay dying, drowning in his own blood.
‘I… I…’ Claire’s voice was garbled and nearly inaudible next to the rushing stream behind her.
I reached out for her even though I was many feet away.
‘Claire’s the spy,’ Marguerite said, and I pulled my hand back.
‘What?’ I said, looking at Marguerite and then to Claire. ‘No, she can’t be…’
Marguerite closed one eye, the other locked on Claire, looking straight down the barrel of her gun.
Claire bent to her knees, weeping. Then her face went white as a sheet, and the tears streaming down her face evaporated right from her skin. ‘Ihr seid beide verrückt!’ she said in perfect German. ‘I’m the one that got away!’
In the blink of an eye, Claire threw a dagger she had hidden in a sheath under her arm, but Marguerite’s bullet hit her first and square in the chest. Pop! The knife cut through the air, missing Marguerite by a hair and me by a foot, landing somewhere behind us.
Claire fell effortlessly backward, her face frozen in a waxy expression, her lips half smiling with a bullet-hole spot of blood soaking into the thin fabric of her peasant dress. The rolling rapids took her away, her torso riding bubbling whitecaps.
‘She’s gone!’ I clutched my chest, frantically searching the whirling water for signs of life as she floated away, but all that was left of her were the imprints of her knees pressed into the pebbly embankment of the stream.
Marguerite stepped back, shuffling at first and then scrambling to see about the man in the truck. She looked at him with arms long at her sides, the gun shaking in her hand against her thigh.
I stumbled toward her with legs of jelly, peering into the cab of the truck. His head had flopped back and a knife stuck straight out of his chest like a blunt stick. She turned him toward her by the chin and then burst into tears when she saw his face, crying his name. ‘Philip… Philip…’
I gasped. ‘Your fiancé!’ I said, only now he was dead.
She brushed a tuft of dark hair from his eyes, which were blue and glassy, her fingers trembling from one last touch of his cheek.
‘Marguerite… I… I…’ I’d only seen dead people at funerals, in their coffins. Not in a truck with a