The Alice Network

  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 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 clipped mustache. He didn’t speak French. She’d heard him say so, just this morning.


  “Bien sûr,” she replied. “Continuez en Français, s’il vous plait.”

  He went on in French. “Your eavesdropping landlady hovering in the hall will be going mad.”

  Eve sat, arranging her blue serge skirts, and leaned forward for the flowered teapot. “How do you take your tea?”

  “Milk, two sugars. Tell me, Miss Gardiner, how good is your German?”

  Eve glanced up sharply. She’d left that skill off her list of qualifications when she was looking for a post—1915 wasn’t a good time to admit to speaking the language of the enemy. “I d-don’t speak German,” she said, passing him his cup.

  “Mmm.” He regarded her over the teacup. Eve folded her hands in her lap and regarded him back with sweet blankness.

  “That’s quite a face you have,” the Captain said. “Nothing going on behind it, nothing to show, anyway. And I’m good with faces, Miss Gardiner. It’s mostly in the tiny muscles around the eyes that people give themselves away. You’ve got yours mostly under control.”

  Eve stretched her eyes wide again, lashes fanning in innocent perplexity. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Will you permit a few questions, Miss Gardiner? Nothing beyond the bounds of propriety, I assure you.”

  He hadn’t leaned forward and tried to stroke her knee yet, at least. “Of course, C-C-Captain.”

  He sat back. “I know you are an orphan—Sir Francis mentioned it—but would you tell me something of your parents?”

  “My father was English. He went to Lorraine to work in a French bank; he met my mother there.”

  “She was French? Doubtless that explains the purity of your accent.”

  “Yes.” And how would you know if my accent is pure?

  “I would think a girl of Lorraine would speak German as well. It’s not far from the border.”

  Eve cast her lashes down. “I did not learn it.”

  “You really are a rather good liar, Miss Gardiner. I would not like to play cards with you.”

  “A lady does not play c-cards.” Every nerve she had sang in warning, but Eve was quite relaxed. She always relaxed when she sensed danger. That moment in the reeds, hunting ducks, before squeezing off a shot: finger on the trigger, the bird freezing, a bullet about to fly—her heartbeat always slowed at that moment into utter placidity. It slowed now, as she tilted her head at the captain. “You were asking about my parents? My father lived and worked in Nancy; my mother kept house.”

  “And you?”

  “I went to school, home for tea every afternoon. My mother taught me French and embroidery, and my father taught me English and duck hunting.”

  “How very civilized.”

  Eve smiled sweetly, remembering the roaring behind the lace curtains, the coarse slurs and vicious arguments. She might have learned to put on gentility, but she’d come from something far less refined: the constant shrieking and throwing of china, her father roaring at her mother for frittering away money, her mother sniping at her father for being seen with yet another barmaid. The kind of home where a child learned quickly to slide unseen around the edges of rooms, to vanish like a shadow in a black night at the first rumble on the domestic horizon. To listen to everything, weigh everything, all the while remaining unnoticed. “Yes, it was a very instructive childhood.”

  “Forgive me for asking . . . your stammer, have you always had it?”

  “As a child, it was a trifle more p-p-p—more pronounced.” Her tongue had always hitched and tripped. The one thing about her that wasn’t smooth and unobtrusive.

  “You must have had good teachers, to help you overcome it.”

  Teachers? They’d seen her get so hung up on words that she was red faced and close to tears, but they’d only moved on to someone else who could answer the question more quickly. Most of them thought her simpleminded as well as hitch tongued; they could barely be bothered to shoo the other children away when they circled around her taunting, “Say your name, say it! G-g-g-g-g-gardiner—” Sometimes the teachers joined in the laughter.

  No. Eve had beaten her stutter into submission with sheer savage will, reading poetry out loud line by faltering line in her bedroom, hammering on the consonants that stuck until they unspooled and came free. She remembered taking ten minutes to limp her way through Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal introduction—and French was her easier language. Baudelaire had said he’d written Les Fleurs du Mal with rage and patience; Eve understood that perfectly.

  “Your parents,” Captain Cameron continued. “Where are they now?”

  “My father died in 1912, of a heart b-blockage.” It was a kind of blockage, getting stuck in the heart with a butcher knife wielded by a cuckolded husband. “My mother didn’t like the rumbling from Germany, and decided to bring me to London.” To escape the scandal, not the Boche. “She died of influenza last year, God rest her soul.” Bitter, vulgar, and haranguing to the end, flinging teacups at Eve and swearing.

  “God rest her soul,” the captain echoed with a piety Eve didn’t buy for one moment as genuine. “And now we have you. Evelyn Gardiner, orphan, with her pure French and pure English—you’re sure about the German?—working in an office for my friend Sir Francis Galborough, presumably passing time until she marries. A pretty girl, but she tends to slide from notice. Shyness, perhaps?”

  The tabby wound his way through the open door with an inquiring meow. Eve called him up to her lap. “Captain Cameron,” she said with the smile that made her look sixteen, tickling the tabby under the chin, “are you trying to seduce me?”

  She’d succeeded in shocking him. He sat back, coloring in embarrassment. “Miss Gardiner—I would not dream—”

  “Then what are you doing here?” she asked directly.

  “I am here to evaluate you.” He crossed his ankles, recovering his aplomb. “I’ve had my eye on you for a number of weeks, ever since I first walked into my friend’s office pretending to speak no French. May I speak plainly?”

  “Have we not been speaking plainly already?”

  “I don’t believe you ever speak plainly, Miss Gardiner. I’ve heard you murmuring evasions at your fellow file girls, to get out of the work you consider boring. I heard you tell a bold-faced lie when they asked why you were late this morning. Something about a cabdriver who delayed you with his unwanted attentions—you’re never flustered, you go about cool as cream, but you faked fluster beautifully. You weren’t late because of an amorous cabdriver; you were staring at a recruitment poster outside the office door for a good ten minutes. I timed it, looking down from the window.”

  It was Eve’s turn to sit back and blush. She had been staring at the poster: it had showed a line of stalwart-looking Tommies, soldierly and identical, with a blank space in the middle. There is still a space in the line for YOU! the headline above it blared. WILL YOU FILL IT? And Eve had stood there bitterly, thinking, No. Because the lettering inside that blank space in the line of soldiers said in smaller script, This space is reserved for a fit man! So, no, Eve could never fill it, even though she was twenty-two and entirely fit.

  The tabby in her lap protested, feeling her fingers tighten through his fur.

  “So, Miss Gardiner,” Captain Cameron said. “Can I get a straight answer out of you if I ask a question?”

  Don’t count on it, Eve thought. She lied and evaded as easily as she breathed; it was what she’d had to do all her life. Lying, lying, lying, with a face like a daisy. Eve couldn’t remember the last time she’d been completely straight with anyone. Lies were easier than the hard and turbulent truth.

  “I am thirty-two,” the captain said. He looked older, his face lined and worn. “Too old to fight in this war. I have a different job to do. Our skies are under attack from German zeppelins, Miss Gardiner, our seas by German U-boats. We are under attack every day.”

  Eve nodded fiercely. Two weeks ago the Lusitania was sunk—for days, her fellow boarders dabbed at their eyes. Eve had devoured the newspaper accounts dry-eyed, enraged
.

  “To stave off further such attacks, we need people,” Captain Cameron went on. “It is my job to find people with certain skills—the ability to speak French and German, for example. The ability to lie. Outward innocence. Inward courage. To find them and put them to work, ferreting out what the Boches have planned for us. I think you show potential, Miss Gardiner. So, let me ask: do you wish to stand for England?”

  The question hit Eve in a hammer blow. She exhaled shakily, setting the cat aside, and answered without thinking. “Yes.” Whatever he meant by stand for England, the answer was yes.

  “Why?”

  She began to pull together something pat and expected about the vile Fritzes, about doing her bit for the boys in the trenches. She let the lie go, slowly. “I want to prove myself capable, to everyone who ever thought me simpleminded or weak because I cannot speak straight. I want to f-f-f—I want to f-f-f-f—”

  She hung on the word so badly her cheeks heated dully, but he didn’t rush to finish her sentence in that way that most people did, the way that filled her with fury. He just sat quietly until she slammed a fist against her skirted knee and the word broke free. She spit it out through clenched teeth, with enough vehemence to startle the cat out of the room.

  “I want to fight.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.” Three straight answers in a row; for Eve it was a record. She sat under his thoughtful gaze, shaking, close to tears.

  “So, I ask for the fourth time, and there won’t be a fifth. Do you speak German?”

  “Wie ein Einheimischer.” Like a native.

  “Excellent.” Captain Cecil Aylmer Cameron rose. “Evelyn Gardiner, would you be interested in entering the Crown’s service as a spy?”

  CHAPTER 3

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  I had vague nightmares of gunshots going off in whiskey glasses, blond girls disappearing behind train cars, a voice whispering, “Le Lethe.” And then there was a man’s voice saying, “Who are you, lass?”