The Alice Network

  “I’m so sorry, Tante,” I began. “For—for everything.”

  She trailed a fingertip over the coffee table, leaving a mark in the dust. Dust lay everywhere like a mantle in the darkened room. “War.”

  Such a small, hopeless syllable to cover so much loss. Tears pricked my eyes, and I laced my gloved fingers together. “Tante, there’s nothing to be done about oncle, or Jules or Pierre . . . But there’s Rose. I know it’s a slim chance, but she might be—”

  Alive. Eve had mocked me for hoping, but I had to hope. I might be a failure at a lot of things, but I was good at hope.

  “What do you think I know? She was in Limoges when I last heard from her,” my aunt stated as though that were the end of it. “She left off writing at least three years ago. Mid ’44, I suppose.”

  “Why did she leave here?” I asked, trying to see a spark, a gleam—anything—in my aunt’s eyes. “Why?”

  My aunt’s voice was low and bitter. “Because she was a little troublemaker with no morals. No morals at all.”

  The bottom fell out of my stomach. “W-what?”

  Tante Jeanne shrugged.

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, you don’t just say that and then shrug.”

  “That girl went wild. Nazis all over Paris, and she wouldn’t keep her head down. First it was sneaking out to listen to God knows what kind of speeches, those clubs where fools talk violence, coming home at all hours of the night. The rows she used to have with her father—the Germans wanted lists of all the socialists and Jews working for his company; what was he supposed to do, refuse? The things Rose shouted at him . . .”

  I stared at my aunt, blood thundering in my ears.

  She continued in her flat voice. “First she was putting pamphlets on cars, then it was breaking windows. She’d probably have gone on to blowing things up and getting herself shot if it hadn’t been for the boy.”

  I remembered Rose’s last letter to me. She was giddy about a boy she was seeing on the sly . . . “What boy?”

  “Étienne something. Just nineteen, a bookshop clerk. A nobody. She brought him to meet us once. They glowed when they looked at each other, you could tell they were—” A disapproving huff. “Well, that was another row.”

  I shook my head, numb to my fingertips. “Why didn’t you tell us any of this? When my father was making inquiries?”

  “I did tell him. I suppose he thought it wasn’t suitable for your ears.”

  I swallowed. “What happened then?”

  “Rose’s boy got caught with the Resistance. They shipped him off, who knows where. Half of Paris was disappearing overnight. Rose probably would have too—she’d already nearly been arrested for kicking a Brownshirt on the Rue de Rivoli, so we brought her back here to Rouen. But . . .”

  “What?” I nearly screamed. “What?”

  “What do you think?” My aunt’s lips pursed like she’d bitten a lemon. “Rose was pregnant.”

  I don’t remember how I got to the beech tree outside the house. I just found myself leaning up against the rough bark, breath coming in hitching gasps. I was terrified to look up at the tree branch above my head, fearing I’d imagine two little girls side by side. This had been our tree, our refuge from our bullying brothers back in the days before James grew older and kinder. Rose and me, sitting on that branch now over my head, feet swinging, like we’d sat in that Provençal café. Never alone, as long as we had each other.

  Rose. Oh, Rose . . .

  “I want to do something different.” And she’d had it in her—of course she’d be striding through the Paris nights breaking windows and kicking Brownshirts. I should have known Rose would get involved with the Resistance. But she’d gotten caught in the oldest trap there is, just like me. Rose wasn’t going to write a book or swim the Channel or do anything different—because once you’re pregnant, you’re finished.

  I’d wanted to save my cousin, but no one could save her from this. I was stuck in the same trap. Helpless.

  I let out a single harsh sob, so loud it startled me. Had she sat out here all alone on our tree branch the night she told her parents? After her mother advised her to take a hot bath and have a stiff gin and then see if she could dance it loose? After her father shouted and shouted, saying she’d brought shame on the family forever? Tante Jeanne had told me all of that as I sat staring.

  My father didn’t shout at me when I told him. My mother did all the shouting; he just sat there gazing at me. When I left the room he turned his head away and just said disbelievingly, “Whore.”

  I’d forgotten that.

  I wondered if they’d called Rose a whore too.

  I slammed my fists into the beech tree, wishing I could cry, wishing I could wrap myself in my old insulating numbness. But the tears were tied up tight inside me in a huge ugly knot, and stabs of fury and pain cut me too deep for numbness. So I just hit the tree until my knuckles were stinging through my gloves.

  My eyes were hot and burning when I finally turned away. My aunt stood watching from the back door, frail and hunched. “Tell me the rest,” I said, and she did, her voice flat. My uncle had sent Rose to a little town outside Limoges to give birth away from anyone she knew. She didn’t write when the baby was born, told them nothing about it, and they didn’t ask. Four months later, Rose sent a brief note saying she was going to work in Limoges, and would pay her parents back for every franc they’d spent on her confinement. Money had come, and two more sets of letters had been exchanged: announcement of first her father’s death and then her brothers’, and Rose’s awkward tear-splotched condolences. No, Tante Jeanne couldn’t remember Rose’s address; she hadn’t saved the letters or the envelopes—and after mid ’44, no more had come. “I don’t know if she’s still in Limoges,” my aunt said, and paused. “I asked her to come back, you know. Rose’s father would never hear of it while he was alive, but after he . . . well, I asked. She never answered me.”

  I didn’t ask if Rose’s baby had been included in that offer of hospitality. I was trembling too hard.

  “Are you staying the night?” Tante Jeanne sounded mournful. “It gets very lonely here.”

  Whose fault is that? I wanted to lash out. You’re the one who threw Rose away like trash. You should have left her in that café in Provence. The words burned at my lips, aching to come out, but I bit them down. My aunt was so thin a breeze could blow her away, finally looking like the invalid she’d always claimed she was. A husband and two sons dead. She’d lost so much.

  Be kind.

  I didn’t want to be kind, but at least I managed not to say the things I was thinking. I just said stiffly, “No, Tante, I can’t stay. I have to go to Roubaix.”

  Tante Jeanne sighed. “Well, then.”

  I couldn’t make myself hug her. I couldn’t bear it. I jerked out a stiff good-bye and moved unsteadily across the weedy lawn, back to the dark blue shape of the Lagonda.

  Finn looked up from The Autocar’s tattered pages. I don’t know what expression he saw on my face, but he sprang out of the car. “Miss?”

  “Why’d you go to prison?” I heard myself ask.

  “Stole a bearskin hat off a Buckingham Palace guard,” he said with no expression. “Are you all right?”

  “You’re lying about the hat.”

  “Yes. Get in the car.”

  I moved toward the convertible, but tripped in the graveled path. Finn caught me around the waist before I could fall, lifted me up and helped me into the front seat.

  Eve was awake, regarding me with those hooded eagle eyes of hers. “Well?”

  I rubbed my hot cheek with a cold hand as Finn slid back behind the wheel. “I found out why Rose left. Because—because she was pregnant.”

  The silence was deafening.

  “Well,” Eve said at last, aiming a deliberate glance at my stomach. “Unless I miss my guess, so are you.”

  CHAPTER 8

  EVE

  June 1915

  Eve was brought up short not b
y any of Lille’s various horrors—and there were certainly horrors—but by a poster. It was tacked outside a church, flapping in the breeze, and it said in both French and German:

  ANY CIVILIAN, INCLUDING THE CIVILIAN STAFF OF THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT, WHO HELPS TROOPS WHO ARE ENEMIES OF GERMANY, OR WHO ACTS IN A WAY INJURIOUS TO GERMANY AND HER ALLIES, WILL BE PUNISHED BY DEATH.

  “Oh, those.” Lili sounded matter-of-fact. “They went up late last year. I don’t think anyone really believed them at first. Then in January a woman was shot for harboring two French soldiers, and that drove the point home nicely.”

  Eve remembered the recruitment poster she’d lingered in front of in London, watched all the while by Captain Cameron. The stalwart Tommies, the blank space in the middle: There is still a space available for YOU! WILL YOU FILL IT?

  Well, she’d filled it. And now she was standing in front of a poster that promised to kill her if she was caught, and it had all become very, very real. More real than Captain Cameron’s promise on a windy Folkestone beach that the Boches did not shoot women.

  Eve looked into Lili’s sunken eyes in the mobile smiling face. “We’re in the m-m-mouth of the beast now, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.” Lili put her arm through Eve’s, moving her away from the flapping poster. She looked very different here than she did in Le Havre: no outrageous hat or elaborate pompadour. She stood neat and subdued in a plain serge suit, her gloves mended and re-mended, a bag over her arm. Her papers, giving yet another false name, proclaimed her to be a seamstress, and her bag carried reels of thread and needles. It also carried a set of maps sewn into the lining—maps marked with target points. Thank goodness Eve didn’t learn that until after they passed the checkpoints into Lille. She nearly fainted when Lili chuckled, “The Fritzes would have been pleased to find that lot! I’ve marked out all their new artillery positions for bombing.”

  “You were m-m-making jokes with the German sentries as they were g-going over your papers, and all the while you had that in your bag?”

  “Oui,” Lili said serenely, and Eve stared at her in a mix of admiration and horror. She knew right then that her boasting to Captain Cameron about how she would surpass his prize agent was destined to be unfulfilled, because nobody, ever, would beat Lili when it came to sheer nerve. Eve both wondered if her superior was a little mad, and admired her violently.

  So, clearly, did Violette Lameron, who greeted them both in a dismal rented room somewhere off the Grand Place. Violette was sturdy and glowering, with neatly knotted hair and plain round spectacles; she hugged Lili with visible relief even while scolding her. “You should have let me fetch the new girl. You make too many crossings, you’re going to get noticed!”

  “Tais-toi, you worrier!” Lili switched into English, as she’d already told Eve they were to do when alone. Far better to spin a story about how they spoke English, if they were overheard, she explained, than to be understood discussing things like secret messages and British codes in French. Lili’s English was flawless, but she salted it with casual French curses. “Now, we need to get Marguerite up to date before you and I head to the border to get the reports out.” She smiled at Violette. “Our new friend is splendidly dumb faced and she’s going to be brilliant, but she needs work.”

  In Folkestone Eve’s training had been formalized: the instructors, the row of desks, the uniforms and flags. This training was quite different. It happened in a damp little room with a narrow bed and a single washstand and a crack running through the ceiling, where everything smelled musty from the unending needle-fine rain falling outside. A room chosen not for its comfort but its proof against eavesdropping, since on one side the building was insulated by the thick stone wall of a chapel, on the other side by a derelict and abandoned apartment building, and above them by an empty attic. A room where three women sat with mugs of an unappetizing drink made of walnut leaves boiled with licorice, because the Germans had confiscated all the coffee, talking matter-of-factly about unspeakable things.

  “A German officer walks toward you on the street,” Violette began after the door and window were checked and sealed. She looked grim compared to Lili’s jauntiness; if her superior refused to be serious, she was clearly carrying the grimness for two. “What do you do?”

  “Let him pass, don’t look at him—”

  “Wrong. Salute. If you don’t, you risk a fine, and three days’ arrest.” Violette looked at Lili. “Do they teach them anything in Folkestone?”

  Eve bristled. “They teach us plenty—”

  “We’ll get her ready,” Lili reassured her lieutenant. “A German asks to see your papers, then starts to grope you. What do you do?”

  “Nothing?” Eve guessed.

  “No. Smile, because if you can’t fake a smidge of willingness, you will likely get slapped and then possibly searched. A German asks why you have your hands in your pockets, what do you do?”

  “T-take them out as quickly as—”

  “No. You don’t put your hands in your pockets ever, because the Huns will think you are reaching for a knife and they will bayonet you.”

  Eve smiled uneasily. “Surely not—”

  Violette’s hand cracked across her cheek, making a sound like a rifle shot. “You think we exaggerate? It happened to a boy of fourteen last week!”

  Eve’s hand flew to her stinging face. Her eyes turned to Lili, sitting with her little hands wrapped around her mug. “What?” Lili said. “You think we’re here to be your friends? We’re here to train you, little daisy.”

  Anger flared through Eve—more than anger, betrayal. Lili had been so warm and welcoming in Le Havre; now everything was wrong-footed. “I’ve already been trained.”

  Violette rolled her eyes. “I say send her back. This one is useless.”

  Eve opened her mouth to snap back, but Lili laid a finger over her lips. “Marguerite,” she said, and her voice was matter-of-fact. “You don’t have any idea what it is like here. Neither does Uncle Edward. He gave you the training that would get you here, but Violette and I have to give you the training that will make you useful here—and keep you alive. We have just a few days to do it. If you don’t learn, you’re nothing but a liability.”

  Her gaze was steady and unapologetic. She could have been a factory foreman delivering a brisk lecture to a new worker, and Eve’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. She let out a slow breath, unclenched her jaw, and managed to nod. “Salute all German officers. Do not object to being groped. Keep my hands out of m-m-m—out of my pockets. What else?”

  They drilled her, over and over. Encounter drills: What do you do if—? Quick-hide drills: If they happen upon you before you’ve hidden a report, what do you do to distract and delay? And they tutored her about the new rules of life in Lille.

  “Trust nothing in the newspapers or bulletins. If it’s in print, it’s a lie,” Lili decreed.

  “Carry your identity cards at all times, but hide your pistol.” Violette had a Luger of her own which she handled with casual authority. “Civilians aren’t supposed to have weapons.”

  “Steer clear of the German officers. They think they can have any of the women they want, with or without their consent—”

  “—and once that happens, a good many people in Lille will despise you for a collaborator and say you flopped on your back just to get favors.”

  “You’ll live here, in this room. Before now we’ve used it as a bolt-hole for quick overnights, but now you’ll live here, so the door outside will need a posted notice with your name and your age in case a roll is called—”

  “—no gatherings of more than ten people allowed—”

  “How does anyone l-live like this?” Eve wondered on the second day, finally earning enough grudging approval to venture the occasional question.

  “Life is shit here,” Lili said. “It will likely go on being shit until we drive the Germans out.”

  “When will I report to you? If I l-l-learn anything.”

  “We c
ome through regularly, Violette and I.” Lili grinned at her lieutenant. “We’ll continue to bunk here with you when we need to stay the night in town. But we’re on the move so much between all my drops, you’ll be alone more often than not.”

  Violette looked at Eve with an utter lack of enthusiasm. “I hope you’re up to it.”

  “Salope!” Lili tugged Violette’s taut bun. “Don’t be such a bitch!”

  German-run Lille was a horrible place, Eve soon saw. Before the war it must have been a fine, bright, bustling city—church spires piercing the sky, pigeons fluttering about the Grand Place, streetlamps casting circles of warm yellow light in the dusk. Now the city was dulled and wretched, every face downcast and pinched with hunger. They weren’t far from the trenches and soldiers and the real action of war—the boom of guns in the distance rolled like low thunder, and occasionally a biplane droned overhead like a poisonous wasp. The Huns had held Lille since last fall, thoroughly entrenched: the boulevards sported new street signs with German names, German boots rang confidently on the cobbles, and German chatter resounded loudly in every public place. The only pink well-fed faces were German, and that alone was enough to push Eve very quickly from a rather impersonal dislike of The Enemy to utter, burning hatred.

  “Don’t get too much fire in your eye,” Lili advised, helping Eve dress for her interview. A neat, drab skirt and shirtwaist, but it was more than just the clothes. Lili was dulling Eve’s skin with a few strategic dabs of chalk and soot, downplaying the healthy color in her cheeks. “You need to look downcast and beaten, little daisy. That’s what the Germans want to see. Fire in the eye will get you looked at.”

  “D-downcast,” Eve repeated grimly. “Oui.”

  Violette looked her over, round glasses flashing. “Her hair gleams.”