Something warm vibrated in my stomach. I’d had some thought of going to Limoges by train, but the idea of being able to hop back into that wonderful car—! I loved that car. It comforted me more than the home I’d just been thrown out of. I looked up at Finn and my throat was thick as I said, “Thank you.”

“Didn’t believe we’d seen the last of you in any event.” Eve, surprisingly, sounded more approving than irritated. “Americans are harder to scrape off than barnacles.”

“Who is this?” My mother managed to get the entire question out this time.

Eve looked at her. What a pair they made: my fashionable wasp-waisted mother in her exquisite hat and spotless gloves; tattered Eve with her old dress and lobster-claw hands. Eve gave that imperious raptor gaze down her nose until Maman’s eyes flickered. “You must be the mother,” she said at last. “I don’t see any resemblance.”

“How dare you—”

“Eve,” I plunged in. “I’m going to look for my cousin, and somewhere in that whole mess is a man you’re afraid of. I think you should find out if he’s alive or dead. I think you should come with me.”

I don’t know why I said it. Eve and her moods and her pistol complicated everything; I’d move faster without her. But I’d made myself be brave today, no matter how much it terrified me, and I wanted Eve to be brave too—to be the unflinching, swearing woman who’d lied her head off to a pawnbroker so I could hock my pearls, and demanded answers from a china-shop clerk who hated her guts. I didn’t want Eve running back to England to hide in number 10 Hampson Street. It seemed beneath her, somehow.

I wanted something for myself too. I wanted to know what had happened to Eve during the occupation of Lille, not just to her hands but to her soul.

I tried to think of an eloquent way to say all that, but I couldn’t think of one. All I could say was, “I want to hear the rest of your story.”

“It’s not a pretty story,” she said. “And it lacks an ending.”

“So write the ending now.” I planted hands on hips, challenging. “You’re half-cocked, but you’re no coward. So what do you say? In or out?”

“Who are these people? Charlotte!”

I took no notice of my mother. She’d gone from directing my life to being utterly outside it. But Eve spared her a glance.

“I’m not coming if Mumsy is. I’ve spent all of thirty seconds in her company, and she is twice as bloody annoying as you. A day on the road and I’d probably shoot her.”

“She’s not coming.” I looked at my mother, and a last stab of tangled anger and love rippled through me, the final dying urge to do whatever she wanted. Then it was gone. “Good-bye.” I probably should have said something more. But what was there to say?

Her eyes were traveling wildly from Finn to Eve and back again. “You can’t just drive off with—with—”

“Finn Kilgore,” Finn spoke up unexpectedly. He reached out a hand, and automatically my mother shook it. “Lately of His Majesty’s prison in Pentonville.”

She dropped his hand like it had grown thorns, lips parting.

“And before you ask,” Finn added in polite tones, “assault. Chucking annoying Americans in the Thames. Good day, ma’am.”

He shouldered my luggage and headed for the doors. Eve lit a cigarette, turning to follow, and looked over one shoulder. “You want to hear this story of mine or not, Yank?”

One last look at my mother. She just stared at me as if she didn’t know me. “I love you,” I said, then walked out of the hotel onto the busy streets of Roubaix. I was light-headed. Sick. Elated. Overwhelmed. My palms were sweating, and my whole mind was a whirling roar of noise. But one thing was very clear.

“Breakfast,” I said when Finn brought the Lagonda around with the top down. I gave the old girl’s dashboard a pat as I climbed in. “We’re aiming for Limoges, but first we get the biggest breakfast we can find in Roubaix. This baby is telling me she wants to be fed.”

“It’s a she?” Eve asked.

“So she tells me.”

What a lot of things I was learning today. And so many still to go.

CHAPTER 16

EVE

July 1915

In ten days, the kaiser would be dead. That was what Eve told herself.

“Hurry up!” Lili urged, quickening her pace up the hill. Eve’s hair was sticking to her neck, but Lili seemed impervious to the summer heat, striding with her skirts kilted up, hat slung back. “Slow-coach!”

Eve hitched the bundled blanket under her arm as she lengthened her stride. Lili knew the countryside around Lille like the back of her hand. “Mon Dieu, but it’s nice to be tramping these hills in daylight for once, and not in the dark of the damned moon with bedraggled pilots in tow! There, one more hill—”

She broke into an outright sprint, straight up the slope. Eve glared, bathed in sweat and realizing how the past six weeks of scant food had cut into her stamina, but her spirits rose as she came out onto the brow of the hill. The day was cloudless, the grassy slope green-gold in the sunlight. They were only a few miles outside Lille, but it was like slipping out from under a dark cloud to get away from the German signs and the German soldiers. Not that things were all roses in the countryside. Each of these small farms Eve and Lili passed had their share of hunger and hopelessness as well, pigs and butter and eggs confiscated by requisition parties. But up on this low hill, it was possible for a moment to pretend the hovering invaders were gone.

And perhaps soon they would be gone. If the RFC did its job.

The two women stood on the brow of the hill with identically folded arms, staring down at the train tracks stretching toward Germany. Ten days until the kaiser rattled down those tracks. Ten days, and the world could be a different place.

“There,” Lili nodded down to the tracks. “I’ve been scouting the area, and so have Violette and Antoine.” Antoine was a deceptively meek-faced local bookseller who forged identification cards and passes under the table for Lili, besides Violette the only other member of the Alice Network Eve had met—a necessary introduction, in case she ever needed new papers in an emergency. “We all agree this stretch is the best spot for the strike.” Lili lifted her skirt and began unlacing her top petticoat. “God knows if the brass will take the suggestion.”

“Spread a b-blanket,” Eve reminded her. “We’re on a picnic, remember?” Their cover story, if any German scouts found them here: Marguerite Le Fran?ois and her seamstress friend, taking their meager sandwiches out to enjoy the fine weather. But when Eve spread the threadbare blanket, Lili didn’t bother with sandwiches. She produced a stick of charcoal and began mapping the surrounding ground in her quick notation on the spread-out petticoat. “It’s getting harder to get written papers through,” she said with a touch of her usual twinkle through the fierce concentration. “But those guards have no idea how much information can be written down on a woman’s petticoat.”