The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

It was like a Degas painting. I could close my eyes and those summers blurred into one long hazy season: the narrow twisting streets, the old copies of Le Figaro lying about the big rambling summer house with its stuffed attics and worn sofas, the haze of greenery with the sun filtering through and lighting up all the dust motes.

Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.

“Why do you want this, Miss Gardiner?” the captain asked, and nodded for her to fire again. “I want to do my part.” She didn’t stutter at all. “Is that so strange? Last summer when the war began, every young man in England was burning to join the fight, make something of himself. Did anyone ask them why?”

She was aching to know more, of course, but she’d be hanged before she asked this spiteful walrus with his ridiculous mustache for another word.

If one has the luxury of sleeping safe in the night to come, one should always have more brandy.”

The devil probably shit him out after a night’s drinking with Judas.”

“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?” Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.”

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

Face-to-face I could have cried it into her shoulder, but putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.

“Honing beauty is more interesting, perhaps, than acquiring beauty already polished.

What did it matter what I wanted when I’d just fail if I tried to get it?

And really, in the life she led was there anything else besides now? Seeing Captain Cameron in two days—the kaiser’s arrival in ten—it all existed in the same gray area. There was the past and the now. Nothing else was certain. Nothing else was real.

What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?

Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.”

It is easier to find me than nothing at all. So tell me who you are seeking. I will tell you if they lived.”

He went on, his elegant vocabulary broken down to the most obscene gutter slang that could be dredged out of the French language, his mouth scarlet with his own blood as though he’d been eating souls, and so he had. He had been eating souls and hearts and lives these past months, anything for profit, and René Bordelon now looked like the ravening beast he was,

Eve sat huddled on her cot as all her stubborn hope drained away, sobbing so hard she almost drowned out the noise of Lili’s agony—but not quite. Eve heard it all, start to finish. By morning she had sobbed herself mute; her voice was gone. And so was Lili. Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron: She finished as she had lived, a soldier.

but words were just air, useless after a tale like that.