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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.