“How do you come to work with his network?” Evelyn asked. “Why are you not working with the French efforts?”
Josephine smiled and shrugged. “I am. Right now, we’re all working together, you see. Our numbers are so few that we’ve had to combine efforts in order to get any kind of reliable information. As our French network grows stronger, I’m sure that will change, but for now, I help where it will do the most good. And that is with Buckley.”
“Are you a courier?”
“No. I support the couriers. Today, when Karl had to activate the alternate plan, I went to the library to make sure you picked up the package successfully.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
“Then I would have retrieved it and sent it on through the network. It would have taken a few days at least to reach Bill, so you understand that it is not ideal.” Josephine paused and looked at her. “Thankfully, I didn’t have to resort to that. Although, you had me worried for a minute. What on earth were you thinking to put the package in your handbag? That’s the first place they look!”
“I know. Karl told me.”
“Mon Dieu! Then why did you do it!?”
“I didn’t.”
Josephine stared at her. “I saw it! He took the envelope from your bag!”
“The envelope, yes. Not the information.” Evelyn rubbed her forehead tiredly. “I took it out and put the envelope in my bag as a diversion. I wasn’t expecting him to open it before he’d gone two steps.”
Dark eyebrows soared into Josephine’s forehead.
“Then where’s the information that was in the envelope?”
Evelyn reached up and pulled the pin from her hat, lifting it off her head. As Josephine watched in fascination, she turned the small blue hat over and folded the inside lining back. There, nestled between the lining and the hat, were the microfilm strips.
“Fantastic!” Josephine breathed, suitably impressed. “Well done again! And you say you’ve never done anything like this before?”
Evelyn replaced the hat on her head, sliding the pin back in to hold it in place.
“Karl warned me to put it somewhere it wouldn’t be found before we parted,” she said. “I had the entire tram ride to consider my options.”
“How did you fall into this, anyway?” Josephine asked, studying her. “You’ll forgive me for pointing out that you are hardly what I’m used to seeing. You should be in Paris, going to parties and gracing the social pages.”
Evelyn was surprised into a short laugh.
“I was,” she admitted. “Monsieur Buckley is a family friend. I went to visit him for lunch yesterday and he confided that he needed someone to pick up a package in Strasbourg. I volunteered.”
“That’s it? You just volunteered?”
“There was a little more to it than that,” Evelyn said with a shrug, “but essentially, yes. If I can help in any way to get information back to London to help them make better decisions about Nazi Germany, then I’ll do it.”
Josephine shook her head.
“That was before you knew you were going to run into two Gestapo agents, eh?” she asked. “Do you have any idea how close that was back there?”
“A bit, yes,” Evelyn said dryly. “If you hadn’t grabbed me, I don’t know…”
Her voice trailed off as a violent shudder went through her. The reality of what could have happened crashed over her and she felt her hands begin to tremble again as her skin went hot and then cold. Josephine reached across the small table and her strong fingers closed around one of her hands.
“There’s no point in thinking about it,” she said. “I was there, and now you can return to Paris, victorious in your first mission.”
Evelyn met her gray eyes and the two women shared a smile. Josephine squeezed her hand and released it.
“Do yourself a favor, though, and consider what you would have done differently now,” she told her, finishing her coffee. “You did the best you could in a situation you weren’t expecting, but that won’t always be enough.”
Evelyn was silent, lifting her cup to finish the coffee.
“What I want to know is how on earth you knocked that Gestapo agent out,” Josephine said after a minute. “I’ve never seen anything like it. How did you do that?”
Evelyn set her cup down with a click.
“I don’t remember,” she lied. “I panicked.”
Josephine’s blue eyes bore into hers for a moment, then she shook her head.
“Well, I wish I did that when I panicked,” she said with a grin. “It was wonderful.”
Evelyn smiled and was silent. She rarely spoke about her unusual training. She had learned as soon as she returned to England that others didn’t understand, nor want to understand, the strange ways of the Orient. Her peers were set in their staunchly English ways and found it disturbing that she had enjoyed her time away from England. If any of them ever suspected that the gently born and well-connected debutante could defend herself in ways unheard of for a woman in the West, her social standing would be destroyed. Aside from Stephen and her own family, no one had any idea she had brought much more than a few fans and shawls back from Hong Kong.
And she was determined to keep it
