A tap at the door drew her up short. “Marty!” she cried.

“I thought you might need these.” Martha Gellhorn marched into the room. “Don’t ask what I had to do to get them.” In her hand was a large bottle of whiskey, and a new Hermes Baby typewriter. “I heard what happened.” Marty settled into a chair and poured out two whiskeys, glasses full to the brim. “Cheers. Here’s to breaking the rules.”

“You mean this has happened to you too?” Jess took the whiskey and propped herself up on the bed. To look at Martha, legs crossed louchely, glass held casually in her fingertips, one would never think it.

“I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve covered four theaters of war. Yet all I’m allowed to do here is sit on the sidelines. I spent the week at Bomber Command but nobody will take me up in a plane. I watched two male correspondents go up though.” Marty swallowed her drink. “There was a press conference while you were in Italy and I asked, as I always do, if I could get a posting to a Press Camp—they’re right near the front. The delightful Warren Stone leered at me like I was a hooker and said, ‘Last time I checked, Martha, you were a woman.’ Every single person in the room guffawed as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard—that Warren Stone had had the luck to discover I was a woman, which of course he hasn’t. Wolfing, I’ve decided to call it—when they treat you like all they want from you is your breasts and your legs and the space in between.”

“You didn’t think to tell me any of this when you were so busy convincing Bel to send me here? What will they do to me? I don’t want to go back to New York.” Jess said it with conviction.

“Depends if someone speaks up for you and says what really happened,” Martha said sagely, clearly the veteran of many a battle with the rules and those enforcing them.

“Nobody will do that. It was my first day.”

“Maybe they’ll let you off for naiveté. Don’t be afraid to wear a skirt; beg, borrow or steal a pair of silk stockings, cross your legs and bat your lashes,” Martha advised. “You can soap off your principles later.”

Jess stood up, a little unsteadily—the large glass of whiskey had found its way into her bloodstream quickly—and stroked the typewriter Martha had brought her. “Do you ever get scared?” she asked, her voice low.

Marty lit a cigarette and offered Jess a smile. “Do you remember that piece I wrote about the hospital in Barcelona?”

Jess thought for a moment. Then she nodded. Martha had written about seeing a ward full of injured children, one boy sobbing for his mother. She’d been asked if she wanted to see the medical ward and in her article she’d written: “Well,” I said. Well, no, I thought. Martha had wanted to turn away too.