“I think that was her intention,” Jess said evenly. “One doesn’t stow away on a ship to get a story and then not write the goddamned story. Wouldn’t it be easier if you just let us go?”

“How it must torment you; she got there and you didn’t.” Warren folded his arms across his chest as if he’d just made the final, winning rebuttal.

“It doesn’t torment me at all.” It was true. Jess was having a hard time holding back the jubilation that Martha had really done it, and had beaten her husband to the story. Hemingway hadn’t yet landed on French soil; Martha had. She risked a smile and raised her voice so everyone in the bar would hear. “When I think about how you must have felt when you found out what she did, all I can do is laugh. And raise a glass to her.”

“Shame you won’t have anyone to raise it with. Martha Gellhorn has been confined to a nurses’ training camp. She has no passport or accreditation papers. She’s not going anywhere.”

“And I don’t suppose I should bother asking if I can see her?”

“Only if you want to hear me say no to you one more time.”

“Well, that’s just another in a long line of shitty decisions,” Jess said. “Martha’s got more experience reporting war than anybody. But she gets locked up for trying to do her job? Exactly how long am I, and every other female correspondent, going to be stuck here? What started out as a ridiculously sexist notion of imagining we might swoon at the sight of war simply because we’re women has become a stubbornly entrenched dictate that nobody in SHAEF wants to relinquish, just to prove a point. It’s childish illogic, especially now that the female nurses are finally going to France.”

Jess felt someone step up behind her. She was just about to whirl around, thinking it would be someone come to defend Warren from the deranged and wanton Jessica May, when she heard a woman’s voice say, “Yes, we’d all like to know that.” It was Iris Carpenter from The Boston Globe. Not one of the novices.

Someone else joined them. Ruth Cowan from Associated Press, another woman with experience. Soon there was a group of women around Jess, all of them staring implacably at Warren Stone, wanting Jess’s question answered.

“If you don’t answer,” Jess said quietly, “we might think you don’t have the authority to do so.”

“I don’t take kindly to being ambushed,” he replied.

Despite the steel in his voice, despite knowing it would only strengthen his resolve to do whatever his obscure threat had promised the other night, despite knowing that she was once again starting a fire that Warren would do anything to extinguish before his superiors felt its heat, Jess made herself say it. “Then it’s a good thing there are better men than you fighting in France.” As she spoke, Jess could feel the held breath of every woman around her, all of them wanting to applaud while at the same time wishing Jess could take it back because what would Warren Stone do now?