‘You’re looking absolutely stunning, by the way. That dress.’ He nodded appreciatively, looking her up and down.

She tipped her head to the side and stared at him. ‘What is it, Jules? I always know when you’re trying to butter me up.’

His eyes glittered as he took a step closer. ‘Well, there is this thing I thought you should know.’

‘Don’t worry, I already know about your “thing”,’ she murmured, looking around the room again. She knew she was going to have to mingle, she couldn’t put it off any longer.

He looked surprised. ‘You do?’

‘Well, of course. Everyone here does.’ She pinned him with another hard stare. ‘You know, you really are an utter shit sometimes, Jules.’

He looked blankly at her before realization dawned. ‘Oh, you mean Violet?’ He pulled an apologetic face. ‘Yes, not my finest hour.’

‘I should say not.’

‘Pretty tricky.’ He nodded self-pityingly.

‘Sticky wicket if ever I saw one,’ she sighed, losing interest. She was glad his problems weren’t hers any more.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed, before suddenly shaking his head again. ‘But no – it wasn’t that I wanted to talk to you about.’

She looked back at him and was alarmed to see he actually looked nervous. ‘What is it? What have you done?’

‘Well, funnily enough, for once it’s more a case of what I haven’t done.’

She shook her head briskly, feeling her muscles tense. An apprehensive Jules was a very frightening prospect. ‘I don’t follow.’

‘We have a bit of a problem.’

‘Bit?’

‘Big. We have a big problem.’

Chapter Nineteen

Madrid, November 1936

They stood in formation, the mops pressed against their shoulders as Ivan patrolled past, checking their placement, bearing and discipline. He kicked at the shin of one woman half a step forward of everyone else but she didn’t even flinch, shuffling back in line; discipline was being instilled, slowly but surely.

He was a hard taskmaster, difficult to please, rarely smiling or finding a good word. Sometimes they drilled for three hours straight, their arms trembling from the sustained weight of holding the guns and the motionless poses. But it hadn’t been for naught, all the marching, weapons training, target practice . . . She could strip, reassemble and load a rifle in three minutes flat now and she had grown strong and streetwise, her innocence of even three months ago now long since discarded.

Her future survival depended upon the shedding of that youthful skin. The fascists were now at the city gates, their notorious Columns of Death having advanced under Franco from Badajoz in the south, and under Mola from Burgos in the north. Their unstoppable drive on Madrid had only been disrupted by Franco’s insistence on relieving Nationalist troops in Toledo as well, giving the Republicans enough time to rally a robust defence of the capital. But if Madrid still stood free, the roads to her were not, the rebels digging in on the city’s outskirts and changing tactics from a coup to a siege; they were sitting in for a long, drawn-out war and although their troops had not breached Madrid’s front line, they had another advantage in their arsenal – their much-feared Fifth Column, made up of a sizeable population of isolated and undercover Nationalist sympathizers already in the city, were now at work: reporting back on Republican tactics, disrupting supplies, leaking misinformation, and stray snipers were even taking aim from rooftops at churchgoers and cinema visitors. Innocents.