To her surprise, Constance Halliday pokes her gently with her stick. “Everything alright there, Miss Webster?”
She closes her eyes and feels the heft of the gun in her hand. The weight of her embarrassment is heavy but she lets it sit on her shoulders, feeling the downward push of it. And then she has it. She opens her eyes and runs a finger down the side of the gleaming barrel. “I don’t like relying on something that can get taken away from me,” she tells her mentor.
Constance Halliday gives her a long, assessing look, then nods. “Well, your hands can’t be taken, can they?”
Billie waits to be thrown out of the program, shipped off to London with a steno pad and a pencil skirt. Instead, the next day she walks out to the training ground to find a man standing next to Constance Halliday. He is muscular and ugly as sin, wearing sweatpants and an expression like he has a better place to be and is doing her a favor.
Constance Halliday smiles thinly. “You may call him Mad Dog. And you will do what he tells you.”
Whatever he is missing out on to be there, he makes Billie pay for it because it turns out that Constance has brought him in just for her. While the other three work at perfecting their respective skills, he teaches Billie everything she doesn’t know about hand-to-hand combat. He throws her down a hundred times that first day, landing her squarely on her back and knocking the air out of her lungs every time.
After she is dismissed for the day, she realizes her legs will not support her and she crawls up the stairs on her hands and knees. The bedrooms are freezing, so the four girls have taken to meeting in the big linen cupboard where the pipes keep the temperature warm enough for the boxes of baby chicks Constance Halliday has ordered. It is a tight fit, but the girls spend their evenings in this tiny room with its warm air that smells of chicken shit and lavender. Billie is too sore to lift her arms, so Mary Alice feeds her while Nat fiddles with a set of lockpicks and a basket of locks and Helen cleans the soil out from under her fingernails. Everyone has chores at Benscombe, and Helen’s is weeding the kitchen garden between weapons drills. She is also a traveling drugstore and manages to get Billie some prescription painkillers while Nat filches half a bottle of wine from the pantry.
By the next day, the bruises have blossomed and Billie’s body is black and blue from neck to ankles, but she hauls herself out of bed and goes back for more. And this time Mad Dog only throws her fifty times.
Four weeks later, on a wet, miserable morning in the garden, Billie catches him below his center of gravity, levering him onto his stomach as she follows him down onto the soggy grass, landing hard on the small of his back with her knee and driving the air out of his lungs. He pops his head up, a reflex to draw in a breath, and when he does, Billie wraps her elbow around his throat. It would have been easy to jerk the head back towards her body, but she pulls him slowly, careful not to loosen her grip. His legs flail behind her, but this accomplishes nothing except to tire him out. He gets his knees under his body and pushes up, trying to throw her off, but she hangs on, jamming her knee into his kidneys. His face changes colors, pretty ones—pink, red, then purple. His nostrils flare white and he keeps opening and closing his mouth, searching for a breath that isn’t there.
He finally sags into surrender, tapping the ground as he collapses. Billie holds on a second longer just because she can, and then rolls off of him. He whoops air into his lungs, gasping and shaking. Billie stands astride him, feet planted wide apart, blood humming in her ears. Her hands are curled into fists and she is ready for him to go again. She wants him to get up and try again. But he lies there, beaten.
Billie looks up to see Constance Halliday watching them, a smile on her face, and she realizes she is smiling too.
“Finally, Miss Webster,” she says softly. “You understand. It isn’t your anger that will make you good at this job. It is your joy.”
The fighting that Mad Dog teaches Billie is not sporting or fair. It is down and dirty street brawling. He teaches her to go for the balls and the eyes, to drive the heel of her hand into an opponent’s nose until the cartilage crunches crisply, like celery. He teaches her how to ram the resulting mess into the brain to finish the job. He shows her on a chicken how to snap a neck with a quick and decisive twist and how to choke someone out using her thighs or the crook of her elbow.
When the training is finished, he has a pronounced limp and an ear that will never be the same, but Constance Halliday is satisfied. Her little flock of Sphinxes has come along nicely, far from what they were when her brother discovered them. Helen Randolph had been an easy choice. Her father had been a founding member of the OSS, and her grandfather a diplomat with a flair for secret negotiations. Clandestine service is in her blood.