Love by the Morning Star (24 page)

Yet where did she belong?
In Germany as it once was, but not as it is
, she thought.

What a shame that Georgie, as she could not help calling the Duke of Kent, only wanted her as a mistress and not as a singer. She wondered how he and Waltraud were getting along. Perhaps if things worked out well, her friend would let her use her apartment in Mayfair, her smart little coupe, while she looked for a job. Hannah was hesitant to leave, because Starkers was the only contact information her parents had, and she had surreal visions of them all wandering around foggy London for an eternity, searching for and never finding one another.

That's nonsense
, she told herself.
Sally or Coombe will keep any letters for me if I ask them, and forward them. I go tomorrow
.

Resolutely, she packed her bags, a task that was completed in the space of one minute. While the band played in the great hall below her attic chamber, she sat shivering in her slip and painstakingly sewed her mother's pearls back into her traveling suit and stitched the buttons on again. She left her Boxing Day parcel on her dresser. Then she curled up under her paltry blankets and slept, more or less, on a tear-damp pillow.

 

I
N THE GARDEN
, beneath the twin yews that grew so closely entwined they were almost one, Teddy waited. He did not wait patiently. The ball had ended at one (earlier than most successful balls, out of consideration for the servants it honored, for they had to be up again by five or six), and after bidding Anna a formal good night under his mother's eye, he retired to his room, waited until the house was quiet, then crept down to find his love. “Meet me in our special place,” he'd murmured as they danced.

He was there; she was not.

He paced, thinking of Anna's transcendent beauty as he held her in his arms. She was like a benediction, and he was grateful for the privilege of being allowed to look at her. It was like a spell, he thought, or perhaps more like a drug. For the first hour of waiting, he was consumed with the visual and tactile appeal.

Then, as his glances toward Starkers became more frequent, as the cold began to seep into his bones, as the proposal speech he'd prepared began to sound trite on the twenty-fifth rehearsal, he forgot to think of her beauty. Instead, he thought of her.

Of her lovely low voice . . .

No, it was a lovely voice, but not so low. If anything, as he'd noticed when they were dancing that evening, it sometimes squeaked. Trilled like a bird would be kinder, though less accurate. It was a changeable voice, rising and falling in pitch. Was it night that softened it, or only memory? For surely when she spoke in their hushed secret nighttime German, her voice was dulcet. And her singing voice! He would beg her to sing tonight. Perhaps he'd even invade her private concert hall in the yew bole.

But her occasionally squeaking voice didn't matter, not in the least. He loved her most for her mind, for the marvelous, funny, clever things she said.

Such as . . .

That was odd. When he imagined her speaking in her high-pitched English, he couldn't remember any of the witty things she'd said.
Ah, but that's because she's a spy in the daytime
, he remembered with a grin.
All of the delicious things she says are at night, when we're alone. How funny to think that if I only knew her in the daylight, I wouldn't love her at all!

Night grew deeper under the slim sliver of newborn moon, and still she did not come. It would be dawn in a few hours and he'd have to leave, again. He thought back wistfully to those endless holidays of his youth (as he thought of the time only a year or two past) when he would lounge at home for weeks, playing rugby and cricket with the village boys, swimming naked in the pond, with that last mad dash of cramming to do his Latin translations before the new term. If only he'd met Anna then, so he could woo her properly, instead of all these moments of interrupted bliss.

Maybe he should tell Burroughs he didn't want any part of this spying business. It had all been so exciting—it still was, for as things in Europe got worse, he knew how vital his sub-rosa role might be. But it pained him nonetheless to think of finding love only to leave it behind to play his very serious, very dangerous game.

I'll talk it over with her after I propose and see what she thinks
. He honestly didn't know what her opinion might be. Oddly, when he thought of her answering in English, he thought she would insist that he stay safe in England. When he imagined her replying in German, he was sure that, whatever sorrow it might cause them both, she would urge him to continue his undercover mission.

He heard steps and his heart lightened. (And sank, too, in some way he didn't quite understand. Was he doing the right thing, proposing to a girl he hardly knew? It felt so right, so perfectly right . . . most of the time.)

But no, there were voices too, those rising and falling tones of the tipsy trying to be quiet, and laughter. It was a couple, he was sure. Who? Two of the servants? Some lingering guests? They were going to the glass hothouse. Ah, yes—Anna had mentioned that Hardy had a paramour. He heard a little shriek, a moment of silence, and then more laughter. Whatever was going on didn't concern him. Where was Anna? Why didn't she come?

He gave it one more hour, and then took a small notebook and pencil stub from his pocket.

I waited for you
, he wrote. That sounded petulant, but he was on his last piece of paper and couldn't tear it up and start fresh.

Marry me
, he added, to make up for it.

Then he felt along the inside of the yew bole until he found a loose piece of bark and fixed it in place.

As he walked back to Starkers he almost turned around to retrieve his scrap of a proposal.
She deserves better
, he thought, and then:
She doesn't deserve that much, because she didn't come
. He thought of the unkind thing she'd said about his beloved old governess, of the misguided (and sometimes frankly stupid) things she'd said about politics, the lower classes. It was an act, he knew, but if she could act that part so well . . .

Will she think less of me if she learns I can act like a perfect Nazi? Will I be a different person because I pretended to be a different person?

Tired of thinking, and simply tired, he made himself stop worrying.
You don't have to think about love
, he decided.
You love, or you do not
.

He remembered the night she called him an ass and told him
tschuss
, not
auf Wiedersehen
, then assured him that they were no longer formal. Her
tschuss
had been like a kiss.
I haven't even kissed her
, he realized.
Not really. Only her hand, that precious scar on her left thumb
. No, it was the right. Was it? If only she'd take off those damned gloves during the day so he could have a proper look.

Half an hour later his Bugatti was purring toward London and Burroughs.

Tschuss
, he whispered to the wrong window, a kiss of promise blown through the cold, sharp air.

 

N
EAR DAWN
, W
ALTRAUD LET HERSELF
into Hannah's room. She looked at the girl's tear-streaked face and almost decided not to wake her . . . but really, joy should always defeat sorrow, she thought, so she sat on the edge of the narrow bed and shook her friend gently awake.

“Thank you!” she whispered as Hannah opened her eyes. “Do you realize what you've done for me?”

Hannah sat up, frowning, still lost in a confused dream. “What have I done to you?” she asked.

“
For
me, silly. You introduced us, and whatever you told him about me beforehand, he was primed, my love, simply primed. He has a reputation for favoring entertainers, but so fast! Perhaps royals move in different time frames. They have the money to do as they like, and then people to take care of any messy termination. Perhaps one day a large man will haul me out of my flat and a lawyer will explain how I have no recourse, and then if I protest or go to the papers I'll end up floating in the Thames.” She gave a melodramatic sigh. “From cabaret trollop to mistress of a royal, can you imagine? Quite worth the looming faux suicide, don't you think? So exciting to be with a man who doesn't have to worry about consequences, or his wife. If I ever become a wife, let me not be a silly, jealous one.
You
must be, though. You must positively kill Teddy if he so much as looks at another woman. Like that fright of an Anna he was dancing with all night after you left.”

She noticed Hannah's pained expression, and wondered if that was the cause of the tears. She had meant to stick to Hannah's side and do everything in her considerable power to make Teddy realize he simply had to propose, but things had taken such an interesting turn with His Royal Highness.

“I didn't hear about the pearl incident until later, and everyone was strangely reticent with details. I would have been there staunchly defending you, except I was ensconced with HRH, as I've decided to call him, doing . . . well, doing such as can be done with a hundred people on the other side of a curtain. Still, that's quite a lot. And then afterward, to have some real privacy, we went to the hothouse, only we found that dishy gardener Hardy there, tending his tubers by moonlight, and HRH and he got to talking about plants and I was almost—
almost
—jealous, but then Anna came, and a few other couples drifted in, and it was practically a nightclub. HRH is so kind. It seems to be his hobby to whisk people off to brave new worlds. He said he can get Hardy an apprenticeship at the Windsor gardens, and after six months of that, practically anyone would take him on as head gardener. I'm glad he didn't think to do anything for that Anna. Oh, darling, we leave for London this morning! Farewell to servitude!”

“You have the flat in Mayfair and the coupe?”

“Or Rolls, though I think I'd prefer to drive myself rather than have a chauffeur snooping, making notes whenever I visit a gentleman who's not my uncle, and of course I haven't any uncles.”

Amid her own troubles, Hannah marveled at her friend, already thinking of infidelity when her adulterous affair had scarcely started.

“But what a pain for you to have been persecuted by that vile old harridan. I know it was all cleared up, but still. Was Teddy quite heroic? I didn't hear a thing while it was going on, and when HRH and I emerged you were gone and the party was winding down. Teddy was dancing with Anna, no doubt to please his mother, and I couldn't exactly go up and ask when the happy day was to be. But I can picture him charging to your defense like an enraged bull.” Waltraud's cheerful voice started to get a little forced, and she realized her extreme happiness wasn't as important as she'd thought.

“Isn't it all arranged?” she pressed. “With that dress, I was so sure . . .”

“You thought a
dress
would make him love me?” Hannah asked with contempt, not for her friend, really, but for the bitter world. “You thought it would disguise the fact that I am a nonentity—a Jew, a foreigner, a cabaret singer? You thought a dress would give me an English complexion and blond hair and the right background?”

“What happened?” Waltraud asked gently.

“Oh, Traudl, they took me away, and he did
nothing!
That is what happens to us, in Germany and here—they take us away, and people do nothing!”

She thought she had run out of tears, but she wept again as she told Waltraud how Teddy had hardly acknowledged her in her hour of need, how he had clung to the beautiful Anna.

“They should be together,” Hannah sobbed in self-pity. “Two shallow English people, making shallow English babies. I know now why my mother ran away from this country.”

“Hannah, love, if he doesn't care for you then he's a fool, and you could never love a fool. The moment he spurned you, your heart should have been warded against all breakage, forever.”

“It doesn't work like that.”

“It doesn't?” Waltraud asked, genuinely surprised. She rarely failed to get any man (or woman) she desired, but lost interest the moment her target showed no reciprocal interest in her.

“He loves me. I know he does. But he can't bring himself to acknowledge it.”

“Then you shouldn't waste your affections on him,” said pragmatic Waltraud. “And what perfect timing, for my Mayfair apartment is to have two bedrooms. For when we have rows, you see. We shall be such an impassioned couple that we will throw things at each other and have tearing big fights, and each go to our own bedroom to sulk, and then creep into one another's bed at midnight to make up. Only, we won't for a while, because you will be in the extra bedroom. He won't mind at all. You can even . . .” But she wisely nipped that suggestion in the bud.

“No, I can never be the cuckoo in your love nest. But I'm still leaving. It was wrong of me to stay past the first day, when I saw how they would treat me. Or how
she
would treat me, and they all follow her. I will go to the refugee center and look for work like any other Jewish girl. That is, any uncertain child of agnostic parents of Jewish heritage. I wouldn't mind being a kitchen maid anywhere else. Only at Starkers does it gall.”

“Stay with me just for a little while, then. HRH can find you work—good work, singing, acting. Or teaching children to sing. We'll get you in the Sadler's Wells Theatre eventually, or the D'Oyly Carte if you want something lighter. There's no need to slave, not with your talent.”

Waltraud wore her down, though Hannah swore she wouldn't impose for more than two weeks, and during that time she'd be out night and day looking for work, and her own place.

Waltraud had some more packing to do, so Hannah said she'd meet her in half an hour outside the gates. She didn't want to say goodbye to anyone. She just wanted to disappear.