. . . God save the King!
They duel all the way past the Reichstag, along the empty Potsdamer Platz, laughing and singing to raise the dead, until Violet’s throat aches a happy ache. Nothing can touch us. The automobile turns the corner of Kronenstrasse, and a bolt of golden-orange sunrise hits the windscreen. Lionel parks the car along the curb, just outside Violet’s apartment building. “I’ll go up with you.”
“You shouldn’t. The attendants will notice.”
“Let them notice. Let them see the way I look at you.” He reaches in the back for her valise. “I don’t want to be without you, not for a minute.”
“Well, then.”
He jumps around the front of the car and helps her out. Together they walk through the door, they nod at the sleepy doorman. Lionel’s hand grips hers. His jacket lies about her shoulders. The attendant in the lift, a man Violet doesn’t recognize, keeps his eyes trained on the silk-lined ceiling and sees no evil.
Violet’s heart pounds as the numbers tick upward. The machinery clangs to a stop; the attendant opens the door and the grille. A musty smell floods around her: the scent of abandonment. All of the servants have gone with them to Wittenberg.
Lionel tugs her hand. “Come along, then.”
There isn’t much to pack; Violet only wants enough to get by until she can find new things, a new life. She picks a couple of old dresses from the wardrobe, a woolen cardigan she bought that autumn in Oxford. She folds them carefully atop her notebooks and underthings from Wittenberg, the jewelry from Walter she plans to sell. Lionel waits in the doorway, watching her, his arms folded.
She snaps the valise shut. Lionel steps forward and takes it from her. “Is that all?”
“No. There’s something else.”
Lionel follows her to the study. She selects a book from one of the shelves, opens it, and takes a small key from the hollowed-out center. Lionel examines the spine and snorts. “The Hound of the Baskervilles. How clever.”
Violet unlocks the glass shelves near the desk and flips through Walter’s journals until she finds the one she wants.
Lionel props himself on the desk and watches her lazily. His arms are crossed against the bottom of his ribs. The valise sits next to him, atop Walter’s empty green leather blotter. “What’s that?” he asks.
“Nothing. Just to satisfy my curiosity.” She tucks the journal into the valise and snaps it shut.
He holds out his hand. “Shall I?”
She hands Walter’s key to him. He slips it into its hollowed-out nest of Conan Doyle and slides the book back into the slot on the library shelf. He turns to her and smiles. “Let’s go.”
“Where to, exactly?”
“I thought we’d go to my hotel. Clean up and have breakfast. Do you object?” He picks up the valise and holds out his other hand for her.
She takes it. “Not at all.”
? ? ?
THE STAFF at the Adlon is far too polite to notice their disheveled appearance, the road dust and the faint whiff of petrol. It might be Lionel’s confidence, the way he strides up to the desk with Violet’s hand indisputably enclosed within his elbow, and asks for his key.
“My luggage is in the motor out front,” he says in German. “The Daimler. Could you have it sent up immediately.” More command than question.
“Yes, Herr Richardson.”
They cross the marble lobby toward the multitude of lifts. “Did they save your room for you, all this time?” asks Violet.
“I should hope so. I paid in advance for the entire summer.”
The lift whisks them upward. Lionel still carries Violet’s valise, as if he doesn’t trust it to any other hands. She curls her hand around his arm and wonders if he’s brought any other women into this elevator. Jane, perhaps, or some woman from a party, some wealthy baroness or an official’s bored wife. To her horror, she hears herself asking him.
Lionel twists his hand to knit her fingers with his. “No, Violet.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not my business, is it?”
“Christ. Of course it is.”
They reach his room, a comfortable corner suite with a double-doored entrance. “I wanted something comfortable, as I was staying all summer,” says Lionel, standing back to allow her through.
The room is beautiful, furnished elegantly in pinks and greens, a large sitting room and a bedroom door to the right. The early sunlight gushes through the tall windows. Lionel sets the valise on a desk and turns to her, smiling, rubbing his unshaven cheek. “Bath first, don’t you think?”
They bathe together in the luxurious enamel tub, surrounded by steam and a weightless translucency of sunlight. Violet lathers his chest an inch thick; she fills her hands with suds and lavishes him all over, his arms and legs and privates, his toes and ears and the sharp tip of his nose. “Now you’re all clean,” she says, “clean and bright and lovely.”
“And scruffy.” He touches his chin.