DUSK SETTLES SWEETLY. Violet has stolen away to the laboratory after dessert—something is nudging the edge of her mind, some beginning of an idea that will not let her rest—and when she steps at last through the French doors to the terrace, the air is flat and indigo-quiet, scented with cigarettes and with the jasmine that grows in a neat row along the side of the house.
A faint noise drifts into her right ear, a male noise, a chuckle perhaps. She knows it belongs to Lionel. She cannot resist turning her head, and she sees him at once: a midnight shadow tucked against the lindens, feet crossed at the ankles while he speaks to the solid height and heft of Herr von Karlow. The smoke from their cigarettes whorls ghostlike in the darkness.
She hears other sounds, too. She hears Jane’s light laughter from the lounge chairs at the opposite end of the terrace, where she sits with Walter every evening.
“Mrs. Grant. I was growing alarmed.”
Violet spins and crashes into the shoulder of Herr Schulmann.
“I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, in his perfect English. Over tea that afternoon, Jane told her that Herr Schulmann attended school at Harrow and university at Cambridge, that he was once engaged to an Englishwoman, though it had ended unhappily. How Jane has discovered these facts, Violet can’t imagine; it’s as if she pulled them from some all-knowing ether, beyond the reach of Violet’s senses.
“Not at all.” Violet’s Schuyler upbringing takes over, as it’s meant to do in such moments. She asks if he would like a drink, if he would like to sit down. The butler has already wheeled out the after-dinner trolley, an abundant arrangement of crystal decanters and cigarettes and coffee and petits fours. Can she offer him something?
He holds up his glass. “I am already sufficiently supplied, thank you. But you have nothing. May I fetch you a glass?”
They wander to the trolley. Herr Shulmann is drinking port, which he pronounces excellent; Violet, for want of imagination, allows him to pour her a glass. They come to rest on the low wall at the edge of the terrace, where the jasmine brushes Violet’s bare arm.
“I’ve never met a more unusual hostess,” says Herr Shulmann. “You disappear and reappear as if borne by fairies.”
Violet laughs. Her head is still sparkling a little from the excitement of discovery on her page of equations, from the low chuckle of Lionel’s nearby throat. “Not fairies at all, I’m afraid. I was in the laboratory.”
“Most wives would be visiting the nursery at this hour.”
“Dr. Grant and I have a different sort of progeny.”
“Indeed.” Herr Schulmann looks at his hands and rolls the sharp-edged bowl of his glass back and forth between his fingers, which are long and polished. He is a government official of some sort, Herr Schulmann, though Violet can’t remember what he does. “I suppose it’s much the same with me. My work is my child, or more properly Germany, and I love her with the same passion as I might love my own daughter, if I had one.”
“Yes, I understand.”
He looks up. He’s not a handsome man—his face is narrow, his hair thin—but the light from the house is kind to him, erasing the tiny pits in his skin, giving his eyes a liquid warmth. He fastens those eyes on her earnestly. “You are American, Mrs. Grant, though your husband is English. Are you a patriot?”
“I am not, I’m afraid. I find myself frustrated by these rivalries between nations.”
“As do I. As do I.” Herr Schulmann rises from the wall, strides to the trolley, and pours himself another glass with a shaking hand. He returns to her, sweeping up his black tails as he replaces himself in his seat. “All this talk of war tonight. You must understand, Mrs. Grant, that Germany does not want war. But we’re encircled, encroached upon.” He makes a motion with his hands. “France on the one side, Russia and the Balkans on the other. Spain begins to align herself against us.” He drinks. “And there is Britain.”
“Britain hasn’t committed herself, has she?” Violet peers through her memory, which traps equations and chemical formulae in perfect detail, but cannot always recall the current political map of Europe.
“Not publicly. But there is an understanding with France, that Britain will follow her into war if declared. And if war is declared, Mrs. Grant, if we teeter into this abyss, Germany will be beset on both sides. France to her west, Russia to her east. And she would fight with all her strength. She would fight to the end.”
“Pardon me, Herr Schulmann, but you appall me. All war appalls me. It is barbaric, the most brutal means of solving differences between nations. Men will be killed, men with wives and mothers and children. Hearts will break, and for what?”
Herr Schulmann’s hand reaches out unexpectedly to enclose her own, over her glass of port. “I agree, Mrs. Grant. I am not belligerent. I despise the very thought of war.”