Yesterday a gang of Russian prisoners had descended on them. They were not as terrifying as the dream. She wrapped her arms around her sleeping boy and said a silent, involuntary prayer of thanks for his young life.
Benita had been pregnant with another child when she was sent to prison, although she hadn’t known it at the time. But when she found out, the life growing inside her had been a source of comfort: Connie was dead, and Martin had been taken, but she was not alone. She had passed her days whispering prayers and rosaries and lullabies to the baby: a little sister for Martin. She felt certain it was a girl.
And then the baby died. Lifeless, its small body huddled stubbornly inside her like a stone. She knew it was dead long before her body expelled it. The delivery was horrific. Her womb became infected, and she remained in the prison hospital until the Russian soldiers arrived.
And while she lay there swimming in and out of fever, she had immersed herself in a strong, oddly sustaining fury at Connie. It was his fault that she was there. His fault that Martin had been taken. His fault that the baby had died. If she had not been in prison, surely the baby would still be alive. He had abandoned her for his lofty ideals and secret conspiracy—and his affairs with other women. Gigi Flagstaff, that brassy American, who had the gall to court Benita’s friendship; Margarete Vederlander, the notorious Berlin glamour girl . . . and who knew how many others? And meanwhile, Benita had miscarried one baby after another.
She and Martin had spent countless long nights alone in their hot, unlavish flat (so different from the one she had imagined when she married), staring out at the empty city streets. Connie hadn’t sent them to the country, like the other aristocrats’ wives and children. His widowed mother did not invite them to stay with her in the drafty old Fledermann estate, and Benita was too proud to ask. Anyway, it was a horrible, formal place that would ultimately be destroyed by the Russians, his mother shot along with what staff remained. But in Berlin, Connie was always busy, always traveling. So Benita and Martin were abandoned to the roar of bombers, the endless trips to the bomb cellar, and the increasingly stark governance of the city.
All this she resented while she lay mourning the baby in her hospital bed. And beneath this, she was angry at her own ignorance. Why had Connie left her in the dark about his work when so many other widows had known so much? Did he think she was too stupid to understand? It was the final proof of their estrangement. She had listened to the radio report on July 20, 1944, with only the faintest inkling of unease.
Later still, Benita would be ashamed of her own oblivion. And of the rage and self-pity she had wrapped around herself during those feverish months. But at the time, it had kept her alive.
From her pallet in the fruit cellar of Burg Lingenfels, Benita began to hear a dull thunk, repeated rhythmically. It was faint but distinct. Gray light glowed through the casement windows. It was a new day. Thursday, to be exact.
Thursday! She realized with a start that the sound was Herr Muller’s ax. It was his last day in these woods. Next week he would be transferred to a camp in the French occupation zone. And anyway, Marianne did not want his help. This morning, he would have approached the castle from the back side of the mountain, through the woods, and not seen the prisoners. If he had seen them he would have turned around. Or if they had seen him, they would have turned him around. Or worse. They would not take kindly to the sudden appearance of an ex–German soldier, an ex-Nazi. Benita did not need rumors to tell her this.
Gingerly, she rose to her feet. It was important she not wake Martin or the von Lingenfels girls, asleep on the pallet they had dragged downstairs. They would only get in her way. With rare clarity, Benita knew exactly what she must do: warn Herr Muller before the prisoners discovered him. She took her shoes and the paring knife she always carried and tiptoed out the door.
Upstairs, the kitchen was empty. Marianne and Frau Grabarek had apparently gone up to their rooms. Outside the window, in the gray light, Benita could see the smoldering bonfire and the blackened carcass above it, an obscene thing. Around it the men slept, splayed out like corpses on a battlefield.
Herr Muller’s ax was louder once she was aboveground. Pulling her cardigan close, she hurried out the kitchen door to the courtyard. On the other side was an old bakehouse with an opening for shoveling waste into the moat. She had often seen Fritz and Martin climb through it and down to the murky bottom. From there they splashed along to a ladder of footholds carved into the moat wall, then up to the meadow between the castle and the woods.
Moving too swiftly to allow time to reconsider, Benita jogged toward it. The morning was fresh and cool, and the wild morning glories climbing along the wall were still closed. From the roof overhang, swallows began to stir, darting out in missile-like feints and swoops. They reminded her of something from her childhood—the swallows in the eaves of the asylum outbuildings; the baby birds that would fall out of their nests to the ground. One year she had tried to care for them, feeding them milk from a medicine dropper, offering them the worms she had dug. They had been so soft and fluffy and pitiful—their tiny bright eyes blinking up from her palm. It had never worked, though. One by one they died.
Inside the bakehouse, all was dim and rotten. It had not been used in years. The opening was not difficult to find; it was not even covered. Benita dropped to her hands and knees and lowered herself through. The drop was farther than she trusted, but she closed her eyes and let go. She staggered upon impact but remained on her feet. From here it was easy to make her way through the muck to the footholds in the wall. In a moment, she had scrambled up and out. Then she was free of the castle with only a short stretch of field between her and the woods.
Again, Benita heard the thunk of the ax.
She did not stop to look beyond the castle to what was visible of the stable, the fire, the sleeping Russians. Instead, she ran across the shaggy grass until she reached the safety of the woods. A scramble of weeds and low brush edged the forest, prickly and sharp, but she barely noticed. She was going to save Herr Muller. It was in her power to do this. The knowledge made her palms sweat and her heart race—but also filled her with a potent determination. She had been saved so many times—by Marianne, by her neighbor Frau Kessler in Berlin, by the prison warden who kept her in the hospital instead of a concentration camp . . . even, at one time, by Connie, her knight in shining armor, who had saved her from her life. But who had she ever saved? No one. Not even her own son.