The Dressmaker's War

by Mary Chamberlain

  “I am a man of honor,” he said. “I always keep my word. I will make your life agreeable. You will like that.”

  He pushed himself free and rolled to one side, one arm behind his head like a younger man.

  “I know someone who needs a dressmaker. Would you like that?”

  “A dressmaker?”

  “Ja,” he said. “This will be our little secret, Adelheid. Mine and yours.”

  Ada pulled her shift towards her, clutched it against her breasts.

  He watched while she dressed, gave her the key. “Open the door.”

  She walked through, into the corridor. He’d seen a person behind the flesh. Adelheid. Ada. A woman. No one had done that in a long time.

  And a dressmaker.

  —

  “EVEN BACK THEN,” Mr. Harris-Jones was saying, “you’d sell your body for a better life. Your soul, too. Body and soul. To the Nazis. A pact Faust would have been proud of.”

  “How would you understand?” she said. “How could you? You could never know how defenseless women are. At least in a POW camp the men had each other. I had no one.”

  Her life wasn’t easier at the commandant’s house. She’d wondered more than once whether she wouldn’t have been better off with the nuns in the home. She’d have had company, companionship, protection.

  “Was the commandant married?” Mr. Harris-Jones said.

  “There was a woman there, with a child.” Her voice hitched up again. Poor little mite. Screaming and screaming till he burst a blood vessel.

  “His wife?”

  “I found out, after, that he wasn’t married. I don’t know who she was.”

  “You made her clothes. Did you make anybody else’s clothes?”

  “She brought her friends along.”

  “And you made their clothes, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Talk me through how it went, Miss Vaughan. A typical day.”

  None of this had anything to do with provocation, or Stanislaus. He was wasting the jury’s time, everybody’s time. Well, she could do that, too. He wasn’t the only one who could drag it out.

  “I’d put my bedding in order, use the bucket. I’d pick up whatever sewing there was to be done. Wait until I was let out. Sometimes it would be quite soon. Sometimes I’d have to wait until midday. No breakfast then. Nothing to eat or drink.” He was letting her run on. She knew it was a trap, but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t stop. “I’d pick up my bucket, and—”

  “We want to hear about dressmaking. What happened when the women came to the house?”

  “They’d come with their material. And a photograph or a picture of a dress. I’d have to make it for them.”

  “What did that involve?”

  “Measuring them,” Ada said. “Designing a dress, to suit. Making a toile, a pattern. Cutting. Tacking. Sewing. Finishing.”

  “Designing. Bespoke. Making a toile,” Mr. Harris-Jones said. “That’s some skill. You weren’t an ordinary seamstress, were you, Miss Vaughan? You were a couturiere.”

  He was playing on her vanity, Ada knew, but she liked the recognition, couldn’t help it.

  “I suppose.”

  “You suppose? You built up quite a following in Dachau. This woman, whom you thought was Frau Weiss, was your front man, front of house. A mannequin, was she? Quite a business. The dressmaker of Dachau, couturiere to the Nazis.”

  “No.” Ada scratched at the loose skin of her thumb. “No.”

  “Your own atelier.”

  “That’s not it. I don’t know why you’re saying this. What does this have to do with Stanislaus?”

  “Did you take pride in what you did?”

  Her thumb was bleeding. She sucked at the blood, wiped her nail against her skirt.

  “It kept me alive,” she said. “Dressmaking kept me alive. It always did, from when I was young.”

  “I asked if you took pride in your work,” Mr. Harris-Jones said.

  “Yes,” Ada said, jerking her head high and glaring at him. “Yes, I took pride in my dressmaking. It made me human.” She clenched her teeth, hissed through them. “What would you understand?” She turned to the jury. “I was trapped there. I was never paid. Not even any special favors or food. So what if Frau Weiss got me work, wore my creations, she and her friends. So what? I didn’t get anything for it. But it kept me alive. I did what I had to, to survive.”

  “You did your best for those women, didn’t you, Miss Vaughan? You hung on their praises, lapped up their plaudits.”

  “No. They never spoke to me. Only one of them was ever kind to me.”

  Mr. Harris-Jones was lifting up the paper he had pulled out of his folder, and laid it on the table, facedown.

  “Item nine, in your bundle,” he said to the jury, walking over and handing Ada the paper he’d extracted earlier. It was a photograph. Ada stared at it, the features drifting in and out of focus, now you see it, now you don’t. There was no mistake. And the dogs. Ada struggled to remember their names. Little Scotties. Negus, Stasi.

  “Did you know this woman, Miss Vaughan?”

  “Yes,” Ada said.

  “Who is she?”

  “She was one of the women I made dresses for.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No.” Ada shook her head. “I didn’t know anybody’s name.”

  “Have you heard of Eva Braun?” Harris-Jones said.

  Ada swallowed. “Eva Braun?”

  “Yes. Eva Braun.”

  “Wasn’t she something to do with the Nazis?”

  “Are you feigning ignorance, Miss Vaughan?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Eva Braun,” Harris-Jones said, rocking on his heels, satisfaction scrawling across his face, “was Adolf Hitler’s mistress.”

  Ada had heard something about it on the wireless, but it was a while ago. She didn’t often see the papers, never looked at the pictures. She didn’t want to live in the past.

  “I repeat. Did you know this woman?” He held the photograph high with both hands.

  “I told you. I met her.”

  “This woman”—Harris-Jones puffed out his chest so his voice ricocheted round the courtroom—“is Eva Braun.”

  His words hit her like a steam train. Ada stumbled with the recoil, grabbed the rail for balance.

  “I didn’t know. I never knew who she was,” she said. “Nobody ever said her name in front of me.”

  “Did nobody tell you?”

  “No. Why would they?” Ada said. “People didn’t talk to me. They never called her by her name. Sometimes they talked about a Fräulein, that Fräulein. Like she was scum, common. They never said who she was. Not Hitler’s mistress.”

  Mr. Harris-Jones raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “Your circle was well connected. Hitler’s mistress? Whom he married the night before they committed suicide? Nobody gossiped?”

  Ada swallowed. Eva Braun had thanked her, complimented her. She had lapped it up, and all along she was Hitler’s mistress. Ada hadn’t known a thing.

  “Do you recognize the dress in the photograph, Miss Vaughan?”

  Ada knew it well, every dart and stitch, the distinctive corsage. She was tempted to lie. No. Never seen it. But Harris-Jones must know, otherwise he wouldn’t be showing this to her. Whatever you do, Mr. Wallis said, don’t lie.

  “Yes,” Ada said.

  “You made it, didn’t you?”

  Ada nodded.

  “Speak up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Designed, cut, sewed. Bespoke. Showed Eva Braun how to wear it, where to place the corsage. This was the dress Eva Braun wore when she married Adolf Hitler. She wore the same dress, without the corsage, when she died with him.”

  Someone in the jury box coughed. Ada watched as the foreman fidgeted, crossing and uncrossing his legs, shuffling his feet.

  “How does it feel to be Eva Braun’s dressmaker, Miss Vaughan? To have made her bridal gown, and her shroud?”


  Ada hadn’t known. She never knew.

  “Eva Braun,” Harris-Jones was saying. “Mistress of the most powerful man in Europe, if not the world. Certainly the most evil. Are you still proud of your work?”

  This wasn’t the point. He was twisting the story again.

  “Was this your contribution to our war effort?” This wasn’t how it was. She’d done nothing.

  “Or to the enemy war effort?”

  “I was trying to stay alive,” she said. “I didn’t know who anyone was. They didn’t talk to me. I had no choice.”

  “Just obeying orders, were you, Miss Vaughan?”

  “No.” Ada held her head in her hands. “No. You’re twisting things. It wasn’t like that.”

  “You were a collaborator, Miss Vaughan.”

  “No.” She was shouting. She didn’t know she had so much sound inside her. “I was a prisoner. I didn’t do this voluntarily.” She turned to the jury, sitting there, eyes drilling into her. “Details don’t tell you the truth, don’t tell you what happened. You don’t know what it was like there for me, alone, a slave in that house.” The foreman with the medals was nodding. Maybe he understood.

  “War,” she went on, “it’s chaos. That’s the real abuse. We are powerless. We do things, to survive, from one day to the next. There’s no future in war. I hated the Nazis. I had to live there, to survive. That is not collaboration. What if I had resisted? Sister Brigitte could have been shot. Could I have lived with that? Would that have been better, more moral?”

  Mr. Harris-Jones raised an eyebrow.

  “Are you so pure?” she said, glaring at him, then across to the jury. “So moral? With your guns and your bombing? Trading cigarettes for family heirlooms, or a little girl’s body? I saw that. Our boys did that, too.”

  She heard the judge draw in his breath, as if he was about to speak. She knew she was crossing a line, but she had to.

  “They say all’s fair in love and war. But not if you’re a woman.” Ada slammed her fist onto the witness box. “I thought I was being tried for murder. Not treason. This has nothing to do with Stanley Lovekin. He abused me, too. You are stringing me up like a Nazi at Nuremberg.”

  She turned to the jury, sitting tight-lipped, jackets buttoned up, fingers itching in their pockets. They didn’t care. Washed their hands of her.

  They’d shave her head, if they could, strip her naked and parade her through the streets.

  “I never betrayed my country. Never.”

  —

  THE FOREMAN HAD had a good war. They all had. Done their bit for king and country, if not in this war then the last. Old comrades, all of them. The jurymen, Harris-Jones, the judge. Spoke the same language, of old soldiers, of men. They understood each other. She could see them looking down their noses at her, at Mr. Wallis. What did you do in the war, sonny boy?

  Mr. Harris-Jones swaggered towards the jury, radiating success. Man to man. He looked down on Mr. Wallis, as if he were the class dunce.

  “Grossly insulting assault,” he began, an eyebrow raised into a question mark, nodding at Ada, at the jury. “This, from the woman who made Eva Braun’s wedding dress. Took pride in her work for the Nazis.” He stretched the words prrride and Naazis so the jury would not forget.

  “This is a very long way from the murder of Stanley Lovekin through asphyxiation by coal gas. A particularly unpleasant death, it should be said.”

  He tapped his pen on the desk, looked at the clock. He thinks he’s got it all in the bag, sewn up tight, Ada thought. One or two of the men in the jury were looking at her while he talked, though she wasn’t sure they were searching for innocence. She was tempted to glare back at them, but knew she had to look contrite. “This was not a matter of self-defense. Nor could it be a matter of provocation,” Mr. Harris-Jones was saying. “Ada Vaughan is a liar. She lies to anyone foolish enough to listen. She lies to further her advancement. She lies to herself. To us. There was no Stanislaus von Lieben. There was no baby. There was no Frau Weiss. There is no evidence for any of it. There was a dressmaking business. There was Eva Braun. There was prostitution and black marketeering. Ada Vaughan pursued her own interests in an amoral, immoral, and ruthless manner.”

  He sipped his water from the glass on his table, glanced at his notes, looked up.

  “The facts of the matter are straightforward. Ada Vaughan, also known as Ava Gordon, on the night of the fourteenth of June 1947, unlawfully killed Stanley Lovekin at number seventeen Floral Street, Covent Garden. The defendant admitted her guilt at the scene, and subsequently signed a written confession at the police station. The forensic evidence demonstrates that the confession is true. There were no mitigating circumstances or issues of self-defense which could explain her actions.”

  That’s all right, Ada thought. If he just sticks to the facts and leaves me out, that gives Mr. Wallis a chance to put my case. It’s not what happened, but why.

  “This wasn’t even a lovers’ tiff. This was a dispute between felons squabbling over the proceeds of their crimes. Ada Vaughan, a woman without morals or sensibility, an inveterate liar and fantasist, was in cahoots with Stanley Lovekin, running a black-market business and, with his partner in crime, Gino Messina, a vice ring. His murder was the result of a squalid quarrel between a pimp and a prostitute, a spiv and a fence over money, which resulted in the defendant, with malice aforethought, turning on the gas, which Stanley Lovekin inhaled and which killed him. A grossly insulting assault? Provocation? We’re talking about a tart here, not a nun.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Ada was shouting. “You can’t think that.” She faced the jury. “I can see the way he puts it. But it wasn’t like that.”

  “Miss Vaughan,” the judge said.

  “But that’s not what happened,” she said.

  “Miss Vaughan. This is your final warning.” The judge nodded to Mr. Harris-Jones to continue.

  “Ada Vaughan waited until Stanley Lovekin was insensible, then turned on the gas and withdrew, sealing the gaps in the windows and door as she went. She intended for him to die.”

  Harris-Jones looked over to the judge, like they were equals. “Loss of self-control is instantaneous. It can only be of the moment. When the provocation, whatever it is, is so acute that it drives reason out of the door. There cannot be provocation drop by drop, little by little. It cannot come years later. It is not like purchasing a frock on an installment plan, or building a wall, course by course. It happens”—Mr. Harris-Jones snapped his fingers—“like that. In an instant.”

  He sat down.

  —

  MR. WALLIS STUTTERED. He started crooked, tripped on his consonants, staggered on his s’s. Ada could see his hands trembling. He coughed, blinked, paused.

  “Let me start again,” he said, “from the beginning.” He took a big breath, and now his words came out rounded and formed, like he’d found his voice, and the story behind it, all together, ripe for the telling. Mr. Wallis was good with words, she’d give him that, used proper, long ones. She held her breath, crossed her fingers behind her back, hoped.

  “A bazooka,” Mr. Wallis was saying. He licked his lips, sucking back the spit. “Those were Ada Vaughan’s words. It was like he pulled a trigger. It all blew out, like a bazooka.” He squinted, catching each juryman’s eye. “He drove me to it. Stanley Lovekin’s provocation was such that any reasonable man”—he paused, turning to Ada—“or woman, would lose self-control. In other words, gentlemen of the jury, had you been in Ada Vaughan’s position, you too would have behaved as she did.”

  He was breathing through his open mouth, gathering wind. “Grossly. Insulting. Assault.” Mr. Wallis slithered out the words. “Such that any reasonable man”—he spoke it like he didn’t see how a woman would be reasonable—“would lose self-control.

  “Miss Vaughan did not witness an act of sodomy, adultery, or violence upon a relative. She wasn’t a husband or a father. She wasn’t witnessing an Englishman being unlawfully deprived
of his liberty. This was Floral Street,” Mr. Wallis went on, “not Burma. Or Italy.”

  The juryman in the demob suit smirked. Mr. Wallis adjusted his gown, lifted his head, hunched his shoulders, as if doing so made him look grown up.

  “The normal expectations of provocation do not apply here. Nor, moreover, did she grab an ax, or a kitchen knife, or a heavy-bottomed saucepan and kill Stanley Lovekin in a frenzy.”

  He paused, gathering his breath, and tilted his head towards Ada. He’s acting, too, she thought. Putting on a show. This whole trial is a show.

  “But neither did she calculate to kill him. It was not premeditated.” Mr. Wallis stuck out his chest. “There was not a single act, a grossly insulting assault, that provoked her.” He shook his head with fatherly concern. “That’s not how women think. Their reason works in a different way.”

  Ada thought he might be putting ideas in the jury’s head, not taking them away.

  “This was the legacy of an abuse that had lain dormant for eight years. It was reignited by Stanley Lovekin. Stanislaus von Lieben. One and the same person. The physical evidence matched. The behavior matched. He was in the town of Dachau, he confessed to abandoning her in Namur. He had ruined her life. He was a man with neither empathy nor remorse.”

  Mr. Harris-Jones blew his nose, a noisy trumpet that sliced through the silence of the courtroom, breaking the concentration. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket in a contemptuous flourish, hoisting up his gown, pulling it back down. Mr. Wallis waited.

  “The pain that Miss Vaughan had undergone, including the loss of her child,” he went on, “and as a victim of the Nazi program of forced labor, was a pain no one was prepared to listen to. Had she been a soldier, a prisoner of war, had she returned from Colditz or Burma, she might have had an audience. But she had to bury it inside her, where it grew like a fistula, drained her reason, so that when Stanley Lovekin confessed and dismissed her as an empty-headed tart—an insult by any standards, but one that was a particularly gross and insulting assault given its heritage—and then abused her, she turned on the gas, knowing that it would cause him to die. She did not think about it. There was no distance of time between his confession and her actions. She lost self-control in that very moment. The provocation, on the other hand, had grown in the passage of time. Historic wrongs have a way of festering. She does not deny killing Stanley Lovekin unlawfully.”