by Kate Hewitt
The Edelweiss Sisters
An epic, heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel
Kate Hewitt
Books by Kate Hewitt
Standalone Novels
The Edelweiss Sisters
The Girl from Berlin
When You Were Mine
Into the Darkest Day
A Hope for Emily
No Time to Say Goodbye
Not My Daughter
The Secrets We Keep
A Mother’s Goodbye
This Fragile Life
When He Fell
Rainy Day Sisters
Now and Then Friends
A Mother like Mine
Amherst Island Trilogy
The Orphan’s Island
Dreams of the Island
Return to the Island
Far Horizons Trilogy
The Heart Goes On
Her Rebel Heart
This Fragile Heart
Writing as Katharine Swartz
The Vicar’s Wife
The Lost Garden
The Second Bride
The Other Side of The Bridge
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
The Girl from Berlin (Available in the UK and the US)
When You Were Mine (Available in the UK and the US)
Into the Darkest Day (Available in the UK and the US)
A Hope for Emily (Available in the UK and the US)
No Time to Say Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)
Not My Daughter (Available in the UK and the US)
The Secrets We Keep (Available in the UK and the US)
A Mother’s Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)
Amherst Island Trilogy
The Orphan’s Island (Available in the UK and the US)
Dreams of the Island (Available in the UK and the US)
Return to the Island (Available in the UK and the US)
Far Horizons Trilogy
The Heart Goes On (Available in the UK and the US)
Her Rebel Heart (Available in the UK and the US)
This Fragile Heart (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Into the Darkest Day
Hear More from Kate
Books by Kate Hewitt
A Letter from Kate
The Girl from Berlin
When You Were Mine
A Hope for Emily
No Time to Say Goodbye
Not My Daughter
The Secrets We Keep
A Mother’s Goodbye
The Orphan’s Island
Dreams of the Island
Return to the Island
The Heart Goes On
Her Rebel Heart
This Fragile Heart
Acknowledgements
*
Dedicated to Isobel, for dreaming of The Edelweiss Sisters first. It’s been an amazing year. Thank you for working with me on so many books!
Prologue
Salzburg, Austria, 1945
Spring is bursting like a song through the city, a symphony of beauty and renewal amidst the devastation wreaked by war. In Mirabellgarten, outside the magnificent palace, the flowerbeds are a riot of daisies and wallflowers, pansies and forget-me-nots.
The magnolia trees in Marktplatz Square froth with silken-petaled flowers, and the Salzach River, flowing down from the snow-capped Kitzbühel Alps through meadows studded with the white stars of narcissi, burbles joyfully through the city. The river’s blue-green waters are untroubled by the broken bridges that gape above it, shattered reminders of the Allied bombs that destroyed them along with the dome of the cathedral, yet thankfully left much else unscathed.
High above the city, by the ancient ochre buildings of Nonnberg Abbey, a woman skulks in the shadows as the dawn sun creeps over the blue-misted mountains of the Salzkammergut and spreads long, golden fingers of buttery light over the indigo peaks that ring Salzburg like a giant’s jagged crown. In her arms a baby stirs and lets out a small, mewling cry, the sound far too weak for a hungry infant.
She draws the blanket up around the child’s face, rocking her as she whispers for her to hush. It has taken her nearly a week to arrive at this point, and she is filthy, exhausted, and starving. It would have been far easier to give the child to the relevant authorities that now swarm the cities and towns from here to Hamburg, officious and efficient, or even to leave the creature where it had been born mere weeks ago, in pain and suffering, into a world that seems broken beyond repair.
But she made a promise, and so she is here, her body bruised and aching, her arms cradling this scrap of humanity that has somehow, impossibly, managed to survive.
High above, the clock in the baroque dome that crowns the abbey begins to chime six o’clock. Soon the nuns will be assembling for prime, their voices rising as one as they recite the ancient words in a ritual that has remained unchanged by time, by war.
The baby cries again, and the woman knows she can wait no longer. As reluctantly as she accepted this burden, she is now loath to let it go. This tiny child is the only thing that anchors her to another human being, to a reality other than wandering the world, one of the many lost to war—homeless, nameless, alone.
She cradles the infant to her chest as she remembers the child’s mother’s fingers clasped in her own, cold and bony, ragged nails digging into skin, eyes lit with the dregs of her strength as it seeped away into the dirty straw.
“Please… promise me… for the sake of my child…”
What else could she have done but given her vow?
“There is a clockmaker on Getreidegasse… a painted sign above it with a sprig of edelweiss… take the baby there… but if no one is there, then take it to the abbey. The nuns are kind there. They will know what to do. Swear to me…”
And so here she is, with this tiny bundle, who nobody still living wants, clutched in her arms. She went to the shop on Getreidegasse, and it was boarded shut. So she came here, up to the abbey, to give them her offering. There is no way she can provide for the child; she must leave her here. The last chime of the clock fades into the dawn silence, a remnant of the echo reverberating through the narrow courtyard as shreds of mist begin to evaporate under the rising sun. Steeling herself, the woman moves forward, the baby cradled in one arm, an old crate held in the other. She found the crate outside a grocer’s in a fetid alleyway off Kaigasse, its damp, half-rotten slats as humble a crib as that for the holy child to whom the nuns raise their voices.
She puts the cra
te on the doorstep of the abbey, and then gently places the baby inside, tucking the dirty blanket, given to her by a Red Cross worker in Munich, carefully around her tiny, wizened face. She tucks the little knitted flower, the edelweiss, into the blanket; the baby’s mother gave it to her, a keepsake she’d managed to hold on to. Perhaps the nuns will know and understand.
She stoops to kiss the baby’s pale cheek before she lifts the heavy door knocker and lets it fall once, twice, three times, each reverberation in time to the thud of her heart.
She hears footsteps, quiet and unhurried on the ancient stones, and she retreats to the shadows, hiding behind a pillar, daring to peek around it because she must see this through.
The door opens with a long, protesting creak and a nun steps out, glancing around in untroubled curiosity before, with a start, she notices the crate at her feet. She is young, this nun; her face is a smooth, placid oval underneath her white wimple, and her body is slender, as are the hands that reach for the crate. A look of wonder flashes across her face as she takes the baby into her arms.
The woman watches as the nun cradles the baby against her body; despite her vocation she seems to know how to hold a child, drawing it instinctively towards her, one hand caressing the tiny, fragile head. A smile curves her lips as tenderness suffuses her face.
It is enough. She has made good on her promise; there is nothing more for her here. Silently, her heart and body both aching, the woman slips away as the sun rises high above the city, filling it with its light.
Chapter One
Salzburg, 1934
Music rose from the tall, narrow house on Getreidegasse, joyous tendrils of sound winding their way through the dim and crowded shop on the first floor, with its glass cabinets of marble mantel clocks. A majestic grandfather clock presided over the premises, along with an intricately carved cuckoo clock, made by the great Johann Baptist Beha, that had chimed every quarter hour for nearly a hundred years.
The music rose up the narrow flight of stairs to the front sitting room with its worn velveteen sofas crowned with hand-stitched antimacassars, the heavy wooden tables and chairs, a mahogany cabinet dark with age—all of it brought from a timbered farmhouse in the Tyrol—and then back to the kitchen, with its square wooden table and blackened range.
Up another flight to the main bedrooms and then further still to the second floor, with its small attic rooms, their small windows overlooking the onion domes of Salzburg Cathedral, the ever-present Alps an indigo fringe beyond.
Music filled every room as three voices joined in sweet melody, alto, soprano and second soprano, the different harmonies mingling together in the popular folk song “Die Lorelei”:
“I do not know what it means, to feel so sad;
there is a tale from olden times I cannot get out of my mind.
The air is cool, and twilights falls…”
Then, suddenly, silence.
“Birgit, I think you’ve gone flat,” Lotte said with a kindly laugh, shaking back her blond hair, a shower of wheat-gold about her shoulders. “Or was it me?” She laughed again, smiling at both her sisters with easy joy. “Let’s try again.”
“There’s no time.” Birgit turned away quickly, hiding her expression from her younger sister’s laughing eyes. “Father’s waiting,” she added and hurried from the back room of the shop where they’d been practicing to give their father peace from their racket; he had suffered from severe headaches ever since he’d been hit by a Romanian shell in the Battle of Orsova nearly twenty years earlier.
“Birgit…” Lotte began, her voice filling with dismay as she flung one hand out to stay her sister, and the oldest, Johanna, shook her head.
“Let her be. You know how she gets. I’m going to change my apron.” Briskly she followed Birgit out of the room and upstairs to the family’s living quarters; with a little sigh Lotte followed too, restarting the melody as she mounted the stairs, although this time her sisters did not join her.
Up in the kitchen their mother, Hedwig Eder, was fussing with the cakes she’d made in celebration of the day, her apron tied over her best dress, usually kept for Sundays. Although she had lived in the city for twenty-three years, she had never gone to any of the events of the Salzburg Festival before, save for the free performance of Jedermann in the cathedral square that even the peasants came down from the mountains for.
The festival proper was reserved for the wealthy holidaymakers and day trippers who came from as far as Vienna, Berlin, or even further abroad—sophisticated people with sleek motor cars, arch voices, and a sly, knowing manner, or at least they seemed that way to Hedwig. The elegants, Salzburgers called them, with either awe or scorn, or perhaps both.
Her husband Manfred appeared in the doorway of the kitchen; like her he was wearing his Sunday clothes, a suit of well-worn wool tweed, smiling at the sight of the sugar-dusted cakes filled with cream and piled neatly on a plate.
“Ah, Prügeltorte,” he exclaimed in pleasure. “My favorite.” He came over to plant a kiss on her cheek; embarrassed, Hedwig twitched away.
“I think I saw a mouse,” she told him as she clapped a net dome over the cakes. “We’ll have to get the man in again.”
He regarded her tenderly for a moment as she bustled around the kitchen, moving the kettle here or a plate there, not meeting his gaze. “Hedwig, there is no mouse,” he finally said, his tone gentle.
She shrugged. “I thought I saw something.”
Smiling, Manfred put an arm around her waist. “You’re nervous.”
“Why should I be nervous? I’m not the one singing.”
“Even so.”
She moved away from him, as she always did, even though she loved him, because his easy affection so often felt beyond her.
“They will be fine,” Manfred told her as she continued to bustle around the kitchen. “It is more for the experience than the winning. Besides, it is not as if they will be on stage at the Festspielhaus—they are merely taking part in a competition for amateurs, at a restaurant, no less. Let us enjoy the day.”
Hedwig did not reply, because she knew she would not enjoy the day, although she would try. Still, she managed to give her husband a distracted smile, knowing he would certainly enjoy it, before she went to the small, cracked mirror by the door and tidied her hair. She might be a simple farmer’s daughter, but she would always keep herself neat.
“And here they are!” Manfred announced, beaming as Lotte came into the kitchen with a laughing twirl, followed by Johanna, as brisk as ever, and Birgit, who was trying not to look anxious. They wore full-skirted dirndls with checked aprons; Lotte had laughed that they looked like milkmaids, but as the competition was sponsored by the Association of Austrian National Costumes, the clothes, made with loving determination by Hedwig, seemed more than appropriate.
It had been Lotte’s music teacher who had arranged their entry into the competition. Manfred and Hedwig’s youngest daughter had been blessed thrice over—of the three Eder girls, she was tacitly acknowledged as the prettiest, the most charming, and the most musical.
Some years ago Manfred and Hedwig had decided she should have singing lessons, something that had not been thought of for either Johanna or Birgit, for there was not really the money. Lotte, however, had such a love of music that to deny their little lark lessons had seemed, to Manfred at least, almost cruel. Hedwig, who managed the household purse strings, had agreed more reluctantly, but nevertheless the silver groschen and gold schillings had gone into the battered tin on the shelf above the range, day by day and week by week.
When the teacher, Herr Gruber, had suggested Lotte sing at one of the competitions for amateurs that ran alongside the famous music festival, Lotte had insisted she not sing alone, but rather with her sisters. They could form a trio; they had sometimes sung in three parts in the evenings, with Lotte’s high soprano soaring above her sisters’ more cautious voices, although they’d never done such a thing in public.
Herr Gruber had agree
d to the trio and duly entered them into a competition for folk singing. Lotte had buoyed her sisters along with her enthusiasm, determined they would all share in this marvelous experience together, because she had never craved the spotlight, even though she seemed as if she were born for it.
“Are we ready?” Manfred asked as Lotte tied a scarf over her golden hair and Birgit fussed with her apron. His daughters, he reflected, were all alike in their blond, blue-eyed looks, and yet they were as different as three people could possibly be: Johanna, so much like his Hedwig, with her strong-boned face and briskly capable manner; Lotte, so playful and pretty and light; and Birgit, sandwiched in the middle, quiet and shy, a bit clumsy, still struggling to find her place in the world.
“How do we look, Papa?” Lotte asked as she twirled again in her skirt.
“Like the most beautiful girls in all of Salzburg. But wait.” From his pocket he took the three sprigs of edelweiss he had picked only that morning, on his walk up the Monschsberg. He’d been surprised to find it, growing determinedly from an outcropping of limestone high above the city.