The German Heiress

by Anika Scott

  More playacting, her father arranging another grand bit of theater in his life, in the lives of others. “You bullied Elisa into agreeing to it, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t need to. Theodor negotiated most of the conditions. The impulse to be generous came from him.”

  “Generosity. Is that what you call it?”

  “It’s what he called it. I would have liked to drown that girl in the Ruhr. I would have sent her so far away no one here would know she existed. It was he who insisted on taking care of her and the child. In return, I set the condition that the affair was over right then and there. We both agreed—all three of us, actually—that no one else should ever know the identity of the child’s real father.”

  “Why on earth did you introduce her to me, then? She might have told me.”

  “If she had, our little agreement would have been null and void. She would have lost everything. And, of course, if it ever did get out that the boy was a Falkenberg, it would have been the family’s duty to take the child into our bosom.” She folded her hands on her chest. “And there would have been no place for a girl like her in our circle.”

  “You threatened to take Willy away from her if she told?”

  “I did no such thing. She understood the stakes and the rewards too. That girl knew exactly what she was getting out of the whole business. Everything she had—everything—was from us. She was a stone around our necks.”

  Clara couldn’t believe it: Elisa so calculating—and little more than a child herself. But this was, after all, only her mother’s version of events. “I think you wanted to keep her close, Mother. You introduced us. You wanted us to be friends. You used me so you could watch her. And the closer we became, the more tempted she was to tell me and go back on your agreement. How excruciating it must have been for her. And what exquisite torture for you. Papa must have squirmed. When he was being difficult, did you remind him he had a little bastard son?”

  “Our sons are dead. My sons.”

  “Don’t go wailing about your sons. You only loved Friedrich. We all knew it. And it embarrassed him. Mummy’s boy.”

  Anne bolted toward her, and Clara grasped her mother’s sharp and bony hands and pushed her onto the divan. Anne had the nerve to stare at her with wounded astonishment. “What’s happened to you, Clara? You’ve become rough. Common. You’ve forgotten who you are.”

  Clara pulled on her cold and damp shoes. She fetched her coat.

  “Where are you running off to again?” Anne spread her arms. “This is your home. Your family. You can’t just leave it all behind.”

  Clara took a last look at the artifacts from a life that was long past. She looked at her mother, the crust of makeup cracking around her eyes, the skin trembling at her neck. There was a slight tremor in her left hand, something Clara had never noticed before. With sadness, she turned away. “Good-bye, Mother.”

  IT TOOK SEVERAL hours for Clara to trudge back to the Works. The wind swept across the junctions where people moved, hunched and slowly, choosing each careful step on the slick pavement. She joined them, staring at the ground as she walked. The core of her had gone cold—a numb emptiness now that she finally understood just how far her father had been willing to go to preserve his precious ideal of the family, and himself. He could compromise anything—his conscience, his political views, even his morals—if he was left intact as a shining idol. He had wanted to take care of Elisa and Willy for his own ends, to keep his secret, and it seemed like a plaster put on a vast wound, a small act of decency within the larger dishonesty, baseness, and corruption. Her father was a selfish man. He was full of his own vanity. He disgusted her.

  She entered the Works through the crumbled wall and followed the trail she and Jakob had made in the frozen snow when they left two days before to see Willy. The track from Jakob’s homemade ski pole made her smile, but only a little. She was trembling again, and the muscles of her face were stiff even in her scarf. She kept walking because she ordered herself to, and her body obeyed because she had no choice but to keep moving or collapse. As soon as she reached her camp, she tore down the wooden slats she’d nailed over the window space. After the mine, she needed light and air even if it let in the cold.

  In the shelter she and Jakob had made, she swaddled herself in the remaining blankets. She was still shivering, but not as much as before. She didn’t know if this was good or bad, and strangely, she didn’t care.

  He would be here soon—Jakob. He’d said he would come, and she had no doubt he would do as he promised. She slipped away, half-asleep, aware of her and Jakob’s musty smell in the blankets. It felt like the war, a night in the bomb shelter, and her head filled with a film reel. Her father young again in a dinner jacket and tinkering with an engine, his hands oily and black. Her mother trying to scrub them with a brush that had needles instead of bristles. Elisa over to dinner at Falkenhorst picking at the bones of a falcon and sucking her fingers. She was nude. Everyone was pretending not to notice. Clara was dancing with Max around the table, their tango odd and jerky because of the rope he’d tied to their ankles. Willy was older, a young man in a Luftwaffe uniform, identical to Friedrich, who sat beside him. They were going over the details of their last mission. Jakob wasn’t there. How odd, she thought as she danced, that Jakob wasn’t there when she had invited him for all the world to see. She didn’t care about his leg or his birth. Didn’t he know that?

  The voices changed, lost their dreamy quality, became sharp and urgent. Her head was touched lightly, then her neck, and under the blanket she felt a gentle hand on her chest. Some irresistible force pulled her by the feet. She felt herself lifted, settled, lifted again, rocking slightly as she floated on air before she was lowered for good. A pressure on her face, her eyelid eased back. Light.

  “Miss Falkenberg.” He was shaking her shoulder. It was very irritating. “Miss Falkenberg. Come on, girl. Wake up.” She must still be dreaming. It was Captain Fenshaw’s voice.

  She struggled to open her eyes and he was there, unbuttoning his tunic, saying something else. She tried to focus. Thought he said, “Cough.” But why?

  He was really making no sense. But she ordered her lungs to take a breath, and she coughed.

  Behind him, there was an open cabinet with rolled bandages inside. It occurred to her she might be in an ambulance. The light was strange, glaringly white somewhere behind her head. Fenshaw looked pale and unreal, his tunic off, face white against his white collar. Hands lifted her again gently, and Fenshaw wrapped her in his warm tunic, and then his coat.

  “Keep shivering,” he said, another bit of nonsense from him. As if she could stop. “You still with us?”

  He was patting her cheek and she ordered her voice to say, “Get your hands off me.”

  Over her head, he barked, “Where’s the bloody tea?”

  He put the cup to her lips. Her fingertips and toes slowly began to tingle, and the pain radiated through her body with a single thought: Captain Fenshaw is here. Not Jakob.

  NO ONE TOLD her where they were going and she didn’t care. Prison was prison. They rode silently with her in the ambulance, Fenshaw and a medic who kept checking her pulse. She drank from the thermos cup and ate the chocolate Fenshaw gave her, breaking off the wedges one at a time, rationing them. The chocolate helped. She began to see the irony in her situation, her arrest. She was wearing her captor’s clothes, drinking his tea, eating his chocolate, while he served her looking disheveled but triumphant in his shirtsleeves.

  She was reclining on a stretcher, but that was just her body. If the body was weak, the spirit could be strong. She imagined herself like Grandmother Sophia upright on her deathbed, refusing to be caught lying down even at the end. Clara’s head was swimming, but she was fighting it, trying to sit up.

  “Lie down. Rest.” Fenshaw’s voice, all of him, was wrapped in a cocoon of certainty and self-satisfaction. She wanted to puncture it. She wanted to hurl abuse at Jakob for betraying her, for who else could it
have been? Even if he had been forced to do it, he had hurt her deeply, and she aimed her anger and pain at Fenshaw, the man who had caused it all.

  “Feeling virtuous, Captain? Heroic? You’ve got your war criminal and the world is safe. You’re the chap who caught the Iron Fräulein. Bravo. I hope they give you a nice pat on the head.”

  He smiled at her just as he had after pulling her off the train. Knowing, indulgent. “You’re going down fighting, are you? I’d expect nothing less.”

  “And it’s such a fair fight, isn’t it? Me against the army or the military government or whoever will be interrogating me. Well, that’s fine. You can tell them I won’t say a word about the war to anyone. You must have threatened Jakob or his family, and for that, I am not cooperating with you, Captain.”

  “Don’t act against your own interests just because you’re angry at me.”

  “My interests are my business. Tell them they can starve me or keep me out in the cold. It won’t bother me. I’ve had all of that lately and I’m still here. I’m not afraid of prison.”

  The ambulance slowed, and everything she had said, her bravado, was gone. Out of the window she saw a squat building that looked like a barracks dropped onto a snowy field. She’d imagined prison to have barbed wire and watchtowers, but she couldn’t see any of that. She was breathing so hard that the window kept fogging over. As the ambulance doors opened, the wind blew snow crystals into her eyes. British soldiers peered inside. “Mind your own business,” she said, and they snapped back in surprise.

  She kept her head up as she limped on Fenshaw’s arm to the barracks. There were no guards. No fences. No matron telling her to disrobe. Just an empty hallway that smelled of damp leather and fried onions.

  At a door, Fenshaw said, “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Everything you need should be in there. I’ll be out here until time is up.” He opened the door to a row of sinks and mirrors. She ignored those—she hardly wanted to see the state she was in—and picked up the things laid neatly on the bench. Soap, clean towel, hairbrush. An army shirt and trousers were folded nearby.

  She spent a good ten minutes under the shower, soaping herself until she finally felt clean and warm, a grand waste of what had become precious to her, simple things like hot water and soap. But who knew when she’d next be offered such luxury. After dressing, she brushed her hair back like a man’s and then presented herself to Fenshaw as a girl soldier in British Army togs. She saluted him and declared herself ready for duty, sah, just as she’d seen in war films. He seemed too preoccupied to notice her disrespect. He waved at her to follow him to an unused office. Her dinner was laid out on the desk, one set of dishes but two teacups by the pot. The food was plain and plentiful, some meat in a bland sauce and heavenly mashed potatoes that warmed her stomach. She ate quickly and when she had finished, Fenshaw poured the tea.

  “Remember that BUF rally we talked about after we took you off that train? London, 1936?”

  The food had mellowed her. She wore fresh clothes and had eaten a hearty meal. She expected prison was going to be much worse than this. She guessed she was being prepared for the real thing, and she wanted this comfort to last as long as possible. “My mother dragged me to a lot of rallies, sir.”

  “You still don’t remember me, do you?” He was fiddling with his teacup, his ears flushed red. It triggered something in her, a memory she couldn’t quite reach.

  “You were in the cloakroom,” he said. “I hadn’t planned to talk to you. You’d left the stage and when you didn’t come back, I thought to look for you. I might have walked right past if I hadn’t noticed your shoe sticking out from behind someone’s rain cape. You seemed very alone in there with all those coats.”

  She drew a breath. She remembered now. She’d paid the cloakroom attendant to leave her alone while she hid out where her mother would never think to look for her. A young man had greeted her shyly from the other side of the counter. He’d been squeezing his cap, awed like most men who had any idea what her family was worth. She remembered his ears flushed red, as if speaking to her embarrassed him immensely. She couldn’t quite believe that painfully shy man had been Fenshaw.

  “You didn’t have a mustache back then.”

  “You invited me to sit with you and we talked. Must have been an hour or more. I claimed I was a voter from Shoreditch, and you told me I was too sensible a chap to vote for the Fascists. You had solid arguments about how they would botch things up if they ever got hold of real power. A roomful of Fascists next door, your own mother onstage, and you were determined to rob them of my vote.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember a word of that conversation.”

  “Well, we did empty our flasks. There was a lot of cognac and whisky.” He looked at her steadily over his cup. “You seemed completely different from your mother and the rest of your family as we knew them. We were keeping an eye on the Falkenbergs, but nobody looked into the baby girl until I did. We watched your career with much interest. Once the war broke out, we thought you might be of some use to our side. You’re half English, after all. It was possible you’d feel squeezed from both sides of the family. A conflict of loyalty. But there was no conflict. When the führer called, you became one of them.”

  “I was never one of them.”

  “Then what were you? The generous, sensible, independent-minded woman I met before the war? She wouldn’t have served them.”

  He sounded disappointed in her. He had met her so long ago, but back then he seemed to have seen more of what she was and could be than she had known herself. Everything he’d done since pulling her off the train—the hunt for her in the ruins, pressuring Jakob to betray her—perhaps it was really a search for that woman. The one who had once impressed him, surprised him, maybe touched him somehow, but in the end was a great disappointment. He didn’t know what she had tried to do in the war. He couldn’t see her conscience.

  “Sir, I tried to help people. You have all those files about me. Do you have the letters I wrote to Berlin, anyone who’d listen, begging for higher rations for the foreign workers?”

  “You wrote letters,” Fenshaw said, leaning back in his chair. “Very heroic.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was trying to get people fed. I harassed the construction companies to build decent housing, I forbade mistreatment of any kind in my factories, I gave the foreign workers space in our air-raid bunkers, I sent medical personnel into the camps to treat people. Is any of that in your files?”

  Fenshaw set a cup in the middle of the table between them, then balanced a spoon lengthwise on top of it. “You wrote letters.” He pinched sugar from the bowl and dropped a few grains into the spoon. “You tried to improve housing”—a few more grains—“medical care”—still more—“and the general treatment of the workers.” A dusting of sugar was in the bowl of the spoon. “But here”—he picked up the sugar bowl—“is where you imported and used at least twenty thousand workers over the entire war.” He overturned the bowl. Sugar spilled across the table. “In the end,” he said, “you did very little good compared to the harm you inflicted.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that? But what more could I do? Close the Works? Walk away? Do you think my father or my mother or some other director would have treated the workers better than I did? All I could do was try.” She thought of Galina and her friends, almost told Fenshaw that she had hidden people, tried to keep them safe. But her riskiest act was also her biggest failure, and it shamed her. Besides, it seemed wrong to use Galina and the others to try to impress Fenshaw now, their lives the price for setting her free. She put her fist to her mouth and looked around the sparse office. “Where are we?”

  “This is just a way station.”

  “On the way to where exactly?”

  “An interrogation center. We’ll be moving there shortly.”

  There was a draft coming from somewhere, a cold she felt in the oddest places: behind her ears, between each of her fingers. She couldn�
�t disappear into an Allied facility. Willy was out there alone, with a gun. And Elisa? Was she even alive? If the Gestapo had released her and she had survived, if she was out there somewhere, she had no idea Willy was in the mine or she would have already talked him out of it somehow. Clara had to let her know where he was. But how?

  Fenshaw was stacking the dishes onto a tray. Her time here was nearly up. She assumed if Elisa was still alive, Fenshaw knew where she was. His files went back years. He’d searched for her at Elisa’s house. He had to know what happened to her.

  “Sir, I know I’m in no position to ask a favor, but I’m going to ask for one anyway.”

  He listened, cautious.

  “I urgently need to see my friend Elisabeth Sieland. I’ve found no trace of her in the city. You know everything about me. You’ve spoken to everyone who knew me. Did you speak to her?”

  “What could possibly be so urgent?”

  “She’s my oldest friend, you must know that. I need to know if she’s alive. I don’t have anyone else.”

  “That’s not altogether true.” He seemed about to say something else—about Jakob, maybe?—but then he shook his head. “It’s not possible. I’m not arranging a meeting of any kind.”

  “Please, sir. I’ll go to prison without giving you any more trouble, but let me see Elisa before I go.”

  “No, Miss Falkenberg.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re delaying the inevitable.” He opened the door and spoke quietly to the soldier outside.

  She desperately tried to think of something that would change Fenshaw’s mind. Something he could possibly want. The mine? She thought of Willy in his army uniform, the rooms full of army food, and finally the army gun he had threatened her with. Fenshaw would want a wartime depot of the German Army, especially one with weapons.

  “Sir, I have information for you. Something you’ll be very interested in.”