by Pirate Irwin
Victoria entered the courtroom with the sashay he remembered from those frenetic days in Berlin, but aside from that there was little resemblance to the sexy beautiful woman he had shared his bed with over so long a period. Her experiences at the hands of the savage Bolshevik officers and the even less human ordinary soldier had taken its toll, so that she looked more early 60s than her real age of 55. Her face was narrower, heavily lined, and her mouth once so full and crinkled in an upward curve to indicate she always smiled had slumped downwards to the extent one could tell she rarely had occasion to be happy these past years. Her eyes still held a certain sparkle to them, but that too had dimmed, though one thing she had retained was her individual style of dressing to suit the particular occasion, as she was dressed in a red velvet dress, sufficiently low cut to still be decent and not indicate she was a hussy on the prowl, but yet showing off her full bosom. Sebastian wondered how high the corset was because after such a battering from the Soviets, it was highly unlikely they could possibly be able to keep themselves from drooping. She did not cast him a glance until she took her place in the witness box, and then it was only a cursory one. He could not tell whether that was because she did not wish him to stare into her eyes and see the damage that had been done to her since they last saw each other, or because what she was about to say on oath was such a pack of lies that she would break down if she looked him squarely in the eye. Whatever, he was dreading not only the evidence about to be given but also the cross examination, because he did not have an earthly idea firstly that she was to be called and indeed, was surprised after her experiences that she could still be alive. He cursed Steiner for introducing her as a witness without informing him and when he raised a protest, the judge backed down as Adam coolly replied that she had come forward of her own volition and at such a late stage that he had no time to inform the defendant. Sebastian could tell from the glint in his eye that Steiner was revelling in his discomfort and he, for one, did not believe a word of what he had said.
The judge, too, expressed a certain scepticism at the explanation but was powerless to stop the evidence being heard, as Steiner explained she had to return home as quickly as possible as her second husband was grievously ill. She did not wish to be absent should he die, as she had been so marked by the death of her first husband and not being able to be with him, given, Adam added drily, the Gestapo were not known for their compassion.
The early part of her evidence held little that was damaging to Sebastian as she related how life was before he arrived in Berlin on his first visit, though, she claimed that she had noticed how he had ogled at her during the Sixes week at Oxford and had felt somewhat threatened. Sebastian laughed inwardly at that and thought name one other male student who wouldn’t have done the same thing, given that she was virtually naked. “Baroness von Preetz, how would you describe the impact of the arrival of the defendant on your family life and friends?” asked Steiner.
She breathed deeply and looked fleetingly across at Sebastian before replying bitterly. “Like the snake invading the Garden of Eden, only this time he stayed on to play the part of Cain to Eric’s Abel.” Sebastian laughed out loud at that response, but nobody else did and several of the jurors looked at him with some antipathy. Steiner sighed with due actorly exasperation at this rude interjection and giving it a suitably dramatic pause asked her to explain her comment.
“Well, it is simple really. From the start I had the idea that all he wanted to do was to destroy us one by one and as you can see he succeeded. Firstly he raped me in the downstairs bathroom on the day of his ersatz best friend’s marriage. Imagine the scene, there is my wonderful husband and his golden son out in the marquee entertaining our friends and Nazi bigwigs. Meanwhile their adopted son and brother has burst into the bathroom on some false pretext and forced himself on me and me being terrified and weakened by the stress of the organization of the big day yielded unwillingly,” and with that she dabbed at her eyes and indicating she had no handkerchief, the judge sympathetically preferred his. Sebastian was dumbstruck at this downright lie and feared that much worse was to come, and how on earth was he to counter it because trying to disprove the rape one to one was hard enough and all other potential witnesses to what really went on between them were dead.
“As for Eric, well, not only did Sebastian try and tear him away from his wife, Henrietta, by taking him to the loathsome club that he had found and which, it was later revealed, was a cover for hiring out young boys for the pleasure of Nazi officials or regular patrons, but he endeavoured to undermine my husband.” Sebastian was now reeling from this bitter alternative retelling of history as the effect of Ponsonby’s disgraceful exit from the Foreign Office had been balanced by her implying he too was a catamite and that he had tried to lure his best friend Eric into similar acts. He wanted to object but he found his mouth going dry and in any case, what was he to object to, for it had transpired that Kessler had indeed supplied boys to those in the Nazi hierarchy who were so disposed so he would only be digging his grave even deeper.
“How did he undermine my husband? Well, he tried every angle but failed until against my judgement the Baron invited him to join his little circle of intimate conspirators such as Count von Helldorf and Fritzie von der Schulenburg, bless him. They were so desperate that they thought by entrusting a seemingly well-born Englishman with the mission of relaying their plans to the highest circles in England they could achieve a real peace before what they saw as an inevitable war started. He did not finish the job till he returned to Berlin several years later, but he ruthlessly fulfilled his ambition.” Steiner pressed her to explain. She dabbed at her eyes again, though Sebastian hoped that some of the jurors saw none of the heavily administered mascara had run down her face, and hands trembling, raised a glass of water to her lips.
“Well, he was assigned, through his pressure on the Baron, to Eric’s regiment and through his malevolent innuendo about our relationship, which was a total invention, drove the poor boy to take his own life. Imagine the scene where this beautiful young man is fighting not only a vicious enemy and caring for the lives of his men but has this so-called friend making allusions about what his stepmother is doing behind his beloved father’s back. Anyone would crack and Eric was no different,” she sobbed, and though they appeared more like dry heaves to Sebastian, he remarked that some of the jury were crying too. She regained her composure and went on, on her personal one-woman destruction course of the man she had once loved but was now intent on effectively murdering. She related other falsehoods; they became so many that Sebastian started to lose count and in any case he was trying to concentrate on how he would tackle her when it was his turn to pose the questions. Steiner, though, showed no sign of calling a halt to her evidence and appeared to be remarkably well briefed, given she had been a last minute witness, which surely Sebastian surmised the judge had taken note of.
“Could you relate to the court, Baroness, the events leading up to your husband’s arrest by the Gestapo, please?”
Victoria nodded weakly and let her head drop for a second or two as she steeled herself for this “painful” part of her testimony. “I returned home one day after shopping with Henrietta, my late daughter-in-law, to discover the house turned asunder and ghastly noises coming from upstairs, screams, slaps and laughter. It was truly nightmarish. So I ran up the stairs and, even what I feared was not as dreadful a scene as I walked into,” she stopped and wiped her brow and drank from the glass – I wish it was bloody hemlock, mused Sebastian – and resumed her testimony. “There was the Baron, strapped to a chair, and Murat, for that was the defendant’s assumed name, walking round him like a hunter with his prey, whispering obscenities in his ears, then laughing as the Baron howled with misery and tried to struggle free of his bounds. He was barely recognizable, his face a mixture of red and blue, his lips bleeding and his chest was bare and blistered with cigarette burns. I collapsed to the floor, shrieking at Murat to stop this madness, but he sneered
at me and said to the Baron, ‘Look at your Lady Macbeth, all feigned innocence and pleading for your life. It’s not quite what she says when I fuck her on your bed. Oh no, she said she wanted you out of the way fulltime so we could screw everywhere and at any time even on your personal letters.’ That was about the cleanest observations he made and I really don’t think I can utter any more of them.”
“That’s because you couldn’t make any more up,” interrupted Sebastian, who received a brusque order from the judge to cease such outbursts forthwith. He turned in frustration to the public gallery and saw that his mother and Mirabelle, who were seated beside each other, were sobbing into their handkerchiefs and with their arms round each other, though when they lifted their faces from the handkerchiefs they could barely look at him and he realized just how bad things were. “Anyway, the Baron was saved by the arrival, would you believe, of two Gestapo hoodlums, and even they were shocked by the state of my husband and reprimanded Murat for his zealousness. He replied that it was necessary to soften him up for the decisive interrogation and he would be no trouble now. They nodded and took him away and that was the last I ever saw of my husband.”
Steiner nodded gravely and asked her whether she would like to have a pause as she must be exhausted and distressed at having to relive such incidents. However, Victoria was on a roll and she declined his invitation with a flirty smile and a “how kind, but no”.
Steiner then took her through the incidents leading up to the July 20 plot and subsequent events. Here she was on less sure ground but struggled through it, blaming her vague responses on the passage of time. She did, however, manage one final dig at Sebastian when asked the last time they had seen each other. “Oh yes, I remember it well. It was one of the happiest moments of my miserable life as my nemesis and rapist appeared back at the house in Dahlem following the failure of the plot. There was this prancing arrogant little boy, for that is all he really was, snivelling to me and holding onto my ankles, bleating that he, the traitor, had been betrayed and the Gestapo were after him, even though he had relayed all the details of the plot to the authorities. He even pissed his pants at the thought of the torture to come. Typical man!” she spat the last words out with enough venom to kill the whole of the courtroom.
“And Baroness, what did you reply?” purred Steiner as if he already knew the response that was coming. Victoria pulled herself upright, and breathed out so the fullness of her bosom could be seen by all and everyone. “Why, I told him to clear up his puddle, of course!” Her delivery reduced the majority of the court to hysterics while Sebastian simply waved his hand dismissively.
Steiner waited for the laughter to die down before asking: “Is there anything else you wish to add, Baroness?”
She nodded saying: “The only regret I have is that he did not hang and that I could not join the Führer to watch the film of it as he had ordered to be done for all the other traitors to the regime. Somehow Murat escaped but there again justice has funny ways of intruding on those who believe that they are above the law. After what he did to my family I am glad that I could be here to see it being done,” she said icily, but Sebastian remarked how Steiner winced at the declaration and felt at last that he had something to go on when he came to cross examine the witch from hell.
After a 15 minute recess ordered by the judge so everyone could get a breath of fresh air after such a devastating body of evidence, Sebastian was ready to take her on and he was not going to stand on ceremony, estimating that he could hardly make things worse and if it were seen that he was treating her softly then he would raise more questions than had already been raised.
“Baroness, what did you do after your husband was arrested?” he asked coolly.
“I’m sorry, what do you mean?” she asked looking a bit confused.
“I think you know what I am asking, so please answer the question.”
“Why, I stayed behind in the family house. What do you expect me to do? Anyway, you know all this, why do I have to repeat to you things you already know? Really,” she sighed in an exasperated tone and smiled at the jury.
“Well, that is the exact point, most of what I have heard here today is the first time I have heard that version of events. However, the court has the right to hear things that we both might know but will be pertinent to my defence. So my next question is, why did you stay there?”
She scowled at him and again sighed. “Because it was my house and where I felt safest,” she said patronizingly.
Sebastian looked at the jury with a puzzled look on his face. “So you stayed in the house because that is where you felt safest. Really, with the man that had raped you all those years ago, and who had been responsible for your husband being so badly beaten up and then carted off and whose son had committed suicide because of this same man’s ‘allusions’ to his sexual relations with you. Why, I find that reply hard to believe. So why did you stay there?”
“Because I was terrified of you and knew that you would come after me and that at least there I felt on home territory and there were always the servants to protect me,” she replied.
“Yes, they had done such a good job of it already, hadn’t they, with your husband, who had been their employer for a lot longer than you had.”
“Well, it wasn’t their fault, was it? I had let them off for the day and I really wish I hadn’t,” she interrupted.
“Do you know where I was that day, Baroness?”
She shrugged sulkily. “Yes, you were in the house when I left for the shopping trip.”
Sebastian smiled. “Really? How funny. For your information, I was on my way back to Berlin from Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg. So I must have been psychic to have known I could have the Baron all to myself. Anyway, let us drop that matter. Did I ever sodomise you, and I excuse the court’s offence at using such a term,” he said, looking at Mainwaring , who clearly was not best pleased at such a word being used.
“Well, you took me from behind at least once,” she replied.
“At least once? Ah, so how long did we stay in that bathroom during the wedding?” She looked flustered at the line of questioning, her assuredness during Steiner’s interrogation disappearing as she came under fire. “I don’t know, it’s a long time ago. Maybe thirty minutes,” she stammered. “Thirty minutes. Hardly long enough to have sex more than once, I would suggest. So I put it to you that you slept with me more than once, and if you did so, then I also suggest that it proves your claims I raped you are mere fantasy and the feelings of a bitter spurned woman, who is living with the guilt of having been responsible for the destruction of her family and her lover for the sake of the Führer, as you called him, and the rotten party he ruled over. Is that true, Madam?”
Despite Steiner rising to his feet to object at Sebastian’s remorseless hectoring of the witness, and her sobbing which was for once the real thing, Mainwaring pushed her to respond, for he had taken note of the discrepancy and had not been impressed by her calling Hitler the Führer, which indicated a sympathy with him, as most referred to him by surname and not with any due deference.
“Yes, we slept together, as you put it, more than once, but that was because I was trying to save my family from your destructive force. I wanted to do anything to stop you and instead I failed them and by that token myself,” she replied haltingly.
Sebastian swallowed hard, confused as to how to pursue her as she had blocked him on that line with a persuasive enough counter argument. Also having used the word sodomise he had expanded the idea that he really might be a catamite after all. In fact, he had wanted to ensure the jury learnt that they had had more than the one encounter than when he had allegedly raped her, but he realized the whole tactic had backfired. He was in desperate need of a boost before he wound up this cross examination and he felt like the then foreign minister of France, Thiers, who had described the Ottoman Empire of the 1830s as “like a drowning man clutching at straws” and by God, did he need a lifeboat to rescue him now.
He could feel the waves of panic surging through his body and hard as he tried to repel them they only gathered in force to attack him again, making his ability to think of how he should change his line of questioning almost impossible. He stumbled straight into another minefield as he tried to regather himself as he put it to Victoria that she had no first-hand knowledge of his purported behaviour on the Eastern Front with Eric and that he had been directly responsible for his suicide. She smiled as if she had been awaiting this question and even before she had opened her mouth the dreadful truth had dawned on him that he had been lured into a trap.
“I think you know full well that your behaviour contributed to his death. Quite apart from the stress of the day to day battle for survival, there he had you as a permanent reminder of a betrayal closer to home than the one being as he saw it perpetrated on the soldiers on the front by the government . . .”
“And do you think the troops were betrayed?” interrupted Sebastian trying to steer her away from the subject of Eric.
She looked angry at having been diverted from her answer and replied: “That is not what you asked me originally and I would like to answer your main question.”
“Well, I have asked you another one as you created the opportunity for me to do so. So, Baroness, do you think they were betrayed?”