Lena went back to the main house and reported to Daisy, who sent her to join Johanna in the Emil Kraepelin building, where they were to scrub the corridors. At five o’clock, when their time was up, she went back to the main house for their break before dinner. Going in through the scullery door, Lena passed the wine cellar, where Hans was selecting some bottles for dinner. He declined her offer of help, but while he was facing the bins, she took an open bottle from the table and held it behind her back.

‘See you at dinner, Hans.’

‘Don’t be late.’

‘I never am.’

Concealing the bottle under an armful of laundry she took from a basket outside the scullery, Lena went quickly out into the cloister and through two courtyards until she came to her own staircase. Up in her room, she poured some wine into her glass and drank it. Then, when she had washed and changed into her dinner dress, she sat at the table and wrote a letter telling Rudolf she would join him in Vienna.

Part Five

1

The train was going through wooded country and there were white churches visible through the forests. After a stop at Hollabrunn, where a tiny farm boy called Engelbert Dollfuss – now the self-appointed ruler of Austria – had once been at high school, they went north through more woods towards the border with Moravia. It felt like going back into a simpler and more devout time.

From his seat at the window, Anton wondered if Delphine had come in a train like this or in some sort of cattle transport. He had replied at once to Claudia Hartung’s letter, left the Schloss Seeblick and returned to Vienna, where the first thing he did was to visit the library of Die Presse and read the back numbers of 1914 and 1915. The headlines were about fighting and casualties; civilian detail took him longer to find. Austria’s biggest problem, it transpired, had been an influx of 300,000 Jewish refugees from the East in the autumn of 1914. The numbers had overwhelmed the government’s attempts to deal with individuals stranded by the closing of borders. The luckiest of the French, British and Italians had been sent home or allowed to remain in their houses under curfew; the less fortunate had been taken to camps and kept with the refugees behind barbed wire; others had been sent to villages in Lower Austria.

To Anton, the most urgent mystery was the fact that Claudia Hartung believed Delphine’s surname to be Jacob. Since the turn of the century, Jewish families in Vienna had been the object of suspicion and resentment; the outbreak of war had only increased the hostility. In these circumstances Delphine would not have volunteered a Jewish name; so she had either lied to him from the start about her family or had assumed the identity in the course of a marriage she had not felt able to mention.