You know, it’s a funny word, loyalty. Loyalty to what? And why? And especially how, that’s the kicker. It seems to me that loyalty requires a suspension of logic, of truth even. Like faith, like superstition, a thing you cling to in defiance of what lies before you in plain sight. On the other hand—like faith or superstition, like love itself—where’s the comfort in a world without it? We human beings possess a marvelous capacity to fool ourselves—oh, not me, never me, you tell yourself, but believe me, sweetheart, you do—and in the course of the six months, earning a salary of my very own, hobnobbing with the haute, I had fallen into a certain fatal habit of mine, for the second time in my life, a weakness perhaps born of certain circumstances in my childhood. I mean, isn’t that supposed to be the case? The circumstances of your childhood determine your character, the entire course of your future, your fate, your destiny, all of it. You are just a mere slave to your subconscious.

Anyway, the sight of those earrings. The weight of them, the twinkle. I didn’t know whether to cry or vomit or run. In the end, I set the box on the cushion beside me and opened the clasp of my pocketbook.

“I nearly forgot, in all the excitement,” I said. “Someone stopped by the bungalow with a special delivery.”

Elfriede

November 1900

(Germany)

A letter arrives for Elfriede, postmarked London. She notices the edge of the envelope, the unfamiliar stamp half-hidden by a napkin, while she’s pouring the coffee. Maybe her heart doesn’t quite stop. But her fingers go limp, and the pot, the pot, the beautiful porcelain coffeepot slips from her hand to land in an awful crash on the silver breakfast tray. Nothing breaks, thank goodness. Only a splash of coffee on her dress. She lifts the napkin and dabs. Reads the name now fully exposed on the envelope—hers, written in firm black handwriting, Frau Baroness von Kleist, and beneath it Schloss Kleist, Westphalia, Deutschland—and the lettering around the postmark circle. lon and the date, 2 nov 1900, two days ago. Her fingers shake. She sets down the napkin, hiding the envelope once more.