There’s no answer. She finds the nurse in the parlor, silent and rigid in one chair, while Helga occupies another chair across the room. Of course the phonograph is still. No cheerful dance hall music for Helga. The air itself might just crack from the weight of all this quiet, the kind of quiet that’s the opposite of peace.

“Charlotte,” Elfriede says. “The baby’s ready.”

Charlotte hoists herself out of the chair and heads for the doorway, where Elfriede holds a squirming Gertrud. Instead of joining Helga in the parlor, however, Elfriede follows Charlotte and Gertrud up the stairs to the small room next to Charlotte’s that serves as a nursery. Charlotte looks up in surprise as Elfriede closes the door behind her.

“Frau von Kleist? Is something the matter?”

Is something the matter! Elfriede’s nerves throb, her skin’s alive. She’s incandescent, she’s going to burst.

“We’re leaving,” Elfriede says. “We’ll pack our things tomorrow morning. I’ll check the schedule for the trains. I hope we’ll be gone by lunchtime Thursday.” (Today’s Tuesday.)

“Leave!”

“Yes.”

“But where?”

“To England,” Elfriede says. “We’re going to join Mr. Thorpe in New York and follow him to England.”

It’s astonishing how things accumulate when you inhabit a house for several months with several children. Every time you turn around, thinking you’ve retrieved it all, another object meets your eye. A toy, a book, a shoe, a pencil. They came to Florida with so little, and now there’s so much—where did it come from? By evening the next day, Elfriede’s exhausted, but her heart still thrills inside her chest. She keeps picturing Wilfred’s face when he sees them, the lot of them, Charlotte and four children and Elfriede, a multitude of trunks and suitcases, waiting for him on that pier in New York. They will live in England, of course, hundreds of miles away from Helga in Germany, from the rigidity and formality of Schloss Kleist. The children are young; they’ll be speaking English like Englishmen before long. Naturally they’ll visit their native land in the summer, on holidays, because Johann after all is the Baron von Kleist. But England will be home. Wilfred will be Papa. Elfriede thinks of some rambling half-timbered house in the countryside, like Shakespeare, messy and rambunctious and filled with children. There will be more of them, of course. She’s not afraid any longer. She’ll have Wilfred by her side, and how could any blackness exist amid so much sunshine? She’ll give Wilfred babies of his own, delightful ginger-haired babies, two or three at least, and this time she’ll nurse them herself, she’ll care for them herself in the bedroom she shares with Wilfred, the house she shares with Wilfred, and won’t the girls be delighted at these darling new arrivals! Won’t they be a large, happy family together! Why, it’s all so simple! Why was she so afraid? She wants to laugh out loud.