Florida! Florida was the worst possible idea, a hedonistic wilderness on the other side of the world. Why, Johann might forget he was German at all! In any case—Helga leaned forward confidentially—Elfriede absolutely could not take Those Children away with Johann. Out of the question. It was immoral. He was young and impressionable. He was a baron. He had his father’s legacy to uphold. What would people think if he regarded these girls as his sisters?

“But they are his sisters,” Elfriede pointed out, even though she knew how Helga would react to this statement of fact. (Elfriede at twenty-six was not the same creature as Elfriede at just eighteen, gazing in awe at the new relations gathered to her wedding dinner.) Then she added, “Gerhard himself acknowledged them,” although in this she stood on shakier ground. Gerhard, believing himself immortal, hadn’t yet troubled to compose a will in which he made explicit provision for his bastard daughters and their mother. Helga was perfectly aware of this fact. Hardly had the mourners dispersed when she made the first of many efforts to evict the cuckoos from the nest, even while one cuckoo was yet unborn. Elfriede resisted each onslaught. But the day was coming, she knew, when Helga’s arguments would prove unanswerable or her tactics invincible. So she allowed the subject of Florida to drop. She allowed Helga to believe she’d won, but when Helga left the following week to spend a few days with her sister, Elfriede packed the children and Charlotte and whisked them away.

She left behind a note, of course. During the voyage across the ocean, she took great pleasure in imagining Helga’s face as she read that note.

Helga, of course, wrote plenty of her own notes during the ensuing months. But Elfriede has no intention of giving up her girls and her freedom, not yet. She knows she eventually must. Helga has some justice on her side. Johann is the baron, he’ll return to Schloss Kleist at some point and learn to be its master. But not yet. Let him be a child first. Let him know his sisters, so he might not banish them once he gains the power to banish. Let the sun warm their hearts and blood and skin. Let them know a little of a man like Wilfred.

Elfriede thinks of all this and puts her arms around her lover’s neck.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she says. “I’m not having a baby.”

“Not yet—” he begins.

She cuts him off in the customary way. By kissing him.

So they keep dancing, these two.

Now, Gerhard—a pious man—strictly observed the biblical injunctions against menstruating women, so Elfriede’s amazed when Wilfred follows her into her room, in the customary way, and turns her around to unbutton her dress. She makes some stuttering protest.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asks, sounding as amazed as she is.