Because of the pregnancy, and because I don’t speak German, and because I don’t have any training in this kind of thing, Ursula Kassmeyer made it absolutely clear that I was not to set foot, or attempt to set foot, on the wrong side of this border that stretches invisibly along the length of the lake: the border that separates Germany from Switzerland, enemy territory from neutral territory. Bad enough that I exist here on false papers, on a stack of clever, delicate lies. Bad enough to have made my way by train through occupied France, across strictly defended borders, on a passport that identifies me as Lenore Schmidt, a Swiss national born in Geneva, married to a Zurich banker, returning from medical treatment abroad in the company of my sister, Marguerite, whose hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows are as dark as mine, thanks to a brunette rinse obtained in an Edinburgh drugstore. Bad enough that at any moment, we might be captured and tortured and expose brave men and women to capture and torture. Nein. I was not to enter Germany. I was not going to make a shambles of a finely wrought plan, I was not going to make some clumsy American mistake and shatter this line she had developed and nurtured herself, for which she would give her own life. No, no. She would get Benedict Thorpe out of Colditz, all right, for the sake of his dead father and dead mother, who had apparently once been like a real father and mother to her, but she wasn’t going to babysit the pair of us fine ladies, by God. Once we crossed into Switzerland—if we crossed into Switzerland—we were to proceed to Lake Constance for our health (mine is a difficult pregnancy, you understand, most fragile) and wait there for a man called Stefan, who runs a safe house across the lake on the German side. By cover of night, Stefan crosses the lake with Jews and pilots and messages. He’ll find us. He’ll deliver Benedict Thorpe to safety.

So. Here I sit, on an elegant bench along the esplanade, as I’ve done for the past ten mornings, the past ten afternoons. The wind is brisk today, the pigeons hungry and cross. The lake ripples before me, reflecting the sun, and behind all this (rather distant) you see the Alps and their sharp, snowy peaks against a sky of winter blue. Margaret—I beg your pardon, Marguerite—has gone off for a walk and a smoke and, possibly, a continued flirtation with the woman who runs the bookstall near the pier, the one that sells racy French novels. There was a giant fall of snow the other day, and while the sun’s made an earnest effort to melt it all into puddles that soak the turf and flood the gutters, the piles of slush remain.