Another gust strikes the window. The room is as black as outer space, not a hint of light. I widen my eyes into this nothingness and consider telling Margaret about the time I found Tommy paying the rent on the landlady’s parlor sofa at two o’clock in the morning, and how he got so mad at being discovered he delivered me a knockout punch to the gut, saving himself the money for the abortion we’d been arguing about, though we did have to skip town directly from the hospital bed. I actually catch my breath on the first words of the story, There was this winter we spent in Amarillo, Texas. But she doesn’t need to hear about this, and I don’t require her pity. I don’t even know why Thomas Randolph visits me now, in this hotel room in Switzerland, when I’ve been free of him for years. It’s just my dream, that’s all. The one that comes to me in the dark of night.

“This woman,” I say instead. “Ursula Kassmeyer.”

“What about her?”

“Well, what do you think of her? Can we trust her?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. I’ve never met her. I do know she’s regarded as something of a saint by the chieftains at SOE.”

“And you never knew you were related to her?”

“No.” She pauses. “I knew about them, of course. Mummy didn’t talk about them often, but I knew I had sisters, German half sisters, Johann’s sisters, and they were taken away by their nurse before I was born. And that Mummy missed them. She missed them terribly.”

“But I don’t understand. How could the nurse have taken away the children like that?”

There is a long silence from the other bed, until I begin to think she’s fallen asleep. Then, in a sharp voice, higher than her usual pitch: “I don’t think they were hers, exactly. I think the baron had them with someone else.”

“What? What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling. I was a child, you know, just a little girl when she told me these things. I don’t know how I know. Until a few weeks ago, I’d forgotten all about it. The missing girls. It was like a story one’s told at bedtime.”

“But your mother loved them.”

“Yes. I know she loved them. Even though they weren’t hers.”