And yet. Isn’t she perfectly correct? Isn’t that why Elfriede’s fury is so fierce? Nurse is right. Elfriede’s crawling with germs. Possibly she has already transmitted the fatal bacterium to her child. And it’s true, God knows, she’s hurt Johann enough already. What boy can recover from a mother’s abandonment? His arms reach to Nurse and he whimpers with longing.

Elfriede presses her lips to Johann’s hair. “I’ll see you again soon, my love,” she says, and she hands him carefully into Nurse’s arms. As she does, a puff of air strikes her nose, the scent of schnapps.

Inside the house again. Elfriede wastes no time leaping up the stairs—not for nothing has she walked the mountains of Switzerland for the past two years, three thousand meters of altitude—and down the corridor to Gerhard’s bedroom. The lights are now ablaze. Her sister-in-law appears like a phantom in a dressing gown.

“Come at once,” she snaps, and turns back into the room.

Elfriede, terrified but unrepentant, follows Ulrika into the master’s bedroom. But Gerhard is not dead. The opposite. He’s awake, the fever ebbs. He spies her in the doorway and lifts his head, calling her name like a man risen from the dead.

Lulu

December 1941

(The Bahamas)

We all have a dream, don’t we? And I don’t mean some dream for the future, some grand desire of the heart. I mean that dream that comes to you in the dark of night. I mean that dream that visits and revisits, unbidden, crawling out from your subconscious while you sleep, the one that knows exactly how to make you scream. Mine goes like this.