“Connie!” Marianne called as she approached.

He turned and a grin spread across his face.

“Aha! The woman I have been waiting for!” He lifted her hand to his lips. “You are looking lovely.” He cast his eyes up to the landing. “Will I get to see my princesses or have you put them away?”

“Put away,” Marianne said with a laugh. “I hope.”

“Alas.” He placed his hands over his heart and feigned collapse. “Well, at least I get to consort with the queen mother. Come”—he extended his arm—“meet my Benita!”

Marianne’s smile stiffened. In the drama of the past week, she had forgotten. Martin Constantine Fledermann was to be married. It seemed impossible. Even with the date set (two weeks from today!), it still had the ring of a lark gone too far.

But he was earnest, even nervous, as he took Marianne by the elbow. “You must befriend her,” he said. “She knows no one. I told her you would be her ally. And”—he turned to her—“you know she will need one here.”

“Why is that?” Marianne asked. “You are among friends.”

“True,” Connie said. “But she is not.”

Marianne frowned at his circular logic, but there was no time to question it because suddenly there she was, Connie’s Benita, a strikingly pretty woman with the kind of flat, Nordic face that emanated placidity. Her blond hair was plaited and wrapped around her head in the style so adored by the Nazis, a Wagnerian Brunhilde in an honest-to-God dirndl dress. She stood between two young men who worked with Albrecht in the Foreign Office, both of whom looked delighted. Marianne felt an unusual pang of jealousy. It was not that she envied the younger woman’s beauty or palpable air of sexuality (she herself had long ago carved out an alternate road to male regard), but at this moment, in the company of these three men—two silly, overeager boys and one dear friend, childhood sweetheart, luminary of the opposition—the other woman’s beauty left her nowhere to go. At thirty-one, Marianne was an adult in a child’s play, a schoolmarm among excitable students.

“Excuse me, boys,” Connie said, making a show of elbowing one of them aside, “I need to reclaim her.” He put a hand on Benita’s arm and pulled her toward Marianne. “My love,” he addressed Benita (how odd it was to hear him say this), “meet my—what shall I call you?” He turned to Marianne. “My oldest friend, my sternest adviser, the person who keeps me most honest?”

“Oh posh, Connie,” Marianne said, trying to tamp down her irritation.

“Marianne,” she introduced herself, and extended a hand to the young woman, who, she judged, could not be much over twenty.

“Thank you,” the girl said, blinking like a startled deer. “How nice to meet you.”

More guests arrived, and Marianne could feel them pressing toward her with hands to shake, welcomes to issue, politics to discuss. There was Greta von Viersdahl, already trying to catch her eye; since Hitler had invaded, Greta spoke of nothing but the winter clothes she was collecting for the Sudeten Germans, so recently “returned to the fatherland,” so long “oppressed by the Slavs” . . . Marianne wanted no part of Greta’s politics. Impulsively, she took Benita’s arm. “Give us a chance to become friends,” she said over her shoulder to Connie, already leading Benita through the back door and into the lantern-bedecked courtyard.