No, she realized with star-bright clarity: it was Connie.

She spread her coat on the grass and lay down beside it, and at some point she drifted off to sleep. When she woke in the first gray light of dawn, the bird was gone and Connie was dead.

CHAPTER SIX

BURG LINGENFELS, JULY 1945

Lying in her cot at Burg Lingenfels, Benita did not open Connie’s letter. Through her sickness, its presence on the bedside table exerted a ghoulish force. In her dreams, she would try to read it, but the words swam before her eyes, long and ponderous, so obscure as to be incomprehensible, or worse, dull. No sense would shake from its folds. And Connie himself hovered at the periphery of her sleep. She saw him across a crowded party or at the end of a hall, or even in the shadows here in her room, but it was impossible to connect. He would be engrossed in conversation with a colleague, or flirting with another woman, or simply slip out of her sight as she approached. When she woke, sweaty with fever, rattled by stress, she wanted nothing to do with his letter and blamed it for her nightmares. I love you, I’m sorry . . . It didn’t matter what he said. Their marriage was what it was—and now it was over. Connie was dead.

“Can you put this away somewhere?” Benita asked Elisabeth one night when the girl came to deliver her evening soup in Marianne’s place.

“Where?” Elisabeth asked. She was a stolid, literal girl and did not seem surprised.

Benita cast her eyes around the bare room. “Anywhere that I don’t have to see it,” she answered.

So Elisabeth stuck it in the chest of drawers that housed Benita’s few possessions. And after that, Benita’s sleep improved.

Benita had been sick for three weeks when she woke to find a strange man in her room. Her first thought was of what she must look like. The edges of her mouth were dry and cracked, and her nightgown sweat-stained. The sheets lay twisted at her feet. She scrambled to cover herself and became light-headed with the effort.

Marianne, who had come in with the stranger, was wrestling open the ancient window and made no move to assist her. “This is Herr Muller,” she said, turning back to Benita, who remained huddled on the cot. “He has come to help around the castle today, and I thought he could begin by taking you outside. The sun will do you good.”

Benita stared at Marianne. “Could I—” She clutched the open neck of her nightgown. “Could I have a minute first to dress?”

“Ah! Of course!” Marianne said. “Herr Muller, would you give us a moment?”

It was so like Marianne to act first and then think. Even in the daze of sickness, Benita recognized this. Marianne had no patience for mundane concerns like appearance or propriety.

“Who is he?” Benita managed to ask as Marianne helped her tug a pair of trousers on under her nightdress.