The knock, when it came, was firm but not belligerent. They were only men, only Russians, Marianne reminded herself, as she had reminded her girls. Human beings, wronged by the same regime that murdered Albrecht and Connie.

She wrestled the heavy front door open, and two men stood before her. One was tall with skin stretched over his cheekbones like the thin layer of fat on the surface of boiled milk, the other short and healthier, with a beard and bright uneasy eyes. The tall one had a blanket over his shoulders, despite the warmth of the day.

“We need food,” he said, in a rough approximation of German, his voice much lower than seemed possible from a man so thin. His pants were too short, and beneath them his bare feet were caked with dirt. “And water,” he added. Behind him, the rest of the men assembled at the mouth of the bridge over the moat. At the front of the line were the more robust-looking prisoners, and behind, still arriving, a collection of sorrier souls, emaciated and close shorn, with wide, haunted eyes. A mix of newer arrivals and those who had been held in the stalag by the Nazis for God knows how long. There were maybe fifty in total, all silent, and all staring at her.

“I speak Russian,” Marianne said in Russian. “You are Russians, no?”

The tall man looked at her without blinking. Neither he nor his partner evidenced the surprise or enthusiasm that usually greeted this announcement. “Most of us,” the man said, speaking Russian now. “We need food and water and a place to rest.”

“I will bring it to you,” she said. “And there is space and straw in the stable for you to rest.”

The shorter man nicked his head toward the castle and spoke in a low, guttural dialect. The tall man translated. “How many people live here?”

“The beds are full,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “But the stable has room. We will bring you food.”

“And water,” the tall man said.

“And water,” Marianne repeated.

Only after she shut the door did she realize her hands were trembling.

In the kitchen, Ania and her boys had already begun paring potatoes. “We can cook these together with the barley and carrots,” Ania said. “It will thicken with a handful of bread.”

Marianne nodded, grateful for the woman’s calm. And the fact that she actually knew how to cook. In the week since she had come, the castle had already benefited from her competence. She knew how to grind spoonfuls of rapeseed into oil, darn stockings, pickle the vegetables to last through winter, and preserve fruit. And she had taken over meal preparation, to Marianne’s relief. It had been so long since she had shared responsibility. Benita had been sick and had never seemed a real grown-up anyway. And it had been ages—a lifetime—since Marianne shared a household with Frau Gerstler in Weisslau.

While Frau Grabarek—Ania, as Marianne had begun to think of her—chopped and cooked, Marianne filled buckets and pots with water from the cistern, which was troublingly low. Once a week, Herr Kellerman filled his “water wagon” and hitched it to his poor long-suffering horse, Gilda, so they could have water at the castle, which was without a well. It had been five days since their last delivery.