And when all were settled in the fruit cellar, which had a door that could be locked, she and Ania sat in the darkened kitchen and waited, listening to the singing and the fire and the occasional shouts.

When the men came to the door, as predicted, the women answered it together and handed over the last of the Weisslau plum schnapps. Already men were passed out on the cobbles and retching in the corners on all fours. Gilda’s body looked obscene, legs tied to the spit, head hanging unnaturally, abdomen blackened and hacked.

Schnapps in hand, the men retreated, and the women once again sat in the dark. Despite everything—the horse, the men, the raw exposure of her own emotions—a weird peace descended on Marianne. In this mysterious, pragmatic woman beside her, she had found a partner. And for the moment, this was enough.

When she finally slept, Marianne dreamed of the Polish laborers. All day they had stirred in the crevices of her mind, rattling tinnily in the corners where she had buried them. Now they marched forward like a ghostly jury in her sleep.

There had been maybe twenty of them, assigned to live on the estate in Weisslau when all the local boys and men who usually worked the fields had been sent to the front. They were from farther east, a part of Poland that had become the General Government, Polish citizens deemed unfit for Germanization. So in the parlance of the Nazis, they were to provide labor to the master race. A lot of Nazi garbage. But the von Lingenfelses had not refused their services. How else was the farm to be worked? And to refuse would have thrown suspicion onto Albrecht’s activities.

Provisional quarters were erected in the old pigsty. Marianne recalled a delivery of cots, some tables requisitioned from the old servant’s kitchen and the appearance of barbed wire across the windows.

The laborers wore P for Polen, or “Polish worker,” stitched onto their ragged uniforms. They reported to Roland Zeppel, the farm overseer. Untermenschen, he called them. “Underpeople”—the Nazi term for non-Aryans—the Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews at the bottom of the lot. They are people, too, Marianne had said when she heard him use the word. You must treat them with dignity. Roland Zeppel whipped out a Nazi pamphlet about managing foreign laborers. “Do not confuse Polish workers with Germans. They are not allowed at the table. Fraternizing is punishable by law.”

Marianne glared at him.

She had never liked the man. He had been a member of the party from the beginning, and even before that, he was not well liked. He had no skills or smarts or education to distinguish him, which made him just the sort to be taken with the notion that he belonged to a master race. But despite Marianne’s objections, Albrecht did not fire him. He had known Roland since childhood; they had gone to the same grade school in Weisslau, played in the same football matches, danced at the same town dances. For Albrecht, this connection was larger than the man’s politics. He was loyal to Herr Zeppel, and Herr Zeppel was loyal to him.