In the dining room, Herr Fetzer, the local butcher, pulled out his fiddle, and festive music filled the space. Even drunk, the young men hung together in uneasy clumps. Wives and sisters and mothers chattered while keeping nervous watch. There was a sense of latent menace. Who might come undone? Who might turn belligerent?

Marianne sat in the corner with Helmut Kressing, her latest matchmaking case. He was a widowed friend of Albrecht’s who had spent the last year of the war in Buchenwald for his role in the resistance. Poor man. He deserved better than to be dragged into this awkwardness. Benita would never marry him, but she could go sit beside him.

As Benita made her way across the room, a young man with a wild look in his eye pulled her into an aggressive dance. Johannes Kraisler, one of the bad ones. Benita had heard of him: a boy who’d always had one screw loose. He had joined the SA while still in school and had recently returned from a Siberian POW camp.

Thank God Martin had been born when he was! He was scarred, yes, but not corrupted by the war. He had never even marched with the Hitler Youth. Why did Hitler want to make war? he had asked her recently with an earnest, quizzical face.

The vigorous whirling of Johannes’s dance made her sick. “Please excuse me,” she said, but he only tightened his grip.

“Really,” she said, and he grinned, swinging her toward the corner with a hostile yank that made her flinch.

“I know who you are,” he hissed into her ear. “The traitor’s wife.” She could feel his penis hard against her leg through his pants. “I know your secret.”

Startled, she looked up into his face.

“Aha! You see, I am not as stupid as you think!”

“I have no secrets,” she said, but her heart gave an anxious lurch.

“You ladies of the castle think you’re better than everyone else,” he said with a dry laugh. “But I can smell a cunt lover a mile off.”

“Ah.” Benita relaxed. “You’d like to imagine that.”

With a quick stab of her elbow to his ribs she managed to loosen his grip. But she could not continue over to Marianne and Herr Kressing now. She needed to compose herself.

Benita wound through the dancers and stepped out into the courtyard behind the house. It was so ugly. The peace and plenty of this time were like a thin quilt spread over a pile of shit. No one was innocent. The Russian prisoner in the woods flashed in her mind: the inhuman sound he had made when she struck him, the squeak of air into his cut throat. Her own personal pile of shit.

She straightened and pushed the hair off her face. Above her, the moon was high and round, laying a coat of silver over the young wheat. And the air was cool, thick with the smell of roses and pigs, slightly damp.