The bunk creaked as Paul flipped onto his back again, his voice growing muffled. “Someday you will, I reckon.”
Dominic wished he could share Paul’s optimism. He couldn’t emulate it, but he was grateful for it. Moments of peaceful conversation about anything other than war had been few and far between. Dominic had lost count of how many skirmishes they’d been in; each time his survival seemed even more like a miracle. Had Dominic’s little unit made a dent in the war against the Nazis? Had they made any difference at all? Even after all these weeks of narrow misses, he wasn’t sure. He only knew he had to keep going, had to keep focused on their mission to win this war. His officers complimented him on his sharpshooting skills and dedication to protecting other soldiers, but he knew that the only reason he was still here was luck. And perhaps the prayers of his mother, all the way back home across the ocean.
“Attention!” A sharp word from the door of the tent brought every soldier to his feet as automatically as machine-gun fire. They stood neatly side by side, feet together, arms by their sides, bodies as straight as their exhausted muscles could make them. An officer walked into the tent, the glittering badges on his shoulders marking him as a major. There was utter silence but for the squish of his boots in the mud that had pooled on the floor of the tent.
The major strolled down the twin lines of men, examining the names embroidered on their uniforms.
“Blakely!” he cried.
Then, his eyes settled on Dominic.
“Bonelli!” he boomed.
“Sir!” Dominic saluted.
“I hear you’re a good cover.” The expression in the major’s dark eyes was unreadable. He quirked an eyebrow. “Come. We have a job for you. Don’t want to keep the commander waiting.”
10
Cecilia
Milan, Italy
January 1490
“COME. YOU MUST NOT KEEP HIS LORDSHIP WAITING.”
Cecilia’s underarms raged as if a dozen bees were stinging her skin at once. Reluctantly, she raised her arms in the air again. Wearing only her sleeveless linen chemise, Cecilia let Lucrezia Crivelli, the dressmaid, fan her underarms with fluttering hands. Around Cecilia’s bedchamber, a dozen gowns in silk, satin, and velvet lay across every surface.
“Aya! What’s in this?” Cecilia huffed out three strong breaths, staving off the pain.
“A little quicklime, some arsenic, pig lard. A few other secrets. A favorite recipe of His Lordship’s mother. Not much longer,” Lucrezia said. “You’re supposed to say two Our Fathers.”
“Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” Cecilia began, but her voice trembled. She shivered in the frigid air and squeezed her eyes shut against the stinging.
“Get used to it. His Lordship doesn’t like his women with hair on their bodies.”
Cecilia opened her eyes wide now and stared at Lucrezia, a girl about Cecilia’s age who was tasked with attending Cecilia and helping with her hair and dress. She examined the girl’s wide, brown eyes to see if she might be teasing her. “Really? Nowhere on the body?”
Lucrezia shook her head. “We’ll do your pòmm next. Keep going.”
Cecilia didn’t know any Milanese words, but she could guess which body part might be up for the next depilation. She squeezed her eyes closed again, pushing through the cold and the nearly unbearable stinging. She got through the prayers, spitting them out as quickly as she ever had. While she prayed, Lucrezia dabbed at Cecilia’s underarms with her fingertips.
When Cecilia completed her Our Fathers, Lucrezia went to the hearth, where a pot roiled over the fire. She dipped a cloth into the water with tongs, then wrung it out and placed the steaming fabric under Cecilia’s arm.
“Aya!” The cold was replaced with scalding heat. Lucrezia roughly wiped away the vile mixture from both underarms, taking the hair out with it from the roots. At last, Cecilia let her arms, nearly numb, fall to her sides. She grasped a brown velvet mantle from a nearby chair and slung it over her shoulders. She brought her fingertips to her underarms, where the bare, raw skin throbbed but was undeniably smooth and hairless. The stinging, lingering but more tolerable, continued as Cecilia walked to the bed. She ran her palms lightly over the pile of dresses. Green satin. Purple velvet. Red silk with black lace and gilded wire threaded through the neckline.
“They are so beautiful,” Cecilia said. In fact, the dresses were the most beautiful things Cecilia had ever seen.
“Castoffs. You’ll need them altered to fit you. You’re a scrawny thing,” Lucrezia said, pressing her hands into Cecilia’s waist so hard that Cecilia flinched. Lucrezia shrugged. “We just pulled these from the wardrobe of the last mistress.”
A long pause. “The last mistress?”
Lucrezia nodded.
“What happened to her?”
“Oh!” A nervous laugh. “She didn’t last long.”
“Why not?” Cecilia studied Lucrezia’s face again to see if she might be setting herself up to be the butt of a joke.
“His Lordship tired of her quickly,” Lucrezia said, her voice suddenly sad in a way that, to Cecilia, sounded anything but sincere. “If you want to know what I think, it’s that she talked too much. Whatever the case, His Lordship’s . . . diversions . . . are usually brief anyway. Only little Bianca stayed behind.”
“Bianca?”
“Poor little bastard child.” Lucrezia shook her head. “She is a beauty, though. Hair as black as midnight. Just like her father’s.”
Cecilia flopped into a chair next to her bed and pulled the mantle tightly around her shoulders. Had she stepped into waters that might close quickly over her head? She wondered how many other important things she did not know.
A knock at the door. Lucrezia ushered in a gray-haired woman in a chambermaid’s dress. The maid uttered something to Cecilia in Milanese dialect, then bowed her head and extended a folded parchment with a wax seal. Cecilia recognized her brother’s elegant handwriting on the parchment but she hesitated. It was the first time anyone had ever bowed to her, and besides, Cecilia had no idea what the maid had said. The old woman met Cecilia’s eyes and smiled. Lucrezia stepped in and took the letter from the maid’s hand, then gave it to Cecilia. “A letter for His Lordship’s flower.”
11
Edith
Munich, Germany
September 1939
EDITH BRACED HERSELF AGAINST A METAL DOORFRAME as the train whistle sounded and the wheels screeched. She pressed herself against the window and watched the twin onion domes of Munich’s Frauenkirche recede into the dusk.
For weeks, Edith had been preparing herself to watch Heinrich board a train for Poland. She had pictured their farewell a thousand times, Heinrich handsome, tall, and lean in his uniform. She imagined herself running along the platform, pressed into a crowd of women as the train pulled out of the station.
Never did Edith foresee that she would be the one fastening up the buttons on a starched field jacket that had been cursorily modified to fit a woman’s shape. That she would be the one boarding the huffing train for Kraków, watching from the window while Heinrich ran along the platform waving, growing smaller as the train pulled eastward from Hauptbahnhof Station. Now she was the one holding conscription papers. There was no refusing the call. Her orders were little more than a signed, stamped shred of paper, a single folio that had the power to change her entire life. Maybe even to take her life, if she were one of the unlucky ones.