Posie Winfield carried this off so well that some people had thought she should, perhaps postwar, become a lady-in-waiting for King George VI’s wife, the queen. In her role Posie had performed beautifully and uncovered a double agent—the Duchess of Chatsworth, a close friend of the despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had been great admirers of Hitler. The Duchess of Chatsworth had been sent to the London Cage in Kensington, a prison and facility for interrogating spies during the war.
And life went on for Posie, Alice, and Louise in their elegant Eaton Square home until they moved to the country. Although the girls’ father, Alan Winfield, was far away, and even though bombs were dropping, they were cozy, the three of them. Until Louise had to go to Norway to map the heavy water plant—the nuclear reactors that the Nazis were developing. Heavy water was anything but just plain water. It had been treated so that it would become a key ingredient for atomic weapons. They called it heavy because it contained a larger amount of hydrogen. A special kind of hydrogen.
If Alice ever got back to Rasa camp and had the advanced physics course, she would learn more about it. And then she too might be called upon to map a secret nuclear facility. When she tried to compare what she had learned in Rasa camp with what she had learned at the stupid Hermann von Haupt Gymnasium, it was simply ridiculous.
What a celebration the three Winfields had in 1943 when British troops and Norwegian guerrillas crossed the mountain plateaus and finally succeeded in blowing up the plant that Louise had so carefully mapped. What Louise had done was heroic. Of course the Company could never celebrate such heroes publicly. And now Louise was out of the Company.
It had been a quiet celebration—for that was how spies must celebrate. Nevertheless, the director of the Company did come to see them and brought heartiest congratulations from Maxwell Knight, head of MI6. And now Louise was out of the game. Or was she? What kind of game might she be playing, if indeed the girl Alice had spied was her sister?
She heard a door slam, the front door of the house. It was the maid who Alice had seen before, the one who had served the officers in the garden. She watched her turn the corner and head in the opposite direction, away from the alley. As soon as she was out of sight, Alice walked calmly, nonchalantly, to the alley. Her heart was beating hard. Would David still be there? She had been gone a number of weeks. Not much could have happened to him since then—or could it? Could he have been discovered in his indoor hiding place, the secret space in the cellar? The weather had been warm. Perhaps he didn’t always have to be there all night long. And would he recognize her? He always had, for some reason that she could not fathom. But now it had been so long.
The fully leafed branches of the trees that bordered the alley formed a green canopy. Dappled sunlight trickled through the leafy embroidery. It was a green veil, so unlike the scrim of ashes in the other parts of Berlin. Slinging her satchel over her shoulder, she reached for the low branch of the tree neighboring the one where David usually perched. She heard a soft trill. She paused to listen. It came again. Some sort of bird. Then nothing. She waited. There was a stream of soft giggles, very human giggles, falling through the leaves. She looked up.
“David!” His dark luminous eyes seemed almost too big for his face, which was paler and thinner than when she had last seen him. He swung down to the branch where she was perched.
“You heard the bird?”
“I thought it was a bird.”
“You thought wrong. It was me.” He smiled and made the sound again. “You know which bird?”
“No idea.”
“A barred owl.”
“But it’s not a hoot. Owls hoot.”
David sighed and rolled his eyes. “Common misconception. It’s as silly as saying all humans speak German. No, they do not all hoot. There are as many different owl sounds as there are species of owl—of which there are hundreds.” He pursed his lips, and a staccato of peeping noises issued forth. “A pygmy owl.” He launched into a demonstration for the next few minutes, until Alice held up her hand.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not really.”
This was a bad sign, Alice knew. People who were starving often became inured, desensitized to their own hunger.
“But you must be. You’re . . . you’re too thin.”
“A lot of people have left. Not much garbage. One grows used to it.”
“You shouldn’t grow used to it.”
David looked her with the strangest expression. As if to say, “You poor thing. You know so little.”
“Here, I’ve brought some food for you.” She took out the bread and handed it to him. He began to tear off a piece. “You like sardines?”
“Sure,” he replied.
She lifted the tiny metal key that was soldered to the lid and began to peel back the top. The tiny sardines were neatly lined up. He picked one and put it on top of the bread and was about to pop it into his mouth, then began to mutter words under his breath.
“Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.” He stopped suddenly and looked at her. “Is it Friday? Shabbat?”
“Uh . . . no. It’s Tuesday.”
“No matter,” he continued. Then he smiled. “Baruch atah, Ute.” He looked up at Alice. “Bless you, Ute.”
He began eating the bread with the sardines.
“I brought some more stuff. Here in the satchel. I wanted to bring an apple cake, but they didn’t have one.”
“It’s okay. This is good.” He swallowed. “I didn’t realize how hungry I was.” He tipped his head toward the trash bins. “They used to throw out more, but now not much. No waste.” He continued eating. “You said it’s Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. It means the maid might be away.”
“I saw the maid leave by the front door.”
“Great!”
“Why? What do you want to show me? Something in the house?”
“Oh no. The garden.”
“We can go down there? No one will see us.”
She glanced toward the terrace where the officers had been drinking champagne.
“Not there. Tuesday afternoon is the servants’ day off. I can show you something.” He paused. “The secret part.” Alice’s eyes opened wide.
They had moved to another tree nearby. Perched over a separate part of the garden, Alice looked down. Beneath her was a flotilla of lilies of the valley, their tiny bell-like heads nodding, their chimes perhaps heard only by two butterflies that swooped past on their way to a stand of foxgloves. Violets crept along a narrow path, occasionally interrupted by the bright yellow of a lady’s slipper—the most elusive of woodland plants, only rarely found in cultivated gardens. There were also trembling toad lilies, shyly tipping their blue and pink faces toward a narrow slant of sunshine.
What was not in the garden was as important as what was there in the other part of the garden, the nonsecret part. There were no roses that announced themselves in bright scrambles on trellises. No bursts of immense lilies, statuesque and brilliant, with their movie-star blossoms of arresting beauty. No irises, dignified and proud, in hues of royal purples and commanding scarlets. Nor were there clusters of pansies or squabbling petunias. This garden was wild and wandering, ambling quietly through the shadows and only seeking the occasional beam of sunlight that dropped through the green veil.