The Dressmaker of Dachau

by Mary Chamberlain

  Mr Harris-Jones was lifting up the paper he had pulled out of his folder, and laid it on the table, face down.

  ‘Item 9, in your bundle,’ he said to the jury, walking over and handing Ada the paper he’d extracted earlier. It was a photograph. Ada stared at it, the features drifting in and out of focus, now you see it, now you don’t. There was no mistake. And the dogs. Ada struggled to remember their names. Little Scotties. Negus, Stasi.

  ‘Did you know this woman, Miss Vaughan?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ada said.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She was one of the women who came to me.’

  ‘Do you know her name?’

  ‘No,’ Ada shook her head. ‘I didn’t know anybody’s name.’

  ‘Have you heard of Eva Braun?’ Harris-Jones said.

  Ada swallowed. ‘Eva Braun?’

  ‘Yes. Eva Braun.’

  ‘Wasn’t she something to do with the Nazis?’

  ‘Are you feigning ignorance, Miss Vaughan?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Eva Braun,’ Harris-Jones said, rocking on his heels, satisfaction scrawling across his face, ‘was Adolf Hitler’s mistress.’

  Ada had heard something about it on the wireless, but it was a while ago. She didn’t often see the papers, never looked at the pictures. She didn’t want to live in the past.

  ‘I repeat. Did you know this woman?’ He held the photograph high with both hands.

  ‘I told you,’ Ada said. ‘I met her.’

  ‘This woman,’ Harris-Jones puffed out his chest so his voice ricocheted round the courtroom, ‘is Eva Braun.’

  His words hit her like a steam train. Ada stumbled with the recoil, grabbed the rail for balance.

  ‘I didn’t know who she was,’ she said. ‘Nobody ever said her name in front of me.’

  ‘Did nobody tell you?’

  ‘No. Why should they?’ Ada said. ‘People didn’t talk to me. They never called her by her name. Sometimes they talked about a Fräulein, that Fräulein. Like she was scum, common. They never said who she was. Not Hitler’s mistress. Not then.’

  Mr Harris-Jones raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Your circle was well connected. Hitler’s mistress? Whom he married the night before they committed suicide? Nobody gossiped?’

  Ada swallowed. Eva Braun had thanked her, complimented her. She had lapped it up, and all along she was Hitler’s mistress. Ada hadn’t known a thing.

  ‘Do you recognize the dress in the photograph, Miss Vaughan?’

  Ada knew it well, every dart and stitch, the distinctive corsage. She was tempted to lie. No. Never seen it. But Harris-Jones must know, otherwise he wouldn’t be showing this to her. Whatever you do, Mr Wallis said, don’t lie.

  ‘Yes,’ Ada said.

  ‘You made it, didn’t you?’

  Ada nodded.

  ‘Speak up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Designed, cut, sewed. Bespoke. Showed Eva Braun how to wear it, where to place the corsage. This was the dress Eva Braun wore when she married Adolf Hitler. She wore the same dress, without the corsage, when she died with him.’

  Someone in the jury box coughed. Ada watched as the foreman fidgeted, crossing and uncrossing his legs, shuffling his feet.

  ‘How does it feel to be Eva Braun’s dressmaker, Miss Vaughan? To have made her bridal gown, and her shroud?’

  Ada didn’t know. She never knew.

  ‘Eva Braun,’ Harris-Jones was saying. ‘Mistress of the most powerful man in Europe, if not the world. Certainly the most evil. Are you still proud of your work?’

  This wasn’t the point.

  ‘Was this your contribution to our war effort?’

  This wasn’t how it was. She’d done nothing.

  ‘Or to the enemy war effort?’

  ‘I was trying to stay alive,’ she said. ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘Just obeying orders, were you, Miss Vaughan?’

  ‘No,’ Ada held her head in her hands. ‘No. You’re twisting things. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘You were a collaborator, Miss Vaughan.’

  ‘No.’ She was shouting. She didn’t know she had so much sound inside her. ‘I was forced. I was a prisoner. I didn’t do this voluntarily.’ She turned to the jury, sitting there, angry eyes drilling into her. ‘You have to believe me. Facts don’t tell you the truth, don’t tell you what happened. You didn’t know what it was like there, in that house.’ The foreman with the medals was nodding. Maybe he understood.

  ‘War,’ she went on, ‘it’s a mess. A muddle. We do things in war, to survive, from one day to the next. There’s no future in war. I never believed in the Nazis. But I had to live with them. Is that collaboration? What if I had resisted, Sister Brigitte could have been shot. Could I have lived with that? Would that have been moral?’

  Mr Harris-Jones raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Are you so pure?’ she said, glaring at him, then across to the jury. ‘So moral? With your guns and your bombing? Trading cigarettes for family heirlooms, or a little girl’s body? I saw that. Our boys did that too.’

  She heard the judge draw in his breath, as if he was about to speak. This was too much. She knew she was crossing a line, but she had to.

  ‘They say all’s fair in love and war. But not if you’re a woman.’ Ada slammed her fist onto the witness box. ‘I thought I was being tried for murder. Not treason. This has nothing to do with Stanley Lovekin. You’re stringing me up like a Nazi at Nuremberg.’

  She turned to the jury, sitting tight-lipped, jackets buttoned up, fingers itching in their pockets. They’d shave her head, if they could, strip her naked and parade her through the streets.

  ‘I never betrayed my country. Never.’

  The foreman had had a good war. They all had. Done their bit for king and country, if not in this war, then the last. Old comrades, all of them. The jurymen, Harris-Jones, the judge. Spoke the same language, of old soldiers, of men. They understood each other. She could see them looking down their noses at Mr Wallis. What did you do in the war, sonny boy?

  Mr Harris-Jones swaggered towards the jury, radiating success. Man to man. He looked down on Mr Wallis, as if he were the class dunce.

  ‘Grossly insulting assault,’ he began, an eyebrow raised into a question mark, nodding at Ada, at the jury. ‘This, from the woman who made Eva Braun’s wedding dress. Took pride in her work for the Nazis.’ He stretched the words prrride, and Naazis so the jury would not forget.

  ‘This is a very long way from the murder of Stanley Lovekin through asphyxiation by coal gas. A particularly unpleasant death, it should be said.’

  He tapped his pen on the desk, looked at the clock. He thinks he’s got it all in the bag, sewn up tight, Ada thought. One or two of the men in the jury were looking at her while he talked, though she wasn’t sure they were searching for innocence. She was tempted to glare back at them, but knew she had to be contrite.

  ‘This was not a matter of self-defence. Nor could it be a matter of provocation,’ Mr Harris-Jones was saying. ‘Ada Vaughan is a liar. She lies to anyone foolish enough to listen. She lies to further her advancement. She lies to herself. There was no Stanislaus von Lieben. There was no baby. There was no Frau Weiss. There is no evidence for any of it. There was a dressmaking business. There was Eva Braun. There was prostitution and black marketeering. Ada Vaughan pursued her own interests in an amoral, immoral and ruthless manner.’

  He sipped his water from the glass on his table, glimpsed his notes, looked up.

  ‘The facts of the matter are straightforward. Ada Vaughan, also known as Ava Gordon, on the night of the fourteenth of June 1947, unlawfully killed Stanley Lovekin at number 17, Floral Street, Covent Garden. The defendant admitted her guilt at the scene, and subsequently signed a written confession at the police station. The forensic evidence demonstrates that the confession is true. There were no mitigating circumstances or issues of self-defence which could explain her actions.’
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br />   That’s all right, Ada thought. If he just sticks to the facts and leaves me out, that gives Mr Wallis a chance to put my case. It’s not what happened, but why.

  ‘This wasn’t even a lover’s tiff. This was a dispute between felons squabbling over the proceeds of their crimes. Ada Vaughan, a woman without morals or sensibility, an inveterate liar and fantasist, was in cahoots with Stanley Lovekin, running a black-market business and, with his partner in crime, Gino Messina, a vice ring. His murder was the result of a squalid quarrel between a pimp and a prostitute, a spiv and a fence over money, which resulted in the defendant, with malice aforethought, turning on the gas, which Stanley Lovekin inhaled and which killed him. A grossly insulting assault? Provocation? We’re talking about a tart here, not a nun.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Ada was shouting. ‘You can’t think that.’ She faced the jury. ‘I can see how it looks, the way he puts it. But it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Miss Vaughan,’ the judge’s voice rang loud.

  ‘But that’s not what happened,’ she said. ‘Let me say it.’

  ‘Miss Vaughan. This is your final warning.’ The judge nodded to Mr Harris-Jones to continue.

  ‘Ada Vaughan waited until Stanley Lovekin was insensible, then turned on the gas and withdrew, sealing the gaps in the windows and door as she went. She intended for him to die.’

  Harris-Jones looked over to the judge, like they were equals, in cahoots. ‘Loss of self-control is instantaneous. It can only be of the moment. When the provocation, whatever it is, is so acute that it drives reason out of the door. There cannot be provocation by instalments. It cannot come years later. It is not like purchasing a frock on the never-never, or building a wall, course by course. It happens,’ Mr Harris-Jones snapped his fingers, ‘like that. In an instant.’

  He sat down, peered at Mr Wallis along the table.

  Mr Wallis stuttered. He started crooked, tripped on his consonants, choked on his vowels, staggered on his ‘s’s. Ada could see his hands trembling. He coughed, blinked, paused.

  ‘Let me start again,’ he said, ‘from the beginning.’ He took a big breath and now his words came out rounded and formed, like he’d found his voice, and the story behind it, all together, ripe for the telling. Mr Wallis was good with words, she’d give him that, used proper, long ones. She held her breath, crossed her fingers behind her back, hoped.

  ‘A bazooka,’ Mr Wallis was saying. He licked his lips, sucking back the spit. ‘Those were Ada Vaughan’s words. “It was like he pulled a trigger. It all blew out, like a bazooka.”’ He squinted, catching each juryman’s eye. ‘“He drove me to it.” Stanley Lovekin’s provocation was such that any reasonable man,’ he paused, turning to Ada, ‘or woman, would lose self-control. In other words, gentlemen of the jury, had you been in Ada Vaughan’s position, you too would have behaved as she did.’

  He was breathing through his open mouth, gathering wind. ‘Grossly. Insulting. Assault.’ Mr Wallis slithered out the words. ‘Such that any reasonable man,’ he spoke it like he didn’t see how a woman would be reasonable, ‘would lose self-control.’

  ‘Miss Vaughan did not witness an act of sodomy, adultery or violence upon a relative. She wasn’t a husband or a father. She wasn’t witnessing an Englishman being unlawfully deprived of his liberty. This was Floral Street,’ Mr Wallis went on, ‘not Burma. Or Italy.’

  The juryman in the demob suit smirked. Mr Wallis adjusted his gown, lifted his head, hunched his shoulders as if it made him look grown up.

  ‘The normal expectations of provocation do not apply here. Nor, moreover, did she grab an axe, or a kitchen knife, or a heavy-bottomed saucepan and kill Stanley Lovekin in a frenzy.’

  He paused, gathering his breath, and tilted his head towards Ada. He’s acting, too, she thought. Putting on a show.

  ‘But neither did she calculate to kill him.’ Mr Wallis stuck out his chest. ‘There was not a single act, a grossly insulting assault, that provoked her.’ He shook his head with fatherly concern. ‘That’s not how women think. Their reason works in a different way.’

  Ada thought he might be putting ideas in the jury’s head, not taking them away.

  ‘This was the legacy of an abuse that had lain dormant for seven years. It was reignited by Stanley Lovekin. Stanislaus von Lieben. One and the same person. The physical evidence matched. The behaviour matched. He was in Munich, he confessed to abandoning her in Namur. He had ruined her life. He was a man with neither empathy nor remorse.’

  Mr Harris-Jones blew his nose, a noisy trumpet that sliced through the silence of the courtroom, breaking the concentration. He returned the handkerchief to his pocket in a contemptuous flourish, hoisting up his gown, pulling it back down. Mr Wallis waited.

  ‘The pain that Miss Vaughan had undergone in the loss of her child,’ he went on, ‘and as a victim of the Nazi programme of forced labour, was a pain no one was prepared to listen to. Had she been a soldier, a prisoner of war, had she returned from Colditz or Burma, she might have had an audience. But she had to bury it inside her, where it grew like a fistula, drained her reason, so that when Stanley Lovekin confessed and dismissed her as an empty-headed tart – an insult by any standards, but one that was a particularly gross and insulting assault given its heritage – and then abused her, she turned on the gas, knowing that it would cause him to die. She did not think about it. There was no distance of time between his confession and her actions. She lost self-control in that very moment. The provocation, on the other hand, had grown in the passage of time. Historic wrongs have a way of festering. She does not deny killing Stanley Lovekin unlawfully.’

  The foreman of the jury was leaning forward. The cadaverous judge was rifling through his file.

  Mr Wallis waited and the judge focused his eyes back onto the court. ‘She pleads not guilty to murder.’ He spoke deliberately and carefully, shoving out his words like he was pushing a boulder up a hill. ‘But to manslaughter, under the duress of provocation.’

  Bit her nails to the quick in an hour. That’s all it took. Ada knew, the moment the foreman stood up, shoulders back, chest forward, hero’s ribbons striped across his lapels. She didn’t stand a chance. Could have spared herself the trouble. She could have pleaded guilty and had it over and done with by now.

  ‘Will you visit me, Mr Wallis?’ Night was closing in and the single bulb in her cell was high in the ceiling, dribbled a dim brown light and cast long shadows across the walls. She had no one left in the world. ‘Before I go?’

  She knew she’d never see him again.

  The wardresses were kind to her. They had nothing to lose. Nor did Ada. She couldn’t run away. The cell was big. Had her own bathroom, bathroom, with a bath and a proper lavatory. Table. Wardrobe, not that she had anything to put in it.

  She could only sit and count the days. Wished they had done it there and then, not made her wait. Time on her hands. The last of time. The trial. Funny way of looking at the past. Facts. This way, or that, white or black. Where was the in-between? The truth, that connected one fact to another? The twilight? If you read about it in the papers, or in a history book, it wouldn’t tell what went on, what really happened. Ada’s war would be forgotten.

  ‘An exercise book?’ the day wardress said. She was an older woman, old enough to have been her mother. Her bosoms sagged and her stomach was soft. Ada wanted to tell her she should wear a girdle and get a better brassiere, but that would have been a cheek.

  ‘And a pencil,’ Ada said, ‘or two.’

  ‘No sharpeners allowed,’ the wardress said. Ada knew why. Unpick the screws, take the blade and swish, the gallows man would be out of a job. Albert Pierrepoint. She knew his name.

  ‘Albert Pierrepoint. He does them all,’ the night wardress had said. They chatted at night. Ada couldn’t sleep, and they wouldn’t turn the lights off. ‘Nice, clean job. Skill. Nothing to worry about.’

  He’d looked a jolly man, ordinary, like a shopkeeper, a grocer perhaps. Ada could s
ee him in a brown gaberdine overall behind a counter. Coupons? Thank you. Two ounces cheddar. One of butter. Quarter tea. Yorkshire accent. Smoked a pipe while he sized her up. What kind of a living was that? Took his jacket off. Ada expected him to have a tape measure round his neck, like a tailor, neck size 13 inches, knot, like a corsage, just so. Drop, this much, slack, so much. Never knew a rope could have so many sides.

  Ada had filled one book, written small along the lines. No one else would tell the truth, tell her story, her war. This was what she wanted to say. It happened, like this. The wardress had brought her another book, a rubber too.

  ‘Even though you didn’t ask for it.’ Six HB pencils. She’d tried not to rub out too much because it left smears across the page. She got a bump on her middle finger with all that writing, and the side of her palm was grey with lead.

  She had more fittings with Mr Pierrepoint than she ever did at Mrs B.’s. All in a week. Was this her last?

  ‘I used to be a dressmaker,’ she said. ‘Neck to waist, I know about measuring.’

  He didn’t say anything, gripped his pipe between his teeth, flecks of saliva on his lips, the pungent fug of Capstan Navy Cut tucking itself into her nostrils.

  ‘House of Vaughan,’ she said. ‘I was going to call it House of Vaughan. Like Chanel. Signature style, too, like her. Mine was a corsage. A large red corsage. Like—’ Why was she telling him this? He didn’t care. The wardress nodded, smiled at her. She’d talk to her, tell her the stories.

  ‘I dreamed of Paris,’ she said. ‘Rue Cambon. Have you ever been there? Cut on the cross, too. My dresses. Once this rationing is over, that’s what I’ll do.’

  She stopped, corrected herself. That’s what she would have done.

  That’s what she should have done. She wished she’d never met him. She might have been rich without him. Successful and happy. Worked hard. House of Vaughan. Paris. London. And Thomas, Thomas. Her baby. Her beloved son. If he had lived, she would have cared for him, given him a home, with his own bed. Your father died in the war. That’s all she would say. Like Sister Brigitte said, sometimes you have to tell white lies. He’d never know. They would have been happy, just the two of them. A little family.