His Majesty's Hope

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  In the United States, I am grateful to the traveling exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” which I was able to see in Philadelphia. Curated by Dr. Susan Bachrach, the exhibition shows how the Nazi regime aimed to change the genetic makeup of the population through measures known as “racial hygiene.” I was also able to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and was particularly moved by the exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.”

  In Berlin, I was privileged to visit the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site, the Liebermann-Villa at Wannsee, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, the German Historical Museum, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Topography of Terror museum.

  Tiergartenstrasse 4 still exists, but the building that housed the T4 offices was bombed during the war. However, there is a plaque on the sidewalk at the address, reading:

  Tiergartenstraße 4—In honour of the forgotten victims. The first mass-murder by the Nazis was organized from 1940 onwards on this spot, the Tiergartenstraße 4 and named “Aktion T4” after this address.

  From 1939 to 1945 almost 200,000 helpless people were killed. Their lives were termed “unworthy of living,” their murder called “euthanasia.” They died in the gas chambers of Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Pirna, Bernburg, and Hadamar; they died by execution squad, by planned hunger and poisoning.

  The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police, and the health and workers’ administration. The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious, or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and children’s hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small.

  A link between Aktion T4 and the Holocaust has been found by historians. Gerald Reitlinger, in his Early History of the Final Solution, notes the direct connection between the personnel and gas chamber technology of the T4 killing centers and the Final Solution, officially put into words at the Wannsee conference in January 1942.

  The historian Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985 edition, also noted the connection between the Aktion T4 program and the subsequent annihilation of Jews: Euthanasia was a conceptual as well as a technological and administrative prefiguration of the final solution in the death camps.

  In addition, Michael Burleigh, Wolfganger Wippermann, and Henry Friedlander, in The Racial State: Germany 1933–45, posit that the connection between the Aktion T4 program and the Final Solution goes well beyond personnel, technology, and procedure, and that they were two campaigns in the same crusade. They state that the killing of the handicapped and of the Jews were two essential elements of the Nazis’ attempted creation of a racial utopia—the former to clear Germany of “degenerate and defective elements” and then the latter to “destroy the ultimate enemy.”

  After the war, Dr. Karl Brandt was tried along with twenty-two others at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, in a trial officially designated The United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. but more often called the Doctors’ Trial, one of the Nuremberg Trials. Brandt was found guilty and, with six other doctors, was sentenced to death by hanging.

  To forget the dead would be akin to killing them

  a second time.

  —Elie Wiesel, Night

  To Idria Barone Knecht

  Thank you

  Acknowledgments

  As always, thank you, Noel MacNeal. And Matthew MacNeal.

  Thank you to Idria Barone Knecht, one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever encountered—and one of the loveliest people, as well—for her time and editing insights.

  I am grateful to Victoria Skurnick (a.k.a. Agent V) at the Levine Greenberg Agency, the best agent imaginable at the best agency ever, who makes everything possible.

  Thanks to the always-patient Kate Miciak, who believed Maggie’s story could continue and even asked for a third and a fourth book.

  Thank you to Maggie Hope’s Random House team, especially Gina Wachtel, Jane von Mehren, Susan Corcoran, Lindsey Kennedy, Randall Klein, Maggie Oberrender, Vincent La Scala, and Susan M. S. Brown.

  Special thanks to the intrepid Random House sales force, who also believed Maggie Hope’s adventures could continue, about whom I can never say enough great things.

  Thank you to Dr. Ronald Granieri, for his patience with German-history-related questions and help in translating German.

  Special thanks to expat Londoner (and Blitz survivor) Phyllis Brooks Schafer for reading and helping with It’s That Man Again’s schedule, as well as myriad other facts of life during the Blitz.

  Thanks to Audra Branum Rickman, my Berlin travel companion.

  Thank you to Dr. Daniel Levy, Director, Synthetic Chemistry, and Principal Consultant at DEL BioPharma in San Francisco for answering questions about the use of fluoride in World War II.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Meredith Norris, who patiently answered many, many medical questions.

  Thanks to musician friends for verifying that people really can be transported in instrument cases: Karen Podd, Jessi Rosinski, Frank Scinia, Louis Toth, Lilly Tao, and Doug Wyatt.

  Thanks to early readers Monica Byrne, Deborah Ellis, Shannon Halprin, Lauren Marchisotto, Jana Riess, Liza Wachman Percer, Kathryn Plank, Sarah Bermingham Quinn, and Jennifer Valvo McCann.

  A special thank-you to Yeoman Warden Jim Duncan, at the Tower of London, who answered my many questions about where various Nazi prisoners, including Rudolf Hess, were kept. (It’s not part of the usual tour of the Tower of London—apparently, guests find the chronologic proximity to World War II too disturbing, and the Tower tour deliberately leaves it out.)

  BY SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL

  His Majesty’s Hope

  Princess Elizabeth’s Spy

  Mr. Churchill’s Secretary

  SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL is the Edgar Award– and Dilys Award–nominated author of the Maggie Hope mystery series, including Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, and His Majesty’s Hope. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and child, and is at work on the fourth Maggie Hope mystery, The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent, to be published by Bantam.

  If you enjoyed His Majesty’s Hope, you won’t want to miss the next ingenious suspense novel in the Maggie Hope series. Read on for an exciting early look at The Prime Minister’s Secret Agent by Susan Elia MacNeal.

  Published by Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks

  Chapter One

  Maggie Hope had thought that summer in Berlin was hell, but it was nothing compared to the inferno of darkness that raged in her own head, even as she was “safe as houses” now in Arisaig, Scotland.

  A mixture of shame, anger, guilt, and sadness had become a miasma of depression. It followed her everywhere, not at all helped by the lack of sunlight in Scotland in November. She’d once heard Winston Churchill describe his own melancholy as his “black dog,” but never understood it then. She’d pictured a large black dog with long silky fur and dark, sad eyes, silently padding after his master.

  But now she knew the truth: the black dog of depression was dirty and scarred, feral and rabid. He lurked in the night, yellow eyes gleaming, waiting for a chink in the armor, a weakness, a vulnerability, a memory. And then, jaws wide and fangs sharp, he would leap.

  Maggie had a few moments in the morning, when she first woke up, when she didn’t remember. Those were blessed moments, innocent and sweet. Until her mind started working again, and the sharp ache returned to her heart. Remembered what had happened in Berlin. Remembered that her German contact was dead—a devout Catholic who’d killed himself rather than be taken by the Gestapo for questioning.

  That she herself had killed a man. “It was self-defense,” the Freudian analyst she’d been ordered to see by Peter Frain had told her. “It’s war. You don’t need to torture yourself.” And yet, even though
he’d shot her first, and she’d killed him in self-defense, the dead man’s eyes haunted her.

  As did those of the little Jewish girl being pushed into a cattle car in Berlin, destined for Poland. “I’m thirsty, Mama,” she’d cried, “so thirsty.” What had happened to her? Maggie often wondered. Had she died on the train, or later in the camp? Because now that Maggie—and most of the rest of the world—knew that the Nazis were capable of killing their own children, she didn’t hold any hope at all for the children of Jews.

  And, as if that weren’t enough burden, her mother, Clara Hess, was a Nazi Abwehr agent imprisoned in the Tower of London—and asking to talk with her. No wonder every breath Maggie took caused her pain.

  She turned over beneath the heavy wool blankets, reflexively reaching for her ribs, the hard outline of the German boy’s bullet, which had just managed to miss her heart. Dumb luck was all that had saved her. The doctors in Switzerland, and then in London—even one of her best friends, Chuck, a nurse—had wanted her to have it removed, but she wouldn’t. She called it her “Berlin souvenir.”

  I’m dead inside, she thought, not for the first time since she’d made it to Arisaig. Worse than dead—if I were dead at least I wouldn’t have to remember everything anymore.

  On her nightstand the green glass clock ticked, and she reached over to turn it off before the alarm rang. The tear-off calendar propped up against her lamp read November 1, 1941.

  Finally, Maggie rose, washed, and changed her clothes, putting on the blue twill jumpsuit all the instructors wore over layers of thermal underwear and wool socks, plus standard-issue thick-soled boots. She twisted and then pinned up her long red hair with her tortoiseshell clip. If she’d been doing office work, she would have put on the pearl earrings that her aunt Edith had given to her when she’d graduated from Wellesley in ’37—but not only were they completely inappropriate for her job as an instructor at an SOE camp, she’d lost them somewhere in London after returning from Berlin.

  Pale and gaunt, with violet shadows under her eyes, Maggie shrugged into her thick wool coat, pulled on a scarf and Fair Isle stocking cap, and then left the gardener’s cottage to which she’d been assigned, heading to the manor house. Although her body ached and felt as if it were made from spun glass, she walked quickly to warm up her muscles before breaking into a run up the path of the rockery, taking the steep, lichen-covered flagstone steps up to the manor house at a brisk jog. The view was lost on her—the snow-covered mountains, the ancient forests, the white sheep grazing in the neighbor’s field, the blue-green ocean in the distance.

  Arisaig House was the administrative heart of the War Office for Special Operations Executive—or SOE, as it was better known. SOE was neither MI-5 nor MI-6, but a black ops operation, training agents to be dropped into places such as France and Germany, and helping local resistance groups “set Europe ablaze,” as Winston Churchill had urged. The SOE used great houses all over Britain to train their would-be spies, sparking the joke that SOE really stood for “Stately ’Omes of England.” While most training camps were preliminary schools specifically dedicated to parachute jumping or radio transmission, Arisaig was the place where trainees received intense training in demolition, weapons, reconnaissance, and clandestine intelligence work.

  Isolated on the far Western coast of Scotland, closed off by military roadblocks, the rocky mountains and stony beaches of Arisaig were ideal for pushing trainees to their physical and mental limits. Arisaig House was the administrative hub. Other great houses in the area were used for training: Traigh House, Inverailort Castle, Camusdarach, and Garramor, just to name a few. Maggie’s lips twisted in a smile as she recalled how a group of trainees from Norway, Italy, and Spain had stumbled over the Scottish names.

  But it was the perfect place for Maggie, still recovering from her gunshot wound—and also from everything she’d seen and done in Berlin.

  As an instructor, she trained her charges harder than Olympians—swimming in the freezing ocean, running over stones, navigating obstacle courses in the cold mud, and mastering rope work. Under other instructors, the trainees learned fieldcraft, demolition, Morse code, weapons training, and Sykes and Fairbairn methods of silent killing. Anything and everything they might need to know when sent to France, or Germany, or wherever a local resistance group might need aid.

  Maggie hadn’t always been a draconian instructor; in fact, the very idea would have made her former bookish and dreamy self laugh in disbelief. She’d planned to obtain her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT, but had instead found herself in London when war broke out. Maggie had found a job in Winston Churchill’s secretarial pool, and, after finding a secret code in an innocuous advertisement, and then foiling an IRA bomb plot, had been tapped for MI-5. She’d been sent to one of the preliminary training camps in Scotland as a trainee in the fall of 1940. Not surprisingly, while she was excellent at Morse code and navigating by stars, she flamed out spectacularly at anything that required the least bit of physical fitness.

  Maggie remembered how angry she’d been when she’d washed out of the SOE program and Peter Frain of MI-5 had placed her at Windsor Castle to look after the young Princesses. But, in retrospect, the Windsor assignment had done her a lot of good. She had grown stronger both mentally and physically, and was able to help foil a kidnapping plot.

  After her adventures at Windsor with the Royals, she’d returned to SOE training in the spring of 1941. She made it through all the various schools and, as a newly minted agent, was sent on a secret mission to Berlin. Now, she had returned once more to Arisaig House—but this time as an instructor.

  As she opened the thick oak door and paused, the bells in the clock tower chimed eight times. The vestibule of the large stone manor house led into the great hall, which SOE had turned into a lobby of sorts, with a desk for a telephone and a receptionist. Sheets protected the grand house’s wooden paneling from the government workers, while a Miss Astley Nicholson, owner of Arisaig and Traigh Houses, had been relocated to a smaller cottage up the road for the duration of the war. However, the spacious, high-ceilinged entrance hall with its mullioned windows, staircase elaborately carved with birds and thistles, and views over fields dotted with white sheep leading down to the jagged coastline made it clear instantly this was no ordinary office.

  “Yes,” the girl on receptionist duty said into the black Bakelite telephone receiver, twisting the metal cord. She was short, sturdy, and a bit stout, with a wide grin and eyes that crinkled when she smiled, which was often. Her name was Gwen Glyn-Jones and she was from Cardiff, Wales, but her mother was French, and she had a perfect accent from summers spent just outside Paris. She was training to become a radio operator—if she survived the physical training at Arisaig. Gwen scribbled something down on a scrap of paper. “Yes, miss—I’ll make sure Miss Hope receives the message as soon as possible.” She hung up.

  “Message for Lady Macbeth?” one of the other girls in the room asked. Yvonne had been born and raised in Brixton, London, but her grandfather was French, and she was bilingual.

  “The one and only.” The girls, both trainees, giggled. Maggie was strict. She was hard on her students. She never smiled. None of the women at Arisaig House liked her. None of the men liked her much either, for that matter.

  Gwen grimaced. “I hate being in Lady Macbeth’s section.”

  Yvonne leaned in. “Why does everyone call her Lady Macbeth?”

  “Because she’s a monster.” Gwen lowered her plummy Welsh-inflected voice. “Rumor is, she has blood on her hands.”

  Yvonne’s eyes popped open wide. “Really?”

  “I heard she killed a man in France.”

  Two trainees walking down the staircase, a man and a woman, had overhead their conversation. “I heard she killed three men in Munich,” the woman offered.

  The man said, “I heard she was interrogated by the Gestapo and never talked—”

  All right, that’s enough. Maggie swept inside, giving them what she’d c
ome to call her “best Aunt Edith look.”

  “Two, Five, and Eight—aren’t you supposed to be out running?” Maggie had given her trainees numbers instead of names. She didn’t want to become too attached to them.

  There was a lengthy silence, punctuated only by the ticking of a great mahogany longcase clock. Then, “I’m on desk duty …”

  “And I was waiting …”

  Maggie held up one hand. “Stop making excuses.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Miss Hope,” Gwen stuttered.

  “And stop apologizing. In fact, stop speaking entirely.” Maggie looked them all up and down. “You, stay here and do your job. You two—go run on the beach. Relay races on the stony part of the shore—they’re good for your ankles and knees and will help with your parachute jumps. I’ll be there shortly.”

  Her charges stared, frozen in place.

  Maggie glared. “I said, go!”

  They nearly fell over themselves in their haste to get away from her.

  Mr. Harold Burns, a fit man in his fifties with smile lines etched around his eyes and rough skin dotted with liver spots, walked in from one of the other huge rooms of the house now used as administrative offices. The instructor favored her with a wintry smile. Maggie was a physical education instructor and Mr. Burns was her commanding officer. “Impressive, Miss Hope. I remember a time when you could barely run a mile without passing out. Or twisting your ankle. Or dropping your fellow trainees in the mud.”