A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  Now he didn’t know what he felt.

  Dieter said awkwardly, ‘There were other things as well, Gilbert. Violet’s affairs with men like Goebbels and Göring . . .’

  ‘She’s had no such affairs.’

  Dieter gave a disbelieving laugh.

  Gilbert said bluntly, ‘Ever since Violet came to Babelsberg she’s been spying for the Americans. She loathes and detests the Nazis just as much as you do. I’m telling you because I think the day may come when she will need your help – or when you may need hers.’

  Dieter stared at him in incredulity and then understanding dawned, to be followed by horror as he realized how gravely both he and Olivia had misjudged Violet – and then horror followed horror as he thought of the constant danger Violet was in.

  He said, his voice raw, ‘But why for the Americans? I don’t understand.’

  ‘The suggestion that, as a high-profile film actress at Babelsberg, Violet was in a unique position to mix with Nazis close to Hitler and pick up useful information was made to Max Bradley. And it was Max who recruited her. I doubt she needed much persuasion, but what clinched it was when he told her that whatever information she passed on would also be passed on to British intelligence.’

  Cloud covered the moon, and the snow-covered pathway was suddenly barely visible. Without speaking they turned, beginning to retrace their steps, aware that all that had needed to be said had been, and that tomorrow, for both of them, was going to be another long, stressful day.

  At five past ten the next morning Gilbert walked out of Vienna’s Westbahnhof station. When he had been a student he had spent a holiday in Vienna, but the city that now greeted him was changed beyond recognition. There were uniforms everywhere: the brown uniforms of Stormtroopers; the black uniforms of the SS; the field-grey of regular army men. As for swastikas – there were even more, if that was possible, than in Berlin.

  He took the underground to Stephansplatz, in the centre of the city, wondering what it must be like for Judith and her fellow Jews, living with the fear that those uniforms and swastikas created. The things that were verboten to Jews in Vienna and the rest of Austria were just as numerous as – if not more so than – the things that were verboten to them in Germany.

  They couldn’t go into cafes or restaurants without being humiliatingly refused service. If they tried to travel by tram, they were unceremoniously ejected, no matter what their sex or age. Public parks and libraries were closed to them. Treatment was refused them at state hospitals. Pharmacies would not sell drugs or medicine to them. Hotels wouldn’t take bookings from them. They weren’t even allowed to own a pet – and the pets they’d owned had been brutally taken from them.

  Shops in Kärntner Strasse, which led off from Stephansplatz and was one of the city’s main shopping streets, nearly all bore signs stipulating ‘Jews Not Admitted’. The only shops without such signs were those with Jewish names, and all of these had had their windows smashed and their stock looted.

  Five minutes later, still in Kärntner Strasse, Gilbert turned left and then left again.

  For a moment, as he entered the cobbled Schulerstrasse, he thought a Christmas entertainment was taking place. A crowd of people was laughing and jostling to get a better view of something happening in the middle of the street. A couple of men had children high on their shoulders in order that they could see better. One of the children, rosy-cheeked and well muffled, was laughing so hard he could hardly keep his balance. Even Stormtroopers on the inner ring of spectators seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  He drew nearer, passing number nine Schulerstrasse and then number eleven. As he drew abreast of the crowd he paused, curious to know what was giving so much fun. What he expected, he didn’t know. Perhaps a man dressed as Father Christmas, or festive street jugglers.

  What he saw, as the crowd momentarily parted, was neither of those things.

  A handful of old people, both men and women, were on their knees in the snow. There were placards on their backs with the words ‘I AM A JEWISH PIG’ written on them, and they were on their knees, shovelling the snow away from the centre of the road with bare, red-raw, arthritic hands while their former neighbours laughed, jeered and spat at them.

  For a second the scene was so diabolical Gilbert couldn’t register the reality of it.

  When he did, he also registered his impotence. He couldn’t do anything to stop what was happening. Any attempt he made would be halted instantly by the Stormtroopers and, if he was to be of any help to Judith, he couldn’t risk attracting their attention.

  With bile rising in his throat so that it was all he could do to stop himself from vomiting, he kept on walking. He passed numbers seventeen and nineteen, and then numbers twenty-one and twenty-three.

  Then he reached his destination. Number twenty-five. The door was broken in. The windows smashed. He didn’t even attempt to enter it.

  He leaned against the wall, his head back, his eyes closed, certain he had arrived too late and that Dieter had been right and Judith was now in Mauthausen. His sense of failure was total. How was he to go about getting a young Jewish woman out of a concentration camp? How could he possibly go back to Berlin without her?

  He became aware of a woman’s hurrying footsteps approaching from across the street. They came to a halt a few feet away from him.

  Unwillingly he opened his eyes.

  ‘Entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte. Sind Sie Englisch?’ the woman asked.

  She was middle-aged and, despite the bitter cold, had no coat on and was wearing an apron. He looked beyond her and saw that the door of the house directly opposite was ajar.

  ‘Ja. Ich bin Englisch.’

  She looked nervously up the street at the crowd and the Stormtroopers. Then, looking towards him once again, she said in fractured English, ‘Are you Viscount Fenton?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, hope flooding through him. ‘I am Viscount Fenton.’

  ‘You look for Fräulein Zimmermann?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, every nerve in his body now taut. ‘I am looking for Fräulein Zimmermann. Do you know where she is?’

  The woman gave another swift look up the road towards the Stormtroopers, but none of them were looking in their direction.

  ‘In my house,’ she said. ‘Come.’

  She led him across the street and pushed the slightly open door further ajar. They stepped into a long, high-ceilinged, narrow hallway. There were closed doors opposite each other, and a little further down the corridor, on the right-hand side, another door. A door that led into a living room. A door that was open.

  The woman stepped into it and, his heart hammering, Gilbert followed her.

  It was a typical middle-class German living room. The furniture was heavy and dark and smelled of beeswax. There was a piano. A table filled with silver-framed photographs. Standing in the middle of the room, so tense with nerves that she looked as if she might snap into pieces, was a slender, dark-haired young woman with hazel eyes.

  ‘I am Gilbert Fenton,’ he said, stepping towards her, ‘And I’m very pleased to meet you, Judith.’

  She wasn’t a blood relation. The correct thing to do would be for him to shake her hand.

  He didn’t do so. Instinct made him open his arms wide and, with a small cry, she fell into them.

  The top of her head fitted neatly beneath his chin and, as his arms closed protectively around her, he said, his voice thick with emotion, ‘I’m taking you to Berlin, Judith. My daughter and her husband live there and, until all your emigration papers are in order, you will be safer with them than you are here.’

  He released his hold of her slightly so that he could look down into her face.

  ‘Before we leave, is there anything you would like to ask me? Anything you want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’ Already tension and fear were ebbing from a face as fine-boned as Violet’s. ‘I would like you to tell me about my birth-mother, and I would like you to tell me about the haven that is England.’
/>   Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Two days after arriving in London from Berlin, Gilbert was on a train travelling north to Yorkshire. In the forty-eight hours that he’d been back in Britain he’d met the prime minister and had again urged him to rethink his present policy where Nazi Germany was concerned. Neville had thanked him with clipped courtesy and had given his opinion that Herr Hitler was simply gathering within the Reich the German-speaking peoples who had either been severed from it by the Versailles Treaty or who, like the Austrians, had always considered themselves to be ethnically part of a Greater Germany.

  ‘And though he has agreed that Britain must rearm in the light of Germany’s ferocious rearmament policy, his fundamental belief remains the same,’ Churchill had growled when Gilbert had met up with him at the Travellers Club. ‘He still holds to his conviction that conciliation and the avoidance of anything likely to offend Hitler are the best policy. The end result of such thinking will, I fear, put our green and pleasant land at great risk. Herr Hitler doesn’t need the language of sweet reasonableness, Gilbert. In order to be reined in, he needs the language of a mailed fist.’

  As the train rattled north Gilbert tried to visualize Chamberlain as a war leader, wielding a mailed fist. His imagination wouldn’t stretch that far. With his slight build, turkey-neck, reedy voice and desiccated manner, what Neville reminded him of was a counter assistant in a haberdashery shop.

  He thought back to the situation he had left behind in Berlin. Though Judith was safer living under the roof of a member of the German Foreign Office than she had been in the house of her defiantly brave Aryan neighbour, her basic situation hadn’t changed. She was still missing the last piece of paperwork with which to leave the Reich and enter Britain.

  Dieter, however, knew exactly the channels that had to be approached – and how, under his guidance, Judith should approach them. ‘She will be in London within a week or two, perhaps less,’ he had promised Gilbert. ‘Trust me, Schwiegervater.’

  It was rare that Dieter referred to him as ‘father-in-law’.

  Gilbert felt tension run down his spine. The risks Dieter was running in being part of a conspiracy to rid Germany of Hitler were enormous – and what would happen to Olivia, if Dieter was arrested? He comforted himself that Olivia was a British citizen and the daughter of a member of the British government and that, as she wasn’t an active member of the conspiracy, there could surely be no question of her being arrested, too.

  With his mind a little eased, he turned his thoughts to the person who was never far from them. Carrie.

  Because ever since she had been a child he had always cared for her and been fond of her in a fatherly way, it had taken him a long time to acknowledge just how drastically his feelings for her had changed over the years. Now his emotions had become overwhelming. Carrie, with her sunny nature, inner calm and constant common sense, had become as necessary to him as Blanche had once been. Did she feel the same way towards him as he felt towards her? Certainly if she did, she would never have shown it. How could she have? He doubted if Carrie had ever done an inappropriate thing in her life, and she would be even more acutely aware than he had been of the difficulties that stood in the way of a romance between them.

  Those difficulties, which had once seemed insurmountable, seemed insurmountable no longer. The twenty-two-year age difference, once huge, didn’t seem so now that Carrie was no longer a young girl in her early twenties, but a mature woman of thirty-one.

  As for the other difference – the yawning gulf of the class difference between them – that was still there, but no one in his family would care about it; people in Outhwaite had been too long accustomed to Carrie’s betwixt-and-between social status to suddenly take exception to it, if she definitively crossed the line by becoming Lady Fenton; and if his friends in government found his marriage socially objectionable, then that was just too bad. He didn’t care. He only cared that Carrie wouldn’t suffer on account of people’s snobbishness and if, in London, she was made to feel uncomfortable, then he would simply resign his government position and live permanently at Gorton, which was, when all was said and done, the only place he really wanted to be.

  That was if, when he proposed to her, she said yes.

  By this time tomorrow he would, he hoped, be out of his misery.

  As the train pulled into Darlington, which was as close to Outhwaite as the mainline trains went, and as he rose in readiness to step from his first-class carriage to the platform, he suddenly wondered what Blanche, if she could have seen into the future, would have thought of his being in love with Carrie and wanting to marry her.

  Certainty flooded through him.

  Blanche, whose affection for Carrie had been so deep; who had loved him with every fibre of her being, and who had always only wanted his happiness, would, he knew, have been happy for him and would have given them her blessing.

  There was no chauffeured car waiting for him at the station. Ever since he and Zephiniah had first separated he had dispensed with a full-time chauffeur at Gorton – and the car kept there was no longer a Rolls-Royce. It was a dark-green Riley that he drove himself.

  His London car was more imposing, and in the capital he was always chauffeured – and would have been chauffeured all the way from Mount Street to Gorton, if his chauffeur hadn’t slipped on London ice and broken his leg.

  He settled himself on the rear seat of a taxi, anticipating the happy surprise on Thea and Rozalind’s faces when he turned up several days before his planned Christmas Eve arrival. It was going to be a good Christmas. Max was spending it with them and, when he returned to America, Rozalind would be with him, entering her homeland for the first time as Mrs Maxwell Bradley.

  Someone who would soon be entering Britain for the first time was Judith, if not by Christmas, then hopefully very soon in the New Year – and by then, God willing, Violet would also be home, and the only loved ones he would have left to worry about would be Olivia and Dieter.

  The next morning, at breakfast, he said to Thea and Roz in as casual a voice as he could manage, ‘I was thinking of telephoning Carrie and asking if she could take some time off today.’

  ‘She’s coming over here for part of Christmas Day and the whole of Boxing Day.’ Thea helped herself to another slice of toast. ‘I absolutely insisted she spend as much of Christmas as possible with us – especially as Lydia Markham is in Madeira and there is no Christmas entertaining taking place at Monkswood. And if she can take time off today, why don’t you invite her to help us decorate the Christmas tree? Roz and I are going to Richmond this morning, Christmas shopping, but we’ll be back by early afternoon.’

  ‘And then, when we’ve done the tree, we can all have mince pies and mulled wine in front of the drawing-room fire,’ Roz said, pouring herself more coffee.

  Gilbert, aware that Thea and Roz had given him the perfect pretexts for telephoning Carrie and asking for her company, beamed across at them. ‘A wonderful idea,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Absolutely grand.’

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you in your office, Mrs Thornton,’ Briggs, Monkswood’s butler, said to Carrie.

  Carrie, who had been checking the linen cupboard, stopped what she was doing. ‘Thank you, Mr Briggs. I expect it’s the butcher, checking on the turkey and ham order.’

  She hurried off to take the phone call, well aware that the local butcher would be vastly disappointed at the size of his Christmas order from Monkswood. Normally, with Lady Markham at home and guests in the house, the order was huge. This year, with only the staff to be fed, it was considerably smaller.

  A few moments later she said into the receiver, ‘Mrs Thornton speaking.’

  The voice that responded was not that of the local butcher, and was one she recognized instantly.

  ‘Carrie?’ Gilbert was always thrown by Carrie being addressed as ‘Mrs’ at Monkswood. ‘It’s Gilbert.’ And then, aware she had never addressed him as anything other than Lord Fenton, added so as not
to bewilder her, ‘Lord Fenton.’

  Carrie sat down swiftly, before her legs gave way. ‘Good morning, Lord Fenton. There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

  Her mind raced as to what could possibly be wrong. If there had been a Fenton family calamity, then the perpetrator was bound to be Violet. Who on earth was she now consorting with in Germany? Goebbels and Göring were bad enough, but what if it was now Hitler? Where Violet was concerned, anything was possible.

  ‘Nothing is wrong, Carrie. I was telephoning to see if you had any free time today? I thought you might like to come over to Gorton and help decorate the tree – and perhaps, beforehand, we could have a walk with the dogs. There’s snow on the moors, but as yet only a light sprinkling and the sky is cloudless.’

  ‘That would be . . . lovely.’ Carrie’s heart was beating fast and light. Was Lord Fenton really suggesting they should take a morning walk together? They had done so often in Richmond, whenever they had met there accidentally. But this time would be different. This time it was something he had given thought to. ‘And I can easily take the time off. With Lady Markham away, there is nothing pressing for me to do here today.’

  He was about to suggest that he called for her in the Riley, but Carrie forestalled him.

  ‘I’ll come to Outhwaite on the ten o’clock bus, if that is all right, Lord Fenton?’

  ‘Yes.’ He knew immediately why she had made the suggestion. His calling for her in person would have had Monkswood’s entire household in a fever of speculation, and Carrie wasn’t to know that, if she fulfilled all his hopes, such speculation would no longer matter. ‘Yes,’ he said, patting his waistcoat pocket where a small satin-padded box lay next to his heart. ‘I’ll be at the bus stop to meet you, Carrie. And, Carrie, we’ve been friends for far too long for you to continue addressing me as Lord Fenton. I’d much prefer it if you began calling me by my first name.’