A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  If he didn’t remember that the carbon paper had still been attached to Hitler’s memo, then she was in no danger whatsoever. However, if he did remember . . .

  As the taxicab neared Gartenstrasse she sat on the edge of her seat, ready to shout instructions to the driver if, when they rounded the corner, there was even one sinister black Mercedes in sight.

  There wasn’t.

  ‘Warte auf mich,’ she said to the driver.

  Feeling in his pocket for his cigarettes and a lighter, he nodded, quite happy to wait for as long as she wanted him to.

  She raced down the path, ran up the steps to the front door, fumbled with her key in the lock and sprinted into the house

  ‘Irmgard! Irmgard!’ she shouted, taking the stairs to the first floor two at a time.

  Once in her bedroom, she yanked open her bedside drawer and snatched up the passport, then wrenched open her wardrobe doors and grabbed a small travel-bag from a top shelf.

  ‘Was ist los?’ Irmgard demanded, rushing into the room, her eyes wide with fright.

  As she slammed open drawers, throwing personal possessions into the travel-bag, Violet didn’t tell her what was the matter. There wasn’t time. What she did tell Irmgard was that she was to leave the house immediately and never come back to it.

  She paused at that point, taking money out of the wallet she kept in her underwear drawer and stuffing it into Irmgard’s hands.

  ‘The Gestapo are probably coming for me,’ she said in German. ‘If you have relatives in the country, visit them, Irmgard. And take the Kandinsky with you.’

  With a terrified Irmgard hard on her heels, she ran back downstairs and into the kitchen. Seizing a knife from the knife rack, she ran into the drawing room, yanked the Kandinsky from the wall and prised it out of its frame. Then she rolled the canvas into a tube and stuffed it beneath Irmgard’s arm.

  ‘It’s yours, Irmgard,’ she said. ‘You’ll be able to sell it for a lot of money, though not in Germany. Go to Switzerland to sell it. Or France. And thank you for being such an angel to me for so long. Now leave, Irmgard. Leave and don’t look back.’

  When Irmgard was safely out of the house, Violet gave a last, long look around. Throughout all her years of living in Berlin, the house had been important to her. It had been a refuge from the part she’d had to play whenever she left it. Now she was leaving it for the last time.

  Vastly relieved that Irmgard, at least, wasn’t going to be found at the house and questioned, she went back upstairs to retrieve her handbag and pick up her hastily packed travel-bag. As she stepped into her bedroom there came the distant sound of car tyres squealing as they rounded the corner into Gartenstrasse.

  She sucked in her breath and closed her eyes, praying that the cars would continue on down the road: that they wouldn’t come to a halt outside number twenty-three.

  Her prayers went unheard.

  One after another the cars screeched to a halt. Doors slammed open and then slammed shut.

  Leather-gloved fists hammered on the door, and then the door was broken in and jackbooted feet pounded up the stairs.

  Seconds later a squad of men burst into the room.

  Violet didn’t flinch.

  ‘I’m a British citizen,’ she said icily as they laid hands on her, aware that even though the passport in her handbag would have served her well at border checkpoints, it was pointless trying to pass if off as genuine in the situation in which she now found herself.

  Goebbels knew she wasn’t American, and as she was being arrested for passing information to the Americans, the American Embassy would be in no position to help her. The only embassy that could possibly be of help was the British Embassy.

  The men who had seized hold of her and who were dragging her out of the room were wearing the uniform of the criminal investigative police. An officer, waiting for her at her bedroom door, said tight-lipped in English, ‘You’re a German resident. You’ve been a German resident for years.’

  ‘The British Ambassador will make a formal protest!’ she shouted as she was dragged past him, and then, as she was manhandled down the stairs and knowing that she should at least be pretending outraged innocence, ‘And why am I being arrested? What am I being charged with? Where is the proper warrant?’

  Even as she shouted the words, she knew how pointless they were.

  The police in Nazi Germany did not deal in proper warrants. Whatever the future held for her, it wasn’t an appearance in a court of law.

  What the future held for her was interrogation at the most-feared address in Berlin. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. Gestapo headquarters.

  She was bundled into the back of one of the cars, her terror so great that her legs were weak. No one interrogated at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse ever emerged in the same physical condition in which they had entered.

  That was, if they emerged at all.

  And now she was being taken there and in ten minutes, perhaps less, she would be inside the building and beyond all help.

  With her hands held tightly together on her knees, she looked out of the window and saw that they weren’t heading for central Berlin; instead they were taking the road that skirted the city on the west and then headed north.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she demanded of the men she was sandwiched between, and then, as she received no answer, ‘Wohin gehen wir?

  The officer on her left grinned. ‘Sachsenhausen.’

  Violet’s pupils dilated in bewilderment. Sachsenhausen concentration camp wasn’t somewhere people were taken for questioning. It was somewhere they were imprisoned; it was also somewhere they were executed.

  She gripped her hands even tighter together.

  Was that why she was being taken to Sachsenhausen? She’d known when she had taken the carbon paper, and asked her American contact how it should be handed over, what the penalty would be, if she didn’t manage to flee the country before its loss was discovered.

  She had known she would be executed. And she had known how she would be executed. There were only two methods of execution for traitors in Nazi Germany: hanging and beheading. And for women, beheading was the favoured option.

  At least, though, she was going to be spared the torture rooms of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8’s basement – and she had always known, if it came to having to pay the ultimate price, how she would handle that final, dreadful walk to the scaffold. She would pretend she was returning home to Gorton.

  Drawing on all her skills as an actress, she would close her senses to the reality around her and imagine she was walking down the lane from Outhwaite towards the bridge over the river. She would cross the bridge and see Gorton Hall in front of her and know that all the people she loved most in the world were there, waiting to welcome her. Papa and Carrie. Thea, Olivia and Roz. Jim and Charlie. Hermione and Miss Calvert.

  And that way, encircled by all the love she knew they had for her, there would be no place for terror. About to be reunited with her family and friends again, she would die without a shiver.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  FEBRUARY 1939

  Tom Kirby’s office in the Office of Public Affairs was a much bigger room than the room in which Max had met him in the summer of 1934. The view from the window was the same, though. A busy street: more public buildings, and the reassurance that the White House wasn’t far distant.

  Max had known the instant he’d received Kirby’s message to meet him that, whatever news Kirby had for him, it wouldn’t be good.

  It wasn’t. It was the worst possible news. News he’d prayed he would never have to hear.

  ‘She was arrested six weeks ago?’ he said disbelievingly. ‘Dear God in heaven, Tom! How could it have taken her US contact in Berlin six fucking weeks before he knew of it?’

  He’d been sitting, facing Tom across the seeming acres of Tom’s desk. Now Max erupted to his feet, slamming his fists down hard on the desk, leaning over it towards Tom, the veins in his neck standing out like cords. ‘Where the crucify
ing fuck did he think she was? On holiday in the fucking Alps?

  Aware that Max was on the verge of grabbing hold of him and trying to strangle him, Tom Kirby put the castors on his chair into quick movement, sending his chair skidding backwards so that he was out of Max’s reach.

  ‘Take it easy, Max,’ he said, raising a hand to warn him off. ‘Violet often went for weeks without making contact. After she handed over the carbon of the Hitler memo, nothing happened to indicate that its loss had been realized. Her go-between – the courier who worked out of the Romanische cafe – wasn’t arrested and there are no signs that he’s come under any kind of suspicion. Our people in Berlin still consider Violet’s obtaining such hard proof of Hitler’s future intentions in Europe to be an absolutely perfect piece of information-gathering.’

  ‘How could it have been?’ Max thundered, feeling as if he was about to explode. ‘If she was arrested six weeks ago, she was arrested the same – or practically the same – day that she handed over the carbon of the memo!’

  ‘I know.’ Tom edged his chair a fraction further backwards. ‘The embassy now knows that. The courier in question is no longer in Berlin, but is now working out of a restaurant in Paris.’

  Max sank back down onto his chair. ‘And Violet?’ he asked, once more in control of himself, knowing that no amount of rage could improve such a nightmarish situation. ‘Where is Violet?’

  ‘We don’t know. If it wasn’t for her maid reporting Violet’s arrest to the British Embassy, we wouldn’t even know that she was arrested immediately after leaving the Romanische. Presumably she was taken to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.’

  Max breathed in hard.

  Tom Kirby rose to his feet. Rounding his desk, he put a hand on Max’s shoulder. ‘It’s been six weeks, Max,’ he said again. ‘Her arrest had to be because Goebbels realized what she done. When you consider the nature of the memo, the assumption has to be that, after her arrest, she would not have lived long.’

  Max’s eyes held his, agony in their depths. ‘And that is what I have to now tell her family – her family that is now my family?’

  ‘Yes, Max. I’m afraid it is. And what you must also tell them is that her action in being able to put such concrete evidence of Hitler’s intentions into the hands of her country’s government has ensured a major change in Britain’s policy towards Nazi Germany. Major changes where armaments production and land, sea and air defences are concerned are already in hand. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s days of appeasement are over.’

  Feeling a decade older than he had when he had woken that morning, Max rose heavily to his feet. It was only a little over two months since he and Roz had returned to Washington after spending Christmas at Gorton. Now they would be coming back to Yorkshire again – and with hideous news.

  News that he had first to break to Roz.

  As he stepped out of the building and onto the sidewalk he did so with a heart as heavy as lead, his sense of responsibility for having recruited Violet crippling.

  Six days later, with an ashen-faced Roz at his side, he was walking out of Waterloo station.

  ‘I’m going to ask the cabbie to drop you off at Claridge’s while I continue on to Mount Street,’ he said as they headed for the taxi rank. ‘I need to be on my own when I break the news to Gilbert, Roz. You understand, don’t you?’

  She nodded, her gloved hand hugging his arm a little tighter.

  Over the five days they had spent crossing the Atlantic she had tried to convince him that what had happened to Violet would have happened even if he hadn’t recruited her as an informer for American intelligence.

  ‘If you had refused to approach her, Tom Kirby would have found someone else to approach her,’ she had said, ‘and the outcome would have been just the same.’

  ‘If someone else had approached her, she wouldn’t have done it,’ he’d said bluntly. ‘She did it because it was I who asked; because, even though you and I weren’t a couple at the time, she regarded me as family.’

  At Claridge’s Roz got out of the cab, her heart filled with grief. It was hurting with her own grief; it was hurting on behalf of the grief that Gilbert, Thea, Olivia and Carrie would so soon be feeling; and it was hurting at the thought of the guilt she knew Max would carry with him until his dying day.

  She went into the lounge and ordered coffee. The first thing Max had done when they had landed at Southampton had been to telephone Mount Street and tell Gilbert he was back in London and on his way to speak to him; which meant, as Mount Street was only just around the corner from Claridge’s, that Max would already be there.

  When the coffee came she drank it black.

  And then she asked for a brandy.

  Though Max had said nothing more on the phone than that he was back in the country and wished to speak to him, Gilbert had known from the tone of Max’s voice that his reason for wanting to do so was not a good one.

  He opened the door himself to Max, took one look at Max’s harrowed face and said, ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it? Bad news about Violet?’

  Once in the drawing room, Gilbert didn’t sit down to hear what Max had to tell him; he simply closed the door behind them and said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Violet finally did what she’d been determined to do, Gilbert. Six weeks ago she supplied irrefutable proof of Hitler’s future military intentions, which are not only occupying what remains of Czechoslovakia, but invading Poland and, after Poland, looking further east, towards Russia.’

  ‘How, in God’s name, did she get proof of such a thing?’ Gilbert’s voice was hoarse, the question an attempt to stave off the terrible denouement that he knew Max was leading up to.

  ‘She removed carbon paper from a memo handwritten by Hitler that was in Josef Goebbels’s briefcase. Her instructions for delivering it were to pass it to a courier working out of the Romanische cafe, which she did successfully.’

  ‘And then?’ The moment Gilbert had been dreading could be put off no longer. There was perspiration on his forehead and crippling coils of dread in his belly.

  ‘Within an hour of doing so she was arrested at her home – and she hasn’t been seen, or heard of, since.’

  Gilbert’s always pale skin drained to a bleached white.

  Knowing there was no way of sparing him Tom Kirby’s opinion of what had then happened, Max took a deep breath and said, ‘It’s Kirby’s opinion – and the opinion of the US Embassy in Berlin – that, considering the nature of the memo and who had sent it, Violet would not have lived long after her arrest.’

  ‘But if there’s been no definite confirmation, those are only opinions, Max!’ There was desperation in Gilbert’s voice. ‘Without confirmation, how can anyone know for a certainty that Violet is dead? She could well be still alive!’

  Max said as levelly as he could manage, ‘The briefcase Violet took the carbon from had been left by Goebbels in Violet’s dressing room at Babelsberg. No one but Violet could have taken it. The contents of the memo were as top secret as it is possible to imagine, and the sender was Hitler. Taking all those things into account, it’s impossible to think Violet is still alive. I’m sorry, Gilbert. More sorry than I am capable of saying.’

  Gilbert sank down onto a sofa and buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. When at last he could speak, he said thickly, ‘Olivia and Dieter are back in Ireland. I’ll have to break the news by phone. Thea and Carrie are at Gorton. I can’t tell them on the phone. I must be with them when I tell them. You’ll come with me?’

  ‘Of course.’ Max blew his nose heavily in an effort to regain his self-control. ‘Roz is at Claridge’s. I wanted to be on my own when I spoke to you.’

  Gilbert nodded, made a despairing motion with his hands and then rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘We’ll leave for Yorkshire now – immediately. We’ll pick up Roz on the way’ He stopped, unable to go on, and then, after a colossal inner struggle, said, ‘No mention in front of Thea and Carrie as to the basements in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and
of how death-sentences are carried out in Hitler’s Reich. They won’t know, and they don’t need to know.’

  Then, every line of his face etched with suffering, his broad shoulders bowed, he stumbled from the room as if he were a man of seventy, not a man in his fifties.

  All three of them spent the four-hour car journey from London to Gorton in almost total silence. As Gilbert’s chauffeured Bentley ate up the miles, the only thing Roz said was, ‘When I was at Claridge’s I telephoned Kyle. I thought you would prefer that I did so, Uncle Gilbert, rather than having to break the news to him yourself.’

  ‘Thank you, Roz.’ There was gratitude in his voice. Unlike Roz, Kyle wasn’t a blood relation, but being Roz’s stepbrother made him extended family and he was someone Gilbert would have had to tell. That Roz had taken on the burden of doing so had been sensitive of her.

  As they left the Ai and headed into the Dales, the narrow roadsides were peppered with primroses. In Outhwaite, thanks to a very mild spring, pale-lemon winter jasmine tumbled up and over the side of Hester Calvert’s front door. There was a bush of golden-yellow forsythia at the war memorial corner and daffodils in every carefully tended front garden.

  The approach to Gorton was thick with daffodils. Because they were wild, they were smaller and paler than the ones in Outhwaite’s gardens, but they were beautiful, nonetheless.

  Their beauty didn’t comfort Roz. It only signalled that soon – within ten minutes – Gilbert would be breaking the news of Violet’s arrest and certain fate to Thea, Carrie and Judith.

  He did so as succinctly and as gently as he could, but it was beyond all possibility for him to break the news in a way that could be bearable.

  ‘She can’t be dead!’ Thea had been sitting on the arm of a sofa and jumped to her feet, her eyes blazing, her face chalk-white. ‘She can’t be dead, Papa! It’s impossible! No one is more alive than Violet!’