Sophie watched him, this man who could speak so easily of sending people to Dachau, some, at least, to torture like hers, and to their deaths. He looked back at her and smiled, seemingly knowing what she was thinking. ‘It is war,’ he reminded her softly. ‘Every one of them would have killed me, if they could.’
‘Dolphie . . .’
‘You wish me to get to the point? Very well.’ He lowered his voice even further. ‘There are many of us, experienced men of good family, who are loyal to our country, but who believe Hitler is leading us to destruction. The Russian front! Why did he not keep Russia as an ally until we had conquered England? Which we would have if we had only one front to fight. Madness, perhaps literally. He grows more unpredictable, more dangerous to our country every day.’
‘So you and your friends will . . . stop him.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, still smiling.
How could he seem so calm about a plan to assassinate the most powerful man in the world? A man he had once been devoted to?
Once again, he seemed to guess her thoughts. Perhaps he read her face. ‘I love my country,’ he said simply.
And it was simple for Dolphie, she realised. Everything he had ever done, or been, had been for love of Germany, except, perhaps, for protecting his niece.
‘And me?’
‘Removing one man is just the beginning. We will need to act fast so that our supporters can show there is a real chance of achieving a just peace agreement with England and its allies, or we will lose control. Churchill will listen to you. America will listen to Churchill. With Hitler gone we can negotiate properly — not the desperate delusions of the demented Hess, with Germany reigning over all of Europe, and England keeping only its independence and its colonies.’
This was what she had been sent to do. This was what she had failed to do. Yet this was exactly what was going to happen, though nothing she had done had caused it. Nor had James Lorrimer: English arrogance, she thought, underestimating Germany and the German military yet again. If we find Hitler’s rantings ridiculous, the men like Dolphie in Germany must find them both humiliating and dangerous.
Would Churchill listen to her? Of course. She had proved both intelligent and discreet during and after the abdication. That did not mean he would accept her advice, or even ask for it, but she could be exactly what Dolphie hoped, a liaison between two governments. She might even phone James from the Reichstag. She smiled. Or call Shillings first, so Lily might know before the rest of Britain.
But Lily would not be there.
She brought herself back to reality, trying to focus. ‘What terms will Germany accept?’
‘I do not know what compromises will be agreed to. Germany must keep Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Slavic nations, the Sudetenland and be returned our colonies. There can be no peace with Russia, but England and America are natural enemies of Stalin too, so I think that will not be a problem. Neither will want to see Russia control Poland. Do France and Belgium get their independence?’ Dolphie shrugged. ‘I do not know. Nor do I much care. France beggared and betrayed us after the ceasefire. We never would have disarmed if we had known about their additional terms. It is only right that they should pay for that. But they have paid. We will concede far more than poor Hess tried to offer.’
‘But what of Japan, and Australia?’
‘Japan will not be able to hold out for long without allies,’ he said, using almost the same words as Nigel. Had it only been a little over two months ago? ‘Britain and America will be able to focus their resources on regaining the territories Japan has taken. The war will be over, Sophie. We will all be free.’
It was strange to have hope again, not just for her own life and the possibility she might see her family again, but for an end to the war. She focused now on regaining strength and movement — a haggard invalid, hardly able to speak, would be little use in negotiations.
After a week, she was able to bear the cramped darkness of the trunk with less sedation, enough to dull the pain but not remove her from the world. Mostly she slept as the car travelled, for she carefully did not sleep at night, wakeful for the knock on the door that meant she must silently hide.
At each place they stopped Dolphie chose a refuge for her before she emerged from the case, under the bed usually, or behind a curtain, or back in the trunk: hiding places that he could help her to quickly, but that would not stand up to a search. But as Dolphie pointed out, if anyone suspected enough to initiate a search, they would both be dead anyway . . . eventually.
The rooms almost invariably had a single bed, in which she slept, while he slept on sofa pillows with a quilt on the floor, for few sofas were long enough for him. He claimed he had a soldier’s toughness. She suspected he had in fact spent few nights away from a comfortable lodging and his batman — his usual man, who also drove for him — had been given leave.
‘Your batman wasn’t surprised?’ she asked Dolphie one night. She was able to talk more now.
Dolphie shrugged. ‘He suspects. I have been careful not to involve him, and he knows it and does not enquire too much. He also knows he will be safer if he has not seen me for a few months. His family has a farm, so with the food shortages it is common to give leave for harvests or plantings. Less so in winter, of course, but not unknown. No one would expect an officer to share a plot with his batman, but they would expect any batman to share his suspicions with the authorities.’
‘He won’t?’
‘He hasn’t. As for the future . . .’ Dolphie shrugged again.
‘What’s your future, Dolphie? Your “after the war” future?’
He smiled at her. ‘So very Sophie Higgs, so sure there is a future.’
‘There has to be. I know mine exactly.’ Sitting in the thin gum-tree shade on the river bank, forever echoing with children’s laughter, although both Rose and Danny would be grown up by then, ducking and splashing in the water, with friends perhaps, Daniel stretched out beside her, his hat over his eyes, Lily sitting in a squatter’s chair, her gauze-shaded hat keeping off both sun and flies. ‘After the war’ there would be time for that. ‘There must be a good peace, and happiness ahead. What else do we work for?’
He laughed at that. ‘Our Führer would say “For the Glory of the Fatherland”. But I’ve never wanted glory for my country, just security and pride.’
‘But you? Would you stay in the army?’ She knew he had no need of money now, with the inheritance from his late wife.
‘I hope there can be a peace with no need for a large army,’ he said slowly. ‘Let the factions fight elections, not in the streets. I will live at the Lodge, walk in the woods, inspect the pigs at the farm each day and send old Franz insane with all my questions. And perhaps I will make schnapps. I have always wanted to make schnapps, not just small amounts now and then, but vats full.’
‘Schnapps?’ she echoed incredulously. ‘But it’s just alcohol, no flavour, just the burn as it goes down.’
‘Ah, you have not had good schnapps! Schnapps should be made from the best fruit, with no sugar added, just yeast, and then distilled and drunk fresh. I make mine from our cherries, and then another batch from the plums. Or I did before the war. The secret is to discard the first of the distillation, and the last. You want only the middle, with the heart of the fruit. Then you get the flame, but the fruit too. A good schnapps will leave fire in your veins for the whole night, but you will still taste it, too.’
She laughed softly. ‘I believe you.’
‘No, you do not. But you will.’ He stretched out his legs, as relaxed as she had ever seen him. ‘I will sit in my chair under the oak, watch the swans on the lake and beautiful women with long blonde hair will bring my schnapps up from the cellar.’
She touched her own bald head instinctively.
‘It will grow again,’ he told her softly. ‘And one day it will be “after the war” and our dreams will come true.’
They talked for longer each night as she regained her strengt
h, always in German. Dolphie chose rooms that were either isolated, or easily accessible, the ones where an occasional woman’s voice in an officer’s room would not be remarkable — though her appearance would be. Her hair had regrown to a velvet fuzz, but Dolphie would not let her see herself in a mirror. She suspected she looked like a spectre: hollow-eyed, white-faced, dappled with bruises.
It was strangely good to talk to him again. She had liked him from the moment they first met. He was interesting, with a capacity to love and be loyal to the niece he regarded as a sister, even if the sense of fun she had enjoyed before the last war seemed to have vanished in the tragedies since.
And he was kind. She had suspected that, long ago. Now she knew it. She needed care, if she was to be of use — and certainly needed to look as if she was a willing, well-treated negotiator, not a tortured captive — but there was gentleness in his touch, consideration in the way he gave her every chance of modesty, pulling up her sheets or towels. At times the daily blankness of the trunk seemed to suck away her entire world. The nightly talks with Dolphie restored her to herself again.
Each night he ordered a meal — as large as possible, three courses or four, to which his military rank entitled him. This food provided her a feast after they arrived, with some kept aside for a smaller meal, eaten while he slept, and a final one to last her through the day when she slept or dozed in the trunk, in pain, lurching and, at times, trying to fathom why they had stopped or where, and if it was voluntary or meant capture, though, if possible, Dolphie told her of the appointments or meetings scheduled for the next day.
They talked of the villages they passed through; of bomb damage in the towns; of crops that would be planted; how Japan should not have attacked America a little over a year earlier, but consolidated its territories before forcing war with such a major enemy.
But Dolphie did not give her details of the plan to kill Hitler. Having recently seen all too well the danger of knowledge, Sophie did not press him. She did, however, ask when his views had changed since his fervent support in 1936.
It was the eighth night, the first when the reduced dose of morphine gave her a semblance of alertness and the ebbing pain allowed her to focus on more than suppressing agony. She managed to feed herself tonight, though she had still let him bathe her, a strange, asexual yet almost devotional ritual — the scabs could not be soaked in a bath, even had she had the strength to get in and out of one.
Cabbage soup, mostly, with rye bread — even being an aristocratic colonel, it seemed, could not always guarantee white bread or chicken broth. The soup was usually followed by a stew that was mostly potato with shreds of smoked meat that might have been ham, or even Higgs’s Corned Beef liberated from a captured ship, followed almost invariably by baked apples, with a small square of cheese and hazelnuts. The bread could be kept for midnight; the apples, cheese and nuts for breakfast.
Dolphie shook his head each time she offered to share the food. He breakfasted well in the dining rooms, and lunched, he claimed, magnificently. He drank wine, if it looked acceptable, beer if it did not. Tonight it was beer, a huge stein with a lid, from which he sipped and watched her.
She spooned her soup carefully. Dolphie had washed her dress, but there was no way to obtain needle and thread to mend it. He had, however, bought two silk nightdresses in Paris, a purchase that could legitimately be made for his mistress, though he claimed he did not currently have one. ‘My last one was French, when I was on leave. My work doesn’t often take me to Paris, though often enough, luckily, that a visit there is not necessarily suspicious — and, of course, every German soldier wants to spend his leave in Paris.’
She looked up from her soup. ‘When did you begin to . . . focus on Hapsburg supporters?’
‘Soon after Sophie Higgs-Vaile-Greenman helped prevent our plan to keep a Nazi supporter on the British throne, and I was moved to other work,’ he said drily.
‘I can’t say I am sorry for that.’
‘King Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies might have prevented war for England and its Empire.’
‘But not for Europe. Would Hitler really have been satisfied to leave Britain and its colonies free?’
‘As an ally of Germany, yes, I think so, back then at least. Now? I have no idea. Perhaps Hitler will conquer the moon next. He has another madman, von Braun, who is designing rockets to take us there — don’t laugh, I am quite serious — though they will take explosives to Britain first. But me? I spy on aristocrats. What else is a count good for?’
‘A good many things. You served in the Great War. I assumed you were in military intelligence.’
‘That was before the war, and not military. Nor, in fact, very intelligent. Intelligence agencies rarely are, but then your enemy’s will not be, either.’
‘Why?’
‘Why did I say that, or why aren’t they intelligent?’
‘The latter.’
‘I think,’ Dolphie said slowly, ‘it is because to be an intelligence agent you must believe in the rightness of your cause. Question it too much — question the methods — and you are no longer effective. But the very act of not questioning places your mind behind a wall you cannot see over and do not dare to tunnel through.’
‘But you tunnelled?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You are part of a plan to kill Adolf Hitler,’ she said drily. ‘Yet for at least a decade you were one of his most enthusiastic supporters. Did he change, or did you?’
‘Both, of course. Who does not change? But mostly, Germany has changed under Hitler. It is a place where children denounce their parents, where parents carefully do not hear their neighbours’ screams. Did you know that Hannelore’s maid had a child who was blind? They killed her for being an Untermensch soon after the law changed in thirty-six.’
‘Was that why . . .?’
‘Why Hannelore became a spy for Britain? Yes, I think so. That and my participation in your kidnapping. She thought I loved you. She was right. But I loved my country more. I still do,’ he said quietly.
Still loved Germany more than her? Still loved her? Sophie said nothing, spooning soup.
‘What was your mission, Sophie? Simply to spy?’
For a moment she suddenly wondered if all of this — from the torture to the faking of her death, even the talk of assassinating Hitler — had been to extract this one piece of information. But if so, it no longer mattered. ‘Yes, simply that. And to find and encourage disaffected German officers to do exactly what you are planning now.’
‘And here we sit, and you are encouraging me nicely.’ He hesitated. ‘Hannelore did not tell the British I am involved in a plot? I have not told her, but she may have found out.’
‘Nobody mentioned anything like it during my briefings. I think they would have told me if she had, as we know each other.’
‘Good. There are too many fascists in British intelligence. If MI5 knew, I might be arrested tomorrow.’
‘Why didn’t you ask her yourself?’
He grinned. ‘Because if I did that, Miss British Agent, it would mean telling her that I was, indeed, part of a conspiracy, and from that she could deduce who else might be in the plot. I could not risk that back then, in case she had ways I hadn’t thought of to get information to England. Sophie, my friends and I aren’t the only ones who know our leadership must change. There may be a hundred similar plots, or there may simply be mutterings. There are also those like the Hapsburg loyalists, resistance movements in every country we have conquered. Our Führer is scarcely universally beloved.’
‘Are you going to tell her? Because if you don’t, she is going to wonder why you have delivered me to the Lodge.’
‘She might leap to an obvious conclusion,’ he offered lightly.
She replied with equal carelessness. ‘That you are madly in love with me?’
‘No. Not madly.’ His eyes were serious now.
She hesitated, suddenly unsure what he wanted. ‘Lily claime
d you went to a lot of trouble not to have me killed in 1936.’
‘And that was proof I loved you? You are Hannelore’s friend, one whom she has always loved. I would have done that for her.’
‘I think I believed in your love because I felt it, too,’ she said slowly. ‘No, please, don’t misunderstand. I love my husband deeply, fully. I am not trying to seduce you, even if I could, like this. But there has been a . . . connection between us.’
‘A might-have-been,’ he said quietly.
‘Just that. If there had been no war we would have kept on dancing, you and I. It was the war that made me feel so passionately that I belonged in Australia. If the war had never happened, I might well have married you, lived part of the year in Germany.’
‘And part of the year in Australia to help your so-valuable Higgs empire, with its so useful riches.’
‘I think you would have come to love Australia, too.’
‘Perhaps. Hannelore has always longed to go there, though I don’t know if the Australia she dreams of exists. Do you think we would have been happy?’
‘If there had been no war? Yes. Because Germany and England were so precariously balanced that you and I and Hannelore would have had to work together to ensure a continuing peace. It would have been a full and good partnership. Did you love your wife, Dolphie?’
‘I quite liked her, for a while. She had no political interests. Sadly, she accepted mine. She was half in love with the Führer, as many women were — I say the Führer, not Adolf Hitler, for few people know the man.’
‘You admired him too.’
‘I did, but not for years now. He has no sense of honour. People of our class —’
‘Your class. I was born bourgeois, remember.’
‘You were still brought up with a sense of duty, culpability.’
‘As are many factory workers and farmers I know, Dolphie.’
He smiled indulgently. ‘It may be as you say. In any case, Adolf Hitler has none of that. He is so sure he is right, no matter what others say, able to achieve a vision others could only see dimly. And for a long while he was right. So much so that he began to feel anything was justified to gain power and to keep it. He achieved so much he thought he could win anything. He . . .’ a pause ‘. . . has required high doses of certain drugs for some years, not drugs known to increase the user’s good sense. He hesitated when he should have invaded England, after Dunkirk. Oh, a thousand stupid decisions . . .’
Legends of the Lost Lilies Page 22
