My name is Beatrice Adelaide Palmer. I was born in 1921 in Ballycarra, County Mayo, the only child of Elizabeth Givens and Morris Palmer of Palmerstown. My family had come down in the world, and we were no longer gentry, but we weren’t tenant farmers, either (not educated at university, but not peasants). I attended a small school kept by Mr. Hugh Knox, a Church of Ireland clergyman with a passion for birds who gave lessons in Latin grammar and mathematics. As there was no lending library in Ballycarra, Mr. Knox encouraged his pupils (there were only three of us) to read from his own collection of books—Robinson Crusoe, Cranford, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray, Jane Eyre, the sermons of Jonathan Swift, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, The Journal of the Beagle, The Complete Father Brown, The Crusade and Death of Richard I, Siegfried Sassoon, The Cloister and the Hearth, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, and Biggles and the Black Peril (a book that instilled in me a terror of Russians).
Mr. Knox also had an extensive collection of bird journals and scientific papers, and although much to Mr. Knox’s disappointment, I didn’t read the ornithology books, I read the novels, some more than once, and the fairy tales many times (particularly the story of Little Red Riding Hood, who Dickens claimed was his first love: “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss”). When Mr. Knox went to Dublin each fall, he always returned with a book that he knew would give me pleasure, such as the new Daphne du Maurier or Agatha Christie, and to my delight he allowed me to keep those books. Mr. Knox liked to say that novels help to show us that the world is a place of strangeness, ruled by chance, which makes it difficult to maintain our certainties. I had no certainties other than my desire to leave Ballycarra.
Mr. Knox encouraged his students to accompany him on his excursions to study the birds of the Moy Estuary, but I was the only one who walked with him, just as I was the only one who read his books. That is when he taught me to fish, giving me the name of Maeve of Connacht, the pirate queen.
He was the sole companion of my girlhood. Were it not for Mr. Knox, my loneliness would have been more than I could bear. When he was not distracted by fieldwork, I asked him questions. Mr. Knox, unlike anyone in our village, had been in the world. He had, by his own admission, seen things. He’d been to university in England and had served in the Great War. He had even traveled in Canada before taking orders. I had been once to Glasgow as a small child with my mother and father. My mother was ashamed of her relatives and never spoke of the trip, other than to remind my father that he’d been sick crossing the Irish Sea.
I was a quiet girl, by all accounts, conversation considered an unnecessary luxury by my parents. I heard no family tales or instructive anecdotes, my head filled instead with the stories of willful heroines, vivacious of temperament unlike myself, with whom I shared a longing for the world and its imagined pleasures—irresistible girls like Eustachia Vye, Maggie Tulliver, Becky Sharpe, and even the wicked Gwendolen Harleth.
It is no wonder that my curiosity threatened my peace of mind. I couldn’t explain my thoughts, or begin to understand them. There was nothing in my family that would have anticipated such a seeking temperament as I possessed, a mystery which often distressed me. Without knowing how to remedy it, I understood that I was already estranged from my parents, if only in my desires, and that my efforts to earn my mother’s regard were fruitless. She behaved more like a stepmother to me than a mother, and now and then I questioned if I was indeed her child.
She rarely spoke about herself and I knew very little about her. She’d worked as a waitress in the teashop in Sligo where my father, a student at a nearby technical school, took his supper every Saturday night. When my grandfather Palmer died shortly after their marriage, my father abandoned his studies to take over the family shop. My mother said that she’d never have married him had she known she’d be lost for the rest of her miserable life in the filthy bogs of west Ireland. She claimed to envy her sisters—one had run off with a commercial traveler, and the other had drowned in childhood. She was born a fool, she said, and she would die a fool. I did not think her foolish—she had too little charm for that—but her disappointments had rendered her bitter and unkind. My father and I were in constant dread of her. I lived in a chaos of desire and disappointment.
When I turned fifteen, my mother, who had long felt that Mr. Knox was filling my head with ideas that would do me little good in the world of haberdashery, took me from school to work in the shop. I was heartbroken, but no amount of pleading or persuasion could make her change her mind. Mr. Knox sent word through one of my fellow pupils, a smirking boy named Peter whose father was bailiff at the castle, that he hoped I would continue to read his books and to accompany him on his walks. My mother told Peter to inform our teacher that I was far too busy to idle in the woods.
A few days later, I announced that Mr. Knox wished to engage me to clean the schoolroom. My mother, who welcomed the chance for me to earn a little money, allowed me to go to the rectory every Saturday when the shop was closed. When I told Mr. Knox my lie, knowing that my mother would demand to see the money, he said that I’d more than earned it, having read aloud to him for years. He was happy to give me a shilling every week.
Mr. Knox particularly liked me to read from The Peterborough Bestiary, which I’d come to know by heart: Cranes divide the night into sentry-duty and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger they make a loud cry. The bestiary also advised that parrots be beaten with an iron rod should they refuse to talk, a passage that always made him laugh. He had a pet gull named Wedgwood that he’d raised (from the shell, he liked to say), and the bird often accompanied us on our field trips. Mr. Knox also taught me to keep his lists in order, and through observing the comfort he took in them, I began to keep lists of my own. In my first list, made when I was twelve, I wrote: A fine pair of shoes, a diary with a key, a parrot, a curling iron.
Although we had few customers, my mother did not let me read in the shop, lest it appear that I gave myself airs. To ease the tedium, I studied my father’s ledgers as if they held the answers to all that I longed to know. They were narrow books with maroon board covers, and in them were kept the names of customers and their transactions. I conceived elaborate tales to match each entry. The notation Mrs. Dennis Gurney, doz. handkerchiefs, no monogram, one bolt pink tulle, three packets needles made me wonder what Mrs. Gurney possibly meant to do with so much tulle (as it was pink, it could not be for a bridal veil) and, less interesting, why she had chosen plain handkerchiefs, as the monogramming was done to order by my mother and free of charge. That the Catholic priest, Father Timothy, fancied costly cashmere hose that had to be ordered from Dublin was, thanks to my youth, less compelling, although mildly titillating.
There were only two boys in Ballycarra who were not Catholic (my former schoolmates), and my mother took care to remind me that if I did not soon make a match with one of them, I would end my days a spinster. I found the boys to be ignorant and dull, and I avoided them whenever I saw them in the village. I was intrigued by the handsome Catholic boys, despite (or thanks to) my father’s horror of Roman Catholics. He’d been told by a great-aunt that the audience at a Punch and Judy show in Killala had cheered at the news that the French had landed nearby, and the shock of it had done it for him, even though the landing had been one hundred years before his birth. I was curious about the Catholic girls, too, but they kept themselves apart, a snub that infuriated my mother, who, despite her complaints, had done well for herself.
It didn’t take long to exhaust the mysteries of the shop’s ledgers, and I began to teach myself to crochet, copying the patterns I found in the ladies’ magazines my father kept on behalf of his customers, studying them until the pages grew soft with use.
I stole lengths of thread from the shop, rolling them into a ball until I’d accumulated enough to make my first cuff (I unraveled it eight times before it was to my liking, and even then I didn’t think it good enough). Copying Mr. Knox’s notes had given me patience and an appreciation of tidy handiwork, and the hours I spent sewing seemed to pass in a dream. Silence had become natural to me, and a tendency to secrecy, if not dissimulation.
I sewed at night, using the ends of candles I found in the kitchen, which burned for an hour or two. My mother, naturally suspicious, took to creeping up the attic stairs to make sure that I was not committing any sins of impurity. At the sound of her footstep, despite her attempt at stealth, I hid my work under a blanket, my furtiveness undoubtedly encouraging her fantasies of vice. My mother was right to worry, as the patterns from Madeira and Brussels and Murano served to further excite my restlessness. I began to dream of the day when I would escape from Ballycarra.
I determined to teach myself to make lace after I saw a Youghal tablecloth drying on a hedge, said to have been made by the girls who sewed in the byre across the bridge, where the moist warmth of the cows kept their thread supple and their hands from stiffening in the cold. I wished to see more of their work, but my mother would not allow me to call on them. It confused me that girls considered so uncivilized could have made something as beautiful as the lace tablecloth with its design of ferns and heather. On warm evenings, I used to watch from the dark shop as the girls made their way to the river, and sometimes I wished that I were Roman Catholic, if only for the summer.
One morning, I brought down one of my finished pieces—a lace collar I’d studied in a magazine—and left it on the counter for my father to find when he opened the shop. Neither my mother nor my father mentioned it, but my father began to leave spools of thread at the foot of the stairs for me. By the end of the year, I had a dozen Valenciennes cuffs and collars, which I again left for my father to find. To my surprise, he offered to display my work in the window of the shop. Although the lace did not sell, even marked very low, it was admired, and I began to gain a certain small renown in the neighborhood. My father, who rarely praised me, reminded me that his father, my grandfather Palmer, had been notorious for the beauty of his salmon flies and suggested that I had, perhaps, inherited something after all.
A few days after my seventeenth birthday, a woman in a rabbit coat stepped into the shop during a sudden rainstorm and noticed me sewing in a corner. My father, who recognized Lady Vaughan, pulled out the tray that held my finished pieces (my mother was not there) and, while he shook out her umbrella, encouraged her to look at them. A week later, a package was delivered to the shop marked with my name, causing my mother to fear that an embarrassing mistake had been made. Inside the parcel were two books of lace patterns, a gift from Lady Vaughan to me. Not long after, Lady Vaughan’s maid came into the shop to order half a dozen pieces of bed lace for her ladyship, so infuriating my mother that she did not speak to me for the rest of the week, and only then to tell me that Mr. Knox had sent me a box of books, which she had returned.
My bed lace so pleased Lady Vaughan that she asked if I would make her a black lace shawl in time for a hunt ball in September. With my father’s permission, I no longer waited on customers but sewed in the back room where the light was best, and by summer’s end, my fingers were so red and swollen that I had to soak them each night in hot water and salt. I was afraid that my work would not be fine enough and that Lady Vaughan would be disappointed, but despite my fear, I also felt a strange elation, so new to me that I often laughed out loud, causing my mother to leave the room. When Lady Vaughan’s maid came to collect the finished shawl, I made her an awkward curtsy and rushed into the yard, where I sat for an hour to compose myself. That evening, Lady Vaughan sent a note thanking me for my “lovely” work, enclosing two one-pound notes with an order for two collars and six cuffs.
The morning after the ball, it was known throughout the village that a guest at the castle, a foreign lady in Ireland for the hunting, had noticed my shawl and had asked Lady Vaughan where she had come by such exquisite lace. The lady, who was said to be a cousin of the Tsar, wore a long white taffeta skirt and black sweater to the ball, with a necklace of turquoise and diamonds, a costume so outlandish that by breakfast it had been described to my mother with screams of laughter by our neighbor, Mrs. Greeley, a maid at the castle (kind Lady Vaughan had worn claret velvet and her garnets). My mother announced that the lady was no more a Russian princess than she was, but I listened with fascination. There had never been a moment when I did not long for the world beyond Ballycarra, and to be offered a glimpse of it by a princess who wore a wooly to a ball was more than I’d imagined possible.
The foreigner—there was no mistaking it was she—came to the shop the following day. I was embarrassed when my mother, who was knitting in a chair, did not rise to greet her, and I rushed to bring a chair from the kitchen. When I returned, my mother ordered me from the shop.
To my confusion, the lady followed me into the street, catching up with me to ask if I’d care to walk by the river—the salmon were running, and she liked to watch the men casting, drops of water flying from their lines, she said, like jewels. Her name was Countess Hartenfels (although she spoke English with a foreign accent and she certainly looked like she could be a relation of the Tsar, she was not, to my relief, Russian). She said that she’d come to the shop in search of “that magician Miss Palmer,” and she confessed her surprise at discovering I was a girl, having expected an elderly gentlewoman in mittens.
Linking her arm in mine (something that no grown woman had ever done, including my mother), she said that she’d like to see more of my lace. She admitted that she herself did not wear lace, except as lingerie. I’d never heard the word spoken, although I’d read it in magazines, pronouncing it with a hard g, and I didn’t understand her at first. She admired lace on others, however, particularly on her dear friend Dorothea Metzenburg, who lived in Berlin and owned a rare and extremely valuable collection of lace. The countess was on her way to Germany to visit the Metzenburgs. “You’d find them sympathetic,” she said confidingly. “Felix has the best manners in Europe.” The intimacy of her tone, as well as her physical nearness, made me tremble with happiness. She spoke as if I understood everything that she said and, even more flattering, all that she did not say. When we returned to the village, having walked as far as the Ridge Pool, I stole into the house to gather my lace to show her, proudly spreading my work along the damp stone rampart of the bridge.
Countess Hartenfels met me again the next afternoon. People stared at us as we passed, and in my excitement, I told her the names of the birds that I spotted along the river (a goosander and the rare killdeer), aware that the creature in black riding habit and veiled top hat, strolling with her arm linked in mine, was, at least in Ballycarra, rarer than any killdeer. The countess, who seemed a bit distracted, a quality that I took for sophistication, said that she, too, was quite fond of birds, even if she knew nothing about them. Her way of speaking, in which she exaggerated unexpected words, was confusing to me. I wasn’t accustomed to emphasis, and I gave significance to certain of her words and phrases that she perhaps didn’t intend. When she claimed never to have seen lace such as mine, I believed her.
Shortly before the countess was to leave Ballycarra, she suggested that I accompany her to Berlin. I would live in the household of her friends, the Metzenburgs, where I would make lace. If I found myself unhappy, a condition she considered unlikely, I could, of course, return to Ireland. Convinced that she was mocking me, I paid her no mind, but she persisted, describing the amiability of her friends, the Metzenburgs, to whom she was devoted, and the excitement of the great city, until I could think of nothing else, causing my mother to ask if I were ill. I said nothing to her of the countess’s invitation but called on Mr. Knox to ask his advice.
As we walked in the water meadow where he’d first taught me to fish, he saw a short-toed lark and stopped to note it in his journal. I told him, somewhat boastfully, of my unlikely acquaintance with the countess and of the extraordinary proposal she had made me. To my disappointment, he said nothing, only asked if I agreed that there had been fewer corncrakes that year. When I again mentioned the countess, he hushed me, not wishing to startle a redwing that we were following to its nest in an elm. It was my job to carry the long pole that we used to steal nests, and in my distraction, I caught the net in some brambles, causing him to glance at me with uncustomary impatience.
On the way home, he was unusually silent. I knew that he would eventually tell me his mind—I only had to be patient. He motioned to me to wait as he lit his pipe, then put away his matchbox, and we continued across the field. He wished to check the duck decoys that he kept in the mere, as they attracted large colonies of gadwall and grebe each fall (a deception that always left me melancholy). As we walked, he said that men who had reason to know were fearful that a war with Germany was coming, and he hoped that I was giving the countess’s invitation some thought. Despite Mr. Knox’s attempts to educate me, all of my history came from novels—I knew nothing of a coming war. Even if such a war were imminent, I did not see how it could affect me. I was the citizen of a free state.
He tapped his pipe on the heel of his boot and ground the embers into the dirt. “Who will read to me?” he asked.
I said that it was thanks to him, to his teaching and to the books that he had encouraged, even pressed me to read, that I had such a yearning for the world and that surely he, of all people, would not deny me the chance to indulge it. I said that it was unlikely that I would ever have such an opportunity again. He agreed somewhat wryly, and I realized from his tone that he would forgive me for leaving him. When we reached the rectory, he gave me his blessing and kissed me on the head. I promised that I would write to him.
The following morning, I announced to my parents that I was leaving Ballycarra to sew lace for a family in Berlin. My mother promptly declared that I was suffering one of my attacks of grandeur and refused to believe me, even after I asked my bewildered father to loan me a cardboard suitcase from the store’s stock. I told them that the countess, who was arranging for my passport (Lord Vaughan’s brother was in Dublin Castle), would meet me at the train station in two days’ time.
The night before I left, as I packed and packed again my few belongings (my books of lace), my father came up the stairs to the attic. “I don’t know where you come by it,” he said, sitting at the end of my bed. “Your mother says it was the books that did it.” He could not bring himself to look at me. He’d made me a present of a new pair of brogues, and I was having trouble fitting them into the small case.
I stopped my fussing. “The books saved me,” I said. “And the lace.”
I sat next to him on the bed and took his hand. I was not accustomed to touching him, and I was embarrassed—I could smell turf smoke on his jacket, and there was a trace of ash on his shirt. “I haven’t much to give you,” he said, tucking a pound into my pocket. “Nothing to get you out of trouble when it comes. Your mother will never forgive you.”
“Think of it as an apprenticeship, Father. I’m going out to work.”
“I have a sinking feeling that woman’s a Papist,” he said with a sigh. He rose stiffly and made his way cautiously down the narrow stairs, his head level with the floor when he stopped to say good night.
My mother would not walk with us to the station in the morning, but Mr. Knox was waiting on the platform with a book for me, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, which he’d inscribed To Maeve, in the hope that she will learn to fly, September 1938. My father, suddenly tearful, kissed me on the cheek (he nodded shakily to the countess, and she gave him a chilly smile), handing me a letter as I boarded the train.
When I showed the countess Mr. Knox’s present, she asked why my old schoolmaster had inscribed it to someone named Maeve. “I am Maeve,” I said. “That’s my real name.” The countess looked puzzled, although not sufficiently interested to question me further. She opened a magazine and, somewhat to my relief, soon fell asleep.
I watched from the window as the familiar river slipped past, low and dark behind the rowan trees. My initial excitement had begun to fade, particularly after saying good-bye to Mr. Knox, and I had a stomachache. I was traveling to a strange country whose language I did not speak, with a strange woman whom I had known for eight days, to work for people whom I did not know at all. I wondered what in the world I’d been thinking (I knew exactly what I’d been thinking).
When I could no longer see the river, I read the letter that my father had slipped into my hand. My mother wrote that as I had left the bosom of your loving family for foreign shores, she hoped that my new friends would be willing to provide the home that I had so eagerly forsaken, as she no longer felt obliged to do so. I folded the letter and looked for a place to put it—I had no handbag, and I tucked it into Mr. Knox’s book. My mother’s coldness, although familiar to me, caused me pain, and I was grateful that the countess was not awake to see me cry.
Over the five days of our journey to Berlin, my misgivings began to disappear. Countess Hartenfels (who more and more reminded me of Trollope’s Madame Goesler, tall, dark, and thin, and adept with her eyes in a way unknown to any Englishwoman) explained that her maid was in Munich awaiting her arrival, and asked if I would be able to assist her with her hair and clothes, a request that thrilled me. When I noticed her staring at me (it was then that I realized she could not be embarrassed), she said that while my hair was a bit thin, it was not a bad shade of brown. And, gracias a Dios, I was not a redhead.
I had my own berth on the train from Calais, meeting Countess Hartenfels for meals in the dining car or in her private compartment, where I helped her to dress (pinning, fastening, combing, admiring). Her elegance left me feeling both threadbare and inspired, and by the time that we reached Belgium, I’d vowed to model my personal habits on those of the countess, even if my scant means (I had nothing) would be something of a constraint. At home, I wore my best dress to church and to the rare wedding or funeral. I wore tweed skirts and cardigans in the shop, with wool stockings and brogues. In summer, a cotton dress with lisle stockings and brogues. I had two flannel nightdresses, a shawl, a brown tweed coat, knit gloves, and a gray felt cloche that I wore to church. Rubber boots, of course. I did not own a party frock or a pair of high-heeled shoes. The countess dressed as if she were going to a party every day, wearing a suit (tailleur, she said, not “suit”), silk stockings, hat, and gloves. In the evening, she wore a chiffon tea gown, with satin shoes in shades of pale blue, gray, or rose. She carried a little gold bag in which she kept a compact, a lipstick, a lighter, and a cigarette case. She wore jewelry in the day (diamonds only after dark) and lipstick all of the time, even when she went to bed.
One night when she went to the dining car, leaving me to put away her clothes, I opened her red leather traveling case to dot some perfume—it was called Cuir de Russie and smelled like oranges and birch bark—behind my ears and on my wrists, and to brush some powder on my cheeks. I had just settled a black grosgrain hat on my head, tilting it so that the feather swept the side of my face as I had seen her do, when the door of the compartment opened. Startled, I knocked the box of powder to the floor.
She stood in the doorway, not particularly surprised at the sight of me in her hat (if I’d known any better, I’d have seen that she glinted). She came inside and closed the door, stepping around the spilled powder so as not to dirty her pretty shoes. “That color is a bit pale for you,” she said. “Your skin is too yellow.” I lifted the hat carefully from my head and put it in its box. I returned the empty box of powder and the scent bottle to her case. As she found the gold lighter she’d forgotten, she said, “They have Saint-Vaást oysters tonight.” She opened the door and looked at me over her shoulder. “Are you coming?” I said that I’d be there in a moment, after I cleaned the powder from the floor.
As we crossed the German border, the countess, wearing a black silk peignoir (another new word for me, and one with unsettling connotations), suggested that she hold my passport for the rest of the journey, not wishing me to be further troubled by tiresome customs officers. Later, I threw my coat over my nightdress and made my way through the train to retrieve a book of lace I’d left in her compartment. As I moved from car to car, I felt that I had never been so happy in my life. My new independence, and my equally false sense that I could look after myself—the elation at having left Ballycarra behind—were so strong that I even walked differently (the countess’s own walk may have contributed to this). When I reached her door, I was surprised to hear laughter and a man’s voice. I hurried back to my berth, my coat clutched around me, no longer quite so elated. I wondered if the countess had changed compartments and forgotten to tell me.
On the last night of our journey, as the countess smoked a cigarette after dinner in the dining car, she confided that she owed everything in the world to Herr Metzenburg. He’d taken her, Inéz Cabral, a young girl of fifteen, straight from Cuba, where he’d found her, and groomed and dressed her. Herr Metzenburg’s house was the meeting place for the most fascinating men and women in Europe—not only politicians and diplomats, but writers and musicians and film stars—and he’d introduced her to a world that would otherwise have been closed, if not unknown to her. She confessed that her new manners and all the couture in Paris would not have amounted to anything in the end had Herr Metzenburg not stood behind her—and even then, she added mysteriously, there had been difficulties. After an arrangement of several years (living contentedly, she said, as slave and master), Felix invited his friend Count Hartenfels to a week’s house party to introduce him to her. Three months later, she and the count were married in the private chapel of the Hartenfels castle near Munich. Felix, she said, showed his customary good taste by choosing not to give her away in marriage.
As my experience of arrangements was limited to the feeding of Mr. Knox’s gull when he was in Dublin, I was understandably confused. I’d learned during my brief time with the countess, however, not to ask too many questions. She was a character in a fairy tale—Cinderella’s fairy godmother, or the Snow Queen, perhaps—and I, who’d been properly bewitched, was accompanying her to a distant kingdom where I would live in an enchanted forest and spin flax into gold.
We arrived in Berlin in the late afternoon, traveling directly to the Metzenburgs’ house on Fasanenstrasse. I thought at first that it was a hotel, but the countess said sharply that she had never stayed in a hotel in her life. She seemed puzzled when no one came to the door, and even more puzzled when Herr Metzenburg opened the door himself.
I could see that Herr Metzenburg must have forgotten that Countess Hartenfels was coming to stay. He kissed her hand with an amused, slightly mocking smile and led us to a pink drawing room, the look of surprise already disappearing from his face. I’d read about such things, of course, but I had it wrong—the man does not actually kiss the woman’s hand but takes her hand in his own and, with a little bow, lowers his face to her fingers. The countess introduced me, explaining that I was a present for the Metzenburgs, which startled me. “You must allow me these little cadeaux,” I heard her say as she took a cigarette from his case.
Herr Metzenburg may have forgotten that Countess Inéz was coming to stay, but I was clearly a surprise. He turned to me smoothly, however, and said that he hoped that my journey had not been unnecessarily stressful, even if I was entering Germany, rather than leaving it, which tended to be more troublesome. Although Herr Metzenburg walked with a slight limp, he had a confident and easy way about him. I was so tongue-tied that I could only nod.
Behind him, a fair-haired, slender woman who could only be Dorothea Metzenburg floated noiselessly into the room, followed by an old man with a mustache and one eye, wearing white gloves and an apron, who immediately disappeared. Delicate and distracted, Frau Metzenburg did not have much to say, although she, too, seemed surprised to see us. Herr Metzenburg said something to her that I couldn’t hear, but I thought I heard her say, “Ah, my very own lace maker.”
The old man, without the apron but with a black monocle over his empty eye socket, returned with a tray of tea and cakes and dropped it onto a low mother-of-pearl table with a grunt. My idea of elegant manners had been taken from books and ladies’ magazines, and I was surprised, especially when Herr Metzenburg waved away the fretful old man to pour the tea himself.
The countess had told me that after university in Heidelberg, Herr Metzenburg had been sent abroad by the German ministry as ambassador, first to London and then to Madrid. She also said that his grandfather had built all of the railroads in South America. “While it’s not the most ancient of fortunes, it’s perfectly lovely. He was so attractive that money hardly mattered. Madame de la Roche once slid over a small cliff for love of him.” Although I was disappointed to discover that the Metzenburgs were not royal (and their house, although grand, was not a palace), both the excessive luxury and the excessive simplicity of the rooms, so unlike the dark and fussy rooms I’d conjured from magazines and books, made me wonder about all of the other things I’d imagined over the years. I’d always understood that if I were ever to have the things that I desired I would have to leave Ballycarra—I just hadn’t known how much there was to desire.
As the old man showed us to our rooms (I heard Frau Metzenburg tell him to put me in a guest bedroom as the servants’ rooms were filled with packing crates), the countess whispered that everything in my room was mine to use—bath towels, writing paper, soap, even the hot water (the last a bit unkind, I thought)—but it was an hour before I dared even pour myself a glass of water. The old man had made no mention of dinner, and by seven o’clock, I was hungry, despite the tea cakes. I heard footsteps in the passage and the sound of a bell, but no one came to my room, and I wondered if they’d forgotten me. Fortunately, a tin on a table next to the bed contained ginger biscuits, and I ate a few, then a few more, until the biscuits, to my dismay, were gone—it wasn’t that I was still hungry, although I was, that worried me, but the fear that I shouldn’t have eaten all of them. I fell asleep on top of the covers, my feet in a pair of silk slippers I found in the closet, waking in the middle of the night when I grew cold. I thought at first that I was in my own bed until the light from the streetlamp in Fasanenstrasse, shining through the open curtains (I’d been unsure about closing them), reminded me that I was far from home.
The next morning, I had already bathed and dressed, made the bed (twice), and folded and refolded my towel and facecloth when the old man, whose name was Kreck, came to my room to tell me that Herr Metzenburg wished to see me in the library. I followed him downstairs, certain that I was to be sent home. What most distressed me—even more than the thought of my mother’s triumph—was the loss of my new bed with its silk sheets and satin quilt (and, yes, the hot water).
Herr Metzenburg appeared upset, looking for a moment as if he didn’t remember me or why he wished to see me, before pointing to a chair and wishing me good morning. I thought at first that we could not possibly be in a library—red lacquer cabinets lined the walls, tall china pagodas between them—but then I noticed the books; there were hundreds of them.
There was the unfamiliar smell of coffee. A tray on the desk held two cups and saucers and a silver pot with an ivory handle. I was very hungry, and I glanced at the tray to see if there might be a scone or a piece of fruit, but there was nothing. Without asking if I wanted coffee, Herr Metzenburg made a sign to Kreck to pour me a cup.
When I felt that it was safe to look at him, the cup and saucer rattling in my hands (I wasn’t used to drinking coffee, and I was nervous), I saw that he was staring out the window. There was a crowd in the street, running back and forth and shouting, and he asked Kreck to close the shutters. Like many people who command your attention, his head was a bit large for his body. He wore his dark hair combed back from his face. His gray eyes reflected light in a way that made me uneasy—I felt that to look directly into his eyes was to risk revealing my most secret thoughts, had I any. He was close in age to my father. They were both about forty years old, but my father looked much older.
He turned to me and said that I was welcome to accompany him and Frau Metzenburg when they moved to their estate thirty miles south of Berlin. He said that a few days before my arrival he’d been offered his old position as ambassador in Madrid, which he had resigned in 1933, but he had refused the post, angering the foreign minister, who had immediately requisitioned the Metzenburgs’ house (my pretty room!) and conscripted all of the servants under the age of fifty. He and Frau Metzenburg had been given ten days to empty the house. A circumstance of which the countess had perhaps been unaware when she left Ireland.
Although I was free to leave (he would, of course, arrange my passage), he had, upon thinking about it, realized that I might be of help to them in the weeks to come, especially as there were no longer any servants other than Kreck and the cook. He could offer me in return a small salary. He apologized that, given the events of the last few days, he could not warrant his protection, as it clearly amounted to very little. He feared that it was only a matter of time before there was a war between Germany, France, and England.
As I listened to him, I kept thinking that I had missed something. Something I couldn’t see. I looked at the old man, but he was absorbed in arranging the silver on the tray. It was only when he signaled with an impatient shake of his head that I was keeping Herr Metzenburg that I was able to give him my answer.
Over the next few days, I noticed that people came to the house at all hours, even through the night. I thought at first that someone was ill—Kreck labored ceaselessly up and down the stairs, cursing under his breath as he carried trays of coffee and brandy, and newspapers and telegrams. Among the visitors were grave-looking men in uniform, dispatch cases under their arms. There were men in fur hats and dark coats, and I wondered if they might be Jews. I’d never seen a Jew, and I felt both excited and afraid.
Countess Inéz stayed for two nights, breaking her journey as she advised me to do when I traveled. On the day that she was leaving, I heard her ask Herr Metzenburg how anyone could possibly stay in one place for more than a month, and Herr Felix said, “Fortunately for you, a war is coming.” The countess laughed and said that she was eager to return to Munich as she intended to divorce the count in order to marry a young Egyptian prince she’d met in Ireland.
Herr Felix said nothing, only lit a cigarette—he may have frowned; it was difficult to tell—but I was shocked. The idea of divorce was disturbing enough, but the countess had led me to believe that she trusted me. Despite her many confidences, she had clearly forgotten to mention the Egyptian prince. I consoled myself with the thought that she would certainly have told me in time—it was so busy in the house with the packing of the Metzenburgs’ belongings and the coming and going of visitors that she clearly hadn’t found the right moment to tell me. As she said good-bye, a swirl of chinchilla and gardenia, she kissed me on both cheeks. I was unused to kissing and made the mistake of touching her cheek with my lips, nearly tearing her veil.
“You’ll be happy at Löwendorf, niña,” she said, settling her veil. “And don’t forget, Dorothea is inclined to couche tôt, but you will find Felix an excellent confidant.” When I looked at her in surprise, she said, “Don’t tell me I’ve misjudged you.” Before I could ask what she meant, she was gone.
I felt a sudden panic at her leaving. It was easy to feel assured when she ceaselessly flattered and praised me. I’d been aware that all through our journey she’d been training me (“Not that spoon, my dear. And it’s not necessary to stand when the porter enters …”), but with her departure, I would be on my own, when I would inevitably disappoint the Metzenburgs. I felt sick (what could couche tôt possibly mean?), but the thought of returning to Ireland was so much worse that I determined to make myself indispensable, at least until I’d been caught out and sent home, which would surely be only a matter of time.
My first task was to pack Herr Metzenburg’s collection of turned ivory. Kreck proudly explained that turning ivory had once been the occupation of princes—“the tusks spun on the lathe in three directions at once!”—and I was terrified that I would break one of the delicate towers. Some of the pieces, thirty inches high but only five inches wide, had their own ebony cases, which made them easier to pack. When Kreck said that Herr Felix had begun collecting art while he was at school, eventually possessing one of the best collections in Europe, my dread increased, causing me to work with unaccustomed slowness.
That evening, I took a sheet of Frau Metzenburg’s gray writing paper to my room, running my fingers over the little gold telephone and numbers at the top of the page, before hiding it in Mr. Knox’s book.
Frau Metzenburg came into the pantry where Kreck and I were sliding soupspoons into little flannel bags to say that we would soon be at Löwendorf, where she had been born. I would have my own sewing room with a table and good light, and there would be people in the village to help Kreck. As she turned to leave, she asked if I would like to see the collection of lace she’d inherited from her father, who had died three years earlier. It was going to the bank at the end of the week, and she didn’t know, given the state of things, when there’d be a chance to see it again. I was relieved to have an excuse to put aside my work for a moment, and I followed her up the stairs to the second floor.
The lace room (next to the gray-and-gold room that Kreck said was her private sitting room) had three chairs and a long table with brass apothecary lamps. A tray held several pairs of white cotton gloves and a magnifying glass. There were two long books, not unlike my father’s ledgers, although Frau Metzenburg’s were bound in red damask. Narrow drawers were built into the walls from floor to ceiling. A library ladder leaned against one wall. She turned on the lamps and handed me a pair of gloves.
I knew that I was staring, but I couldn’t help myself. She was about thirty years old, younger than the countess and just as lovely, although there was something boyish about her, and secretive. She wore a navy-blue suit with two gold clips in the shape of question marks, a white crepe shirt with a narrow collar, and navy spectator pumps. Her lipstick was bright red. Her hair, the color of wet straw, was parted in the middle and twisted into a flat roll at the back of her neck. She was as weightless as a ghost.
“You didn’t go to Mass with Inéz,” she said, wiggling her fingers deeper into the gloves.
I was too surprised to speak.
“Even if you’re not religious, you can believe in grace.” She was so odd, so unlike anyone, even the characters in the books I’d read, that she made me uneasy. To make matters even stranger, she said, “But then I suspect that your moment of grace is yet to come.” Then she asked where I would like to begin. It took me a moment to understand what she meant.
I pointed in front of me, and she slid a drawer from the wall and carried it to the table. Inside the drawer, on black velvet, were the yellowed hem of an alb sewn in point de France, a narrow panel of point de Venise, its delicate black dots sewn in a pattern of birds in flight, and a cravat of lace bees in what appeared to be mixed bobbin-and-needle lace. When I’d had my fill, I nodded, and she replaced the drawer with another. “These are only fragments, of course,” she said, not troubling to conceal a yawn. “The larger pieces—wedding dresses and altar cloths—have already been sent to the bank.”
There were designs of windmills, stags, pyramids, cherubs, the Eiffel Tower, sailing ships, and double-headed eagles. There was simple Irish crochet work. She pointed with a gloved finger to a stiff linen ruff. “Sixteenth century. I think.” She opened one of the books and found the description of the ruff, reading it to herself.
I again heard the sound of a bell, rung, I’d learned, to remind the Metzenburgs and their guests that it was time to dress for dinner. She pulled off her gloves and dropped them on the table (inside out, I noticed). “You have no interest in the women who made the lace,” she said. “The blinding headaches and the torn fingers. It’s the trousseau of the Dauphine that intrigues you. The handkerchief of the queen.”
Had I not been so overwhelmed, I would have told her that I wasn’t interested in the history of lace or even its romance. When I first taught myself to sew, it was the discovery that I could make Ballycarra disappear that had compelled me. More than that, I could make myself disappear. But as I no longer wished to disappear, I said nothing.
On my way to the servants’ dining room at night, I sometimes passed a sour-faced, elderly woman, half squirrel, half bird, in an old-fashioned long black dress, carrying a tray with a plate of steamed fish, boiled potatoes with parsley, and beetroot. I sometimes saw her on the back stairs, a sweep of glittering evening gown draped across her two outstretched arms or carrying a tray of opera gloves, but when I tried to catch her eye, she refused to look at me.
When I asked Kreck about her, he grinned maliciously, the tips of his dyed black mustache nearly reaching his ears, and said that she was Frau Metzenburg’s maid, Fräulein Roeder, who did not eat with the rest of the household. He’d been quick to add that although Fräulein Roeder’s food was prepared for her especially, he and I ate the same food as the Metzenburgs. My mother, who’d worked as a young bride in a big house near Ballina, often complained of the indignities suffered by servants, particularly in regard to food, and I’d been happy to hear this from Kreck.
We met each evening for dinner at six o’clock, sitting across from each other as we ate the delicious food. He often seemed preoccupied, even distressed. I thought that a little conversation might cheer him, but when I attempted it, he did not bother to answer me.
I tasted for the first time that week an avocado pear and a pineapple, which I later sketched from memory to send to Mr. Knox, along with drawings of the birds I saw in the Metzenburgs’ garden. I seldom thought of my mother and father, although I wrote to them (describing the food). I missed my old schoolmaster more than I missed my parents.
Because it was assumed that I would not break anything, given the deftness of my fingers, I was asked to wrap the Metzenburgs’ collection of porcelain and pack it in crates of bran—that there were no other servants, except Kreck, who had a tremor, and the equally aged cook, Frau Schmidt (Fräulein Roeder, it was made clear, only attended to Frau Metzenburg), may also have been a consideration.
“Herr Felix beseeches your pardon,” Kreck said in his stilted English, “as this will not be your accustomed duty, but when you are finished with the Nymphenburg, there is the Augsburg silver. And the Vincennes.”
As I wrapped the porcelain in newspaper before settling it in the bran, my fingers grew black with newsprint, and I had to wash my hands frequently. As I went back and forth to the pantry, I lingered in the rooms, looking at all of the treasure that had accumulated over the years. The objects seemed more real to me than the people. I’d never seen anything as pretty as the silver plates decorated with bees, snails, and mulberries that had been bought, Kreck said, at the Duchess of Portland’s auction. The dinner service with mythological figures in red and gold had been used by Frederick the Great at Sanssouci. A fluted white beaker and saucer, painted with plump Japanese children, had come from the palace in Dresden. Kreck, who seemed to know a great deal about the objects, had his own opinions. He thought the Duchess of Portland’s silver plates too beautiful, causing me to question my own taste.
As I helped to fold a pair of velvet curtains, appliquéd with green monkeys, that had been hanging in Herr Metzenburg’s bedroom—Kreck moved stiffly, due to his age and to palsy, turning the act of folding into a curious dance—I began to understand what the countess had meant when she said that Herr Felix had a weakness for the playful, a gift she attributed to his instinctive cocasserie (which at first I took to mean “coquetry”). His bed linen and towels were embroidered, she said, with a silhouette of his pet donkey, Zara. The floor of the summer dining room was covered with fragrant apple matting. Plaster owls with yellow glass eyes blinked from the red lacquer cases in the library. The peonies in the pink drawing room were in tall blue-and-white vases ringed with what looked like the bars of a cage. Meissen, said Kreck when he saw me looking at them, but I didn’t understand him.
Herr Metzenburg watched while we packed the carved panels of saints and a tiny velvet bed with silver Gothic spires, embroidered with seed pearls and emeralds. A bed for the Christ Child, Kreck said. I’d asked him if the Metzenburgs were Roman Catholic, but he hadn’t answered me.
Several pieces were too large to manage on our own, and Herr Metzenburg hired porters from an auction house to help us. He watched apprehensively as the men moved a melancholy barefoot Christ, the size of a child, sitting on the back of an equally downcast donkey. It was called a Palmesel—there is no word for it in English, he said—and it depicted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. His expression as he watched the men pull it across the room—it sat on a wooden platform with four small wheels—was both rapt and anxious, his hand reaching to steady it. “The donkey would have had a leather bridle, which Our Lord held in his right hand.” He said that almost all Palmesel had been made in the fifteenth century by local craftsmen. “Do you see how subtle it is, despite its apparent crudeness? The plump, perhaps even overfed donkey, Christ’s scarred hands, the cracked hooves?” A special packing crate had been built to carry the statue, but it was too large to bring into the house. Herr Metzenburg led the procession as we solemnly escorted Christ and the donkey to the street where their crate awaited them. “There is a Palmesel in Verona I’ve been trying to get my hands on for years,” Herr Metzenburg said with a smile. “It is said to contain the bones of the donkey that Christ rode into Jerusalem.”
With the gradual disappearance each day of the Metzenburgs’ belongings, the rooms grew larger and the ceilings higher. Although my experience of valuable objects had been limited to commemorative pickle forks (our dinner plates at home were called delft), I believed Kreck when he said that Herr Felix’s taste was vorzügliche. Exquisite. My first German word.
One afternoon, I slipped a small silver dish into the pocket of my apron and a pen and an amber cigarette holder that Frau Metzenburg had left in an ashtray, and later I arranged them on a table in my room as if they were my own. I threw away my old Ballycarra list and made a new one. I wanted a navy wool coat with a gray fox collar, a good haircut, a silver brush and comb engraved with the letter M (for “Maeve”), and a few of what Kreck called einige schöne Dinge—perhaps a blue enamel desk set to match the pen, and an ivory sewing box.
I now and then caught sight of Frau Metzenburg as she glided from room to room, repeating her husband’s lengthy and precise orders as she cajoled the hired men and calmed Kreck’s nerves. If she bothered to acknowledge me, I blushed.
As there was no one left to do errands and Herr Metzenburg no longer wanted delivery boys coming to the house, Kreck had to shop each day, a task that made him so irritable that I offered to help him. Herr Metzenburg, who saw us one afternoon as we returned to the house with our parcels, thanked me for helping, but told me that he did not wish me to walk alone in the city, although a stroll in the nearby Tiergarten would be safe. There had been acts of violence that summer against Jewish shopkeepers, and I noticed that many windows and doors in the shopping district were marked with crude drawings and inscriptions.
Kreck, despite Herr Metzenburg’s warning, began to send me on errands alone, and I soon learned my way along the streets and alleys. Although I was frightened at first, especially on the streets that had been looted, and worried that I would be lost or stopped by the gangs of men I saw in the street, I felt useful and efficient, checking off the errands on my list as I proudly instructed the shopkeepers to charge my purchases to the Metzenburgs’ account.
I wrote to Mr. Knox describing the Tickell’s thrush, redheaded buntings, and icterine warbler I saw in the Tiergarten. I also told him about the ruined shops and frightening caricatures on the walls of the buildings. When I read the letter for spelling errors, I was surprised by its worried tone. I didn’t want Mr. Knox to think that I was afraid, or in danger, and I copied the letter onto a new sheet of paper, leaving out the description of the shops.
As we wrapped the last of the Vincennes, Kreck said, “I’m surprised that Herr Metzenburg hasn’t received another visit from Herr Hofer. He came once, but did not remain more than a few minutes.” He made a face, but I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or relieved. “It’s well known that our Führer doesn’t admire the Romanesque, in which Herr Metzenburg has a particular interest, although Reichsmarschall Göring has a passion for it. He has coveted Herr Felix’s collection since the old days. It is thanks in part to the Reichsmarschall that prices are so high.” He also said, lowering his voice, that one of the Reichsmarschall’s friends in the Foreign Office had that week offered Herr Metzenburg a posting in Algiers. Although Herr Felix refused to leave Germany, he did not wish to prevent Frau Metzenburg from going, if that was what she desired. Kreck said that Herr Felix wanted to be with his treasures, but Frau Metzenburg wanted to be with Herr Felix. Sometimes, Kreck said, Herr Felix acted as if his objects had lives of their own. I was curious to know more, but two porters came into the room to remove a crate, and Kreck fell silent.
We moved to Löwendorf at the end of October, traveling in two cars, one of them driven by Herr Felix. A few boys were standing at the gates when we arrived, shoulders hunched with the chill, and a white-haired man from the village, Herr Pflüger, waited hat in hand in the gravel court in front of the house. He insisted on helping with the numerous suitcases, and I could see that Kreck didn’t like it.
The house, known as the Yellow Palace, was a large, square, symmetrical box of yellow stone in the classical style, two stories high, with marble urns at the corners of the flat roof. On the ground floor, five arched windows, their shutters painted sea green, looked onto a terrace with marble statues. There was a park with a narrow river running through it, and at the bottom of the park, a small temple with a striped awning on its roof. A large house, the Pavilion, built for Frau Metzenburg’s parents when they married, was in the park and, in the distance, a forest called the Night Wood.
Kreck, who’d been sent to Löwendorf ahead of us to see to the unloading of twenty-three wagons of treasure, took me through the rooms. The house had been built by a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandmother, the Baroness Schumacher. There was gold-and-black lacquer furniture in the dining room and music room, and a chandelier with fifty-six candles in the hall. The walls of the dining room were painted with Chinese figures, outlined in silver. A low divan of white silk ran along two sides of the drawing room, whose walls were covered with rectangles of pale green silk framed in gold. In the paneled library, there were lime-wood bookcases, two desks, leather chairs, and a long table for reading maps and manuscripts. In each of the rooms, Kreck had filled pale green vases with leafless stalks of allium, the only flower that Herr Felix allowed in the house in winter.
My bedroom was on the second floor, overlooking the avenue of Dutch elms. The curtains and bed coverings were in pale blue linen. There was a black marble fireplace and a red-and-orange patterned carpet. Against one wall was a chest of drawers. A gilt mirror above the chimneypiece reflected the tops of the elms. I could see the river, winding through the park, and the two German oaks that stood on either side of a brick path leading to a large cobblestoned stable yard with a clock tower. Beyond the stables were a walled kitchen garden and a garage. An allée of box led to a plantation of mulberry trees. There was a large orchard of cherry, apple, pear, and plum trees and, beyond it, a fenced meadow, used as a paddock for the horses.
Although the beautiful rooms were a bit dusty, the garden a bit wild (Kreck told me that nothing had been changed at Löwendorf in a hundred years), the Yellow Palace was the most vorzügliche place I’d ever seen.
Seven of us lived at Löwendorf—the Metzenburgs, Fräulein Roeder, Kreck, Schmidt the cook, myself, and a young man from the village named Caspar Boerner, who was the gamekeeper. Herr Felix’s donkey, Zara, and seven dogs were kept in the stables with the horses.
It was hoped that Caspar Boerner would be able to assume some of the simpler tasks of Herr Felix’s valet, as well as those of the footman, both of whom had been mobilized along with the farmworkers, gardeners, and grooms. Caspar, who was nineteen years old, lived with his widowed mother in a farmhouse near the village. His two brothers had been conscripted, but Caspar was exempt from military service, at least for the moment, thanks to the loss of three fingers on his right hand.
Kreck said that it was bad enough without servants, but with only Caspar to help in the Yellow Palace, it would be a Katastrophe. Caspar, whose cropped hair was the color and texture of swans’ down, had lost his fingers in an otter trap. As the Reich was opposed to cruelty in all forms, Herr Felix thought it best that no one know the details of his accident, as just that month a man in Potsdam had been sentenced to four months in prison for throwing stones at a bird (Roeder hinted that Caspar had injured himself on purpose—Caspar’s brother, according to her, was a Communist).
Kreck said that no one in Caspar’s family had ever been a house servant, the Boerners fit only for fieldwork, and he wondered if Caspar’s new responsibilities would be too difficult for him, the boy more adept at twisting the neck of a pheasant than winding a cravat around Herr Felix’s neck. Herr Felix had a very precise morning routine, including the playing of jazz records as he dressed, but Kreck suspected that Caspar had never even seen a gramophone (Kreck, himself very fond of a band called the Weintraub Syncopators, had brought several boxes of gramophone needles with him from Berlin). Caspar, who moved into a room over the stables, would also serve as groom, cut and store wood, and polish our boots when we left them outside our doors at night. He would take me to the village in the dogcart when I needed to buy anything of a personal nature. In the village, which was three miles away, there was a church, a blacksmith, a mill, a baker, a dry-goods store, and a small inn.
I didn’t like to think of myself as a servant, but I knew that I fell into that less easily defined company that included governesses and ladies’ maids. It was Catholic girls who went out as servants, not Palmers (a thought that sounded so alarmingly like my mother that I immediately put it out of my head). It was to the Metzenburgs’ credit that they did not live by the more simple rules that governed domestic life in Ireland. Because her wealth served to isolate her, Frau Metzenburg did not trouble with the customary prejudices of her class. Herr Felix, despite the railroads in South America, and a boyhood position akin to godhead in a house of doting women, was unusual in that neither money nor adoration had ruined him. Although the distinctions between master and servant were maintained in traditional ways—the taking of meals, forms of address (I called them Dorothea and Felix only in my head), clothing—as well as a more subtle sublimation of self, I was surprised by their courtesy (the best manners in Europe). But I counted myself so fortunate to have escaped Ballycarra that I would have endured anything.
At night when the house was quiet, I would arrange the silver dish and the gold pen and the cigarette holder, as well as a pair of doeskin gloves I’d found drying in the laundry, around my room. (As I didn’t intend to keep the lovely objects, I didn’t consider myself a thief.) My rash decision to accompany Countess Inéz to Berlin had been made in ignorance, I knew, but I did not regret it. The disturbing restlessness of my girlhood was gone, my longing replaced by the sense that a world in which anything might happen had opened to me and, even more astonishing, that I’d been allowed to enter it. It cannot be chance that my favorite book that winter was All This, and Heaven Too, in which a French nobleman murders his wife in order to marry the governess.
As I didn’t speak German, Herr Felix arranged for me to spend an hour each afternoon with Herr Elias, whom Felix had recently brought from Berlin when the Ministry of Information drafted his secretary. I found Caspar lurking in the library when I arrived for my first lesson, dusting books as he sang a ditty in German. He grinned when he saw me and sang the verse again. When Herr Elias came into the library a few minutes later, Caspar abruptly stopped singing, although apparently not soon enough. Herr Elias said something to him, and Caspar lowered his head and went back to work.
Kreck had told me that Herr Elias’s father was Italian, which explained his dark eyes and thick black hair, but he put me more in mind of the Saracen warrior Saladin, whose adventures I’d followed in Mr. Knox’s book about the Crusades. Although Herr Elias did not have the easy elegance of Herr Felix, there was a manliness about him that I found most engaging.
Kreck also said that Herr Elias was fortunate to be alive. In early November, a Jew had been accused of murdering a German diplomat in Paris, and Nazi storm troopers, assisted by enraged citizens, had looted and set fire to many Jewish shops and houses in Berlin. A synagogue on Fasanenstrasse had been burned to the ground, and another in Savignyplatz. Women had roamed the streets with empty prams, the better to load them with looted goods. Thousands of Jews had been arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen prison in the north of the city. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, are you?” Kreck asked, peering at me. He made me think that I could end up in Sachsenhausen—that we all could end up in Sachsenhausen.
Dorothea’s grandmother had liked to mark the year with saints’ feast days and festivals, and on Christmas Eve, the villagers had visited the Yellow Palace to drink Weihnachtspunsch and to sing carols. As Dorothea wished to continue the tradition, a big spruce was cut in the Night Wood on the second Sunday of Advent. Roeder and I decorated the tree with the baroness’s collection of Neapolitan ornaments, and Kreck prepared baskets of ham and schnapps for the families of the workers on the estate. As I hung branches of holly in the dining room, I had a sudden longing for home. Although I didn’t miss the gray winters of Ballycarra or the cold pews in Mr. Knox’s stone church or the awkward exchange of practical presents Christmas morning (with the special treat of a glass of sherry and an orange), I felt sad at the thought of my mother and father.
It was very cold that first winter at Löwendorf. It snowed for weeks, softening all sound but for the constant roar of the wind from the east. The river was frozen, and in the park, the trees splintered and cracked in two. Caspar and I trudged through the fresh snow with long poles to knock the snow from the branches of the fruit trees. As we swung our poles, the snow flying through the cold air, the crows lifted themselves noisily into the sky. The boys from the village sometimes followed us, unable to resist pelting us with snow, and we chased them across the frozen meadow, shouting with happiness.