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“I am sure we shall,” he replied, putting his hand on Cecily and drawing her a little closer to him.
Margot’s smile froze on her face. Oh God, Roger! What have you got into? she thought, and tried frantically to think of something to say.
CHAPTER
27
Elena spent a long, difficult night in the police cell. She was so tired she thought she might sleep, but every time she drifted off into troubled dreams, she was disturbed by footsteps, voices, and now and then the door opening and someone shining a light on her. Then before she could ask what they wanted, the door was closed and the iron flanges of the lock slammed into place.
The bed was uncomfortable, a straw-filled palliasse on a wooden frame. The ends of the pieces of straw poked through the canvas ticking. The single blanket was gray and smelled of rancid butter.
Perhaps she did not have much time left? If they found her guilty, they would execute her, surely. How? Shooting? Hanging? Did the Germans hang people, or was that just an English thing to do? The French used a guillotine. Bloody, but quick. Except in the case of Louis XVI, poor soul. They had botched it and had to make three attempts before they succeeded. At least that’s what the history books said.
Was this really it, the end? Was there a heaven? An afterlife? Would she find Mike there? She had accepted the idea of heaven, in the pain of losing him. People did. They were too dazed to it; they wanted to give one another comfort. If you say a thing often enough, at least some of the time you believe it. And who would say to a grieving mother, or widow, that death was the end?
She had never felt so utterly alone. Would anybody ever tell her family, her mother, or Lucas, what had happened to her? Please God—if there was one?—let her do this with courage.
She thought of famous people whose deaths had been witnessed and recorded.
Charles I, who had been executed at the end of January, and asked if he could wear two doublets, so he would not shiver in the cold and have people think that he was afraid.
How did you keep from being sick when you knew you were going to be shot any minute, absolutely for certain? She didn’t want to be pitiful. She would look them in the eye and tell them to go to hell!
She drifted in and out of sleep, sometimes dreaming, sometimes falling into a soft, gray oblivion.
When she woke it was light and someone was standing by her cot with a dish of porridge and a wedge of bread. There was something in an enamel mug that looked like tea. It steamed gently, so at least it was hot.
She thanked the guard and took it. Please heaven she was not so clenched up inside that she would throw it up. Was torture better on an empty stomach or a full one? She ate it anyway. It tasted stale, but it was edible, and perhaps she was better for it.
They came for Elena far sooner than she had expected. She was still sitting with the breakfast dish before her and the dregs of her tea, black and bitter.
“Stand up,” one of the policemen ordered. These three were men she had not seen before. She obeyed. There was no point in causing more trouble than she already had, just for the sake of pride. There was no one to impress.
The thing that hurt perhaps even more deeply than fear was the sense of being so alone. These policemen were all people who looked like most Englishmen. Only their uniforms and their language differentiated them. And yet she had never felt so violated.
Had Mike felt something like this, just before going over the top of the trench into the gunfire? She tried to think of him, to imagine he was there in spirit with her. “Chin up, kiddo,” he would have said, with a slightly twisted smile.
She was walked through the station and out to the back, where a car was waiting for them.
One of the police caught her surprise and smiled, without warmth. “We’re giving you to the Gestapo,” he said with satisfaction. “You did not know Scharnhorst, did you.” It was a statement.
“No…I didn’t!” she said fiercely.
“Then it’s not a domestic murder, it’s assassination. That belongs to the Gestapo. It’s an offense against the state, not just a local thing, like killing to steal or committing some crime against a neighbor.”
“I didn’t kill him at all!” she said levelly, almost.
“Bad shot, eh?” he said sarcastically. “You saying you didn’t mean to kill him? Who did you mean to kill?”
She started to deny it again and realized there was no point. They would think whatever they wanted to. Perhaps their own careers depended on catching the assassin. Or at least seeming to.
There was a driver sitting at the wheel, on the left-hand side, and for a moment she forgot where she was. It was all unreal. This was not the Germany she knew, the place in her memory where she had been happy, even amid the destruction and loss immediately following the war.
An officer got out of the other side of the car and came around to escort her. Not that she would really have escaped, with her hands manacled together behind her back, and the police on either side of her.
He looked at her curiously, with cold, careful eyes. Then he opened the passenger door at the back and nodded for her to get in. She obeyed rather awkwardly, hands behind the back not being the natural way to climb into a car and sit down, unable to straighten your skirt or rearrange yourself.
The door slammed and he walked around to the other side.
