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“My husband…he died in that battle, the fifth in Ypres. Along with my brother.”
His voice, too, was thick with old, deep grief: “That is why we must never, ever do it again. Whatever our differences…” He trailed off, staring around the room.
Margot looked at him, then away, and over to where Cecily had gone with Hans, where Winifred, clinging to hope, was doing her duty. Roger must be somewhere. She could not recognize his head among all the others. How many of them were clinging to the coattails of peace and felt anger or shame for what their allies and enemies alike were doing? Above all, their fellow countrymen? What was patriotism compared with humanity? They were busy with avenging old wounds, rather than preventing new ones?
“Thank you for telling me about this,” she said, swallowing hard and managing to keep control. “It makes my husband more…real. I tried to imagine how he could not be afraid, and I never really succeeded. It took him away from me somehow. Can you understand what I mean?”
“Yes. Tales of courage, rather than the real thing, fragile and very mixed. Real courage is being terrified and doing it anyway. Sometimes, it’s just because letting everyone else down would be even worse than being shot. Certainly than losing an arm.” Konstantin smiled at her, and this time there was nothing in it but the gentleness of memory shared for a moment.
She turned away before emotion overcame her. When he departed she brought her mind back to the present.
Behind her, two men were talking, their heads together, wineglasses in their hands, almost touching. “Dollfuss won’t bend,” one of them was saying. “He’s got a taste of power and he’s going to run with it. You think he’ll listen to us? You’re whistling in the wind. You’ll be overtaken. Believe me.”
“It’s for the greater good,” the other man said with certainty.
“Whose greater good?” There was derision in his voice. “Ours? Austria’s? Europe’s?”
“Europe’s, of course! Can’t you see that?” the second man said sharply. “Think what we could accomplish in a hundred years of peace! A thousand!”
“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous! Hitler’s lifetime, at best.”
“By then, people will have come to accept it. England’s coming around already. Did you see who was here tonight?”
“Yes, of course I did, and it’s a start, but we must be careful about Austria.”
“Dollfuss will crack like an eggshell, you’ll see.”
“He could surprise you!”
“He’ll have to be got out of the way, that’s easy enough. The Fatherland Front is very strong; their victory is inevitable, and soon. Don’t be so damned lily-livered…”
“More wine?” a voice said at Margot’s side.
“What?” She turned and saw Roger Cordell. She was unreasonably, overwhelmingly pleased to see him. “Oh! I’m sorry, I was watching—”
“Two rising soldiers of the Führer’s new army,” he answered, so quietly she barely made out the words.
“They were talking about Austria,” she began.
“What about it?”
“Something to do with getting rid of Chancellor Dollfuss.” She stopped, seeing the shadow across his face. “Roger, you don’t…” She had been going to ask if he believed there was anything in it, but that seemed a facile question now. He clearly knew what she was talking about, because he had not asked her to expand.
“There’s only so much we can do,” he said quietly. “I feel as if we have one finger in the dike, but there are more holes springing up all the time.”
She looked at him and saw more clearly the tiredness in his face, so evident now, this close to him at the end of a very long day in which he had said goodbye to his only child. He did not believe that it would be all right, and neither did she.
CHAPTER
14
“You can’t go like that,” Aiden said when they had left the café and walked half a block along the road, then into a third narrow street and finally into a slightly better district. “You look too casual.”
“So do you,” Elena replied, regarding his old trousers of indeterminate color, so well worn were they. His sweater was a heavy fisherman’s knit, equally faded. One could only guess that once it had been blue.
He smiled. “We’re going to Gabrielle’s apartment. Just along this way. I keep clothes there.” He did not explain. “You can borrow something of hers. We don’t want to look as if we’ve come to deliver the food.”
She looked him up and down. “You look more as if you’d come to sweep the pavement. And I don’t think Gabrielle lends her clothes to relative strangers, even in the unlikely event that they should fit.”
