Chapter Forty-Two
Honor
Honor waited until she heard the cars depart before getting up.
She had listened to the voices – Chips’, as always, loudest – in the corridor outside her room and later in the hallway below, and tried to decipher who was going and who staying.
She heard Rose Kennedy’s quiet tones and assumed if Rose was going the ambassador was too.
Brigid and Kick were clearly of the party – Brigid barged in, hair still wet, to ask if she might borrow a sunhat, her own was lost – and Maureen, just as clearly, was not.
Elizabeth, she felt she need not even ask.
Duff? She hoped, if Maureen wasn’t going, that he was.
The idea of a day alone with the two of them, if they were anything like the mood of the evening before, was too much.
And Doris? There, she felt as certain as she had of Elizabeth; Doris would not be going.
She dressed quickly, unwilling to wait for her maid; unwilling to waste a minute of a day that stretched before her with such glorious freedom.
It would be hours before they returned. She had heard Chips talk of a picnic.
She checked her reflection in the long looking-glass. How drained she looked. Dark shadows under her eyes that did not – as they did with Doris – make her look fragile or interesting. Honor just looked exhausted. Defeated. She sucked in her stomach and stood sideways. She was getting stout.
She looked out the window. At the far end, beside the pool house, she made out a figure in a broad-brimmed hat sitting at the little table.
It was a woman, but the hat was angled in such a way that Honor couldn’t see her face.
The woman poured herself a cup of coffee from a silver pot that caught the sun and sent it winking cheerily on.
The way she lifted the coffee cup to her lips and drank told Honor it wasn’t Maureen or Elizabeth.
Quickly, she finished pinning back her hair and pulled on a pair of sunglasses.
The idea of a morning, even an hour, alone with Doris in the swirling shade of the old elm beside the pool house was delightful.
It was the certain knowledge that Chips was away, could not come upon them or send for her or intrude.
Knowing she would not hear the sound of his voice, catch sight of him in his pale flannels crossing a path or catch a breath of his cologne on the breeze, was as galvanising as the sound of the huntsman’s horn used to be in the days when she got up early on winter mornings. She felt a busy stirring of excitement.
‘Tell Andrews I will take breakfast outside,’ she said to her maid when she came with tea. ‘Ask him to bring a fresh pot of coffee. And you may take the morning off. Miss Ponsonby can look after herself, if she gets up.’
Doris, she thought as she drew close, still looked tired. But she turned her face to Honor and gave her a dazzling smile. ‘Come and sit this side,’ she said, moving her chair up. ‘The shade is better.’
‘More coffee is on the way,’ Honor said, sitting down.
‘And there I was, wondering if there was any way this day could be more perfect.’
‘I thought you might need another cup,’ Honor said.
‘Did you?’ Doris opened her eyes wide. ‘Why on earth?’
‘Don’t tease, darling. Now tell, what were you doing, out in the early morning with the dew still wet on the ground?’
‘I could tell you what I told Chips, and Brigid, and Rose, and all the others who have asked,’ Doris said slyly. ‘An early-morning walk, on a beautiful day.’
‘But you won’t,’ Honor said, settling back in her chair. She took one of the freshly baked biscuits Andrews had brought with the coffee.
‘If you must know, I was coming back.’
‘Yes, that much was rather obvious. From where?’
‘The stables.’
‘The piebald …?’ Honor asked, bemused. Then, ‘Oh. No. Albert?’
‘Yes.’ Doris looked straight at her. She was refusing, Honor saw, to be abashed in any way. ‘Albert.’
‘But why?’
‘Only you would ask that,’ Doris said, amused. ‘There are a thousand women I could tell that to, and they would simply smirk and say “Yes, I see …”’ She laughed. ‘I tell you, and you blurt out “But why?”. However, you are correct. There is a why.’
‘Which is?’
‘I wonder how much to tell you.’ She glanced away, across the lawns, towards the river which could be heard, swollen and greedy, running over the new ground it had claimed.
‘Everything. Tell me everything.’
‘Not everything, darling. It isn’t possible. But I will tell you some. What I may. Are you sure we will not be interrupted?’
‘Perfectly certain. Nearly everyone is gone, thank goodness. Elizabeth will not surface for hours. Maureen and Duff seem to have their own matters to attend to …’
‘Yes, I rather thought that last night … Well, alright then. The truth is, darling, much as I love you, I am not here entirely to see you. Yet again, all unknowing, Chips has done me a service.’ She grinned.
‘You know a little of why I am in Berlin?’ She lowered her voice and looked around, a quick, nervous glance that was, Honor thought, quite unlike her.
‘I know what you have told me, which is very little, and what I have understood, which is a little more.’
‘I am a reporter.’
‘I have seen your articles in the Express. Approving accounts of race meetings and sporting events.’
‘Exactly. I go about. I meet people. I have the very gayest of times. And I watch. I listen. I remember.’
‘You were always good at that.’
‘And when the time comes, I repeat what I have seen and heard and observed to people who have more pieces of the puzzle than I. Who know what to do with the information I gather.’
‘How glamorous you are.’
‘I’m not. I am often scared and maybe useless. Certainly I am very low in any chain of importance. I have little faith in what I do, and less all the time – perhaps what I pass on has no value at all? – but it is the best I can do, and I suppose that is something.’
‘Maybe glamorous is not the right word. Brave, then. It sounds dangerous.’
‘It is. But not as dangerous as what others do.’ She paused, and silence fell between them.
A swallow dipped to the surface of the pool, angling its wings sharply, then turned and soared.
‘Recently it has become more clear that there are some Germans who no longer support the Nazis. They believe Hitler to be a danger and would be happy to see him gone, if there were a way for that to happen that would be fairly painless. There are enough of them, but they aren’t united.
Mostly they mistrust one another. They each have their own reasons, their own gripes and demands, their own views of what should replace him. But we believe—’
‘Who is “we”?’
‘Better you don’t know that. Actually,’ Doris laughed, ‘I hardly know myself. There are many.’
‘Go on.’
‘We believe that if all of these different strands could be woven together and persuaded to adopt one plan of action, they could put aside their differences and turn their discontent into action. If they have a purpose, they will make a plan. And so we try, discreetly, to help the making of that one plan.’
‘Which is?’
‘That’s where it gets complicated. In order to have one plan, apparently we need to consider many different plans. One is Fritzi.’
‘Him?’
‘I know. It does seem … Well, you know him; so you know what it seems. But after all, he has the name, he has the background. He is known, but not too well known. He offers the reassurance of familiarity, along with the promise of something new. There is a chance that he might be the very person behind whom others can unite.’
‘Funny,’ Honor said slowly, ‘it is almost the very same thing Chips used to say to him. How he had the personality to be the natural successor to his grandfather, and restore the House of Hohenzollern … But what about his father, who is still alive?’
‘Hopelessly compromised,’ Doris said cheerfully. ‘Far too much friending and falling-out with Hitler. No one knows what he’s about anymore, nor trusts him. There are the brothers, of course, and at least one of them is interesting too, but my charge is Fritzi.’
‘Does he know?’
‘Not a thing,’ Doris said.
‘Why?’
‘No point, until it is decided.’
‘So Chips flatters Fritzi that he could be the kaiser. His father forces him to join the Luftwaffe. The ambassador encourages him to be vocal in his support for Hitler, so he can write to President Roosevelt and tell him that even Germany’s princes support the Reich.
And all the while you conspire to see will he do as the figurehead of a coup. And the boy himself knows nothing?’
‘In a nutshell.’
‘No wonder he’s on edge, even if he doesn’t know the half of it. Funny, Elizabeth said something yesterday … Asked me had I noticed how very popular Fritzi was …’
‘Did she now? That girl is far less empty-headed than she lets on.’
‘No one could possibly be as empty-headed as she lets on! But what has this to do with Albert?’
‘Albert is a bit of a detour …’
‘How so?’
‘Well, I’m here for Fritzi. But once I saw that Albert was not really a servant—’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, I think we all know …’
Honor remembered Maureen: Quite a different creature …
‘He’s an unknown quantity,’ Doris continued.
‘He’s been here, in England, with Fritzi, since he arrived two years ago, and we want to know why.
Whose man is he really? Everyone thinks he was sent by Fritzi’s grandfather, to keep an eye and report back to the old man.
But now, well, I wonder if the Reich don’t believe Fritzi’s protestations of loyalty. Even though he swore an oath.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen him clicking his heels, for all the world like a wooden marionette, when he meets von Ribbentrop.’ Honor tapped her own heels together, sharply, but the effect, in her white plimsoles, was feeble.