The Winter Garden (2014) Read online

  The Winter Garden

  By the same author:

  Black Roses

  The Weighing of the Heart

  Patrimony

  The Shell House

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Thynker Ltd 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Jane Thynne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN: 978-1-84983-987-7

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-84983-988-4

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-84983-990-7

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  For William

  ‘Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.’

  Adolf Hitler

  ‘Take up the frying pan, dustpan and broom and marry a man.’

  Hermann Goering, Nine Commandments of the Worker’s Struggle

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Berlin, October, 1937

  The flash and dazzle of fireworks, like multicoloured shrapnel, studded the night sky. Vivid bursts of phosphorus erupted in the damp air, bloomed into extravagant showers of stars, then fizzled and died against the dark sheet of the Wannsee below. A faint plume of smoke drifted across the lake as the fireworks fell quiet and night closed in again.

  From where she stood, in the deep shadow of the garden, Anna Hansen tried to work out which of the big villas on Schwanenwerder Island had something to celebrate. Fireworks were nothing special here. There were always parties going on in the grand houses. They all had large gardens stretching down to the lake from where, across the water, loomed the inky mass of Grunewald’s eastern shore. Between the shores the dip and ripple of small boats could be heard, rocking in the wind as the water slapped against their sides.

  Anna shivered in the night air. It was cold standing here, surrounded by softly dripping shrubs. She shuffled her slippered feet and clutched her dressing gown more closely around her. Though it might have been the bangs and whistles which woke her, in truth she had scarcely been able to sleep, despite an exhausting day. But then, it was always an exhausting day at the Schwanenwerder Reich Bride School. It seemed there was so much to learn for women who were about to marry members of the SS. It wasn’t like being an ordinary German bride, though, heaven knows, those girls had their work cut out. But as the Führer said, the women who were to marry the cream of German manhood needed to be something special.

  Not that Anna had much choice when she arrived at the Bride School, a stately villa with pillared gates proudly topped by a pair of swastika flags and screened from the world by a ridge of tall pines. A course there was compulsory, it had been since 1935, on Himmler’s orders, and you needed to submit the certificate you gained to the SS Race and Settlement Office before your marriage could go ahead. In some ways the School was like a military training academy, with a regime which started at five thirty in the morning and didn’t end until the shattered brides dropped into their beds at nine o’clock at night. That morning, for example, had begun with the usual outdoor bath, to take advantage of the island’s fresh, pine-scented air, followed by energetic gymnastics in shorts and vests. After breakfast came Sewing, and then a visit from the local Mother and Child branch for Childcare instruction, before lunch, which was made on a rota by the brides themselves, wearing headscarves and spotless aprons.

  Today they had been focusing on ‘Cooking Without Butter’ because of the shortage, and very dull it had been too. Though that was no bad thing, Anna thought, because all these regular meals were making her plump. After lunch came Culture, consisting of a talk on fairy tales. All brides needed to learn fairy tales because the German mother was the ‘culture bearer’ to the next generation. Today’s lecturer had explained how in Cinderella it was the prince’s Germanic instincts that led him to reject the stepsisters’ alien blood and search for a maiden who was racially pure.

  Culture should have been what Anna enjoyed best. She had been a dancer after all, not so long ago. Chorus line at the Wintergarten. Standing there amid the shadowy shrubs, she ran an absent hand over her rumpled, shoulder-length hair. Her dark roots were showing badly and the bleached curls were already turning to frizz in the damp air. She sighed. It was hard to imagine a greater contrast between her previous life and the one she was living now. Her old friends would die laughing if they could see her. But then Anna’s circumstances had changed. Changed drastically. And by some miracle, just as she had needed to escape from a difficult spot, SS-Obersturmführer Johann Peters, six foot two with a jaw like granite and eyes as blue as the Baltic Sea, had walked into her life. From the moment Johann had come up to her in that dank little nightclub, she hadn’t looked back. If it hadn’t been for Johann she might even have resorted to answering one of those depressing advertisements you saw in the newspapers. ‘54-year-old lawyer, pure Aryan, desires male offspring through marriage with young virgin, hard-working, low heels, no jewellery.’ So when Johann had requested a dance, and shortly afterwards her hand in marriage, she had taken him up on it without a second thought, even if it meant spending six weeks at Bride School in preparation.

  The villa that housed the Bride School had been occupied by a single Jewish family until it was transferred into the ownership of the Deutsches Frauenwerk. As Anna walked between lessons, she would look wistfully at t
he grandeur of the décor, the folded mahogany panelling of the hall and the line of little bells in the kitchen which were connected to different rooms in the house. The whole place was full of colour; pistachio paint in the hall, almond white on the dado rails, and deep burgundy red in the library, which still smelled of leather and cigars. The music room – an entire room devoted to music! – was painted daffodil yellow, and the ballroom, which was lavender blue, had a ceiling like a wedding cake, moulded with plaster roses, from where great chandeliers were suspended. Anna liked to imagine the life that had existed there before – all the parties and the fun and the elegance. There were patches on the walls where gold-framed oil paintings had hung, and if you stood quite still you could almost sense the family that had gone before, evanescent as a waft of perfume down a corridor, or the faint sound of laughter in the air.

  Now, though, the ballroom had been fitted with desks and its damask curtains taken down in the interests of cleanliness. Cleanliness was all important at the Bride School. Everything had to be hygienic and disinfected, smelling of soap and polish. Dirt, and all soiled traces of the past, must be scrubbed away. Dust was disgusting, the instructors said. It was almost unGerman.

  Anna’s dormitory, where eight girls slept, was a long room on the top floor. It must have been the nursery originally, but it had been redecorated in the same plain, brutal fashion as the rest of the house. Iron bedsteads flanked the walls, and the floors were bare boards. The wallpaper had been whitewashed over, but if you tipped the wardrobe slightly you could see a remnant of it, pale pink with knotted posies, in a spot that was difficult to reach. Anna was observant like that. She had an eye for detail; she always liked to know what lay underneath things.

  It had been hard to leave her bed and slip out of the house unnoticed. Strangely for an organization which believed so fervently in fresh air, the dormitory window was kept locked and after bedtime the corridors were patrolled by the sewing mistress, Fräulein Wolff. Brides were encouraged not to leave the room except in cases of emergency. Luckily the only person to notice Anna waking that night was Ilse Henning, a good-hearted country girl with a shelf of a bosom and a face as scrubbed as a pine table, who blinked at her in puzzlement, then rolled obediently onto her side. Ilse probably assumed, quite correctly, that her roommate was going into the garden to smoke an illicit cigarette.

  That much was true. Yet it was a deeper restlessness which was troubling Anna Hansen. All day she had had the curious sensation that she was being watched. It was nothing obvious. Just a brooding self-consciousness that crawled across her skin, raising the minute hairs on her neck, making her tense, the way a gazelle tenses when it scents the approach of a predator. Several times during the day, both in the garden and the house, she had the distinct feeling of someone’s eyes upon her, only to wheel round and find nothing there. She had repeatedly attempted to rationalize the sensation. Perhaps it was the sorry shortage of nicotine that set her nerves jangling. Or maybe the ugly gardener, Hartmann, the one with the limp and the hedgehog haircut, was spying on her. He was always hanging around eyeing up the Reich Brides. What was a man like him even doing in a place like this? Why couldn’t he be sent to the Rhineland or something?

  The feeling came on her again as she lay trying to sleep in the dormitory, listening to the distant crump of fireworks, and to shake it off she had risen and crept out into the chill October air.

  The moon was obscured by a bank of heavy cloud as she progressed down the garden, avoiding the gravel path and hugging the shrubs at the edge of the lawn. Behind her in the distance the house was a shuttered and slumbering hulk, with only a single lamp burning on the ground floor, and ahead lay the leaden expanse of the lake, visible only by the lights which glimmered from the few yachts and pleasure boats moored at its edges.

  She stopped at the trunk of a large pine tree and pulled out her cigarettes. Around her a dim tangle of laurel receded into a pool of deeper shadow. There was dense vegetation underfoot. Flecks of water from the lake blew against her face and she hugged her arms to her chest, wishing she had worn something warmer than an old silk dressing gown. Because of the rigid dress code at the School, nightwear was the only area where brides had any self-expression. Most of the girls opted for a floral tent of scrubby towelling, but Anna’s was creamy silk with ivory lace inserts with a matching negligée which smelled of smoke and perfume and acted as a consoling, luxurious reminder of the good old days.

  Suddenly she sensed a glimmer of movement in the bushes, a spectral flicker accompanied by a rustle of leaves. She froze, her senses on the alert, straining to filter the night sounds. The fireworks had subsided now and the night’s silence was penetrated only by the whine of the high trees swaying and the thrum of a car making its way along the lake road. More faintly, the soft rattle and groan of boats, their timbers creaking and the water slapping on their sides, carried on the breeze.

  There it was again. A distinct crackle of leaves, a couple of yards to her left. Anna stiffened, her heart lifting in her throat, and turned to see a white shape and a pair of golden circles trained on her. She almost laughed with relief.

  ‘God, Minka. You gave me a fright. Hiding from the fireworks are you?’

  The cat approached and rubbed against her leg. She was a friendly animal and much loved by the Bride School inmates. Anna squatted down to stroke her head, then took out her lighter, an elegant silver lozenge engraved with her initials. God forbid anyone should find her with it. She had had to smuggle it in here, because smoking was strictly forbidden at the Bride School. The Führer called cigarettes ‘decadent’ and said smokers were unfit to be German wives and mothers. All brides had to sit through a lecture on the poison of nicotine and how the Jews had brought tobacco to Germany to corrupt the native stock. She snapped the lighter open, the flame leapt up, lit the cigarette and she took a deep drag, impatient for the first delicious hit to coil down her throat, then rested her back against the bark of the tree. This was a long way to come for a smoke, but it was worth it.

  Beside her the cat froze and lifted its head. It had seen something, but what? A mouse perhaps, or a bird? A fox even? Following its gaze she stared blindly into the murk.

  ‘Is someone there?’

  A sudden screech heralded the launch of a single rocket that flared and dissipated in an emerald shower, lighting up the sky. The cat’s pupils contracted to slits. As the sound died away, Anna heard something else. The soft crunch of a footstep on the wet earth.

  ‘Who is it?’

  The words choked in her throat. As she stared desperately around her into the darkness, frantic thoughts raced through her mind. It had been a mistake to come out here. She should never have left the dormitory. Perhaps it was the creepy gardener, spying on her.

  ‘Hartmann? Is that you?’

  Two more steps and then a face was looming up before her. As she peered through the darkness, terror engulfed her. Her knees almost buckled, and it took everything she had to summon a tone of coy flirtatiousness.

  ‘Well, hello stranger.’

  The man raised the Walther 6.35-calibre pistol and Anna’s eyes widened a moment, but the sound of the shot was drowned in an exuberant volley of fireworks. A spume of scarlet sparks arced and spangled the sky. The man with the gun watched Anna languidly as she fell, then he turned away and melted into the shadow. For a moment Anna’s hand clutched frantically, as if she were trying to haul herself up on empty air, then it dropped back and the lighter slid out of her opened palm, down into the damp grass.

  Chapter One

  Clara Vine swung her car through the wrought-iron gates of the villa and braked violently to avoid a peacock crossing the drive. As the bird strutted onto the lawn, dragging its magnificent lapis lazuli tail, she was sure she divined an arrogant glint in its beady eye. Still, she was relieved she hadn’t hit it. It wouldn’t do to damage any property belonging to the Reich Minister for Enlightenment and Propaganda, even if it did happen to be an unwanted pet. The birds wer
e a leftover from Joseph Goebbels’ magnificent Olympics party the previous year, when Peacock Island in the Wannsee had been turned into a fairy-tale playground for two thousand guests, filled with dancing and fireworks. Film stars, singers and all kinds of celebrities mingled with diplomats and high-ranking visitors. The papers had been full of it for days. After the balloons and the banners had been packed away some of the birds had ended up here, even though Frau Doktor Goebbels detested them. Their jewelled crowns and magnificent displays concealed a nasty temper, and the stillness of Schwanenwerder was constantly pierced by their raucous cries.

  Not that the neighbours would have dreamt of complaining. The Goebbels’ villa, at Inselstrasse 8, was in the most desirable position on this tiny, exclusive enclave. Though it was called an island, it was actually a peninsula, which stretched out from the Grunewald into the lake, connected by a single, narrow road. Surrounded on all sides by water, and wooded with oak, birch and pine, Schwanenwerder was only a few kilometres from the centre of Berlin, yet it might have been another country. It had been colonized a hundred years ago by the very wealthiest of Berlin’s society, the bankers, industrialists and department-store owners, who had competed among themselves to build the most tasteful, luxurious country houses and take advantage of Schwanenwerder’s restorative air. Since then, in the space of four years, a new élite had emerged to replace them. On the day Hitler came to power, Nazi stormtroopers flocked onto the island and raised the swastika flag on its water tower. Most of the homes were now occupied by senior party figures. Number eight had been bought by Goebbels at a price far beneath its genuine value from the chairman of the Deutsche Bank, who had been all too keen to sell before his enforced departure abroad. It had a panoramic view of the Greater Wannsee, extensive lawns running down to a boathouse and a garden ringed with oaks, pines and fruit trees.