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“Did I hear correctly?” Mamie said.

Johanna nodded. “My husband has been reassigned because he failed in his duties, which means Astrid and I are being sent back to Berlin.”

Fabienne looked to Mamie. Johanna leaving was only one part of the problem. “You know what else this means?”

Mamie took a sip from her glass. “There will be a new kommandant.”

Fabienne inhaled deeply. She wouldn’t work for a third. “Yes.”

Johanna was still shaking her head. “I hadn’t thought about that. Oh my God!”

“I don’t think I can cope with a third one,” Mamie said. “With the way things are going, I wouldn’t expect the next kommandant to show any kindness. This is not good news.”

“We won’t have to,” Fabienne said. She drank the brandy. Solving Johanna’s problem was easy to do in principle; avoiding a third kommandant was a different matter altogether.

Johanna hugged herself, rocking in the chair. “I can’t leave. I don’t want to go back to Berlin. God, I don’t even think I want to be German anymore. Please, Fabienne, help us.”

No matter which way Fabienne thought about it, she kept coming back to the same solution. “There’s only one way you can stay.”

Johanna grabbed her arm. “What is it? I’ll do it. Anything.”

Johanna’s desperation mirrored her own and Mamie’s. “They have to think you and Astrid are dead.”

Johanna released her with a look of disappointment, shaking her head. She flung her arms in the air. “How are we supposed to do that with Nanny and Schmidt watching us?”

“It doesn’t solve the problem of a third kommandant either,” Mamie said.

Fabienne looked to Mamie. “We have to burn down the house, and they have to think Johanna and Astrid are in it,” she said. She’d sounded more casual than she felt. The house had been in their family for generations, and technically it was Mamie’s decision.

“No. You can’t do that. It’s your home.”

Johanna’s objection fell on deaf ears as Fabienne waited on Mamie’s response.

Mamie smiled at her, raised her glass in a toast, and drank. “We will burn the house down and everything in it, then no one can move in.”

Relief flooded Fabienne. She nodded to Mamie and sipped her drink.

“But you will have nothing.” Johanna was looking from one Brun to another, wide eyed.

Fabienne knelt in front of her and held her hands. “We will have each other, and that is the most important thing. Now we need to come up with a plan.”

34.

JOHANNA HAD WATCHED GERHARD leave without her heart missing a beat. On the contrary, she’d been able to breathe easily for the first time since she’d arrived at the house, and felt almost giddy with excitement for the coming week.

Yesterday, news had arrived in the town about the US troops taking a hold on Normandy. There was a new energy, a rise in optimism, though it was still too much to believe that the war would end any time soon. The allies were advancing at a pace everyone had said, though the German tanks and trucks still passed by on the main road in their hundreds.

Today, everything would change.

This day would mark the end of her old life and the start of a new one.

She tucked the photo of Ralf in the valise between two dresses and closed the lid. She set the case on her bed and went downstairs. Astrid was in the garden with Nanny. Hauptmann Schmidt was packing up their things, working methodically room by room. He had started to store boxes in the foyer ready for collection on their departure in two days’ time. She looked upon them as she walked past and felt nothing.

She ran her hand across the closed lid of the piano with a heavy heart. It would be impossible to save it, though she wished they could. In the end, it had not only been her saviour but also the protector of the children in the cellar. She gazed around the empty walls, thankful not to see either their fathers or Hitler staring back at her, though she would be pleased to watch them all burn to the ground.

Fabienne greeted her with a warm smile as she entered the kitchen. “Madame Guillaume is expecting the girls at the schoolmaster’s house after dinner. She is the woman who took in the boy with the baby we rescued, and they are both doing well. I trust her; she will take good care of the girls. Mamie will drive them over there and then she will come back to the cottage.”

Johanna lit a cigarette and took a long draw.