Page 62 of The Girl with a Secret
“Perhaps,” she said quietly, “this changes your opinion of me.”
Peter shook his head slowly, the look on his face despairing. “Rosa…” he began, and then stopped. She waited. “I love you,” he said helplessly. “I still love you, even knowing what you just told me, and hating that. And yet…” He swallowed. “I must admit, it is something I find very difficult to excuse.”
“Not excuse, perhaps,” she returned softly. “Butunderstand, at least a little? Or… forgive?”
“I…” He shook his head, and her heart wilted within her.
She knew she couldn’t regret being honest, and yet at what cost? It felt far higher a price than she’d ever wanted to pay, and she still had to face Ernst himself.
“The SS,” he burst out, almost angrily. “Whatever you say, whatever you’ve let yourself believe… they weremonsters, Rosa. Monsters! Brutal thugs who enjoyed torture, violence… The man who stamped on my fingers had a look of uttergleeon his face when he did it. And at Dachau… there were women prisoners there, you know. Not many, but they were… brutalized.Raped. There was an SS training school attached to the camp, the men used to come and take their pick, as if they were choosing a chicken for their dinner. We wereanimalsto them, Rosa, just dumb animals…” He trailed off, shaking his head again, looking near tears.
Rosa found she, too, was near tears. When he said all of that, she hated herself all over again. How could she have convinced herself she’d loved Ernst? And yet she had. “I know I can’t excuse it,” she whispered. “But, Peter, I didn’t know any of that sort of brutality at the time. How could I? And Ernst… to me,he was just a handsome man who paid me attention. I let my head and heart be turned, I admit it. I’m sorry, Peter. I’m truly sorry.” She looked down at the ground, blinking back the tears that filmed her eyes. What more could she say?
He let out a shuddering breath and raked his hands through his hair. “I do understand that,” he told her after a moment, sounding more composed. “I do. And I accept you were young, as you said. I just… find it hard.”
“I know.” She glanced up at him, hope warring with fear.Hard, or impossible?“I should have told you before,” she said. “I know I should have. I always meant to, yet the moment never seemed to come. I suppose I didn’t want it to. But I knew I couldn’t let things go any farther between us without you knowing. I suppose it changes things now.” She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat. That Peter would reject her, just because of Ernst! It felt dreadfully unfair, and yet Rosa knew she’d been expecting it all along. She found she couldn’t begrudge him for it.
“It shouldn’t change things between us,” Peter replied after a moment. “I know it shouldn’t.” He lapsed into silence, and Rosa wondered what he wasn’t saying.Yet it still did? “Oh, Rosa,” he said on something of a groan, and then he took her into his arms.
Rosa went willingly, wrapping her arms around his neck as his lips found hers, soft and sweet and yet he kissed her in a way that felt desperate, an ending rather than a beginning.
He broke off, looking anguished. “I’m sorry…”
Rosa didn’t know what he was sorry for—the kiss, or the relationship they could now no longer have, or something else entirely—because he thrust her away from him, shaking his head as he walked away, leaving her alone in the park.
CHAPTER 25
Two days later, Rosa found herself staring at her wide-eyed reflection in the mirror of the ladies’ room at the 400 Club in Leicester Square. Her lips were blood-red with lipstick, her cheeks pale, save for two hectic spots of color. Her hair had been styled into an elegant chignon, and she was wearing an evening dress in midnight-blue satin that was demure enough in the front, but draped shockingly low at the back, its whispering folds of fabric brushing her tailbone.
Over the last two days, she’d been drilled in her own fabricated history—working as a typist for a law firm in London, living with two other typists in Kensington, her parents still in Belsize Park. They’d scrubbed her German Jewishness from her, Rosa had reflected, and tried to turn her into a goodtime British girl; she had no idea if the ruse would work.
Despite the preparation she’d been given, she could not imagine what she would say to Ernst when she saw him. She was afraid of her own reaction, that she’d give herself away before she’d even begun… and also, more treacherously, that she’d feel something she didn’t want to feel.
“He’s here.” The severe-looking woman who had been assigned as her handler appeared in the doorway of the ladies’ room. “It’s time to go.”
Wordlessly, Rosa nodded. She’d memorized and rehearsed her part in this charade well enough, but now that it was real, she felt faint and sick. She couldn’t do it, she justcouldn’t…
She wondered if Peter somehow knew about this little drama, and decided that he couldn’t possibly. Taken off her usual duties and busy with this new operation, she sadly hadn’t had the chance to see him since he’d told her he loved her but acted as if he no longer did. Rosa had been too much in shock by the prospect of seeing Ernst again to feel truly heartbroken, but she knew the emotion was there, underneath the nerves, waiting to surge up and overwhelm her when this episode was over.
“Quickly!” the woman said, and Rosa, her heart beating hard, turned from the mirror.
Outside the ladies’ room, she straightened, throwing her shoulders back, lifting her chin, as crowds circulated around her, chatting and laughing, drinking and dancing. For a second, she felt almost as if she were back on theSt Louis, staring out at the sea all the way to the horizon, summoning the strength to envisage her new life, dizzy with both possibility and fear of the unknown.
She’d come full circle now, she thought, facing Ernst, and maybe there was something good and right about that. She could do this, Rosa realized with a ripple of relief, a frisson of something almost like joy. She could do this because this was what needed to be done to win the war, and end Hitler’s evil forever, and in doing so she would find her own absolution.
“He’s there,” the woman hissed behind her. “Go.”
As elegantly as a cruise liner slipping into the sea, Rosa strolled across the floor of the club. An eighteen-piece orchestra was playing a slow, slumberous number, the perfect soundtrackfor her assured, hip-rolling amble. She saw Ernst before he saw her, and for a second, no more, she checked her stride, before she made herself keep walking.
There were two other prisoners with him, looking around in wary wonder and dressed in plain suits, accompanied by several British officers, but they all faded away as Rosa gazed at Ernst, her heart feeling as if it had hollowed out, everything in her emptying.
He looked just the same, she thought with an ache, and yet entirely different. He still had his blond hair swept away from his forehead, his pale blue eyes as piercing as ever, but he looked…diminished, somehow. Defeated, even, with the slight slump of his broad shoulders. The expression on his face was wondering, a little lost. What had he thought of his tour of London, avoiding all the bombed-out buildings and rubble? Had he been impressed? Shaken? And what did he think now, of all the well-heeled people in one of London’s premier clubs, dancing and drinking the night away as if they hadn’t a care in the world?
She took a deep breath, threw her shoulders back a little more, and kept walking.
She’d almost reached the bar when she heard his sharp intake of breath, the incredulous note in his voice. “Rosa…?”
Rosa turned, eyebrows raised as she did a theatrical double-take, one hand pressed to her chest. “Ernst… dear heaven,Ernst.” She took a step toward him, and then checked herself, giving an embarrassed little laugh. “My goodness… but… what onearthare you doing here?”
