Beneath a Starless Sky
About the Author
TESSA HARRIS read History at Oxford University and has been a journalist, writing for several national newspapers and magazines for more than thirty years. She is the author of nine published historical novels. Her debut, The Anatomist’s Apprentice, won the Romantic Times First Best Mystery Award 2012 in the US. She lectures in creative writing at Hawkwood College, Stroud and is married with two children. She lives in the Cotswolds.
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Beneath a Starless Sky
TESSA HARRIS
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Tessa Harris 2020
Tessa Harris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008400378
E-book Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008400361
Version: 2020-11-18
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Munich, Germany 1940
Ten years earlier
Chapter 1: Munich, Germany 1930
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23: New York, America 1933
Chapter 24: Côte d’Azur, France 1934
Chapter 25
Chapter 26: Munich, Germany
Chapter 27: London, England
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30: Hollywood, America
Chapter 31: Henley-on-Thames, England 1935
Chapter 32: Hollywood, America
Chapter 33: Henley-on-Thames, England
Chapter 34: London, England
Chapter 35: Henley-on-Thames, England
Chapter 36: Fort Belvedere, Windsor Great Park
Chapter 37: London, England
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40: London, England
Chapter 41: 1936
Chapter 42
Chapter 43: 1937
Chapter 44: Munich, Germany
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50: The Berghof, Austria
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53: London, England
Chapter 54: 1938
Chapter 55
Chapter 56: 1939
Chapter 57: 1940
Chapter 58: Paris, France
Chapter 59: Munich, Germany
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64: Lisbon, Portugal
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Forty years later
Chapter 68: Petworth, England
Chapter 69
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Dear Reader …
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For Catherine, with thanks and love
‘… Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.’
Martin Luther King Jr.
Prologue
Munich, Germany
1940
Tilting her silver head towards the gramophone player, the old woman listened to the shellac seventy-eight crackle into life. As the needle scoured out the music, Fred Astaire’s voice rose, crooning from the grooves. Dancing in the dark, dah dah dah dah dah …
A smile twitched her lips. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t understand the foreign lyrics. Fred Astaire, in his white tie and tails, would scoop her up in his arms and whirl away all her thoughts of despair.
Outside, the city slept under curfew. The only distant sound came from armoured trucks and lorries that rumbled relentlessly along the main highway, taking men and machines to war. Inside, in her dark and damp apartment, its windows blacked out, the old woman was left rocking in her one remaining chair. All the others had been burned in the kachelofen, the huge, green tiled stove in the corner.
Dancing in the dark, dah dah … The song was a welcome distraction from contemplating her own mortality. It made her think of her daughter. Of happier times. Lilli had given her reason to hope; slipping out of Munich unremarked by the authorities just two days before, she’d left behind the travel papers for her and her granddaughter. The plan was to escape to Switzerland with the little girl, asleep now in the next room. They would both be safe there – safer – until Lilli returned. But nothing seemed to go to plan in war.
When the music’s blue notes made the melancholy return, the old woman stroked the black cat on her knee. It was better fed than her.
Starvation could be the possible cause of her death, and if not starvation the cold – if she made it to winter. Or, of course, she might even catch diphtheria from her little granddaughter. That was the most likely cause at the moment. The child had been suffering for several days, although her fever had broken a while back and there were signs of improvement, she still remained weak. Now, however, the old woman herself was feeling a little flushed, her throat was sore and her old bones ached even more than usual.
There was, of course, another way she could meet her end, although she constantly tried to push it out of her mind. They could come for her. Some of her friends had already gone and she doubted she would ever see them again. When faced with the thought of either starvation or hypothermia, diphtheria seemed much more preferable. Dying in a camp would be the worst, but however death came, she prayed it would be quick.
As it happened the old woman was spared the indignities of nearby Dachau and at least her end, when it came, was swift, if rather brutal. She was fortunate, too, in that she was alerted to her executioners’ approach before she actually saw them.
When they came that evening, their heavy tread echoing up the stairwell and their thick voices bouncing off the walls, she would not have heard them over Astaire’s serenade at first. But the cat did. It heeded them all right and leapt off her knee. In the few seconds between being alerted to her killers’ advance and their knock, the old woman knew exactly what she had to do.
Scrambling into the bedroom as fast as her creaking legs would carry her, she lifted the child from the bed where she slept. In the bathroom there was a small chest where towels and sheets were kept. She laid the little girl on one then covered her loosely with the rest.
The pounding fists and the shouts that followed a second later were momentarily silenced as, nervously, the old woman opened the door. When she saw the four of them – an army officer and his three soldiers – standing there, smelling of leather and gun metal, she tried to swallow down her fear, but it caught hold of her throat and snagged her voice.
‘Yes, sir? How can I help you?’ she asked, feigning innocence, as if she had no idea what could possibly have brought these men to her door.
The officer was short and stocky with a long, raised scar on his face, as if someone had drawn a line in pencil from his left cheekbone to his jaw. Another smaller one marked his chin. His eyes were obscured by the peak of his cap when he spoke.
‘Where is she?’
‘Who?’
‘You know who, you old Jew. Search the apartment,’ he ordered.
His men stormed in. They split up: each stomping into a room. The old woman could hear wardrobe doors opening and slamming, drawers flung to the floor, china smashing on the tiles. As if my daughter will be hiding in a vase, she thought to herself.
While his men were wreaking havoc in the other rooms, the officer’s eye was caught by the gramophone player. The disc was crackling incessantly as it pirouetted on the turntable. Stalking over to it, he lifted the stylus and grabbed the record to read the label. The old woman remained still, watching the fury march across his face. Suddenly he jack-knifed his leg and cracked the disc in two across his knee, cursing loudly.
‘Fred Astaire!’ he cried, flinging the shards to the floor. ‘Records are verboten!’
One by one the soldiers returned from their forays shaking their heads. Again, the officer narrowed his eyes. ‘You have one more chance. Where is she?’
The old woman also shook her head. ‘I don’t know who you mean,’ she replied.
Without a word, the officer reached into his holster and pulled out his Luger. An image of the old woman’s daughter filled his vision. He’d always wanted to possess Lilli Sternberg ever since he’d first set eyes on her all those years ago. There’d been something maddeningly mesmerising about her. She’d driven him frantic with desire, yet whenever he’d come within reach of her, she’d slipped his grasp. Once again, the intelligence had come through too late. She’d be in Lisbon by now. With the former King of England and his American wife. If he couldn’t have what he wanted, her mother must pay. Even before the old woman had time to react, he pulled the trigger. An ear-splitting crack filled the space between them. His victim clutched her chest, made an odd gurgling sound and fell. Death did, indeed, come swiftly for her, as she had hoped.
The silence that followed the shot didn’t last long. It was pricked by a needle of a cry coming from one of the rooms.
‘What was that?’ growled the officer.
His men froze, their heads switching involuntarily towards the thread of high-pitched sound. Without warning the door from the bathroom was opened by some unseen force. Hands were clamped around rifles on high alert until, from out of the room, dashed a black cat. It leapt over the crumpled body that lay on the threshold without stopping to sniff the pooling blood, and darted straight past the soldiers and down the stairs.
The officer cleared his throat, re-inserted his Luger into its holster and tugged at his jacket. As he worked his jaw in silent rage, he cast a final glance around the room. What the old woman had said was true. Her daughter wasn’t there. His bird had already flown. In his gut he had known it before he came to the apartment looking for her and shot her mother instead. Lilli Sternberg was long gone.
Chapter 1
Munich, Germany
1930
Smoke. Not just the smoke from a stove. It tingled in her nostrils. This smoke smelled different. Acrid. Harsh. Lilli Sternberg’s quickening heart sounded an alarm as she rounded the corner into Untere Grasstrasse. When she lifted her gaze to the rooftops, she saw the sparks of a thousand fireworks join the stars to fill the black sky.
Fire. Suddenly cries cut through the cold air and a man careered past her at high speed. Before she could move out of the way, he clipped her shoulder and sent her spinning. She staggered back against a wall. Shaking the shock from her head she heard someone nearby shout a warning and she looked up just in time to see a blazing beam hurtling towards her. There was no time to react. It crashed to the ground just a few metres away. She screamed. And then she saw more flames.
‘Get back! Get back!’ yelled a fireman.
‘My father. The tailor’s shop! Is it …?’ But her cries were lost in the confusion.
At least two shops along the street were alight, tongues of orange flame licking clean the bones of the bunched-up buildings lining the narrow street. There may have been more ablaze, but the firemen were keeping onlookers well back. Just before her way was barred, Lilli thought she could make out a few men forming a human chain along the street. They were passing buckets from the water hydrant at the end of the row.
The heat was starting to sting her hands and face. She decided to retreat, narrowly avoiding the shower of molten sparks exploding across the cobbles. The roar of the blaze filled her ears and the thick smoke seemed to suck the breath from her lungs, making her cough.
The flames had already risen to the upper floors. Shattered glass from windows carpeted the narrow road below. A fire engine blocked the street and a solitary jet of water arced up through panes, dampening down the blaze and making it hiss in protest. Lilli could tell some of the adjoining shops were beyond saving. Was her father’s workshop one of them?
Lilli felt her legs melt beneath her. Already exhausted from hours of rehearsals with Madame Eva at the Académie de Danse, her feet were badly blistered, too. But she knew she needed to return home as fast as she could. She was worried about her father. What if he was inside his shop when the fire started?
An icy blast whipped around her legs and ripped through her lungs like a knife as she ran. Despite her pain, she struggled through the back streets of Geising, stopping now and again to catch her breath and swallow down the agony in her feet.
Past the old doors plastered in posters and the boarded-up shops she went until she came to the run-down apartment block she called home. The stairs up to the fourth floor seemed even steeper than usual. The shock of what she’d just seen weighed her down. She felt sick with worry with each step that she took. What if her father had been stitching with the sewing machine? He wouldn’t have heard the crackling flames. He had a cold, too. It would have taken him longer to smell the smoke. For the first time in ages she found herself praying to a god she didn’t believe existed. Please, let him be safe.
As she reached the first landing something darted out in front of her. She veered to avoid it, only to realise it was Felix, the block’s black cat.
Just then a child’s voice called down. ‘Well, if it isn’t the movie star!’ A small face squeezed between the spindles of the staircase. ‘Did you know your vati’s shop is on fire?’
It was Anna Kepler, the dentist’s daughter, an eight-year-old who often spied on people on the stairs. Her teeth were held back by steel braces. Lilli only wished her tongue could be. Angrily, she powered up the last remaining flights of steps, barging past the girl, cursing under her breath to burst into the apartment, gulping for air.
‘Vati! Is he here?’
Her mother, Golda, was sitting hunched on the threadbare sofa. Wrapped in a shawl, she was cradling a cup of coffee in both hands.
‘Oh Lilli!’ cried Golda. ‘Praise be!’ A plump hand reached out to grasp her daughter’s. Lilli rushed to take it, the room filling with the stench of acrid smoke in her wake.
Their neighbour, Frau Grundig, the one Lilli called the Ram because she wore her braids coiled around her ears, was by her mother’s side.
‘At last!’ cried the Ram. ‘It was a good of you to turn up,’ she mumbled sarcastically. She disapproved of Lilli, suspecting her of fooling with boys when she told her parents she was at the academy.
‘I’m sorry, Mutti, rehearsals ran late and Madame Eva …’
‘Madame Eva! Madame Eva!’ mimicked the Ram.
Ignoring Frau Grundig’s taunts, Lilli turned to her mother. ‘Vati! The fire! Where’s Vati?’ she croaked.
‘He’s safe, praise be,’ replied Golda, raising her eyes heavenwards. ‘The Almighty took care of him.’
Golda was a heavy woman, with large, dark features. Like a sturdy piece of mahogany furniture, her frame was thick and serviceable. She moved in a cloud of resignation. Fire, flood or famine: because she believed they were God’s will, she accepted them all without complaint. Her daughter did not.
‘I came as soon as I could but …’ The words still struggled to escape Lilli’s gritty throat. She was careful to avoid the Ram’s gaze as she spoke. It was true that she’d been kept late rehearsing Giselle. She’d been chosen to dance the leading role in this year’s gala performance. But if her parents ever found out she also worked as an usherette at the cinema after classes some evenings, she’d be in deep trouble.
‘Where is he?’ Lilli asked, her dark eyes searching the room.
‘Seeing what the Almighty will let him save,’ replied Golda with a shrug.
Leon, Lilli’s younger brother, sat by the kachelofen in the corner, feeding logs to the hungry giant stove. He was four years younger than her, but he had the mind of an adult. He said little, but thought a lot, preferring to bury his dark head in books rather than play sport. Up until then he had been content to watch events unfold, but he suddenly broke his silence.
‘You put too much faith in the Almighty, Mutti,’ he told his mother, finally prising himself away from the big stove.
‘Leon!’ Frau Grundig took it upon herself to scold him, too. ‘If he were my son …’ she began, but she was childless and everyone else’s child, it seemed to her, behaved badly.
Golda lurched forward in her chair. ‘Leon! Wash your mouth out with soap and water!’ she cried.
Leon skulked across the room, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his eyes cast down. Golda slumped back into her seat, shaking her head as she watched her son leave.
‘He’s angry,’ she muttered on a long sigh.
Lilli agreed. She looked on politics as something that happened to other people, like being run over by a bus. Leon, on the other hand, thought all his family’s problems were caused by politicians, who stirred up hatred against them. Her brother would not act. Not now at any rate, but Lilli feared that the day would soon come when he and his synagogue friends would do something foolish.
‘The people who did this …’ Golda carried on, staring into her coffee.
‘People?’ butted in the Ram. ‘You think the fire was started deliberately?’ Frau Grundig leaned forward, her ample bosom bulging over the top of her old-fashioned dirndl. A scandalised look puffed out her face. ‘How do you know?’
Golda shot a savvy glance at Lilli before she replied. ‘We can’t say for sure but …’
‘I’m afraid we can,’ came a voice from the doorway. Jacob Sternberg stood bowed on the threshold, covered in soot. For an instant he reminded Lilli of the actor in the new American talkie The Jazz Singer, whose face was painted black. Her father gave a resigned shrug.
‘A star with the word “Juden” was daubed on my shop door the other day,’ he told them.
‘Oh!’ Frau Grundig’s hands flew up to her face in an exaggerated show of empathy. ‘Who could do such a thing?’ she asked disingenuously. She knew as well as her neighbour about the recent spate of arson attacks on Jewish premises.
Golda stemmed her tears. Lilli could tell her mother wanted to cry, but, as ever, her pride ensured she did not. ‘The usual thugs, with nothing better to do, I suppose,’ was all she would say.
‘The fire service was already there when I arrived,’ Jacob told his small audience. ‘They did their best, but …’ His voice trailed off in defeat.
‘They have their work cut out tonight,’ butted in Herr Kepler. He was the dentist from the third floor. He stepped into the apartment uninvited, an unlit pipe clenched between his uneven teeth.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jacob, wiping the soot from his spectacles with a handkerchief.
‘The synagogue is ablaze, too.’
‘How can this be?’ asked the diminutive Frau Kepler. She’d followed behind her husband, making the sign of the cross as she spoke.
An annoyed Frau Reuter piled in, too, with one of her four small children on her hip. All the commotion had apparently woken her little ones.
Despite the difficult circumstances, Golda suddenly remembered her duty to her visitors. ‘You will take coffee?’ she asked the Keplers and Frau Reuter.
‘My children have been woken up,’ Frau Reuter replied testily, jiggling her infant on her hip, as if it was patently obvious she did not have time for a coffee.
Before the others could answer, however, the sound of heavy footsteps echoing up the stairwell brought a halt to the conversation. Lilli was only relieved that Leon was out of the room when the door was flung wide. Herr Backe, in his brown storm trooper’s uniform, a swastika band on his left arm, paused on the threshold to survey the gathering. For a moment there was an uneasy silence. None of the residents liked the lodger who shared the Sternbergs’ apartment.
‘Sieg heil!’ he barked suddenly, raising his right arm in an abrupt salute. An arc of spittle went flying through the air.
A few months ago, the gesture had made Lilli giggle. Now she and her mother swapped uneasy glances. He was as a cuckoo in the nest and a buffoon, but, as her father pointed out, he was the one whose rent money was putting much-needed bread on their table. They were wary of him and his ways, but they put up with him. Only Herr Kepler responded with a half-hearted salute that was more of an embarrassed wave. The others bobbed their heads in reply.
‘Herr Backe,’ acknowledged Jacob.
By day Hans Backe was a bank clerk, but by night, after attending one of his weekly National Socialist Party meetings, he seemed to transform into someone quite loathsome.
‘Frau Sternberg. Herr Sternberg.’ The lodger returned the greeting before pivoting on his heels towards his room. His uniform made him look bigger than his cheap clerk’s suit did, thought Lilli. She hated him.
Everyone waited for the sound of the door to click shut, but the damage was done. The unwelcome interruption seemed to bring the gathering to an early close, as if a shadow had just passed over the room. No one knew what to say – not safely – so the Keplers, Frau Grundig and Frau Reuter just smiled politely, and did what any good German citizen would do. They bid the Sternbergs ‘Guten Nacht’ and left.