Page 27 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Let’s go,” she said.

To reach hernana’s house Anne didn’t have to cross the town centre but even so the night echoed with cries, and ran to the tempo of racing feet, and above all of this the sound of breaking glass shattered every lull.

Anne reasoned that if she could hear the mobs even here among theresidential streets, far away from the high street, it must be mayhem where the Jewish-owned businesses clustered. And there was no doubt in her mind that this attack—this madness that had turned neighbours into enemies—was directed at the Jews.

Somehow over the course of this one night a tipping point had been passed. The single stones had become many. The hostility on the street that had started as slights, and had progressed into name-calling and threats, was now violence: a wilful open violence that would chase you into your home and beat you to death.

Twice, Anne saw crowds outside the homes of people she knew from the synagogue. The windows of the Lucas family’s house had been broken and the curtains had become caught on lingering shards of glass. As a child, Anne had been there to play with their daughter, Miriam.

She pulled back in the alley by the furniture factory, and with a nearly synchronized tramp, tramp, tramp of boots a dozen brownshirts hurried past. Anne had no expectation that they were in town to keep the peace. They were here to incite the chaos.

Anne led the way across Neustift Strasse in the militia’s wake, pulling a growling Kerrol into the shadows as a truck rattled by, headlights blazing.

“He’s intrigued by the manner of its locomotion,” Yute explained. “I myself am—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Anne snapped, fear displacing her manners. “We can’t be seen.”

She advanced at greater speed now, wanting to minimize the time they were exposed. So many people were hurrying towards the riot or whatever it was that three more breaking into a run wouldn’t draw too much interest.

They crossed Maltsergarten by starlight, slowing so that Anne could catch her breath. Yute too was puffing and blowing—worse than she was, if anything. Kerrol seemed utterly unaffected, though he did keep pressing a hand to his left shoulder as if it troubled him.

“That’s the library.” Anne waved an arm at the large, two-storey building.

Yute and Kerrol showed no signs of abandoning her to the night, though whatever strange book-related interests had brought them to Amberg, itseemed they were now on hold until Anne was delivered into her family’s keeping.

They threaded through the backstreets until at last Anne turned onto the road on which Nana Hoffman’s house stood, a well-heeled neighbourhood, not the finest the town had to offer but close.

Anne’s growing confidence became in an instant an empty hole inside her, devouring her strength and making her feet falter. The quiet residential street on which one might expect to see at most a handful of people after dark, and more likely none, tonight held a crowd.

Many of Nana Hoffman’s neighbours had left their homes to stand at their gates and jeer like jackals as Cousin Daniel was brought out through the front door by a pair of brownshirts. Other stormtroopers stood in the street with the lit torches of a military parade, the flames delineating a path to a waiting lorry.

Uncle Walter followed, similarly manhandled. When he turned as if he’d forgotten something, one of the men shoved him roughly and he fell to the ground. They hauled him up like a sack of grain and, even at this distance, Anne could see he’d lost his glasses.

Somehow the torchlight felt appropriate. As if the world she knew, a world of electricity and radio waves and modern medicines, had given way to something from a previous century, enlightenment abandoned in favour of the basest desire to persecute, to wound, and to burn.

It wasn’t until Kerrol’s hand closed around her arm that she realised she was walking towards the scene. “I have to—”

Kerrol’s rumble cut across her.

As the stormtroopers pushed Anne’s uncle into the back of the lorry, the torchlight afforded her a glimpse of men crowded inside, and briefly—so briefly that she might persuade part of her mind she had imagined it—she saw her grandfather’s grey head.

Kerrol’s hand, whichhad sealed away her scream almost as it emerged, remained in place until well after he had carried her, at remarkable pace, several streets away.

Yute came puffing up behind them, favouring one leg noticeably.

He held up a white hand in the darkness as Anne struggled to free herself from Kerrol’s grip.

“I must apologize.” Yute hauled in a breath. “It was never our intention to deprive you of your liberty.” Another deep breath, calming now. “But, for the kindness you’ve shown us, it was necessary to give you a moment to think.” He nodded to Kerrol, who released Anne. “I’ve lived many more years than you might imagine from my appearance. And although I am a stranger here, I know about mankind. Like many other species, in the grip of the moment, absolved of responsibility by society, they will commit horrors.”

“I’m going back,” Anne said.

Yute inclined his head regretfully. “They appear to have taken males from your family. I assume the females remain within the house. I advise you to seek shelter with your matriarch.”

Kerrol turned his dark eyes on her, just gleams in the moonlight, and rumbled out something, a full sentence.

“Kerrol says that your intervention will not stop your grandfather and the others being taken.” More growls. A narrowing of those non-human eyes. “But in such times, on such nights, the unfortunate truth is often that those most at risk are young females. If you put yourself in danger, you will achieve nothing, hurt yourself, and hurt your family. This is the harsh reality, no matter how honourable your intentions.”

“And what,” asked Anne, making no effort to keep the anger from her voice, “would Kerrol do in my position?” She was enraged that he’d laid hands on her, furious with the mob outside her nana’s house, and perhaps angriest of all that he was right, and that the world held nothing even close to justice in it.

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