Page 22 of Hell to Pay
I paused, and Dr. Bauer said, “All of this is true, of course, but it establishes nothing.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “a glass of water.”
“Certainly,” Dr. Bauer said. “Or tea, possibly?” At my nod,she spoke briefly on the phone, then rang off and said, “Go on, if you feel able to.”
I said, “After Auguste’s death, Marie quickly remarried and eventually sold the parure—perhaps she needed the money, and perhaps her second husband was jealous of her first; who knows? People don’t change so very much, after all. From there, the parure passed on down.” I went on to detail the various royal marriages, culminating in my maternal grandmother’s to the Prince of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, “which was at that time, of course, part of the German Empire, though it now belongs to Denmark. My mother, Princess Alberta Victoria Alexandrina von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, received the parure upon her marriage to my father, the Crown Prince Anton August Georg von Sachsen. And that,” I finished as the tea arrived, “is how the parure came to Dresden.”
A few minutes during which a young woman handled the business of tea and then departed, and Dr. Bauer said, “What sort of documents have you? Marriage certificates, birth certificates …”
“None of that,” I said. My hands were trembling worse than ever now, the cup rattling against the saucer when I attempted to hold it, and I replaced it with reluctance. “The palace was bombed, as you know. We grabbed all we could after the first bombing, when it was clear the palace was burning, but when I left, afterwards, I …” Again with the shaking, and my vision was going a bit hazy, too.
“Oma,” Alix said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, willing the shaking to stop and being, as usual, unsuccessful. “I’m afraid I bumped my hip rather hard on the edge of the desk in my room in the night, and I’m a bit … If I can just sit quietly a minute, please.”
“Do you require medical attention?” Dr. Bauer now looked like she very much wished she’d brushed me off at the start.There was playing on sympathy, and then there was disrupting a person’s entire workday.
“No,” I said. “I’ve come too far not to keep going. Alix can …” I waved a hand at her. “Explain. The documents. The photos. Show her.”
Alix, of course, didn’t, or not exactly. She told Dr. Bauer, “I can sense your waves of skepticism from a mile away.” I could have told her that you didn’t speak to Germans that way, but I wasn’t feeling well enough. “But why would my grandmother lie? She’s not asking to take anything, not yet. She’s just asking tolook.”
“If there were any proof—” Dr. Bauer began.
“All right,” Alix said. “There’s clearly no DNA or anything like that, since my great-grandparents were apparently buried in a mass grave with most of the other 25,000 people who died here, so you can’t get it from the bones. At least we assume so, since I doubt anybody troubled to put them in a sarcophagus in the vault of the cathedral, right at the end of the war like that. I looked it up, and the internet says that my great-great-grandfather is the last one buried there. My grandmother, my mother, and I, though, are all hemophilia carriers, and obviously my great-grandmother and so on were also, all the way back to Queen Victoria, which was how we ended up with it. My grandmother had two brothers who died in infancy. Her parents’ marriage might have been happy, but it sure was unlucky. The hemophilia is a point in our favor. Not life-wise, but credibility-wise.”
“Not both in infancy,” I said. “August, the heir, was five. Very headstrong, I hear. He ran from his nurse and fell down the stairs. My parents nearly didn’t have me. They tried to avoid pregnancy, but as we know, that isn’t always possible, and when it happened again … well, they wavered. At last, though, my mother said, “Either way will hurt. Now or later, what’s the difference? And maybe this one won’t have it. We’ve had two who’ve been afflicted, yes, but surely that means this one won’t. Doesn’t he—she—deserve the chance? Don’t we?”
“Not how statistics work,” Alix put in. “Exactly the same chance every time. Fifty-fifty, for boys to have the disease and women to be carriers. Fifty-fifty every time.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said. “My father hesitated still. My mother was like Alix—not enough clotting factor to avoid difficulties in her daily life—and childbirth was dangerous for her, even more dangerous than an abortion. But my father loved her too much to deny her.”
“Surely they didn’t tell you all this.” The skepticism was written all over Dr. Bauer’s face now.
“No,” I said tiredly. “The servants. I overheard. One always overhears, especially when one is young and is believed to be unable to understand.” I flapped a hand at Alix. “Show her what we do have.”
Alix unzipped her rucksack, which was green and looked like military issue—Alix would be wearing Patagonia, not St. John, at ninety-four—and began pulling things out and piling them on the table in front of her. “The earrings,” she announced first. “The only piece of the parure we have left. Go on and open it. Diamonds and emeralds, as advertised.”
Silence as Dr. Bauer opened the faded purple velvet pouch and tipped the contents into her cupped hand. Two identical diamond flowers with an emerald at the center of each, a chain of diamonds, and a huge, flawless teardrop of an emerald, matched perfectly to its twin. The most humble piece of the parure.
Ashleigh said, “Holy shit.”
“Next,” Alix said, handing it over, “a photo of my great-great-grandparents on their wedding day. My great-great-grandmother—Oma’s grandmother—is wearing the parure. Tiara, necklace, earrings, brooch, check. Oma’s had thispicture on her dressing-table as long as I’ve been alive, if that means anything. He was some big cheese in the Army, I guess—look at all those medals.”
I waved a languid hand. “Princes and kings did tend to get medals in those days. But I understand he was gallant. He will have had to be in order to lead.”
“Third,” Alix said. “A photo of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather ontheirwedding day. She’s wearing the parure, as you see, and he has medals too. I hear he earned those the hard way.”
Dr. Bauer’s face registered shock. “The King was burned,” she said, almost to herself. “I’ve never seen a photo of him taken after the first war.”
“And now you know why,” I said. “His right arm and hand were useless, though you can’t see that in the photo, and his chest badly burned as well. He suffered greatly, and his health was never good afterwards.”
“Whoa,” Ben said, picking up the photo once Dr. Bauer set it down. “He’s, like, horror-movie stuff. His face looks melted, and he doesn’t have any hair on that side. The eye patch—I guess he lost his eye, too, huh?”
“He was a great man,” I said. “And a flying ace who shot down seventeen enemy planes. His plane was on fire, but he waited to parachute out until he was clear of a populated area. That’s why he was so badly burned.”
“And here are the documents wedohave,” Alix said. “My grandmother’s originalKennkarte—her identity card, giving her full name and title. The replacementKennkarte,for Daisy Glücksburg, and her U.S. passport and marriage license. That’s it. That’s what we have.”
Dr. Bauer picked them up and studied each in turn, then set them down, folded her hands one on top of the other, and asked, “Why did she change her name?”
