Love by the Morning Star Read Online Free PDF Page B

couldn’t help but believe that Lady Liripip would be far less formidable than she appeared in her letter. Her parents would leave Germany in a few weeks without a hitch, and they would be together again, free of all danger. Why, in a few months Germany would probably come to its senses and a change of government would leave them free to go home again. Meanwhile, she was on holiday.
    So she told herself, and tried to believe it. Then the sun shifted, casting clear slanting light on the dewy grass, and each silver drop shone like shattered glass. She shivered, feeling a gimlet of panic prod through the assurance she’d wrapped around herself. Was it here too, in this idyllic spot? The hate and the pain and the fear?
    It couldn’t be, because here, suddenly, was music, lilting over the grounds, and where there was music those bad things could not exist. The past days of travel were the first she’d spent in her entire life without being constantly enveloped in song. There was always someone practicing at Der Teufel—comic songs, ballads of tragic love, wry and subtle political songs that hid their jabs in syncopation. Scales rose and fell in the background of her life as birdsong does for a country dweller. And Hannah herself was rarely without a tune, murmuring songs as she bustled through her work in that low contralto so startlingly at odds with her slight form. Among the things she had given up—family and home—was music. In addition to her cabaret performances, she’d been taking private lessons most of her life, and her teacher thought it might be time to collect on the favor the director of the Vienna Opera owed him and send his young protégée.
    She’d resigned herself to the loss of her career, because she told herself it was only a temporary loss. Even if she couldn’t go back to Germany, even if Austria never welcomed her, there was opera in England, wasn’t there? At worst she could take supporting roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas—they, along with Wodehouse, were her standard for interpreting the English. But it was only now that she realized how acutely she missed music in her everyday life. There had been no singing on the train, where she’d trembled at every stop and checkpoint. There had been no singing on the Channel crossing, during which she had been most humiliatingly ill. The refugee office had been all bustle and efficiency, everyone far too busy to pause for a song.
    Now, as the uplifted voice reached her ears, she felt she was breathing for the first time in days, and gasped it in eagerly. She saw him then, a strapping fellow a little older than she, with that typical floppy English hair, a shade or two darker than Lord Winkfield’s. He was pushing a wheelbarrow, belting out a song she’d never heard before but that she instantly wanted to steal and translate for Der Teufel.
    She was still puzzling out how she could change it to German, the impossibility of it making her mouth curl most becomingly, when the man parked his barrow at her feet.
    â€œYou’re the new maid?” he asked.
    It occurred to Hannah that either she’d missed some colloquialism in her mother’s English or expressions had changed since her mother had left the country. She knew women were called bird, chick, hen. It sounded so medieval to be called a maid, but if that was the slang of the day . . .
    â€œI am. I’ve just arrived.”
    He grinned at her. “I know. If you’d been here already you’d already be my girl.” He winked at her, and it was so like the backstage flirtation, which never meant a thing, that she felt instantly at home. “Just remember, I’ve called dibs. Why have a footman when you can have a gardener? Well, under-gardener.”
    â€œDoes that mean you just do the potatoes and bulbs and such?”
    â€œUnder-gardener for underground things! Oh, you’re a doozy, you are. And not