Foote’s shovel scraped the blanket. “There she is.”
They continued with their shovels, but a putrid scent escaped the folds of the blanket, gagging me, and I had to climb out of the pit and watch them work.
Foote wore overalls and a watch cap. He was about forty years old, but his face was prematurely creased and sagging, perhaps from the nature of his work. Bartholemew wore a suit shiny with age and a key chain across his stomach. He had left a black leather bag containing his tools and an apron at the side of the pit.
As they lifted her from the ground, Bartholemew reassured me, “She’s been here only a month. Even for an amateur like you, this won’t be too bad.”
He was wrong. They carried her body to the manor house.
The pathologist said, “With her dead four weeks, I won’t need a blood gutter around the table. Let’s use the dining table.”
She was laid out and unwrapped. I saw her hair, glistening as it always had, but when my eyes moved to her face, I had to look away and grab the table edge for support.
Bartholemew pulled a pair of gloves and several tools from his bag. He wrapped the apron strings around his waist and tied them in front.
He passed me his notebook. “You take notes, Colonel.”
I did, with a trembling hand.
He cut away her clothes, then said, “Desecrated muscles and deteriorated skin indicate death occurred about a month ago, as believed. Her joints are intact. There is considerable abdominal viscera rotting, with its odor.”
I was embarrassed for her, lying on her table, stripped of her clothes, shed of all the careful constructs of her life, her dignity, even her humanity.
Bartholemew said, “She had a both-bone fracture of her right arm. The radius and ulna are virtually severed by an impact that pierced the skin. Her right clavicle has also been fractured.”
He poked and peeled for a few more moments. I gradually discovered that I could watch this morbid process. The memory of Lady Anne became disassociated from the mound of decomposing flesh and bones on the table.
I asked, “Would those injuries have killed her?”
“Yes, if she received no care.”
Then I asked the question for which I had exhumed her. “Did she die before she received those wounds?”
He replied, “Any break produces a blood collection called a fracture hematoma. The blood clots, then the cells turn into a fibrous clot, a tannish, sticky substance like glue. The body deposits calcium there to repair the break. No evidence of that here.”
I took notes.
Bartholemew continued, “And a fracture tears periosteum off the bone. Had she been alive when these breaks occurred, there would be blood around the fracture ends.”
I looked up from the pad.
He concluded, “There is no blood. Her circulation was well stopped when her body received this trauma. She died of something other than these fractures, something other than the explosion that tossed her study and knocked her off the chair, something other than the falling beam, which may have hit her.”
Then I knew how she died.
Lady Anne had been sitting at her desk at five o’clock that afternoon, May 31, 1942, the fourth day of the invasion. I had come to understand her sense of herself, and she may have had the windows open as a dare and an invitation. There were several books about the room, so she may have been reading, or she may have been writing the letter to General Clay.
As Foote told me, “She was dressed for evening when I found her, just like you see her clothes on this table. Ready for the ball. Black dress and pearls. I didn’t even remove her earrings. Too busy.”
There she sat at her desk, braced by her ineffable calm and steely purpose, when the invisible cloud drifted in through her windows. She inhaled the poison several times and silently slumped forward onto her desk.
That is how I think of it, out of newly found respect for her memory. But Haldon House had been enveloped by the nerve gas tabun, and her death more probably involved vomiting, involuntary defecation and urination, and body-wrenching seizures.
She died in agony, as did thousands of her countrymen at that same hour.
23
The Luftwaffe had manufactured its Scapa Flow victory decorations before the operation. The medal depicted the black, upended bow of a sinking Royal Navy battleship in a bronze circle. The Luftwaffe—the entire Fatherland—was besotted with medals. Even so, Oberleutnant Franz Stenzel was proud of his Scapa Flow medal. He and his weapons officer, Fritz Cohausz, had pinned theirs to their jerkins just after receiving their new Stuka.
Staffel 4, II Stukageschwader (Stuka squadron), had been providing ground support from the captured RAF aerodrome near Guildford with endless dive-bombing missions in front of armor and infantry. Stenzel was rummy from his labors. Twelve sorties already that day, and almost five hours of daylight still remained. Each time, he returned with empty bomb racks and gun belts.
They were empty yet again as he banked for an approach to the airfield. Southern England had been blanketed by smoke since his countrymen had arrived. From Stenzel’s vantage, it seemed that hardly a structure in Kent and Sussex remained whole. Smoke rolled away from most of them.
Stenzel said into his mask, “I’m becoming an expert on smoke. Black smoke from vehicle oil fires. Gray smoke from fires that are still churning. White smoke from dying fires.”
“Kindly keep your eye on the road, Franz,” came from Cohausz.
They sank toward the runway. Smoke rolled across the concrete. Stenzel wondered at it, because firecrews should have quickly extinguished fires hazardous to air maneuvers. He nodded when he saw a fire truck near the north end of the runway. They were working on the blaze, but it would be a stunt landing, as difficult as his ditching in the North Sea a few days before.
He lowered his flaps. It appeared that some of the squadron was about to take off. The planes faded, then materialized in the haze. Mechanics were clustered around one of the Stukas. Perhaps an engine failure was holding up the entire squadron. It was unlike Stenzel’s squadron leader to allow delays. Perhaps it was the smoke. The Oberleutnant stuck his oxygen mask back over his nose and mouth. He motioned for Cohausz to do the same. He didn’t want the indignity of greeting his ground crew with a racking cough.
They glided toward the airstrip. Stenzel nudged his stick with his knees. The rolling smoke and the sock at the far end of the runway indicated the wind was blustery. The pilot could feel it in his controls. The haze parted, and he was startled by the closeness of the runway. The Stuka bounced, cracking its pilot’s teeth together. “A perfect three-point landing, four times,” he told me after the war.
He throttled back, and his Stuka slowed. He guided it toward a fuel truck waiting for him. He would undoubtedly return to the sky in moments.
Cohausz said, “I hope the controller lets us leave the cockpit. I’ve got to pee.”
Stenzel drew his plane nearer to the other planes and gave a thumb’s up signal when he recognized Schwartz at the controls of the nearest dive-bomber.
“I had not noticed anything remarkable, but suddenly everything was wrong,” he recalled. “Schwarz was leaning forward over his stick, motionless. Another pilot lay on his wing. The crew of mechanics, who I had thought was repairing a plane, was prostrate on the ground. No one moved.”
Stenzel turned the plane toward the hangar, the north portion of which had been heavily damaged before the invasion. A dozen, maybe twenty, Luftwaffe pilots and crew were sprawled before the opening as if they had been cast out of the structure by a strong wind.