A forceful boot shunted the sturdy kitchen door open, his elongated strides taking them up the servant’s stairs to the master bedroom on the first floor. A second kick flung the bedroom door back against the wall with a whack that left a crack in the plaster. He lay Gabi down on the bed, never lifting his gaze from her for a moment.
Now, in the light of the room, he could see clearly what Gabi had suffered. Bruises and grazes covered her body; a ring of purple circled her neck. He dare not examine her private place; this he would leave for the doctor. Tears welled, to be blinked away before they broke.
“Gabi, wake up, Gabi…” He stroked his daughter’s forehead, softly repeating her name.
Gabi’s lashes fluttered, and her eyes grew. She pulled herself up, but a pain stabbed at her innards and she curled herself into a ball.
“Papa, it hurts.”
“Shhhh… it’s all right, my little soldier.” He eased her body back so she would lie flat and pulled the bed covers up to her shoulders, tucking in the edge as one does with a child.
“He hurt me, Papa. He hurt me.” Her words quivered, and her body shook.
“Who hurt you?” he said in a voice choked with rage.
A tear trickled along the curve of her cheek and down to the pillow, leaving a faint stain. He wiped away the second tear that followed the same path, his glistening eyes pleading for her to respond.
“Yuri.”
The captain’s eyes glared.
“You believe me, Papa, don’t you?”
The captain could not speak for fear that he would lose control. He stroked Gabi’s forehead with a trembling hand, willing the doctor to appear and relieve him from his duty. He had never been good at dealing with her tears and even now, it felt foreign to him to comfort her. He could not remember a time when his own parents had ever shown any warmth or tenderness, and sadly he was a product of such an upbringing. But his wife Mary had been different, and he had loved her for it.
A knock at the door announced the doctor’s arrival. He walked into the room, placed his battered medical bag on the bed and shook the captain’s hand with a flaccid grip. Gabi’s eyes darted back and forth between her father and the doctor, her knuckles white as she clung to her sheets.
“The doctor is here, my little soldier; he will make you feel better.”
“Perhaps it would be best if you wait outside,” the doctor said.
It took a moment for his words to rouse panic in the little girl, and she sprang up and reached out for her father.
“No, Papa. Don’t leave me!”
“Frau Hermann will stay with you. It won’t take long,” the captain said, avoiding her pleading eyes and closing the door firmly behind him.
He rushed downstairs to the reception hall where a troop of policemen waited, impatiently shuffling their feet and murmuring into their coats.
“Yuri, it was Yuri.” The captain watched the men pour outside into the courtyard and scatter. He left them to their search and made his way to the drawing room, a place where he always felt most contented and at peace. But not tonight.
Reclining into a wingback chair, he waited for the police to return, tapping his fingers on the lustrous patina of a desk clear of clutter but for two ornate photo frames, one of his wife on their wedding day, the other of Gabi cuddling Saxon as a puppy. He stared at the image of Gabi taken on her fourth birthday; her joy so great and emotions so overwhelmed that she had cried. And he had laughed at her.
Ten minutes passed. He paced the room, the pendulum of the grandfather clock swinging in unison with his steps, amplifying the intensity of the unfolding drama. Twenty minutes passed. Finally, a police officer entered the room to announce that Yuri had been found.
Captain Richter ran for the courtyard, launching himself down the stairs to the gathering in the centre of the yard where a carriage stood, a filthy blanket covering what appeared to be a body in the back.
The police officer coughed nervously. “He hung himself in the forest.”
Captain Richter lifted the blanket and saw a man with bluish-grey skin and bulging demonic eyes that stared vacantly up at him. This was not the friendly, accommodating man that he had employed as a gardener over two years ago; it was the face of Satan.
“This death was too good. He should rot in hell.” The captain stared down at the man feeling nothing but repulsion. How could anyone commit such a heinous crime? What possesses a human being to inflict such pain and horror on an innocent child?
No answer came to him. He let the blanket fall and returned to the house where he paced the deserted reception hall, suppressing a rage that would not settle.
“Papa, it hurts.”
A cry for help from his little girl sent the captain charging up into the bedroom once again. She thrashed about as she fought against Frau Hermann’s grip on her legs and the captain glared at the doctor.
“She’s been torn and needs stitches,” he said in response to the icy stare.
Captain Richter made no sound but his expression told the doctor of this thoughts. They retreated into the privacy of the hallway where the captain cleared his dry throat with a cough that left his voice deep and menacing.
“How many stitches must she have?”
“Seven, perhaps eight.”
“Why so many?”
“Yuri is a big man.”
“Yuri is dead.”
The doctor hesitated, lowering his voice to a gruff whisper. “He may have also inserted other things in her.”
The captain gasped at the unimaginable. He fled back into the room and sat on the bed beside Gabi, softening his demeanour at the sight of her pleading eyes. The pain and fear had left her weak, but she still sobbed and trembled. He held her hand and whispered soothingly into her ear.
“Be brave, my little soldier. It’s going to be all right. I’m here for you now.”
The doctor removed a syringe from his bag, inserting it into a vial of clear liquid. “I will administer some morphine to help dull the pain.”
And when she lay still, her eyes rolling to one side with barely a blink, they lifted her and placed clean sheets beneath her pelvis and the doctor commenced his work.
The following day, Captain Richter made arrangements for Gabi to live with her aunt and cousins in England as soon as she was well enough to travel. He explained to his daughter that he could no longer trust the staff at Manor Grand Oak with her care and that she would be safer with family abroad. And in so doing, the captain cleared himself of responsibility and guilt and Gabi, as children have a tendency to do, convinced herself that she was to blame.
September 1939
A tiny shadow moved along the skirting board, pausing every now and then to review its position. Gabi’s gaze followed the mouse until a slamming door sent it in a frenzied dash to sanctuary: a small crack hidden behind an impressive bookcase that stretched the full length of the room, its shelves so laden with knowledge that they bowed.
She shifted her weight on the hard pew and surveyed the surrounds of the foyer. Like everything at St. George’s School in Ascot, it was stuffy and pretentious, filled with airs and graces befitting the pedigree of its students. She had spent the best part of her informative years at the institution and had loathed every minute of it for unlike her peers, Gabi had a common ancestry that left her ostracized and open to ridicule. She was ‘that strange German girl who had bought her way into St. George’s with dirty money made from mining’. How bourgeois.
She leaned back against the wall and unravelled a satin bow at the end of a long braid, tied with a knot so stubborn that it would not undo. Her finger twisted the ribbon idly while she waited and pondered her return to Germany. Home. The word stuck in her head like a spell, conjuring emotions and memories that swirled with happiness. Home. It was where she belonged. Home. It would be Christmas, her favourite time of the year. Home. She would be with those she loved…