Dan grinned lopsidedly.
“I’m still trying to get used to my good fortune, Mrs Nordstrom.”
“Gretchen is up and about,” the housekeeper informed him. “She’s running around in that chair getting under our feet! She’s been on the telephone all morning. There were two newspaper men here yesterday. She is supposed to be taking things easy! Resting!”
Dan was already feeling a little guilty that he had suggested that Gretchen add her name on the list of putative defense attorneys for the as yet unscheduled ‘rebel trials’. The trouble was that Gretchen did not know how to ‘go through the motions’; and even while she was still trapped in her bed at the National Navy Medical Center at Bethesda she had got down to work.
Dan followed Mrs Nordstrom up the steps into the house.
Entering Oak Hill was like walking into another age. Polished boards underfoot, ancient gas light fittings now glowing with electric bulbs, big portraits in coarse oils on the walls, and the stuffed head of an Elk, was just one of a dozen mounted animal heads on the wall. In places the low oaken frames of the house might easily have brained a taller man if he stood up too quickly. A grey haired man in a blue cardigan emerged into the pool of light inside the door. He viewed Dan with his earnest curiosity.
“Welcome again to Wethersfield, Mr Brenckmann.”
Karl Nordstrom was some years older than his wife and more than somewhat in her shadow, seemingly a rather meek, affable man perfectly happy doing exactly what his life partner demanded of him.
“Dan,” the younger man replied. “Please, I’d be much happier if everybody just called me Dan. Every time somebody calls me ‘Mr Brenckmann’ I start looking around looking for my Pa.” He said it with a boyishly mischievous smile. If he was going to be Claude Betancourt’s protégé and, by proxy, the great man’s personal representative on the Warren Commission into the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, anything which kept his feet well and truly grounded was to be enthusiastically embraced.
“Dan,” the old man agreed.
Gretchen had told Dan the Nordstrom’s story one afternoon at Bethesda. Karl had been a junior officer in the Kaiser’s Navy at the outbreak of the First World War, a Leutnant zur See on the light cruiser Breslau which in company with the battlecruiser Goeben, had fled from the British Mediterranean Fleet and sought sanctuary at Istanbul. As part of the treaty which saw Turkey enter the war on the German side both the Goeben and the Breslau had been handed over to the Turks, their crews transferring to serve under the Turkish flag for the duration of hostilities. After the war Karl — a gunnery officer — had stayed on in Turkey as the two ships were handed over to wholly Turkish crews. By the time his extended tour of duty was over Germany was in chaos, there was rioting in the streets, starvation in some cities and he, a Lutheran secular Jew had determined that — at the age of twenty-six — there was no future for him in the post-war Weimar Republic. Travelling via Denmark and England he had sailed to America in 1920. Having learned English as a naval cadet — most officers in the Kaiser’s Navy spoke English — and with many years practical engineering and ordnance experience he had had no trouble finding work; and when he had looked to find a wife soon fallen into the waiting arms of Kathleen Steinmeier, the daughter of Silesian born parents who had come to New York as children in the 1890s. Kathleen had been working as an assistant housekeeper at the Betancourt’s mansion on Brooklyn Heights; and it had happened that at the time the couple became engaged to be married, a vacancy for an accountant and steward became available within the household and the rest, as Hollywood would have its gullible adherents claim, was history. The Nordstrom’s had taken over Oak Hill, the Wethersfield ‘retreat’ as long ago as the fall of 1928.
“Dan!” Gretchen called, slowly wheeling herself into the lobby. “You’re late!” This she declared with a severity that was of that particular variety that a woman tends to effect when she is trying, and failing — for her own indefinably feminine reasons — to conceal how inordinately pleased she is to be reunited with a man for whom she has a host of contradictory and horribly unresolved feelings. “We were expecting your hours ago!”
The man chuckled.
“It’s great to see you again too, Gretchen.”
He bent down and planted a pecking kiss on her left cheek.
Dan stayed down on his haunches so he could look the woman he loved in the eyes. Or rather, eye, because Gretchen’s damaged left eye was concealed by a pale gauze protective bandage. An eye specialist flown in from Philadelphia had operated to re-attach — or tweak, Dan was not really very clear about what had been going on just that it was the last chance to save the sight in that eye — the retina two weeks ago. It would be several weeks before they would know if the procedure had been successful.
Gretchen’s dark hair had grown back over her scarred scalp. Her facial injuries, so obvious in the days after Dan had found her half-dead and comatose in that emergency ward at Bethesda Hospital while sporadic fighting was still going on across the District of Columbia, had healed so well that one had to look really hard to re-discover them.
It was only what her doctors called the ‘nerve damage’ in her lower spine and her slowly knitting together left leg that kept her in the wheel chair most of the day. She was capable of moving around the house — but not negotiating steps or the stairs — on crutches but her balance was dangerously imperfect and her nurses and the Nordstroms hovered around her whenever she tried to rise from her chair. Gretchen might be in a hurry but there were some things which simply could not be hurried.
What lifted Dan Brenckmann’s spirits was that Gretchen, although pale and drawn, and still so thin that a strong gust of wind might blow her away, was so obviously and very combatively determined to show that she was, albeit slowly, on the mend.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been out here to see you since you were discharged from Bethesda,” Dan apologised wanly as he pushed Gretchen’s chair into the front living room. He planted himself in a chair before her, studied her sympathetically. “You really do look much better.”
“Um…”
The man reached out and took Gretchen’s right hand.
“Joseph called yesterday,” she declared, frowning.
Dan’s eyes widened a fraction. Joseph Theodore van Stratten would one day inherit several blocks of Wall Street, the banks located therein and a sizable chunk of the treasure stored in their impregnable vaults. He was also Gretchen’s fiancé. That he should visit Wethersfield was entirely expected, wholly proper and ought not to have surprised him in any way.
“Oh?” He murmured, his mood instantly depressed by mention of the obscenely rich playboy banker’s son whom the Betancourts and the van Strattens had many years ago determined would, with Gretchen, found a new East Coast dynasty.
“It was a duty call,” Gretchen explained. “He needed to be seen to be taking an interest in the cripple.”
“You are not any kind of cripple,” Dan protested.
“I know that!” She snapped distractedly. “I also know that I’m not any kind of potential trophy wife anymore!”