Love by the Morning Star Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Anna, Who Is Not the Heroine

  Hannah, Who Is the Heroine

  Hannah, the Unfortunate Fruit

  Anna Is a Kissing Cousin

  Hannah Meets the Heir of Trapp

  Hannah May Eat as Many Bugs as She Likes

  Hannah, Who Tried to Be Helpful

  Anna and Hannah and the Gross Social Blunder

  Lord Liripip Berates a Star

  Teddy and Hannah Are Not Formal

  Hannah Utterly Fails at Domestic Service

  Anna and Hannah Discuss the Slum Disease: Love

  Hannah and Anna Reflected in Each Other

  Hannah as Love’s Messenger

  Hannah on the Road to Damascus

  Hannah’s Boxing Day Dismay

  Lord Liripip Knows Exactly What Hannah Is

  Teddy Figures It Out

  Hannah Is Propositioned and Almost Proposes

  Hannah Learns That Pearls Mean Tears

  The Letters of the New Year

  Hannah’s Salad of Bitter Herbs

  Anna and Hannah Get Engaged

  Hannah’s Glass of Champagne Changes History

  Hannah Is Forgiving

  A Sudden Need for Flowers

  Sample Chapter from LADIES IN WAITING

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Laura L. Sullivan

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Sullivan, Laura L.

  Love by the morning star / Laura L. Sullivan.

  pages cm

  Summary: Mistaken for one another when they are sent to the grand English country estate of Starkers on the brink of World War II, Hannah, a distant relative hoping to be welcomed by the family, and Anna, sent to spy for the Nazis, both unexpectedly fall in love.

  ISBN 978-0-547-68951-7 (hardback)

  [1. Mistaken identity—Fiction. 2. Social classes—Fiction. 3. Family life—England—Fiction. 4. Household employees—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction. 6. Great Britain— History—George VI, 1936–1952—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S9527Lov 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013037690

  eISBN 978-0-547-68958-6

  v1.0614

  For Buster

  November 1938

  Anna, Who Is Not the Heroine

  IT TAKES SO MUCH WORK being better than everyone else, Anna Morgan mused. Of course, on one level, superiority is a matter of one’s birth. No, she hastily amended, recalling her father’s origins as a grocer: not birth, but blood. Rank and money don’t matter. What did it say above the National Fascist Front (NAFF) headquarters? “Rank is but the guinea-stamp; the man’s the gold for all that.” She didn’t mind—almost didn’t mind—that she wasn’t of noble birth, because she had enough pride simply in being British. There was nothing better than that.

  But to appear instantly and unequivocally superior to the untrained eye, that took some work.

  She had natural advantages, of course, being statuesque and fair, with high-piled blond curls arranged in careful bedroom disarray. Her hourglass lines were achieved through exercise and will; her elegant, floor-length attire suggested leisure and lofty social status. Her features were large, her jaw strongly defined, with those Pre-Raphaelite bones that can make a girl either a stunner or a bumpkin, depending on what she does with them. Anna had been learning what to do with them for seventeen years, and had it down to a science. She knew she was beautiful—if a little frightening, but that was a part of her beauty—and if she ever forgot it she had only to stroll down the street and learn it again from all the admiring stares she received.

  From earliest childhood, she’d always had ideas about what she could be, but her seed would have been scattered on barren soil if her grocer father had not discovered his gift for oratory and hate. Several years ago, a Russian Jew had opened a small grocery store around the corner, and through diligence, friendliness, the ability to get oranges year round, and a most un-English lack of rats and black-beetles in his storeroom, managed to lure away a good-size chunk of Mr. Morgan’s clientele. From that moment Mr. Morgan conceived a violent hatred of all things foreign and all things Jewish. He threw in Communism for good measure, liberated a soapbox from the storeroom, and began to spout off to anyone who would listen to him.

  His eloquent vitriol caught the attention of Reginald Darling, who thought Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists too soft and coddling, and he was recruited into the newly formed National Fascist Front. Mr. Morgan marched, he shouted, he smashed windows and broke heads, gradually rising to become Lord Darling’s right-hand man. When laws were passed and public opinion overwhelmingly turned against them, they took the organization underground (which was a relief to Anna, because it meant her father would never again have to wear the blood-red plus-fours that were part of the NAFF’s official uniform) and plotted to rid Britain of the parasitic foreigners who were sucking its lifeblood.

  Which was all very well with Anna, particularly because it meant a move to London, where she could expand her horizons and learn to emulate the aristocracy. She was one of nature’s aristocrats, of that she was certain, so it was only right she should act like them. Her voice became cultivated, she always remembered to scoop her soup with the far side of her spoon, and she learned to apply her makeup in such a way that it seemed she had none on at all. All the while her father worked for the preservation of the true British way of life, and the well-being of the true British worker, and her mother hosted parties in their stylish new flat where people of like mind could plot the overthrow of the government for its own good. Anna kept her eyes open, looking for a “Lord,” or a “Sir,” or at worst an “Honorable” who might whisk her away to the life she knew she deserved.

  Did she too hate foreigners, Jews, Communists? Where there is such self-love there is very little room for anything else, even hate. She did not argue with her father, and she had a general and vague opinion that foreigners were dirty.

  Germans, however, did not seem to count as foreigners in the eyes of the NAFF, so when her father received an invitation to be a secret envoy in Berlin, she was forced to revise her opinion slightly. It was not difficult to do. Queen Victoria had married a German.

  Now Anna sat before a third-floor window in the Hotel Adlon, letting the streetlights cast her in a silvery outline that she knew was quite becoming. The man her parents were talking with had a Von in his name, which she thought meant he was something aristocratic. Not that she had any plans of settling for a German, but it was good to stay in practice. Though she had no official role in the NAFF, just a decorative one, she could tell that Herr Von Whoever-he-might-be was paying her particular attention. She let a small smile play on her lips, and began to listen to the conversation.

  “Thanks to Mosley and his ham-handed tactics, the British have a bad opinion of fascism,” the Von said.

  “He meant well,” Mr. Morgan replied, stung by a barb against his countryman.

  “You and I, Germany and England, must be united in common cause. Lord Darling has told you, I’ve no doubt, of certain operations to place those sympathetic to our cause in positions of power. Unofficial, highly clandestine operations. The Nazi Party itself is unaware of them. The more forward-thinking of us will coordinate directly with Lord Darling. The English people do not wish to be at war with Germany—the Munic
h Agreement has made that clear—yet led as you are, I think war between our peoples is inevitable.”

  Anna saw her father’s mouth twitch—he was itching to launch into his standard rhetoric, but Lord Darling had been teaching him patience.

  The Von glanced at Anna, and she preened her curls. “We are all Aryans, the British, the Germans,” he said. “Yet those who are not friends of Germany must perforce be our enemies. We are noble people, soldiers, warriors; we do not recognize neutrality. It is another word for cowardice. If England does not join us, she will fall as the slave races fall . . . which will be a shame. Brandy?” He held out a glass.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Morgan said, draining it in a gulp, without warming it or smelling it first. Anna saw a fleeting look of distaste cross the Von’s face. Unlike Anna, her father had not taken pains to improve himself. But then, Lord Darling liked his working-class charm, offsetting, as it did, Lord Darling’s own aristocracy, helping the NAFF appeal to the masses.

  “We have the germ of a plan, a master stroke that will ensure that England and Germany are forever allies, and we need your help.”

  “Of course. Anything,” her father replied.

  But the Von wasn’t looking at Mr. Morgan. He was looking at Anna.

  “You have an intelligent daughter,” he said, “and a beautiful one.” He looked her up and down, lingering too long in the middle, until she felt something squirming inside her, something cold and unpleasant. “She is loyal to the cause?” He turned back to Mr. Morgan.

  “Unswervingly.”

  “We’ve talked about you at great length, my dear,” the Von said to Anna. “And I think you will do. If you succeed, you will be a heroine to two nations. You will have done your part to keep our races pure. Very likely you will have prevented a war. Are you willing?”

  The chill worm still wiggled inside her, but something else warmed her now. Was it patriotism or pride? No, it was ambition. The only thing she really heard from him was the word “heroine.” Heroines always marry well, don’t they?

  “I am willing!” she said, low and thrilling. “What must I do?”

  “I can’t tell you everything yet. Now it is only necessary that you be put in the proper place and await instructions. There is a castle not far from London, a mile or two from Windsor Castle. Starkers is the name. You will be sent there.”

  For an instant the world around her disappeared. To think, a minute ago she’d been contemplating an alliance with a mere German Von, and now she was being sent to one of the grandest establishments in England, barely a step below the royal residences. Why, everyone knew that Their Majesties went fox hunting at Starkers every winter, that Their Highnesses spent long weekends dancing at Starkers balls and fishing for Starkers trout and strolling through Starkers shrubberies. And now by some miracle she would be a part of it! The cream had finally risen to the top.

  “There is a cook at Starkers, sympathetic but not aligned with any organization, who has been at the castle for many years, so she is above suspicion. Through her, we have secured you a job as a kitchen maid. Once inside Starkers, you’ll be in a position to—”

  “Kitchen maid!” The world crashed back in all its ugliness. “Absolutely not! Do you know how many hours I’ve soaked these hands in paraffin?” She held up fingers encased in the softest kid gloves, which she never took off in public, and rarely even in private. “My hands are extraordinarily sensitive.”

  It was the excuse she always gave for her perpetually gloved state. Although she did indeed bathe them in paraffin and lanolin daily, and though they were preternaturally soft, no amount of cream treatment could reduce their size or squareness. They were broad peasant hands, and she hated them. She could exercise her waist into tininess, but her hands, she thought, betrayed her low origins, and she swore she would not remove her gloves in front of a man until her wedding night.

  She refused to wither under the Von’s scathing look. How dare he belittle the effort she’d put into making her outside as worthy as her pure British inside? Kitchen maid, indeed!

  The Von kept his composure as he worked on her; her father did not. She knew she’d comply in the end. That word “heroine” still rang in her ears, and she knew if she succeeded in whatever they had planned, the world would open to her as she had always dreamed. What could her task be, anyway? Passing a message on the sly? Stealing incriminating letters from a guest’s bedroom? And then . . . it would be worth the temporary humiliation if she was elevated to the position she deserved.

  But she’d make them work for it.

  “I suppose I might,” she said, cocking her head to catch her reflection in the silvered window. “Perhaps I could wear surgical gloves.”

  “You’ll be posing as the lowest domestic. Chapped hands are a small price to pay for the glory of your country.”

  “I don’t know . . .” She pretended to stare out the window, considering, but she was looking at the full curve of her own cheek, thinking, No amount of drudgery will mar that. Poor food might only improve my figure. She’d noticed a disturbing thickening of her waist since her father had gone on the NAFF payroll.

  “Honestly, do you think I can pass as a kitchen skivvy?” she asked in her most cultivated voice.

  “Perhaps we can get you in a slightly better post—a housemaid, maybe—but the important thing is that you are there at Starkers.”

  “Why me?” she fished. Because you’re so clever, she willed him to say. Because we trust you.

  “Because a servant, particularly a female servant, is anonymous and inconsequential. Especially in an upper-crust British estate, servants are so taken for granted that for all practical purposes they don’t exist. They are conveniently invisible. You come from the lower class—no, don’t scowl—but you know how to emulate the upper class. You can pass for one of the maids, but understand the masters. That may be necessary. Now, will you do it?”

  Below her, through the naked boughs of the few remaining linden trees lining the boulevard, she could see a vague commotion. The window was propped open a crack, and through the gap came a cry, a wail that rose in frantic desperation until it was cut off abruptly to strangled silence. Then the sound of shattering glass, so loud that she was certain her own window had been smashed, and she flinched back. But no, it was in the street. The sound seemed to echo . . . or was it more glass breaking, farther away?

  “What’s that?” she gasped.

  The Von snaked an arm behind her and snapped the heavy curtains closed.

  “Nothing that need concern you. Internal affairs.”

  When he had gone, Anna said petulantly to her father, “I’m happy to help in any way, of course, but really, a kitchen maid!”

  Her father slapped her, hard, and that was that.

  Hannah, Who Is the Heroine

  HANNAH MORGENSTERN WAS SINGING ABOUT SHEEP. Why her audience loved songs about sheep, she was not sure. They were soldiers, businessmen, wealthy gentlemen about town, who had probably never known a sheep intimately. (What a joke her father would make out of that!) Still, when Hannah sang sheep songs they bought champagne and oysters like they were going out of style, and left tips so large that goodhearted Benno the busboy often ran after them, asking if they’d made a mistake.

  This was a song about black sheep on the grassy banks of the Danube looking like the freckles on her true love’s nose. Since the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria, she was a bit leery of singing songs about that country, but her repertoire of sheep songs was limited. It was either that, a tune about a British shepherdess, which was too politically risky, or one about frolicking Sudeten lambs, which was too fresh, though no doubt popular with her customers. What the show needs, Hannah decided as she crooned the final bars to wild applause and tossed flowers, is a song about a nationless, nondenominational sheep. A sheep that cannot stir up resentment from any side.

  Of course, by now there was only one side, really, and everyone else kept silent if they knew what was good for them.
r />   The next number was the Double Transvestite Tango, so Hannah made her bows, scooped up as many flowers as she could carry (Benno’s grandmother would sell the sturdiest of them the next morning, and one might end up the boutonniere of the very man who’d tossed it the night before), and made her way to the wings. Already a couple of admirers were homing in on her. She was used to becoming another person onstage, someone who attracted and compelled. It was good for business but annoying when business was done, when all she wanted was a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the stars over Berlin.

  Her father, Aaron Morgenstern, was the master of ceremonies and the comedian, dressed, as always, in some variation of a devilish costume. Her mother sang torch songs, sad and sultry. Rounding out the troupe were assorted dancers, actors, and singers, lewd or clownish or satiric as the situation demanded. But there was a market for innocence, too, for eyelet lace and braids and shepherdesses in dirndl skirts, for gentler tastes than most of the clientele possessed. Hannah filled that niche. Old men and young soldiers adored her.

  Two of the latter, young lieutenants in the Heer, the German army, tried to catch her eye, so she ducked into her mother’s dressing room and peeled off her false eyelashes. She slipped out of her dirndl and into a dark wool dress, then pulled off her wig of coiled blond braids to reveal a slicked-back chocolate-colored bob. When she walked by the two eager officers they didn’t recognize her.

  “Have you seen that luscious bonbon with the golden braids?” one asked her as she passed.

  She grinned up at them with such impish mischief that they almost forgot their quest for the singer. “She is with her lover,” Hannah said. “But she can always handle one or two more.” She winked at them. “Go there, through that door.”

  She made her escape while the uniformed hobbledehoys gawked and gaped and finally burst into the dressing room where Franz, the three-hundred-pound juggling strongman, was adjusting his loincloth.