Hot and panting, Lucy crammed the letter inside her dress and turned toward the window, as Michelle called to her to join the others.
They were bent over the paper Michelle had taken from Lucy’s hand, a long, narrow map of the Rhine, from Cologne to Mayence, with about ten miles of territory on each side.
“What is it?” asked Lucy, trying to speak naturally, not daring to raise her eyes for fear of betraying her excitement.
“Just a map,” said Larry. “Nothing special on it, that I can see, except these crosses, which might mean anything.”
He pointed to a dozen or more small, black crosses in ink, marking various places along the river, towns or villages, or open country. Sometimes the crosses were on one side of the river, sometimes on the other, occasionally connected by a stroke of the pen.
“Probably a map he had during the war. I’ll stick it back in his coat,” said Bob. He crossed the room and felt about in the other pockets but returned empty-handed. “It’s half-past four and time to go home.”
“I’d better put out the fire,” said Larry, as they left the bedroom. “I suppose Franz served under this von Eckhardt,” he remarked, kicking apart the glowing embers. “Adelheid said her father left off soldiering to become a woodcutter. That must have been owing to von Eckhardt’s patronage.”
Lucy could hardly talk at all, her thoughts were in such a whirl of bewilderment. Nothing much was clear to her except her determination to keep Elizabeth’s letter secret until she could think out its meaning for herself. Then she would either convince herself of the German woman’s innocence or face her and demand the truth. But to show the letter now to Bob’s suspicious eyes, to Larry’s openly accusing ones, to condemn her old nurse on such hasty evidence—this she could not do.
But her heart throbbed with grief and anger, and she could not drive Elizabeth’s face from her mind, that face whose truth and loyalty she had believed in so entirely, and which seemed all at once to hold the enemy’s sly duplicity.
“It can’t be true. It can’t, it can’t!” she told herself, as she gathered her cape around her and felt the letter crackle from where she had thrust it inside her dress.