Faith and Beauty Read Online Free

bang of a shop door, the jangle of a milk cart, the whine of a wireless; but out here the silence had a different texture. It was a deep, ancient quiet, the kind you never found in the city. Thick and tangible, oppressive almost. Clara could see why no one bothered locking their doors. The only sounds were the distant chug of a steam cruiser, squabbling squirrels in the high branches of the pines and her own breathing.
    But it was no good. Whenever Clara relaxed, her mind would return to the same matter. The matter that she tried to keep buried, but became increasingly urgent as time passed.
    Leo Quinn.
    Leo was the British passport control officer who had first suggested her other – and what felt increasingly like her real – role. At his urging, Clara had begun to feed details of the gossip and feuds of the senior Nazi women to British Intelligence. Moving, as she did, in the regime’s high society, Clara had become a spy on the private life of the Third Reich. For years she had formed a link in the shadowy chain that stretched across Europe, passing news of the Nazis to her contacts in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, learning from Leo the tradecraft and secrets of a spy’s life.
    And in the process she had fallen in love with him.
    At the thought of Leo, sadness swelled and images of their last two weeks together flared in her brain. They had spent the time enveloped in each other, taking a borrowed car out to the lakes and plunging into the crisp water, slippery fronds beneath their feet. Making love in a bedroom, the morning light spangled across his face. Walking in the forest, beneath the shifting leaves. Talking about the future, and Leo’s urging that she should leave Berlin for the safety of England. She thought of his fingertips tracing her face as though committing it to memory. Holding her so tightly she could feel the blood pulse through him, his mouth on hers and his arms encircling her as though he would never let her go.
    And yet he had let her go. Without a second’s hesitation.
    It happened quite abruptly one morning. He had received a message the previous night, requesting that he return to work in London without delay. Clara didn’t even know what Leo’s job entailed – only that it was something to do with encrypted communications and that he was based in a London office block, somewhere near Oxford Street, but also made frequent sorties abroad. Yet as soon as he had told her his orders, he was knotting his tie and glancing at his watch. Then he pulled on his jacket, gave one last look back, and headed out of the door.
    That was six long months ago and she had not heard a word from him since. Not so much as a postcard.
    Where are you, Leo?
    The questions ran through her head like beads on a rosary.
    Most evenings after she had finished at the film studios, she would have a solitary supper and bury herself in the latest novel her sister had sent out from Hatchards bookshop in London. Occasionally she would be dragged out by friends, and other times she took Erich to the cinema or for a meal. At night she might stretch out a hand across the satin counterpane to where Leo had been, but more often she fell asleep the moment she climbed into bed, exhausted by the constant busyness she had adopted to keep thoughts of him at bay.
    Yet increasingly a mutinous anxiety arose in her, that she tried and failed to suppress. Why had Leo not been in touch? For someone whose work involved communication, it was ironic that he had failed entirely to communicate with her. Agents learned to compress their words into codes, but what code did silence contain?
    On one side of the room a gigantic, rococo mirror was angled to reflect a photograph of Ursula on the opposite wall, an icy peroxide fantasy swathed in fur. Gazing into the mirror, Clara tried to see what Leo saw.
    He had always said she had a face that was easily able to conceal her feelings, or to project other emotions entirely. The glossy dark hair