The Pursuit of Pearls Read Online Free

the Kurfürstendamm rather than an ocean liner across the Atlantic. Everything was still there—cushions, lampshades, curtains. The rubble of lotions, stubby kohl pencils, and cratered powders on the dressing table. She had abandoned all her books and furniture, not to mention crockery in the sink and withered rosebuds in a dry vase. Even Ursula’s clothes were still in the bedroom, draped carelessly across chairs, falling out of drawers, and hanging in scented layers of silk and satin like gleaming ghosts.
    Fortunately Clara didn’t have much luggage of her own. She had always traveled light, ever since her days in repertory theater in England. All she had with her was a few changes of clothes, her leather jewelry box, Max Factor makeup, a book of Rilke’s poetry with a duck-egg-blue cover, and the sheaf of mail she had grabbed from her apartment as she left.
    Wandering into the kitchen, she set down a bag containing black rye bread, eggs, potatoes, and an onion. She had stood in line that morning for the eggs and onion and had every intention of enjoying them in an omelet as soon as she had unpacked. As she ran a tap to fill the kettle, she opened a cupboard to rummage for a cup and discovered, with the delight of an archaeologist making an antique find, a gigantic jar of real Melitta coffee beans, shiny nuggets of black gold, almost untouched. The only coffee to be found in Berlin right now,
Kaffee-Ersatz,
was a gritty concoction of chicory, oats, and roasted barley mixed with chemicals from coal, oil, and tar; so a jar like this was real treasure. Unscrewing the lid, she inhaled greedily. Everyone in Germany obsessed about food now. They dreamed of potatoes fried in butter, crispy chicken, and fragrant roast meat. Of real coffee and cream. Being half English, Clara fantasized about thick wedges of Fuller’s walnut cake and solid chunks of Cadbury’s chocolate, which were even more impossible to find.
    Cradling her fragrant, smoky-flavored coffee—black, no milk—Clara went over to the far window, from where a long sliver of the lake was visible, its hard silver surface marbled by high clouds, and a dark fringe of woods beyond. A narrow jetty protruded into the water and a duck stood on it, frisking a rainbow of water across its back. Shielding her eyes against the dazzle of light, she opened the French windows and stepped outside. She had not had a garden since childhood, when nine acres of Surrey at the foot of the North Downs had formed the limits of her world. There she; her elder sister, Angela; and her brother, Kenneth, had raced snails, collected tadpoles, and played French cricket.
    Resting against the sun-warmed brick, she breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of narcissus and sweet woodsmoke from a bonfire, letting the smell of nettles and grass float through her. In the city a hundred different noises made up silence, like the colors that together constitute white light—the rumble of traffic, the 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, medieval 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 that 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 Leo’s 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 now she had formed a