Jo came in. "He's in his pants!"

"His clothes are all wet." She kissed the boy good night. "Put yourself to bed, darling. I'll tuck you up later."

"Kiss teddy, then."

"Good night, teddy."

Jo went out. Lucy looked back to Henry. His eyes were open, and he was smiling. He said, "Kiss Henry, then."

She leaned over him and kissed his battered face. Then carefully she cut away his underpants.

The heat from the fire would quickly dry his naked skin. She went into the kitchen and filled a bowl with warm water and a little antiseptic to bathe his wounds. She found a roll of absorbent cotton and returned to the living room.

"This is the second time you've turned up on the doorstep half dead," she said as she set about her task.

"The usual signal," Henry said. The words came abruptly.

"What?"

"Waiting-at-Calais-for-a-phantom-army…"

"Henry, what are you talking about?"

"Every-Friday-and-Monday…"

She finally realised he was delirious. "Don't try to talk," she said. She lifted his head slightly to clean away the dried blood from around the bump. Suddenly he sat upright, looked fiercely at her, and said, "What day is it? What day is it?"

"It's Sunday, relax."

"Okay."

He was quiet after that, and he let her remove the knife. She bathed his face, bandaged his finger where he had lost the nail and put a dressing on his ankle. When she had finished she stood looking at him for a while. He seemed to be sleeping. She touched the long scar on his chest, and the star-shaped mark on his hip. The star was a birthmark, she decided. She went through his pockets before throwing the lacerated clothes away. There wasn't much: some money, his papers, a leather wallet and a film can. She put them all in a little pile on the mantelpiece beside his fish knife. He would have to have some of David's clothes.

She left him and went upstairs to see to Jo. The boy was asleep, Iying on his teddy bear with his arms outflung. She kissed his soft cheek and tucked him in. She went outside and put the jeep in the barn. She made herself a drink in the kitchen, then sat watching Henry, wishing he would wake up and make love to her again. It was almost midnight when he woke. He opened his eyes, and his face showed the series of expressions that were now familiar to her: first the fear, then the wary survey of the room, then the relaxation. On impulse, she asked him, "What are you afraid of, Henry?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You always look frightened when you wake up."

"I don't know." He shrugged, and the movement seemed to hurt. "God, I'm battered."

"Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"Yes, if you'll give me a drink of brandy."

She got the brandy out of the cupboard. "You can have some of David's clothes."

"In a minute… unless you're embarrassed."

She handed him the glass, smiling. "I'm afraid I'm enjoying it."

"What happened to my clothes?"

"I had to cut them off you. I've thrown them away."

"Not my papers, I hope." He smiled, but there was some other emotion just below the surface.

"On the mantelpiece." She pointed. "Is the knife for cleaning fish or something?"

His right hand went to his left forearm, where the sheath had been. "Something like that," he said. He seemed uneasy for a moment, then relaxed with an effort and sipped his drink. "That's good." After a moment she said, "Well?"

"What?"

"How did you manage to lose my husband and crash my jeep?"

"David decided to stay over at Tom's for the night. Some of the sheep got into trouble in a place they call The Gully."

"I know it."

"And six or seven of them were injured. They're all in Tom's kitchen being bandaged up and making a terrible row. Anyway, David suggested I come back to tell you he would be staying. I don't really know how I managed to crash. The car is unfamiliar, there's no real road, I hit something and went into a skid and the jeep ended up on its side. The details…" He shrugged.

"You must have been going quite fast. You were in an awful mess when you got here."

"I suppose I rattled around inside the jeep a bit. Banged my head, twisted my ankle…"

"Lost a fingernail, bashed your face, and almost caught pneumonia. You must be accident-prone."

He swung his legs to the floor, stood up and went to the mantelpiece.

"Your powers of recuperation are incredible," she said.

He was strapping the knife to his arm. "We fishermen are very healthy. What about those clothes?"

She got up and stood close to him. "What do you need clothes for? It's bedtime."

He drew her to him, pressing her against his naked body, and kissed her hard. She stroked his thighs.

After a while he broke away from her. He picked up his things from the mantelpiece, took her hand, then, hobbling, he led her upstairs to bed.

The wide white autobahn snaked through the Bavarian valley up into the mountains. In the leather rear seat of the staff Mercedes, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was still and weary. Aged sixty-nine, he knew he was too fond of champagne and not fond enough of Hitler. His thin, lugubrious face reflected a career longer and more erratic than that of any of Hitler's other officers: he had been dismissed in disgrace more times than he could remember, but the Fuehrer always asked him to come back. As the car passed through the sixteenth-century village of Berchtesgaden he wondered why he always returned to his command when Hitler forgave him. Money meant nothing to him; he had already achieved the highest possible rank; decorations were valueless in the Third Reich; and he believed that it was not possible to win honour in this war.

It was Rundstedt who had first called Hitler "the Bohemian corporal." The little man knew nothing of the German military tradition, nor-despite his flashes of inspiration-of military strategy. If he had, he would not have started this war, which was unwinnable. Rundstedt was Germany's finest soldier, and he had proved it in Poland, France, and Russia, but he had no hope of victory.

All the same, he would have nothing to do with the small group of generals who-he knew-were plotting to overthrow Hitler. He turned a blind eye to them, but the Fahneneid, the blood oath of the German warrior, was too strong in him to permit him to join the conspiracy. And that, he supposed, was why he continued to serve the Third Reich. Right or wrong, his country was in danger, and he had no option but to protect it. I'm like an old cavalry horse, he thought; if I stayed at home I would feel ashamed. He commanded five armies on the western front now. A million and a half men were under his command. They were not as strong as they might be: some divisions were little better than rest homes for invalids from the Russian front; there was a shortage of armour, and there were many non-German conscripts among the other ranks, but Rundstedt could still keep the Allies out of France if he deployed his forces shrewdly. It was that deployment that he must now discuss with Hitler. The car climbed the Kehlsteinstrasse until the road ended at a vast bronze door in the side of the Kehlstein Mountain. An SS guard touched a button, the door hummed open, and the car entered a long marble tunnel lit by bronze lanterns. At the far end of the tunnel the driver stopped the car, and Rundstedt walked to the elevator and sat in one of its leather seats for the four-hundred-foot ascent to the Adlerhorst, the Eagle's Nest.

In the anteroom Rattenhuber took his pistol and left him to wait. He stared unappreciatively at Hitler's porcelain and went over in his mind the words he would say.

A few moments later the blond bodyguard returned to usher him into the conference room.

The place made him think of an eighteenth-century palace. The walls were covered with oil paintings and tapestries, and there was a bust of Wagner and a huge clock with a bronze eagle on its top. The view from the wide window was truly remarkable: one could see the hills of Salzburg and the peak of the Untersberg, the mountain where the body of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa waited, according to legend, to rise from the grave and save the Fatherland. Inside the room, seated in the peculiarly rustic chairs, were Hitler and just three of his staff: Admiral Theodor Krancke, the naval commander in the west: General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff; and Admiral Karl Jesko von Puttkamer, Hitler's aide-de-camp.