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Germany.”
    â€œThey would do that to me?” All her mother’s warnings came rushing back to her. She hadn’t believed it. People might be grumps, ignorant and selfish. They might not
want
to take in stray members of their family. She’d braced herself to be lectured and insulted and given a tiny room and relegated to the worst seat at the table. She was ready for all sorts of criticisms of cabaret life.
Don’t expect kindness from them
, her mother had said.
    Not kindness, no, but civility. Human decency. Hannah remembered that night of broken glass, and wondered if such a thing as human decency still existed. Had it withered away in the human spirit, victim of some insidious modern disease?
    You must accept any treatment
. Her mother had said that, too.
    Hannah smoothed the single fallen tear into her cheek until it disappeared. “To be sure I understand,” she began, her accent thick now as in her mingled fury and disappointment she reverted to her more natural pronunciations, “you mean that I am to work in the kitchen? To be permitted to live here but only to work?”
    â€œTo serve, yes.”
    â€œLike a penitent,” Hannah said, settling her heavy-lashed dark brown eyes on Sally. She composed herself, making her small body somehow even more compact, folding in on herself to become an organism of profound self-sufficiency and inwardness.
    Sally felt a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to fall on her knees before the girl and beg her forgiveness. But Trapp whispered in her ear:
So she thought her life would be easy and it is hard. Should you care? You scrubbed your share of grates and slate floors. Your knees still ache with it. So she’s some European bluestocking with soft hands and too much to say. Peeling potatoes and plucking pheasants never killed anyone. Better than whatever is happening to her sort in Germany
.
    â€œShut up,” Sally muttered under her breath, too softly for Hannah to hear.
    â€œI beg your pardon?”
    â€œNothing. One of the housemaids will show you to your room and fetch your uniforms. Two print, one blue, the other pink.” Horrid things they were, too. “Plus aprons and caps—cap to be worn at all times—and towels. Return here for lunch and you may begin your duties assisting at dinner. Fortunately it is only the family here tonight, and one houseguest, a distant relative of some sort. Tomorrow you will begin your official daily duties. Here is a list. Wait out there, and close the door behind you.”
    When she was gone, Sally had a quick therapeutic weep, the second of the day and by no means the last. Then she splashed her face, dusted her nose with powder, and set about making other people cry, as Trapp would have wished.

Hannah May Eat as Many Bugs as She Likes
    H ANNAH HAD JUST BEEN DECIDING with what exact degree of stiff, formal politeness she would greet the designated housemaid when she heard more singing—throaty, abysmally untalented singing in ribald German. She took a swift, sharp breath. It could not be . . .
    The door swung open, and in came Waltraud, the (mostly) female half of the Double Transvestite Tango.
    â€œTraudl, could it be you? Oh no, it couldn’t, really, never in that outfit.” Hannah’s mobile face incandesced into joy. She took her friend by the arms. “What do they call this?” She rubbed the rough black fabric between her finger and thumb.
    â€œLinsey-woolsey,” Waltraud said with an exaggerated English accent, then switched immediately back to German. “Isn’t it a scream?”
    â€œI hardly knew you without silk and sequins. How on earth did you get here?”
    â€œOh,
Liebchen
, it was terrible. I had to sell all my costume jewelry to that horrid Bavarian hen, and my only consolation is that she can’t tell glass from diamonds. Still, they were all such pretty baubles, and now they adorn her fat neck. Do you know she took a