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two German oaks that stood on either side of a brick path leading to a large cobblestoned stable yard with a clock tower. Beyond the stables were a walled kitchen garden and a garage. An allée of box led to a plantation of mulberry trees. There was a large orchard of cherry, apple, pear, and plum trees and, beyond it, a fenced meadow, used as a paddock for the horses.
    Although the beautiful rooms were a bit dusty, the garden a bit wild (Kreck told me that nothing had been changed at Löwendorf in a hundred years), the Yellow Palace was the most
vorzügliche
place I’d ever seen.
    Seven of us lived at Löwendorf—the Metzenburgs, Fräulein Roeder, Kreck, Schmidt the cook, myself, and a young man from the village named Caspar Boerner, who was the gamekeeper. Herr Felix’s donkey, Zara, and seven dogs were kept in the stables with the horses.
    It was hoped that Caspar Boerner would be able to assume some of the simpler tasks of Herr Felix’s valet, as well as those of the footman, both of whom had been mobilized along with the farmworkers, gardeners, and grooms. Caspar, who was nineteen years old, lived with his widowed mother in a farmhouse near the village. His two brothers had been conscripted, but Caspar was exempt from military service, at least for the moment, thanks to the loss of three fingers on his right hand.
    Kreck said that it was bad enough without servants, but with only Caspar to help in the Yellow Palace, it would be a
Katastrophe
. Caspar, whose cropped hair was the color and texture of swans’ down, had lost his fingers in an otter trap. As the Reich was opposed to cruelty in all forms, Herr Felix thought it best that no one know the details of his accident, as just that month a man in Potsdam had been sentenced to four months in prison for throwing stones at a bird (Roeder hinted that Caspar had injured himself on purpose—Caspar’s brother, according to her, was a Communist).
    Kreck said that no one in Caspar’s family had ever been a house servant, the Boerners fit only for fieldwork, and he wondered if Caspar’s new responsibilities would be too difficult for him, the boy more adept at twisting the neck of a pheasant than winding a cravat around Herr Felix’s neck. Herr Felix had a very precise morning routine, including the playing of jazz records as he dressed, but Kreck suspected that Caspar had never even seen a gramophone (Kreck, himself very fond of a band called the Weintraub Syncopators, had brought several boxes of gramophone needles with him from Berlin). Caspar, who moved into a room over the stables, would also serve as groom, cut and store wood, and polish our boots when we left them outside our doors at night. He would take me to the village in the dogcart when I needed to buy anything of a personal nature. In the village, which was three miles away, there was a church, a blacksmith, a mill, a baker, a dry-goods store, and a small inn.

    I didn’t like to think of myself as a servant, but I knew that I fell into that less easily defined company that included governesses and ladies’ maids. It was Catholic girls who went out as servants, not Palmers (a thought that sounded so alarmingly like my mother that I immediately put it out of my head). It was to the Metzenburgs’ credit that they did not live by the more simple rules that governed domestic life in Ireland.Because her wealth served to isolate her, Frau Metzenburg did not trouble with the customary prejudices of her class. Herr Felix, despite the railroads in South America, and a boyhood position akin to godhead in a house of doting women, was unusual in that neither money nor adoration had ruined him. Although the distinctions between master and servant were maintained in traditional ways—the taking of meals, forms of address (I called them Dorothea and Felix only in my head), clothing—as well as a more subtle sublimation of self, I was surprised by their courtesy (the best manners in Europe). But I counted myself so