The Pursuit of Pearls

The Pursuit of Pearls
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015, 2016 by Thynker Ltd

Reading group guide copyright © 2016 by Penguin Random House LLC

Excerpt from
Woman in the Shadows
by Jane Thynne copyright © 2014, 2016 by Thynker Ltd

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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ALLANTINE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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ANDOM
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OUSE
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EADER
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IRCLE
& Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Simon & Schuster UK under the title
Faith and Beauty,
in a different form, in 2015.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Woman in the Shadows
by Jane Thynne. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
C
ATALOGING-IN-
P
UBLICATION
D
ATA

Names: Thynne, Jane, author. Title: The pursuit of pearls: a novel/Jane Thynne. Description: New York: Ballantine Books, [2016] | Sequel to: The scent of secrets.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016000590 (print) | LCCN 2016004835 (ebook) | ISBN 9780553393866 (softcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780553393927 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Actresses—Fiction. | Intelligence officers—Great Britain—Fiction. | Espionage—Great Britain—History—20th century—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | FICTION / Sagas. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction. | Spy stories.

Classification: LCC PR6070.H96 P87 2016 (print) | LCC PR6070.H96 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/​2016000590

eBook ISBN 9780553393927

randomhousebooks.com

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Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Victoria Allen

Cover photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

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We want girls who believe unreservedly in Germany and the Führer, and will instill that faith into the hearts of their children. Then National Socialism and thus Germany itself will last for ever.

Dr. Jutta Rüdiger, head of the Faith and Beauty Society

In the peoples of Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves.

T
ACITUS
,
Germania

PRELUDE

I
t is cold in the dense woods of the Grunewald at seven on an April morning. Even though spring has dotted the moss with bluebells and wild daffodils and filled the tops of the pines with nesting birds, the temperature is still chilly enough to goose-pimple the arms and cause the hardiest hiker to shiver. It's gloomy, too, even in the glades, where the early sun filtering through the boughs casts only a greenish, watery light and leaves most of the tangled ferns and mulch in darkness. The mist hangs low between the closely packed trees, confusing any traveler unwise enough to stray from the path. The mix of wood here—pine, oak, and birch—has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and wild boar forage for beech mast in the undergrowth as they have always done. Hunters search for deer and pig along dirt tracks that have been trodden since the Middle Ages. Though the city is only a few miles away to the west, the forest could be the same primeval place it was in the Ice Age, when meltwater first created the lakes surrounding Berlin's flat, sandy plain and the early German tribes first emerged from the boggy swamps.

In the Grunewald, history slips by like a leaf falling to the forest floor.

HEDWIG HOLZ SQUINTED DOWN
the barrel of the Walther PPK pistol, released the safety lever, cocked the hammer, took aim, shut her eyes tightly, and squeezed.

Nothing happened.

She dropped the pistol with a sigh, aligned it again. Keeping two fingers wrapped around the grip and her little finger curled beneath the magazine the way she had been shown, she aimed again. Despite the freezing air, she could feel a trail of sweat running down her brow and a maddening itch from her woolen vest just below her arm that she longed to scratch. What was more, in her hurry to dress that morning she had chosen the tighter of her two skirts, and the waistband was now digging in uncomfortably. Yet she had to stop these trivial bodily sensations from distracting her, just as she must ignore the thrushes flitting between their nests in the high pines, the squirrels scrambling among the branches, and the whole awakening Grunewald around her. She must concentrate. Straighten her arm, feel the cold metal of the pistol burn against her palm, find the target, and shoot. Even without her glasses, how hard could that be? She aimed, shut her eyes again, and fired.

Although the gun worked this time, the shot veered wildly off course, ricocheting around the tranquil woods and provoking a chorus of screeches from the crows overhead. Hedwig flinched, brushed the sweaty trails of hair from her brow with the back of her sleeve, and aimed again. The rustling in the trees above had broken her concentration; her next shot went even wider, sending a flutter of birds up into the sky and provoking muffled laughs from the gaggle of girls behind her.

They had been there for an hour now, a group of twenty young women, all startlingly alike from a distance, with blue eyes, braids of various shades of gold pinned up on their heads, and white smocks with neckties over navy serge pinafores. All wore ankle socks, and clumpy black boots. They made a curious sight as they threaded their way along the woodland path behind their leader—an Amazonian figure named Fräulein von Essen, wearing a leather jerkin and carrying a satchel of ammunition and a target, which she set up a hundred meters away from the firing site. They could expect to be there for another hour at least, Hedwig decided despondently, until Fräulein von Essen was satisfied every girl among them could shoot a man at a hundred paces.

Shooting was the last activity Hedwig had expected when she joined the Faith and Beauty Society. Far from shooting a man, all most girls wanted was to capture one. The Glaube und Schönheit society was, after all, the Third Reich's elite finishing school for young women. Its girls were the pearls of the Reich, and the plan was to equip them with the poise, polish, and talent required to marry into the top ranks of the Nazi hierarchy.

To this end, every weekend, and several evenings in the week, a select group of girls would gather at the Faith and Beauty community house in the picturesque woods outside Neubabelsberg to be educated in the finer points of civilization: history, the arts, music, dancing, and dinner party conversation. How to discuss Beethoven intelligently and dazzle a man with knowledge of the Franco-Prussian War. How to make tapestries and play chamber music. How to waltz, sketch a head, and paint a decent landscape in watercolors. Any old Bride School or Mother Class could teach a girl to cook a herring, the wisdom went, but some German girls should be setting their sights on higher things. That was why Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, head of all Nazi youth groups, had hit on the idea of a society for the cream of the nation's young women. Faith and Beauty girls were the Third Reich's Vestal Virgins, according to the introductory talk—a comparison that made Hedwig blush profusely when she heard it for the first time.

Every girl applying to the Faith and Beauty Society must be blond and blue-eyed—the precise color was measured against a chart containing sixty different shades—but there was no actual stipulation that they must also be beautiful, which was fortunate for Hedwig, whose moon-like face was earnest, rather than exquisite, and whose mousy hair could be called blond only by a vivid stretch of the imagination. She was tall and bosomy, a born worrier with a perpetually anxious air that vanished only when a good-natured smile lit up her face, exposing her crooked teeth.

Hedwig's appearance was in stark contrast to that of her only friend in the society. Lottie Franke was a slender beauty with thick, honey-gold hair, a bold gaze, and a full mouth. She looked like a girl in a Renaissance portrait, with eyes as blue as gas flames and skin like whipped cream. Although Faith and Beauty girls were encouraged to acquire a suntan, Lottie maintained that sunlight caused wrinkles and insisted on coating herself with Nivea and remaining as pale as wax.

Despite their physical differences, the two had been close since they met on the first day of school, with their satchels on their backs and the traditional cones of sweets in their hands. Frau Mann, the Faith and Beauty principal, never lost a chance to boast that the two girls proved the egalitarian nature of the society. In the Third Reich, elites weren't just for the rich. The other girls might come from middle-class homes with pianos and maids, but Hedwig and Lottie were unambiguously from the wrong side of the tracks. Hedwig and her five brothers inhabited a cramped apartment in Moabit, four rooms with a cuckoo clock in the parlor, a pervasive aroma of pork fat, and a bathroom they shared with another family. Lottie's family was even poorer. It had been a great sacrifice for the Frankes to find the fees, but Lottie was an only child, and generally Lottie got what Lottie wanted. And what she really wanted was a ticket to a better life. To meet all the right people and leave working-class Berlin behind forever.

Lottie was passionate about fashion, and as part of her Faith and Beauty course she had chosen to study costume design at the nearby Ufa film studios in Babelsberg. She had met any number of film stars—Lilian Harvey, Willi Fritsch, Brigitte Horney, and Marika Rökk—and she was full of snippets of celebrity gossip. Which actor was sleeping with someone else's wife, who had undergone cosmetic surgery, what girl had caught Reichsminister Goebbels's eye. All the Faith and Beauty girls crowded round her. Lottie was the type who knew secrets, and even though she probably made most of them up, hearing about a film star's drug habit was infinitely more diverting than a lecture on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

Hedwig braced herself, focused, and once again took aim. The gun was heavy—half a kilo of iron that had to be aimed with a straightened right arm. Her next shot went even wider, provoking unrestrained shrieks of laughter from her fellow students. Damn pistol shooting! And archery. What on earth was it for? Fräulein von Essen told them archery would reawaken their sense of the medieval, but Hedwig had a nine-to-five job as a librarian. She had never had a sense of the medieval and didn't want one now. When would she ever need to handle a bow and arrow? Let alone a gun?

As if reading her thoughts, Fräulein von Essen glared at her, flint-eyed, and signaled, with an infinitesimal dip of the head, that she should try again. Hedwig needn't think that mere ineptitude would reprieve her from pistol practice. They could stay there all day, as far as Fräulein von Essen was concerned. Didn't Hedwig remember taking that oath to the Führer about loyalty, sacrifice, and achievement?

Hedwig was distracted—that was the problem—and it was Lottie who was distracting her. She had not turned up for pistol practice that morning, nor had Hedwig seen her at their previous community meeting. She was out during the day, of course, but everyone was supposed to congregate at the community house at six for dinner and evening instruction, and Lottie had already missed a two-part talk on medieval tapestries.

Hedwig knew what the problem was, of course. Lottie was in love. When Hedwig asked who the lucky man was, her friend had turned secretive, so Hedwig assumed he must be unsuitable. She had no idea who it could be, but Lottie had been making endless outings over recent weeks and refused to tell Hedwig where she had been. God forbid she had eloped. The thought of what that would do to Herr and Frau Franke, who worshiped their clever daughter and had gladly donated their savings for her Faith and Beauty training, made Hedwig wince.

When her next shot veered even farther from the target, prompting a further burst of hilarity from the others, Fräulein von Essen put an unexpected end to Hedwig's misery by ordering her to give someone else a try, so she moved gratefully to the back of the group, leaned against the trunk of a tree, and miserably surveyed the dank, mushroomy woods around her.

Hedwig knew she was supposed to like the forest. The Faith and Beauty girls were constantly sent on hikes with a knapsack and compass, the branches whipping in their faces and the undergrowth threatening to trip them up, and besides, true Germans belonged in the woods. They had learned that in the weekly race ancestry lessons; according to the Roman author Tacitus, the German race had originated in the forest before giving birth to the whole of human civilization. The original Germans were blue-eyed with golden hair and vigorous bodies, and life in the forest had made them a tough warrior race.

But the silence of the forest unnerved Hedwig. Berlin was a cacophony of noise, yet here were only pigeons rustling and cooing, the occasional sound of a deer crashing through the undergrowth, and the sporadic crack of the girls' guns.

That morning, however, the silence had been shattered by a bevy of construction workers who had begun work a few hundred meters away, building an air-raid shelter for the film studios. Because of the warmongering of the British, the whole of Berlin was digging air-raid shelters now. Wherever you went in town the rattle of drills and clang of spades could be heard in the background, preparing for the day that British bombers appeared in the skies. Everyone was talking about war, but Hedwig didn't believe it for a second. As far as she was concerned, the chances of any actual fighting were as remote as those ancient battles between the rival tribes of Europe that Tacitus wrote about. No foreign country had stood in the Führer's way before, and there was really no reason to suppose they would now.

On the way back, Fräulein von Essen couldn't resist another dig at Hedwig's hopeless aim. “Back again tomorrow, ladies. And perhaps this time Hedwig Holz will be able to manage just a single shot on target.”