The episode opens with back-to-back sponsor reads. William Dalrymple champions the London Review of Books as 'the most wonderful journal in the country,' inviting listeners to try three months free at lrb.me/trial. A pre-recorded segment follows for BetterHelp, citing the platform's own 2026 State of Stigma report finding that 74% of Americans feel society discourages asking for help. Medical advertisements for Tremfya follow. Finally, Attio — billed as an AI CRM — is presented with an Empire-themed pitch about managing information across growing organisations, with a free trial available at attio.com/empire.

William Dalrymple opens the substantive episode by situating it as the second in a series that Anita Anand pioneered with her book on Sophia Duleep Singh, noting the accompanying London exhibition and growing public awareness of the family's extraordinary story. Where Episode 1 covered Sophia's suffragette activism, Episode 2 turns to Catherine — a woman who chose a radically different path, one that took her to a German town called Kassel in Prussia with her intimate companion, who happened to be her childhood governess. Dalrymple frames the central paradox immediately: a brown-skinned Indian princess, the sister of a British army officer, cohabiting with another woman, living in Nazi Germany. It is a premise that sounds impossible — and yet it happened.

Anita Anand paints a vivid portrait of the three Duleep Singh sisters as they were presented as debutantes before Queen Victoria: eldest Bamba fierce and unsmiling, youngest Sophia pliable and anglicised, and Catherine in the middle — the most beautiful, with an enigmatic stillness. Their guardian Lord Heneker dispatched regular reports on the girls, congratulating himself on improving these 'poor neglected children' once removed from their 'malign family's influence.' Skin tone shaped perception even within the family: Catherine and Sophia, lighter-skinned, were considered prettier. Anand notes the tragic backstory: their mother died in 1887 and their father effectively abandoned them to a dissolute end in a Paris hotel, leaving the sisters in the care of guardians and tutors — including a drill sergeant, a deportment teacher, and finally a German governess.

Queen Victoria, who trusted German governesses above all others for their discipline, brought Lena Schäfer into the Duleep Singh household. Lena is described as kind and gentle — exactly the stable maternal presence that the traumatised, orphaned Catherine craved at sixteen. What begins as dependence transforms into something more durable: when Catherine goes up to Somerville College Oxford, Lena comes too, despite there being younger siblings at home who arguably needed a governess more. Anita Anand reads the relationship carefully — she spent over a decade with these women's archives — and concludes that what kindles at Somerville and continues for forty years is 'a loving relationship.' Whether sexual or not, it is acknowledged by Sophia, a notorious prude, who uses the word 'intimate' and never once questions the fact that Catherine and Lena are a package deal.

The conversation turns to what kind of relationship Catherine and Lena actually had, and what the consequences might have been. Dalrymple notes that male homosexuality faced brutal criminalisation — Oscar Wilde received two years hard labour in 1895 — and asks whether women faced similar risks. Anand's answer is striking: no equivalent law existed for women, because the Victorian legal mind simply could not conceive that women would 'do such a thing.' This invisibility cut both ways: it protected Catherine and Lena from prosecution, but it also meant their relationship would be invisible to history. Anand is careful to avoid imposing modern categories, while being clear that the evidence — inseparability, financial interdependence, Sophia's own word 'intimate' — points overwhelmingly to a loving bond.

Following her studies at Somerville, Catherine leaves with a third-class honours in French and German — an education almost no woman of her generation possessed, even without a formal degree. She and Lena then undertake the Grand Tour, the aristocratic tradition of extended European travel as education and self-discovery. The housekeeper Margaret Mays records her unimpressed reactions to Germany and enthusiastic responses to Italy; Egypt moves the sisters deeply because their mother was born in Alexandria. But quietly, and without announcing it, Catherine has resolved during this trip that Germany — seen through Lena's eyes — is where she wants to live. There is no family connection, no practical reason. She simply chooses it, and sets up home in Kassel with Lena.

Kassel is described as a prosperous, slightly sleepy German university town set in a valley surrounded by beech forests — the town where the Brothers Grimm collected many of their fairy tales. For Catherine and Lena it is domestic bliss: Lena cooks restorative German food, the air is delightful, and Catherine writes to Sophia tempting her to visit and recover from what sounds like an eating disorder. From this happy distance, Catherine watches Sophia's suffragette campaigns with bemused but real support, sending money to Millicent Fawcett's non-militant wing. Anand suggests Catherine's support for women's rights was perhaps sharpened by her own unconventional situation — a relationship that could, at some point, have been criminalised. Meanwhile, Sophia and Bamba seethe in Hampton Court's grace-and-favour apartments, surrounded by what they consider the architects of colonial violence against their family.

The First World War catches Catherine on the wrong side of the border. As a British citizen, she has every right to return home; she refuses, because Lena — a German — cannot leave. Sophia bombards the India Office with requests to extract her, and the authorities monitor the situation. Then Catherine's secret letter to Sophia is intercepted: it describes Germany as orderly and peaceful, calls the war unjust, and — using a coded star symbol — begs her brother Victor not to fight. Anand reads it aloud: it amounts to suborning treason. William Dalrymple notes this is a period of total censorship, and the letter goes into a file alongside an assessment that Catherine is 'decidedly pro-German' but 'not a serious threat.' She is left to remain in Germany. Only in 1918, starving and with Lena seriously ill, does Sophia succeed in extracting her via the Dutch embassy in Berlin — on Armistice Day itself. ^{[1] — Anita Anand "Catherine wrote a secret letter to her sister Sophia during WWI urging their brother Victor not to fight against Germany, calling the war '…" 22:00 Play}

The moment Catherine is strong enough after WWI, and the moment borders allow, she returns to Lena in Kassel. Through the 1920s — the era of Weimar Germany, of Babylon Berlin, of unprecedented same-sex visibility and cultural experimentation — Catherine and Lena live in what the former calls 'domestic bliss.' Dalrymple evokes the world of Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, noting how little this era of German openness is remembered now. Catherine describes them as 'happy little church mice,' wandering around and having the most wonderful time. It is a happiness that history is about to catastrophically curtail — but for a decade, they are simply content. ^{[1] — Anita Anand "Through the 1920s, Catherine and Lena lived out their days in Kassel during the Weimar Republic's wild years — describing themselves as 'ha…" 26:49 Play}

William Dalrymple catalogues the escalating nightmare of Nazi Germany: Hitler chancellor in 1933, Führer in 1934, Nuremberg Laws in 1935, brownshirt violence in the streets. Yet Kassel remains, for a while, relatively insulated — 'half-timbered cottages and cuckoo clock houses' in a provincial Prussian town. By 1938 everything is changing. The Anschluss happens in March, the Sudetenland crisis unfolds through summer, and Europe reaches Munich by September. Catherine is 66. Lena is in her 70s. Lena is Catherine's shield — an Aryan German, beloved of the local community, whose presence makes the extraordinary spectacle of an Indian princess living in Prussia comprehensible to the authorities. ^{[1] — William Dalrymple "When Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship in 1935, Catherine — a brown-skinned Indian woman…" 27:39 Play}

After the dramatic setup of Catherine in Nazi Germany, the episode pauses for a mid-episode break. Michael and Hannah from The Rest Is Science introduce a Cancer Research UK segment explaining CAR-T cell therapy — the process of extracting and reprogramming a patient's T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells, with particular promise against blood cancers and now being extended to solid tumours. Cancer Research UK claims its 50 years of work have helped double cancer survival in the UK. A further medical advertisement addresses Peyronie's disease, and the show then returns to Catherine's story.

Anita Anand reveals the new research dimension that makes this episode remarkable: Sophia's goddaughter remembered 'dirty people' arriving at Hampton Court — people smuggled in on coal barges, cleaned, fed, and sent on their way — who she now believes were Jewish refugees helped out of Germany by Catherine. Historian Peter Bunz has been tracking what he calls the 'Indian Schindler,' and the context he provides is essential: Britain in the 1930s required a named, credible British citizen to personally guarantee every refugee would not become a burden on the state. Without that signature, the visa was refused. Catherine, with her British passport and her title, signed for at least six families — and bought a manor house in Buckinghamshire, remotely and sight unseen, to house them. It is, Anand argues, an act of pure humanity: saving lives across every barrier of colour, religion, and ethnicity. ^{[1] — Anita Anand "British refugee policy in the 1930s required a named British citizen of standing to personally guarantee every Jewish refugee seeking entry…" 32:10 Play [2] — Anita Anand "Saving one life or saving 10 lives is still saving. You're saving someone's life. Somebody who's not your colour, not your religion, not yo…" 34:25 Play}

The story of the Hornstein family is the episode's most human and specific moment. Ilse Hornstein is sitting in a doctor's waiting room in Kassel in 1938; her husband Wilhelm, a Jewish lawyer and decorated WWI veteran, has just been arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen. Their two young children, Klaus-George and Ursula, are with her. She has no idea if Wilhelm is alive. And then she finds herself sitting next to an Indian princess. According to the family's own account, Catherine immediately offered to be their British guarantor — a complete stranger, known for ten minutes. Wilhelm was eventually released from Sachsenhausen (the camp was overcrowded and releasing prisoners on condition of immediate departure) and the entire family was sponsored to Britain, sheltered initially at Faraday House. In 2002, a descendant of another rescued family walked into Peter Bunz's office to confirm: 'If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be alive today.' ^{[1] — Anita Anand "In 1938, Catherine sat next to Ilse Hornstein in a Kassel doctor's waiting room. Ilse's Jewish lawyer husband had just been taken to the SS…" 36:10 Play}

Lena's death in August 1938 is the turning point that forces Catherine's flight. At 67, she is alone for the first time in half a century. Her neighbours, alarmed by her vulnerability — brown-skinned, known to be helping Jewish families, now without Lena's protective Aryan status — urge her repeatedly to leave. Her neighbour Dr Fritz Rathig begs her. She does not want to go: Lena is buried in Kassel. But good sense eventually prevails, and this foreign-born woman in an unconventional relationship, whose activities would have been a red flag to the Nazi authorities, gets out. She reaches England via Switzerland in November 1938 — just after Kristallnacht — and goes, reluctantly, to the place she hates most: Faraday House in Hampton Court, Sophia's home, with all its dogs and cigarettes.

Catherine's final years in England are a study in tenacious advocacy. At Cole Hatch House — the Buckinghamshire manor she'd never seen before arriving — she recreates something of her Kassel life: ornamental garden, orchard, European furnishings. She writes constantly to MPs, arranges passage for more refugees, and campaigns for Germans interned in Britain who have been lumped indiscriminately with Nazi sympathisers — including anti-Nazi Jews who had only recently escaped Hitler. Even during the Blitz, she persuades the reluctant, furiously chain-smoking Sophia to leave London for a cottage across the road. Then, on 8 November 1942, Sophia finds her lying dead on the floor. Her death is immediate — 'clot on the heart,' the doctor says, quite painless. Sophia is stupefied. Catherine's final wish is to go back to Lena: her will requests that a quarter of her ashes be buried as near as possible to Lena Schäfer's coffin in Kassel. Bamba, the fierce custodian, makes it happen. William Dalrymple reads out the words of the will: 'I desire that a quarter of my ashes be buried as near as possible to the coffin of my friend, Fraulein Lena Schäfer.' It is the end of a fifty-year love story — and the hosts promise that next time, they will meet the most difficult sister of all: Princess Bamba. ^{[1] — Anita Anand "Even after reaching England, Catherine never stopped — writing to MPs, arranging passage for more refugees, fighting to free Germans intern…" 41:20 Play [2] — Anita Anand "All she wanted was to go back to Lena. Just take my remains back to Lena." 43:00 Play}