He jumped out of the car and kissed her properly. ‘Good morning,’ he said with a smile.
‘Good morning yourself,’ she replied, grinning. It was the first time she’d seen him dressed casually, in jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt that once again deepened the brown of his eyes to nearly black. That, combined with the way his body felt beneath the soft fabric as her hands moved down his back made her grin turn to a sigh. ‘You should wear this all the time,’ she said.
He raised a teasing eyebrow at her. ‘All the time?’
She laughed. ‘You’re right. All the time in public places, I mean. But when it’s just me, you’re allowed to take it off.’
He laughed too. ‘If I’d known you were this feisty in the morning, I’d have come earlier.’
‘Mornings are my metier, don’t forget. Three-year-olds have no idea what sleep-ins are.’ She gave a wry grin. ‘And I’m sure sleeping isn’t what you had in mind, which just goes to show how bad I am at flirting.’
‘You’re perfect,’ he said, kissing her forehead.
She tried not to blush but knew she hadn’t succeeded when Elliott touched her cheek and said, ‘You are.’
They climbed into the car and Elliott drove along Pall Mall and then onto Piccadilly. The streets were quiet, most people still sleeping, Hyde Park a field of gold in the sunrise. Elliott glanced over at her and Kat knew he wanted to ask more about where they were going but that he was waiting for her to bring it up. She took a deep and steadying breath.
‘In my grandmother’s cottage in Cornwall there is one Dior gown for every year from the very first showing in 1947 until now,’ she began. ‘I found them last month.’
Elliott’s eyes flicked over to her again before he returned them to the road. ‘That’s …’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t even know what the right word is. It’s more than strange …’
‘I know.’
‘And I suppose she won’t talk about that either.’
‘Other than telling me I need to wear them, no. She said she’d thought she could tell me but then …’ Kat paused. ‘That was when she looked so, so scared.’
‘Kat, do you want to do this?’ Elliott asked gently. ‘I can turn the car around and we can go back to London. I’ll somehow get on with my research and not bother you with it. I don’t want to mess things up with you and your grandmother.’
Kat’s exhale filled the car and she stared at her hands, spinning her vintage Deco ring around and around on her finger. ‘I don’t know if I can just forget about all this now. If there’s something out there, some history that made my grandmother look the way she did that night,’ Kat felt herself shiver, ‘then shouldn’t I find out what it is so I can make sure it never – I never – hurt her like that again?’
‘Kat …’
The way he said her name made Kat the one who was scared now.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he said.
She braced herself, but said lightly, trying to shrug off the dread that had woven itself tightly around her, ‘You have a fourth wife locked in your attic?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Definitely not. I wanted to tell you this at the party but it wasn’t the right place – I thought you wouldn’t want people around when you heard. And then afterwards … well …’ He sighed. ‘Maybe I should have told you afterwards but that didn’t feel like the right time either. It’s just that, if your grandmother really is my Margaux Jourdan, then it means your mother …’ Another pause. ‘Your mother was born in a concentration camp.’
Bright sun. Much too bright. Green fields lurid beneath the rays. A sunbeam glaring off a sign for a hideously quaint English pub called the Nobody Inn.
Was Kat now a nobody? If her grandmother really had been a spy … And her mother had been born in a—Kat blanched, cutting off the thought.
A piercing toot roused her, followed by another. Elliott had stopped the car by the roadside and was saying her name.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she heard him say. ‘But I couldn’t not tell you. If you’d somehow found out and discovered that I’d known …’ He reached for her hand and she saw it wilt into his. ‘You look like you might faint or be sick or both. Do you need some air? Or can I get you a coffee?’
She shook her head. The thought of entering the Nobody Inn and hearing people laughing over coffee made the nausea rise. How could her mother have been born in a concentration camp? It meant that …
‘My grandmother was sent to a concentration camp?’
Elliott nodded. ‘She nearly died there, Kat. So did your mother. I can tell you more about it, if you want. Or I can shut up and regret having said anything.’
She saw that his own face looked bloodless and understood what a conflict he’d faced: knowing something so appalling and deducing that she had no idea. Of course he hadn’t wanted to tell her at the party. Or afterwards. He’d been right not to. She hadn’t wanted anything other than pleasure that night.
And now … She didn’t want to know it now either. But she also knew that behind his words – your mother was born in a concentration camp – lay a terrible story that she would have to face. A story that she must face, just as her grandmother had had to by living through it. No wonder her face had paled. No wonder she’d looked so frightened.
‘Can you tell me more when we get to Cornwall?’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can deal with it right now. But I want to. Later.’ She felt tears fill her eyes. ‘Poor Margaux.’
‘Kat …’ Elliott reached for her and kissed her forehead. ‘If I say sorry for the millionth time, I know it won’t help. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know whenever you’re ready to hear it.’
They spent the rest of the drive talking about other things, and slowly Kat felt herself relax. By late morning, they reached Porthleven and the turn-off to the house. As they bounced along the track, the cottage, transformed by brilliant sunshine from the brooding creature of her last visit, looked almost picturesque.
Elliott drew the car to a stop, hopped out and whistled. ‘This is amazing.’
‘I suppose it is,’ Kat said as she joined him, taking in the undeniable beauty of the cottage’s position, the uninterrupted view across the sea. The water moved smoothly and lustrously like a swathe of blue velvet, a bodice of sun-washed sky blooming out of it. Gulls circled, wings unflapping, soaring without effort. ‘I didn’t really notice how pretty it was when I was here last month because I was so confused about why my grandmother had a house she’d never told me about. I thought I should convince her to sell it but …’
What if she didn’t? What if she brought the girls over for a holiday? How they would love building sandcastles and exploring rock pools and searching for shells. But she knew she would only be able to do that if she let go of her unease over the house and uncovered what it meant to her grandmother, what the dresses meant too – and what her grandmother had hidden away behind her fear.
‘Don’t sell it,’ Elliott said. ‘That would be sacrilege. Not that I’m trying to tell you what to do,’ he added hastily. ‘But it’s extraordinary.’
‘The outside maybe,’ Kat said. ‘The inside, not so much.’
She slipped her hand into his and led him into the house. Dust rose to surround them the moment they entered.
‘It’s a bit neglected,’ Elliott said as his shoe crunched on the skeleton of a spider, ‘but I like it. It feels …’ He stopped and smiled.
‘What were you going to say?’ she asked as they moved into the front room with its matchless view of the ocean.
Elliott walked over to the window seat, clearly unable to resist the lure of the water. ‘Something horribly pretentious: that it feels like an unopened book. Luckily I stopped myself before you had the chance to think I was an idiot.’
She managed a wry laugh. ‘Tell me the story has a happy ending though.’
‘How could it not, set in a place like this.’
‘Let me show you what’s upstairs first.
You might change your mind then.’ She led him to the bedroom where the bounty of dresses hung in the wardrobes. ‘See?’
He stared at the rainbow of silk and she knew he was, like her, thinking of the Vogue image of Margaux Jourdan modelling for Dior in 1947.
She reached out to touch one of the dresses: Le Muguet, a white knee-length dress adorned with hundreds of intricate and perfect lily-of-the-valley flowers. May lilies. Lilies of happiness. Or the lilies that bloomed from Mary’s tears at the foot of the cross. Now, in her grandmother’s house and with her grandmother’s dresses before her, all Kat could think of were the words: concentration camp.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Elliott said, obviously sensing her shift in mood.
She nodded. Perhaps the balm of sea and sky would restore her spirits and make her less afraid of her grandmother’s secret past and what it all meant.
They walked down to the cove. Crabs scurried out of their way and over the sand. The shore stretched all the way to a rocky wall that almost hid the town of Porthleven from view. Kat wondered if there was a way through the wall, or if it created a dead end, making the beach truly private.
Before they reached the wall, the breeze picked up, flinging sand at them, so they decided to walk over the moors behind the house instead. After almost half an hour, they reached a wall at the far boundary of the property. On the other side she could see a beguiling mix of tall and elegant trees. She pulled herself up and sat atop the wall, peering down into wonder.
It was a garden that stretched for acres, in some ways formal, and in some ways completely wild. In the far distance a house was just discernible, almost hidden by a jungle of ivy, vines and grandiose trees. There were several greenhouses nearer to Kat, topiary hedges, a vegetable garden, a lake with a rope bridge curving across it and a meadow dotted with flowers like a striking pointillist painting. She was so awestruck that she leaned forward to see more, lost her grip and tumbled over the other side.
‘Kat!’ she heard Elliott call. ‘Are you all right?’
Within seconds he had scrambled over the wall, dropping far more elegantly than she had to the other side.
Kat sat up and smiled ruefully. ‘Luckily I managed to land in this.’ She indicated the mound of freshly mown grass that had cushioned her fall.
She stood up, grass stuck to her clothes and, she imagined, all over her. Sure enough, Elliott leaned over to pick some out of her hair.
‘You look like a wild creature from myth,’ he teased.
They were interrupted by a harsh voice. ‘There’s no getting in for free. Make your way to the front and pay like everyone else. Although when you arrive an hour before closing time, I don’t know what you expect to see.’
Kat drew back from Elliott and saw an elderly woman with long white hair that had faded like aged cotton to yellow near the ends. She was pointing a finger at them.
Kat shivered. ‘I’m so sorry. We didn’t mean to sneak in. I fell off the wall.’
The woman stared at her accusingly. ‘How did you get onto the wall? The only way to do that is to trespass on the property behind this one.’
‘Oh no,’ Kat said. ‘We weren’t trespassing.’
Elliott stepped forward and offered his hand. ‘I’m Elliott Beaufort. This must be the Lost Gardens of Lysander. I’ve heard of it, that it’s a beautiful place, but I’ve never had the chance to visit. I can see that was a mistake.’
The old woman smiled and shook his hand, clearly charmed by both his manner and his words.
Kat offered her hand too, and said, ‘And I’m Kat. It really is breathtaking.’
‘Do you own the gardens?’ Elliott asked.
‘Yes.’ And then the old woman said, ‘I’m Margaux Jourdan.’
Kat’s gasp ricocheted around them. She shook her head and stepped backwards. It was only Elliott, putting a hand on her back to steady her, that stopped her from running away.
He said to the woman, frowning, ‘I called you months ago. You told me you were fifty years old and couldn’t be the woman I was looking for.’
‘I lied,’ she said unapologetically. ‘Who wouldn’t want to be fifty again? Besides, I never thought anyone would come looking for Margaux Jourdan.’
Kat froze. The gardens vanished from her vision. Everything disappeared, in fact, except the woman. And the knowledge that her grandmother had said exactly the same thing to her back in Australia: I never thought anyone would come looking for Margaux Jourdan.
PART SEVEN
Skye
The first thing I would like to make clear is that we women members of the Air Transport Auxiliary do not regard ourselves as heroines …
– Joan Hughes
Twenty-One
ENGLAND, JUNE 1943
Over the next two months, some malevolent god ensured that Skye ferried planes to RAF Tangmere more often than she’d ever done for the entire year previous. On one of those occasions, she saw her sister’s back slinking away but Skye didn’t let her escape.
‘Liberty!’ she called out.
A grinning face whirled around and Liberty came over to greet her, at least having the sense not to lie and say, Sorry, I didn’t realise it was you.
But even though Skye had forced the meeting, she didn’t know what to say. She knew nothing about her sister now, so conversation came hard. ‘What does your new job involve?’ she settled on, thinking that would be safe ground.
Liberty lit a Sobranie, smoothed a hand over her dark-brown hair and said, faux-serious, ‘Flirting.’
‘Very funny.’ Skye waited, not for one minute thinking that was all her sister would say.
But Liberty blew out carefully formed smoke rings as if she’d been learning the art of irritation-by-cigarette from Margaux and elaborated with only one word: ‘Typing. You’re the Penrose sister doing all the exciting things. Just like always.’
‘You were given every opportunity to fly. You never wanted to.’
‘No,’ Liberty agreed. ‘I never wanted to be Vanessa Penrose in the way that you did.’
There was something about the way she said their mother’s name – something hostile – that had Skye momentarily wishing one of those smoke rings might strangle her sister. ‘Have you been home since you’ve been back in England?’ she asked.
‘My home is up here with people rather than down there with crabs,’ Liberty said coolly.
‘You say that as if you don’t like Cornwall at all.’
‘It’s a lonely place.’
Don’t leave me alone. The voice of Skye’s nine-year-old sister insinuated itself into the present.
‘It wasn’t lonely,’ Skye objected. ‘You had me and Nicholas.’
‘No, you had Nicholas. And Nicholas had you.’
‘You had Mother.’
Liberty’s laugh was bereft of humour. ‘Nobody had our mother. She gave herself away long ago.’
Don’t leave me alone. That echo again. Even though Skye wasn’t sure she wanted to see the conversation through to its end, given the peculiar direction it was turning in, she made herself ask, ‘What do you mean?’
‘The world turned its back on us the moment we were born, Skye. That’s what it does to illegitimate children.’ Liberty spoke serenely, one arm crossed over her body to support the other arm that moved her cigarette in and out of her mouth. ‘All she gave us were things that made the world turn its back on us even more. Flying lessons. Fortune-telling—’
‘She gave us the courage to do anything.’ Skye interrupted her sister.
‘She gave us the burden of disreputability.’
It was Skye’s turn to laugh, as if Liberty were just fooling around. ‘Well, I wouldn’t change any of it.’
‘I would. Our childhoods, while parallel, were nothing alike.’
‘They were exactly the same,’ Skye said, temper flaring. ‘I have to go. I have work to do.’
That afternoon, as she flew through a sky the colour of the Cornish sea – a deep, fathomless blue
– one thought whirled through Skye’s head like a blizzard: she and Liberty told two such different versions of the same story. Whose was right? Perhaps Liberty was just trying to take away the one thing they shared beyond their surname – their history. But if they didn’t even have a past, then what would tether them together now and in the future?
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Liberty’s childish kicking had simply been replaced by exasperating behaviour designed to goad the other party into lashing out. And as usual, Skye had managed to do something she regretted: storm off. There was no point dwelling on it. The next time she saw her sister, Liberty was sure to have moved on to some other provocation.
Thankfully for Skye’s jumbled emotions, she didn’t see O’Farrell, Nicholas or Margaux for quite some time. It meant she was able to put off discovering whether what she felt for Nicholas was written all over her face, no doubt mortifying him, Margaux and most especially herself.
Then, unbelievably, Liberty wrote to Skye to tell her that she’d met O’Farrell and, when he’d discovered she was Skye’s sister, he’d invited her to join them in London. She added a postscript that Skye didn’t trust: He’s exceptionally charming!
So it transpired that Liberty met Skye and Rose at Southampton station and caught the train with them to London. Joan was now training to fly four-engine bombers and couldn’t join them. At the Dorchester, O’Farrell and Richie met them in the lobby with eager smiles.
Richie kissed Rose’s cheek and, blushing endearingly, gave her the key to their room so she could freshen up and stow her overnight bag there.
O’Farrell, of course, didn’t blush or prevaricate; he took Skye’s bag from her, and Liberty’s too, and led the way upstairs to their rooms.
Liberty took one look at her cramped single, and at Skye and O’Farrell’s much larger and more luxurious accommodations, sniffed and said, ‘I thought I’d be able to spend time with my sister this weekend.’
O’Farrell’s face contorted.
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