Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  ‘And I love you.’ And she did. She loved him with quince blossom and springtime — which she suddenly saw with deep clarity was not enough to build a lifetime on. Though it might be a place where one could begin …

  ‘I’ve got a job now, Sophie,’ he said softly. ‘Assistant to my father, and he’ll retire when I’ve learned the ropes. It’s a good job, and land I love.’

  A young woman, dressed in sensible navy blue, let herself in, carrying a false leg. ‘Angus?’

  The melodrama eased. The young woman stared at Sophie.

  Sophie smiled back. I would win if I fought you for Angus, she thought. I could persuade him to come to Australia, to manage Thuringa and whatever neighbouring land we buy. I could make him into exactly the husband that I needed.

  And that was what Angus was afraid of.

  She rose and held out her hand. ‘Sophie Higgs. I knew Captain McIntyre in France. I’m so delighted to see him happy now.’

  She drove herself back down the flowering lanes, still wondering if she had done the right thing; if Angus’s hesitation had been based far more on the loss of his leg, the notion that this made him inadequate to hold his own as her husband, than he would admit even to himself.

  Perhaps when he had been back at work, and part of life, for six months or a year, he would feel differently as the mental scars of war faded — and they would fade, in the healing air of trees and streams, the hush of owl wings and indignant protest of nesting plovers. But by then he might be engaged to that young woman, and Sophie back in Australia.

  Where to now? Not just in her life, but today? Her suitcase was strapped to the back of the car, though her trunk still waited at the Abbey; she had been so sure she would need to stay with Angus, or at a hotel near him.

  If she kept driving and had no flat tyres, and found fuel whenever needed — each as unlikely a proposition as a lasting peace across the world — she would make it back to the Abbey by midnight, which was not a suitable time to arrive anywhere — unfair to the servants, but also all too obviously saying, ‘I am crawling back here because I have nowhere else to be just now.’

  A hotel. Not in the next town — she needed distance from Angus physically as well as in other ways, for reasons she did not feel like analysing yet. There would be a post office where she could cable Mr Slithersole to book her another passage home. Perhaps she should go to Shillings again until she sailed. Nigel might even help her untangle her feelings about Angus. Nigel of all people knew the complex flavours of love. Two men currently wanted to marry her, but the one man she had asked had refused …

  Did she truly love him? Of course she did. Angus had been the first man whose very breath could make her shiver, and would always be, as well as the man who had heard her story in that war-shredded night, and yet had travelled on with her, despite his terror.

  And if she insisted now, he would travel with her once again. She who had been taught so well that a woman could choose her own life must give the man she loved the freedom to choose his. A small life, which was perhaps all he could manage after so large a war, while she longed for empires …

  The hamper was still on the back seat. She thrust her mind away from another back seat, another hamper, and waited till the mossed stone walls gave way to a muddy lane, drove a little way down and parked the car. Too much mud and cattle muck to bother getting out. She hauled the basket into the front seat and poured tea into the cup that was part of the Thermos lid. Ginger nut biscuits. And the mail, still unopened. The housekeeper must have tucked the letters into the basket so that she would not overlook them in what must have seemed her strange haste.

  She flicked through the envelopes. One from Miss Thwaites, darling Miss Thwaites. Another from Ethel, probably inviting her on yet another journey somewhere or other in the sidecar of her new motorbike. If the call of home had not been so strong, she might have said yes.

  I will come back to England, she thought. There are people I love here. Every few years I will give six months of my life to cross the world and visit.

  Nigel, too, would need her. And so would Miss Lily, for if Nigel was to be truly whole, Miss Lily must return, even if in a different incarnation. Besides, Sophie loved Miss Lily too.

  She looked at the letters again. Two from women who had nursed at her hospitals and one from Sloggers. We were an army, she thought. An army of women, never mentioned in dispatches. The history books will probably never mention us either. We make the men who write them too uncomfortable.

  Another letter, with many German stamps. An unfamiliar hand, the letters shaped slightly differently from all those she knew, except for Hannelore’s …

  The small closet she had chained shut was immediately ajar. Hannelore must be safe! And Dolphie?

  She put the letter down, unopened, suddenly unable to bear seeing what it held. Angus had accused her, back during that long night, of sacrificing him in her quest to save the English forces from the gas. But it had been Dolphie she had sacrificed. His arm, if the wound had festered. His men. Possibly his life and honour, because by being found there, presumably with no orders, he would be at best a deserter, at worst a traitor. Imprisoned. Shot.

  She thought, I cannot bear to open this.

  A cow mooed, sadly. Stop wailing, she thought impatiently. At least you are kept for milk, not corned beef.

  She opened the envelope.

  The writing was not Hannelore’s.

  Liebe Sophie,

  I write to you for Hannelore, who will not write. Do not worry: she is safe and well, or safe for a time and well enough, though far too thin. But then I do not think there is a person of plumpness in the whole of Germany.

  Hannelore’s estates are in Russian hands now, as are mine. I cannot help her, as I would wish to do, not just because of the loss of fortune, but because of other matters of which I may not write but which, perhaps, you will understand.

  I write to you as her friend, knowing that you will still be her friend, and not her enemy, and can offer her a home, a future, in Australia and its sunshine perhaps, as you once promised, far from the starvation and misery of Germany. You may start with the address on this envelope. She is not there, but the people will know where she can be found.

  I remain yours faithfully, as I always have been, and will always be,

  D

  The letter ‘D’. Not his title, not even his full nickname. What was Dolphie’s position in a defeated Germany? Traitor? Discarded aristocrat? Precarious enough that even this letter might threaten him, and Hannelore, if it were read by others?

  … of other matters of which I may not write but which, perhaps, you will understand. But I don’t understand, she thought. I don’t know Germany, especially not now, in poverty and defeat, its previous similarity to Britain destroyed.

  ‘You never did see me, did you, Sophie?’ he had said that terrible grey morning on the French front line. ‘I made most sure that you would not.’

  But now she did. Saw the man she had trusted not to shoot her.

  Was it possible to trust a man more than that? Saw Dolphie, finally, not as a fashionable fool, joker, enemy, but as the man who would forgive her — and in a way that Angus never could — for sacrificing him, just as she would have sacrificed herself, to save an army from a devastating weapon. Saw the man who trusted her to stop the deployment of a weapon, in the middle of a war. A man who had not just forgiven her, but also understood. Even more, for a man like Dolphie, he had forgiven her for shooting his men. Saw the slightest, smallest possibility that an alliance between a German count and an Australian corned-beef heiress might become something good, something better than either of them alone might be.

  Above her a lark soared, delicate, beautiful. She longed instead for a wedge-tailed eagle, broad-winged, that owned the sky. It would be months more before she saw that eagle now.

  She didn’t know if she was right. Couldn’t know. Because for that she must go to Germany. Which she must do anyway, to find Hannelore a
nd make her safe, either in Australia or at Shillings, where Nigel would surely welcome her, even if Hannelore was too proud — or too defeated — to ask. Felt she had failed, perhaps — as if one woman could ever keep a world from war, or a nation at war from using every horror weapon it could find.

  Sophie sat back upon the leather seat and felt the smile spread across her face. So this was what she must do tomorrow, after an evening in the next hotel. The strategies spread out before her, as they always did.

  Yes, she would return to Shillings. She needed its peace to accomplish this, its scent of new-ploughed earth. Nigel and Jones would help. Perhaps in helping, Miss Lily too might emerge again, this time hand in hand with Nigel.

  James Lorrimer would know what passports and letters of introduction were needed. She would not marry him, but she could trust him.

  Dangerous for a woman unaccompanied. Would Ethel come to Germany? Or Stinkers, or Sloggers? Sloggers’s governess had been a Fräulein. Sloggers spoke German well.

  Sophie had a feeling that Sloggers, like a million other women now discarded after the work they’d done throughout the war, might welcome a challenge. Nigel or Jones would find a loyal chauffeur who knew how to use a pistol and his fists.

  Letters of credit … Mr Slithersole presumably had contacts even in Germany. Starving Germany must need corned beef, and this was a good opportunity for securing contracts, an excuse even for her father’s daughter to head to Berlin … lovely, innocuous corned beef, a perfect product to take her into the complexity of an enemy country in safety. Or in as much safety as might be achieved. Corned beef might even be a weapon for peace, when offered on reasonable terms to a starving, war-crippled country. Perhaps she should take a truckload of it, for both supplies and advertising. A truck would also be an excuse for the authorities. Ethel might even join in a new enterprise, forging fresh markets for her father’s cocoa instead of picketing parliament and riding her motorbike across the moors.

  And then? Find Hannelore at the address, which was a street address, not a castle or manorial name. Hug her. Feed her. Take her to love and safety. And Dolphie, who had asked for help for his niece, not for himself? How to persuade him that he could possibly find sunlight and a future in Australia?

  She smiled. She had been trained for this, after all. Knew what to do with every heartbeat in her body, for a man who had lost a war, his wealth and estate, even perhaps his own sense of himself. Knew too, now, that even a woman had the power to change the pieces in the patchwork quilt that was the world, and how precious it was to find a man who would let her be herself.

  The lark had perched, begun to sing: lovely, though lacking the liquid power of a lyrebird.

  Thank you, Miss Lily, she thought.

  Author’s Note

  While this book is based as far as possible on fact and primary sources, from Queen Mary’s knitting to the events that led to war, there is no evidence I have read indicating that anyone tried to stop Germany’s first use of mustard gas. On the other hand, if anyone had tried, the incident is likely to have been carefully forgotten, just as the role of the millions of women who served unofficially in the war has been forgotten, with only the official nurses and VADs celebrated, the smallest fraction of the women without whom the war would not have been won — or even lasted until the first Christmas, when it would have ended with German victory.

  No person in this book, apart from the obvious characters like Winston Churchill, is based on any one person, but all are composites of real people. None is based on any person living.

  Please forgive the views and some of the terms expressed in this book. The views are not necessarily mine — even the ones you may agree with — but those of the characters of the time. In the next two books in this series, covering the years 1920 to 1946, you may find the opinions of the same characters change.

  This book has evolved under the brilliant editorial guidance of Kate O’Donnell, Kate Burnitt, Emma Dowden and Pam Dunne. More thanks than I can say to Lisa Berryman, Cristina Cappelluto and Angela Marshall, without whom this book could not have been written, and also would not. My deepest love and gratitude, always. These books are your creations, at least as much as they are mine.

  About the Author

  JACKIE FRENCH AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children’s Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. She is regarded as one of Australia’s most popular authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much-loved historical fiction. ‘Share a Story’ was the primary philosophy behind Jackie’s two-year term as Laureate.

  jackiefrench.com.au

  facebook.com/authorjackiefrench

  Copyright

  Angus&Robertson

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia

  First published in Australia in 2017

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Jackie French 2017

  The right of Jackie French to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  French, Jackie, author.

  Miss Lily’s lovely ladies / Jackie French.

  ISBN: 978 1 4607 5358 3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978 1 4607 0194 2 (ebook)

  French, Jackie. Miss Lily; 1

  World War, 1914–1918—Fiction.

  Young women—Conduct of life—Fiction.

  Historical fiction.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Lisa White, HarperCollins Design Studio

  Cover images: Woman by Richard Jenkins; Chinese peony, Redoute Flower Illustration by istock.com ID:514108261