The Lily and the Rose

by Jackie French

  And landed — once more sinking down into the water before they rose to bob on the surface. Miss Morrison turned to her, as if they had completed a shopping trip into the city and back, shook her hand firmly and managed to say, ‘I will telegraph your offices about setting up the transport company.’

  ‘I think Mrs Henderson probably already has, but yes — I’ll telegraph my Sydney office to make sure you’re getting all you need as soon as I get to England. I promise we will do all we can to get your business going.’

  She glanced outside at the busy port. Large ships, small ships, strange vessels . . . did Miss Morrison expect her to get out now and swim to shore? Even as she thought it the aviator climbed out onto the wing and a smart white cutter drew up to them.

  ‘Ahoy there!’ The young man wore impeccable white flannels and a solar topi. ‘Miss Higgs? Ah, you’re Miss Higgs.’ He turned from Miss Morrison’s ruined face with relief. Miss Morrison stayed expressionless, though her hands clenched. How often does she endure that? wondered Sophie.

  ‘We’ve been watching for you with binoculars from the balcony of the Consulate. Good old Higgs’s Corned Beef, eh? Cornerstone of the empire, corned beef. They’re holding the train for you.’

  What train? She had thought that there at least she might need to arrange the next part of her journey herself, but it seemed her employees — her friends — worked even more capably for her than she had realised. Instead of asking the man for details she turned to Miss Morrison, hesitated, then hugged her, hard. A second later the hug was returned. ‘We are going to meet again,’ said Sophie shakily. ‘When we are on the ground and we can talk, and I can meet your husband. And you will stay with us and we will talk about a million plans and . . . and life . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Morrison, and kissed her cheek with lips that had vanished years back and yet still kissed.

  Sophie waved to her, and the cutter wound its way across the harbour.

  Chapter 50

  Travel is adventure. It is not always a good one. Adventures rarely are, at least while one is experiencing them.

  Miss Lily, 1914

  The train was long, and full of freight, but seemed to have as many passengers on its roof as there were crates of goods inside, except on her carriage, which had been tacked onto the end, like a mouse that had bitten a snake and didn’t know how to let go.

  Her carriage was definitely not a usual part of a freight train. The inside was panelled with mahogany except where it was satin or gold velvet or Persian carpet or polished bronze. There were fifty-six lamps, in carved marble, bronze and alabaster — she counted them as she lay in the great, white-pillowed, four-poster bed. Whoever had designed this carriage had the same concept of ‘restraint’ as Genghis Khan.

  A servant in white jacket and trousers brought her tea and chilled mangoes, the cheeks already neatly sliced, and strange small stews in silver dishes or anchovies on toast at times that never seemed to fit with any mealtime she knew about. But she was too tired to do more than smile and sleep with the curtains drawn to keep out the new scenes she had no interest in.

  Perhaps it was the aftermath of the crash, or the withdrawal of whatever desperation and anguish had led her to this wild journey. And yet she realised, as she lay there in sheets that were changed each morning while she bathed behind a screen in scented water with soap of the same perfume, and towels as long and soft as mermaid’s hair, that she had swept across a landscape just as thoughtlessly once before, though admittedly not across the world — just two countries, and to save ten thousand, not a single man.

  Her presence wouldn’t save Nigel. It had been a momentary need to justify this journey to herself and Maria to ever claim it might. She had not even thought deeply what her presence might mean. Just that Jones had asked for her. She trusted Jones.

  And so she ate and slept and bathed, and ate again.

  Sometime, in the cold recesses of an early morning — which meant she was far north on the Indian coast to be this cold — her carriage was attached to a goods train. When she woke properly and peered through the curtains all she could see was grey desert and funnelled bare hills, quite like the desert she and Mrs Henderson had slept in only a week ago.

  A telegram lay on her breakfast tray, if rice simmered in chicken stock with small soft grapes might be called breakfast. She picked it up.

  Orient Express booked stop luggage arranged stop Mr Lampeen will escort you stop love from us all Maria Thwaites stop

  So this train, whose destination she hadn’t even ascertained, must be crossing Central Asia and the Middle East to Constantinople. And luggage would be good. At the moment she washed her underwear every evening and her nightdress each morning and longed for Green. She did not want to give her underwear to the steward to wash. It might offend him. It might not return either.

  A volley of shots fractured the morning, if it was morning. Her watch had lost all meaning — she had no idea how many time zones she had crossed. The shots were answered, reminding her that she must now be on, or near, the North West Frontier, where Nigel had been raped, beaten, left for dead. Where he had met her dad.

  Her father had lost his leg on the North West Frontier. Nor was it any safer today, according to its rare mentions in the newspapers. But the shots had sounded far away and the area was secure enough for a freight train line to exist — blowing up or removing a train line should be simple enough for determined men.

  She peered between the curtains again; she saw the same grey hills closer, this time adorned by a black goat; and then the goat was gone.

  She lay back, for the first time wishing she had a book to read. On any other train one could ask the steward for an English language newspaper, but not when one’s carriage was tacked on the back of a freight train and one had no idea what country, much less languages, were around them. The steward had not even spoken when he had brought her breakfast.

  Somehow, it did not seem to matter; or, rather, it mattered deeply that it did not matter. The train carried her; trains, unlike planes, could not deviate from their course, and Mr Lampeen was awaiting her with luggage.

  She would trust the minions of the empire her father had created, and she had extended, under the umbrella of the massive British Empire itself. And wait.

  Mr Lampeen wore a too dark, too narrow suit, a thin moustache and perfumed hair oil, and drove a car of elderly magnificence. He spoke little and likely had few English words to speak, but did not want to lose face by admitting this lack. Sophie accepted his ‘Miss Higgs!’ and ‘The car, Miss Higgs,’ ‘The luggage is on the train, Miss Higgs,’ and ‘Good journey, Miss Higgs?’ and, after their drive from the city outskirts to the central Sirkeci Station, with a brief stop en route for Mr Lampeen to send several telegrams in two directions so her friends could keep up with her movements, followed the steward into the polished carriages of the Orient Express.

  Her berth smelled of lemon polish, of tea and biscuits and starch and the hint of mothballs. The seat was soft leather, and shone; lamps glowed softly.

  ‘Mademoiselle Higgs?’ A soft voice, speaking Parisian French. ‘I am Eloise. Lady Georgina arranged for me to attend you on this journey. Will you dress for dinner, or take it here?’

  ‘Dress?’

  Eloise, neat in black dress, black stockings, black shoes, black hair and very white skin and hands, put down the small jewel box she had brought into the compartment and opened the wardrobe. She selected a gown in a soft burnished gold and held it up for Sophie’s approval.

  A dining car. People. She would like to be near people again, among them, not travelling past them. Not to speak to, but to listen, to be back in her familiar privileged world. And this was Nigel’s world too, and Miss Lily’s. A dining car, a maid, brought her closer to them.

  ‘The dress is perfect, Eloise.’

  How had Georgina and Green arranged this miracle? For the dress would most certainly fit, as would the others hanging next to it, and the coat, the mo
st glorious coat of soft leather with a wide shawl-like collar and cuffs of mink at sleeve and hem. She opened the jewel box. Pearls, but not the old-fashioned short string like Mrs Henderson’s. Was Mrs Henderson now camping by the Overland Telegraph Line again, gazing at the jewel stars or already plotting her new enterprise and new life with Miss Morrison?

  These pearls would loop in two waist-long strings. Extraordinarily expensive — which one must not mention but keep in mind — and, moreover, so evenly matched that only the most well-connected of all jewellers could have obtained them. In Paris, certainly, and by wire from Australia. On top of the velvet-lined case a mundane telegram said simply, Thank you stop travel well stop love Georgina stop

  She heard Miss Lily’s words, from so long ago. How had they gone? ‘One must always wear something given with love.’ Perhaps not quite those words, but that was their meaning.

  These clothes, these pearls, were procured and given with love.

  A bath, with rose-scented soap. She let herself glide into the dining car, her body swan-like even with the slight lurch of the train, as she was used now to far more severe turbulence. The Orient Express was almost like punting on a small still river.

  She sat, at a table for two but already set for one, for her. She did not wish to make small talk on a journey as long as this. Starched tablecloth, starched napkin. Silverware that gleamed. A menu . . .

  She chose.

  A glass of champagne. Oysters, though she ate only two of the six, knowing the staff would consume the leftovers, turtle soup, turbot with green sauce, chicken ‘à la chasseur’ of which she ate only a mouthful too. The steward offered red wine with the fillet of beef and château potatoes but she declined; she ate three mouthfuls of beef and some of the potatoes. A chaudfroid of game animals was presented next, which suddenly made her think of John’s rabbit stew, so that she sent it back untouched, lettuce salad with small hearts of radish and strips of orange peel, a chocolate pudding that she ate slowly, letting each spoonful spread across her tongue, then scraped the bowl, deliberately disobeying the manners taught her by Miss Thwaites and Miss Lily.

  Passengers gazed at her discreetly. They were wealthy, mostly elderly; one younger man had the look of an ex-officer who had declined in standing and become either a card sharp or a gigolo, investing in a first-class fare to look for his next prey. He smiled at her. She kept her face blank.

  Three women, of three generations, who might have been visiting the battlefields of Palestine, having lost loved ones there. Had it been the daughter’s husband, fiancé, and the other two were there to comfort her? Or a son, brother, grandson?

  At another time she might have joined them for coffee — or wished that someone had brought her an invitation to join their table. But just as her body reminded her it needed rest and sustenance to recover from the early terror and continued stress of this journey, her mind seemed cast back to 1917, as well as the events of just over a fortnight earlier.

  So much had happened that she needed all the time available to process all that had occurred. She must catch up with her life before she arrived at the inevitable challenges of Shillings and England.

  She declined coffee; she stood, knowing her dress, her pearls, her poise were perfect, even if her hair was not quite — she had grown too used to Green’s fastidious care. Shorter hair was ostensibly less work and certainly dried faster, but long hair could be pulled back in a simple chignon, even by an amateur like her. Somehow a bob always had a stubborn lock or two that wisped away from the rest, and Eloise was not Green who alone, it seemed, knew the magic for keeping Sophie’s hair neat after it had left the attentions of her comb and lavender spray.

  She walked back to her compartment and knew that with the grace Miss Lily had taught her no one had even noticed her hair.

  The bed had been made up. Starched sheets, a soft pillow. She sipped cocoa from a cup of fine china emblazoned with the railway’s crest and presented on a silver tray. And then she slept.

  They changed trains at Belgrade the next day, though her new compartment was almost identical to the first one. Porters and Eloise took care of her luggage. She wore her new coat and felt stares again as she swept across the station platform. The mink hat even covered her sub-standard hair.

  Belgrade to Vienna. The train wheels on their tracks below her sounded like a heartbeat: an irregular one, just like the lives beating all around.

  Dark, light; dark, light; her body had lost all sense of time. She slept when her bed was made up, crisp linen and feather pillows. She did not dream; or did not think she did. It was as if her life had emptied so that dreams could no longer come. She ate when the steward ushered her to the dining car, and enjoyed the ritual, because eight-course meals meant she was approaching the ‘civilisation’ that required them, the land where Nigel waited.

  She knew the food was good too, even though she could not remember its flavour after she had swallowed it.

  The only food she truly tasted was when she breakfasted alone in her compartment, off a tray: scrambled eggs with smoked salmon; croissants with English marmalade, which was not at all how one should appreciate either, but was how she liked them, and no steward on the Simplon Orient Express would argue with the strange tastes of a passenger; and milky coffee, this time with the curtains open, letting herself be drawn back into the world of Europe — bare forests of dappled trunks above a tapestry of dark earth or gleaming snow, and women in black — black scarves, black shawls, black stockings, black rags wound about their feet, bearing loads of firewood on their backs. She imagined their feet, cold and bleeding, their hands bleeding and splintered too.

  Theirs was not the simplicity of John’s life, where he had wood enough for warmth and food and peace, and no responsibility except to the dead, which admittedly was enough to crush his soul. These women had children, grandchildren, elderly parents waiting for the firewood back in cold cottages. But one could not stop the Orient Express to share its luxury; nor could she stop her life to share its privilege.

  She had created jobs and decent working conditions. She had done her best . . . except, of course she hadn’t. This journey in itself was a personal indulgence that cost more even than the pearls she wore even at night to keep them safe aboard the train. It was a maid’s job to guard the jewellery and she was afraid that Eloise might feel slighted to be denied that role, but the pearls linked the Sophie of a fortnight ago to the one who would arrive in . . . what? . . . two days, perhaps three, in England.

  She pulled the bell for Eloise. ‘May I have a newspaper, please?’

  ‘Of course, Mademoiselle Higgs.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave her a smile of apology. ‘I am afraid I have been most ungrateful of your care. I am . . . tired, you see.’

  ‘But of course, Mademoiselle Higgs.’ A look that said, ‘If you are not going to make me your confidante, which is the right of every lady’s maid, then I will not unbend for you.’

  Sophie sighed as Eloise left the compartment. She would tip her well in Paris . . . except she had no francs; nor did she wish to waste time establishing a line of credit at a bank. Perhaps the manager of the bank she had used back in 1919 was not even there.

  Ah, well. Whoever had hired Eloise must arrange for her to be well tipped.

  She lunched in the dining car and dined there too, focusing now on her graceful hands, the perfect poise of her neck, subtleties she had let slip as a factory owner or at Thuringa, as well as the long meals she had dispensed with in her Australian life, where four courses — soup, fish, meat, pudding — followed by tea with petits fours, was considered a banquet.

  Does Nigel still eat like this at Shillings? she wondered, nibbling game pâté on thin toast. In the immediate post-war period they had dined simply, one course and fruit from the estate, the sugar ration kept for the cherry cake Mrs Goodenough religiously made every four days for Sophie. But Nigel would be ill now . . .

  Where was the tumour? Jones could not have given that
detail in a telegram to be read by so many. Surely not in his brain, or he would not be able to tidy the estate affairs before his operations. Or would he, if the tumour had been diagnosed early?

  Please, let it not be his brain, she thought. Or . . .

  No, there was no place in the body she could think of where a tumour that might kill you could be acceptable. Why couldn’t tumours be confined to portions of the body one could do without, as so many were doing now — legs or arms or even faces . . .

  She shook her head in apology as the waiter brought the soup. Some parts of the body should remain inconspicuously doing their duty. She no longer felt like eating.

  Chapter 51

  There are times when time vanishes like steam from a teacup, and others when it sits upon you like London fog.

  Miss Lily, 1914

  The change of train at Vienna brought a most handsome man in a short German jacket and with hair of perfect oiled neatness into her compartment. He presented her with a buff envelope that contained a wire and three more envelopes, filled with many French francs in small and large denominations, a wad of German marks which she suspected had very little value, and two hundred English pounds in one pound notes. She would have to sleep on them for security. Eloise might have been chosen simply for her availability and skill with stain removal and ironing. She might also have been a staunch companion for La Dame Blanche with Green, and thus trustworthy not just with pearls and cash, but with one’s life. Lacking information, caution still seemed advisable.

  The envelope also contained a telegram, written with a happy disregard for expense:

  Darling Sophie comma all here relieved and delighted you have arrived safely in Europe stop all well here stop Green arrives Southampton 6 January stop is bringing your luggage but has arranged for all necessary to await you in Paris stop do not continue to Calais as a flight from Paris to Shillings will avoid wasting time with paperwork at a port stop Mrs Henderson has arranged a surprise for you in Paris and all other arrangements have been made comma but phone Jones from Paris to tell him when to have a field cleared for landing comma as the time of your exact arrival will be uncertain stop all send their love to you stop Timothy has painted a portrait of Thuringa and given it to Green for you stop please give his lordship our very best wishes from all who love you in Australia and my best regards to Jones stop love always Giggs stop