The Lily in the Snow

by Jackie French

  Fog curled around the doorsteps, wisps as thick as scarves but nothing like the choking coal smog that could spread across the city. A baker’s cart rattled down the street, the horse plodding in the mud, the baker’s boy darting back and forth as he placed the loaves in bread bins left by the back doors. Violette expected Mrs Maillot would have cut back her bread order already to save money. Or perhaps she would be living only on tea and toast to save money after the extravagant beef roasts.

  Violette let her fingers linger on the pearls in her pocket. Soon Mrs Maillot would have caviar and champagne. Violette had never consumed either, but they were obviously something she and Mrs Maillot deserved.

  Violette opened the front gate, hesitated, then walked around the back. The baker had been. Two loaves, she saw in surprise, a brown cob and a high white. She knocked, the smile ready on her lips.

  ‘Yes?’ A man stood there, unshaven, in a red dressing gown. She blinked at the unfamiliarity and then again because he was familiar. His was the face in the photo on the dresser. The red dressing gown had been one of the sad souvenirs in the wardrobe.

  ‘Mrs Maillot?’ asked Violette.

  ‘Sorry, miss, don’t know her.’ The man began to close the door.

  For a second Violette wondered if Mrs Maillot could have taken a lover, one who very closely resembled her dead husband. ‘But I am Violette. I live here with her. She will want to see me.’

  The door swung open again. ‘You what? Hey, Joanie!’ His body still blocked the door.

  A woman appeared, also in a dressing gown, one of Mrs Maillot’s. A girl peered from behind them. A most familiar girl.

  ‘This lass says she lives here. Says a Mrs Maillot does too.’ He turned back to Violette, ‘You stay right there, missy. Georgette, run down to the telephone box and call the cops. I reckon this Maillot woman is the one who’s been living here while we’ve been up with Auntie Flo.’

  ‘That’s my coat!’ said the woman indignantly. ‘You take it off this minute.’

  The coat held the pearls and the painting. Besides, the day was cold.

  Violette ran.

  The man would pursue her. The police too, undoubtedly, notified by Shillings and by the people in Mrs Maillot’s home . . . the house she had taken for Mrs Maillot’s. But before then someone from the house must get dressed, run to a phone box, and then the police must be called, and a policeman would have to bicycle through the mud and listen to the story . . .

  When did that family arrive? Last night? But Mrs Maillot called me last night . . .

  She had to think. This was impossible, but impossible things happened, Grandmère dying or the son of the family next door returning to a welcome home feast then hanged from the oak tree the next morning as a collaborator. Nothing in life was as it seemed.

  The fog was rising. Good. It made it easier to hide. She turned a corner and began to walk swiftly to the station beyond the one where she had alighted.

  She was hungry, she was cold, and she was scared. The last two she could ignore, as she had so often, but she must find food today. Without food you could not think clearly. She had to think well.

  So. If the house was not Mrs Maillot’s . . . she turned another corner . . . Mrs Maillot must have known the family would not be there, somehow got the key, coaxed Violette into staying only until the family were due back. And, yes, for the past week she had been saying, oh so regretfully, that she would miss her so much now the earl and his family had returned.

  Manipulated. But why? She was not important.

  The earl was. And possibly his half-sister. Yes, the questions last night had certainly focused on the sister, the ‘Miss Lily’ Violette had thought was her mother.

  Blackmail? A member of the aristocracy’s illegitimate child was possibly blackmail-worthy. She would kill Mrs Maillot if she tried to blackmail Miss Lily, who was not her mother anyway . . .

  Her face was cold. Violette realised it was wet too. Tears. Of anger, of betrayal, of disgust at herself and her foolishness, taken in by so little kindness, tears because she would almost certainly never see Mrs Maillot again, because she had nowhere in the world that would give her shelter, unless she went back to Shillings, where they would not want her now, even if they did not call the police, and she didn’t even have the train fare to go back there anyway.

  The most important matter then was to get as far away as possible, in case the man back at the house really had called the police. And then food. But there had been no café at the railway station, nor any that she knew of nearby where she might forage in a rubbish bin, though most café owners had an arrangement with a pig man, so you might need to search several bins before you found stale bread or half-eaten cakes a careless waitress had thrown out.

  It was too early to enter a café and sit at a table not yet cleared, where the previous customer had left crusts, or even a remnant of pie. So she must walk, and keep walking, despite the cold, despite the trembling, which was just cold for she was used to fear, would not be trembling because of that, would not waste her energy thinking of betrayal, of the woman who had pretended to love her, of how everyone had betrayed her all her life, even Grandmère with her death . . .

  She would not think of that. She must calmly keep walking like a . . . what did they call those people who had that new fad of walking for pleasure? Hikers, that was it. She would walk like a hiker at least until mid-afternoon, till she found city streets, and a café to sing outside where there were lanes behind that she could vanish into.

  Because if the police nabbed her for the theft of the coat they would find the pearls and the painting and she had nowhere she could leave them and no one to help and nothing had ever been quite as desperate before . . .

  The car came slowly around the corner, shining grey in the yellow fog.

  The car stopped. A man got out and turned to look at her, not unkindly, over the silver roof.

  ‘Get in,’ said Jones.

  Violette obeyed.

  Chapter 28

  Always breakfast well. Your day’s decisions will be far more rational.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  The café was at least ten miles away, and filled with men in overalls. The tea tasted of stewed dishcloths; the plates were piled with fried eggs, fried sausages, fried potato, bacon, canned beans in tomato sauce, with slabs of bread and margarine.

  Violette ate. So did Jones. Neither had spoken since she had slid into the car, just as a policeman bicycled around the corner. Jones had tipped his hat to him as they drove on, stopping here where Jones evidently knew the menu, at least well enough to say, ‘The lot for both of us.’

  At last he cleaned the egg yolk off his plate with the last of his bread, a gesture she did not expect he used at Shillings. He smiled as he saw her watch him munch the yolk-soaked bread. ‘Old habits die hard. Nothing better than fresh bread soaked in the last of a fry-up.’

  ‘Miss Green said you had been a butler.’

  ‘And Nigel’s batman in the last war, and long ago on the North West Frontier too.’

  ‘Are you taking me to the police?’ It would take more senior ones than a fat man on a bicycle to take charge of the thief of a countess’s pearls and a Rembrandt.

  ‘No. Why were you running?’

  Violette considered. But there was nothing to be lost in telling him. He might even have an explanation. So she told him everything, from the meeting with Mrs Maillot outside the Lyon’s Corner House to her hopes of creating a sanctuary for the woman she thought had loved her.

  Jones listened, then nodded at her suggestion that Mrs Maillot had intended to blackmail Lily Shillings about her abandoned illegitimate child. ‘Possibly. Or maybe she hoped you’d open the door for a gang of thieves one night, for a bigger haul than you’ve made off with by yourself. But the questions about Lily are . . . interesting.’

  ‘But as Miss Lily is not my mother there can be no reason to blackmail her.’ She shrugged. ‘A maid is not useful to blackmail. No money.�
��

  ‘Green’s done all right but, no, I can’t see anyone blackmailing her. They’d be lucky to escape with all their limbs.’

  Violette stared. ‘Miss Green would fight people?’

  Jones grinned. ‘You think you inherited your sweet temperament from me? You’re your mother’s daughter. I saw her slice a man’s thumb off once in a bazaar in Morocco.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His hand was holding a rope, with a child at the other end. Don’t know what happened to the man — we didn’t stay to find out — but the child was adopted by a baker and his wife, a hundred miles away.’ Another grin. ‘And you stole Sophie’s pearls from her. Brave girl.’

  ‘I . . . I did not know Miss Green was like that.’

  ‘Lucky you’re her daughter, then. She won’t slice your thumb off.’

  ‘What will she do?’

  ‘Cry. She’s crying now, I reckon. Your fault, and mine too. I haven’t . . . behaved well over this.’

  ‘You are a nice man.’

  ‘Thank you. I am also a surprised man. But talking it over with Nigel . . . there was no way Greenie could have let me know about you at the time. And afterwards . . . well, my war was bad. I have just discovered that hers was worse.’

  ‘She truly wants me as her daughter?’ asked Violette slowly.

  ‘Let’s just say she wants her daughter and you’re it. You’ll get used to each other.’

  ‘And you? Do you want a daughter too?’ She did not use guile in her tone. She wanted the true answer.

  ‘I had a daughter,’ he said slowly. ‘She died. Honestly? No, I don’t want another child. I didn’t do a good job of looking after the one I had, off with Nigel most of the time. But that’s irrelevant. I have a daughter. You could be worse.’

  ‘I am a thief,’ said Violette indignantly. ‘I have stabbed a man, and maybe killed him, and attacked other men too, when they deserved it. I wanted to kill my mother!’

  ‘Like I said, you could be worse. You could be a boring little sweetheart. If I’d wanted one of those I’d never have fallen for Green. Or Lily.’

  ‘You loved Miss Lily too?’

  ‘Not like that,’ said Jones quietly. ‘Never like that. But, yes, I love Lily. Part as her friend, part as her father, or uncle maybe, as I’m only a decade or so older than her.’

  Violette pushed away her empty teacup. Men were obviously waiting for their table, and their own fatty portions of fried pig adorned with bloody-looking baked beans. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘We go home.’

  ‘Home is Shillings?’

  ‘Unless you have another one.’

  ‘No. I . . . I have nowhere else. What . . . what will the earl do with me?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Jones cheerfully. ‘Send you to bed with no supper? He won’t call the police at any rate. Or set the dogs on you.’

  ‘I did not see dogs.’

  ‘Which is why he won’t set them on you. Sophie’s more volatile, but you’re probably pretty safe from her too.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘Probably,’ agreed Jones, standing up from the table.

  ‘And Miss Lily?’

  ‘She is no longer there.’

  ‘That is a pity. She is . . . interesting.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jones. ‘Lily is interesting.’

  ‘You know she wears a wig? She is vain, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘I’ve learned it’s best to take Lily as she is, and not make judgements,’ said Jones, leaving the change on the counter as a tip.

  Violette waited till they were in the car again, such a comfortable car with leather as soft as a caress, the polished wooden dashboard, even a small rose in a flower holder near the steering wheel. Who put a fresh rose in a car each day, and in late winter?

  ‘If they let me stay,’ she asked carefully, ‘what will happen then? After they have forgiven me, perhaps?’

  ‘What do you want to do? Were you serious about wanting to learn to fly?’

  ‘No. Though one day, perhaps.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t see you as a lady’s maid, nor a housekeeper. Or cook.’

  ‘I am a very good cook.’

  ‘Till the day you put arsenic in the hollandaise. Just joking. Tell you what, how about I start off teaching you jiu-jitsu?’

  ‘Jube eat you?’

  ‘No, jiu-jitsu. It’s something you learn in the east — how to kick two men in one leap while you strike another in the neck. Deadly, but a matter of balance and strength, not size and weight.’

  ‘Does Miss Green know jiu-jitsu? And Miss Lily and the countess?’

  ‘Greenie does, and Lily. I don’t think Nigel has taught Sophie.’ Jones considered. ‘He hasn’t really had a chance since they married. He had a major operation, and still needs to take care. She’d probably like to learn.’

  ‘I think that I would too.’

  They drove in silence for a while. The fog thinned and so did the houses on either side. A wet cow stared at them mournfully. ‘I’d better ring them to let them know to expect us,’ said Jones, stopping outside a telephone box. ‘Should have done it before. They’ll be worrying.’

  ‘About the pearls and painting?’

  ‘About you.’

  Violette absorbed that. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Violette, do I have your word that you will not injure any of my family, friends or household?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you won’t run away again?’

  She considered his question. ‘I cannot promise that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why good?’

  ‘It means you were telling the truth when you made the first promise. Probably.’

  ‘I always tell the truth, except when I am lying.’

  ‘Good enough,’ said Jones.

  Chapter 29

  You will notice I do not urge you to any particular political path, my dears. Each of you, I hope, will follow your own. But do be prepared to turn right at the next star on the right if it seems brighter. And always have a contingency plan in case your star should fade.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  HANNELORE

  Miss Washford sat on the silk-covered sofa and sipped her coffee. Her high-heeled shoes matched the dark green of her silk Chanel dress, though her now-dark hair had been recently cropped slightly too short for the current fashion. No one would ever recognise this woman as the lower-middle-class Mrs Maillot.

  ‘A wig,’ said the prinzessin thoughtfully. ‘She said she saw a wig?’

  ‘Yes, Your Highness, and a padded camisole, nor even a sign her room had been recently occupied.’

  ‘That is most interesting,’ said the prinzessin slowly. ‘A grey and blonde wig. Why not stay blonde, for vanity? To be there, so suddenly, just when she is needed, and then to be not there, even more suddenly. You are quite sure that Violette never saw Lily Shillings and the earl together?’

  ‘I asked her directly, Your Highness.’

  ‘And there was no clue at all where Miss Vaile might be travelling to now?’

  Miss Washford sipped her coffee again. ‘None, nor any mention of where she had been, either.’

  Miss Washford’s father’s surname, Hannelore had been informed, had not been Washford but von Grüner. Miss Washford’s mother had changed her daughter’s name when she married her second husband, the English stepfather. Miss Washford had kept her stepfather’s name but also retained her loyalty to Germany.

  In the weeks when it seemed war with Germany was inevitable, Miss Washford had offered her services to the German embassy. The embassy officials had been inclined to dismiss her: what help could a woman be? Luckily the interview had been interrupted by a young count, the uncle of the Prinzessin von Arnenberg. That meeting had led to Miss Washford being most useful to the fatherland in the war. As indeed she hoped she was useful now. Being useful was also — usefully — lucrative in these hard times.

  ‘I believe the earl was deliberately vague about where his
sister had been, as well as where she might be going,’ she answered.

  ‘Just as his wife is,’ murmured Hannelore. ‘Interesting. A mother finds her daughter, but the woman who saw this most touching reunion does not join them for a family dinner that very night. She is not well enough to dine, but well enough to travel. The brother who trusts her enough to have left her so often in charge of his estate does not even care where she might be going, or keeps it secret. Thank you, Miss Washford. You have been invaluable.’

  ‘I am glad you think so. I don’t believe I could have found out more even had it been possible to stay at that house any longer.’

  ‘The earl’s absence for so long was inconvenient,’ agreed Hannelore. ‘Especially as Miss Lily was not there, even though he was absent so long.’ She stood. Miss Washford stood politely also. ‘I believe my uncle has arranged payment?’

  ‘He has, Your Highness. He has been most generous. Please do call on me if you have any further work I might help you with.’

  ‘Of course.’ Though she would not. Hannelore could not risk being seen with a woman familiar to a girl who might well become part of the Shillings household.

  She rang the bell. The butler showed Miss Washford from the room.

  Hannelore sat in silence.

  She had thought, at first, that she had an answer to Miss Lily’s continued disappearance. A child — a very late-in-life child, but still possible — might mean drastic changes to her life, for she could not imagine Miss Lily farming her own child out to strangers, nor bringing scandal to her friends and family by letting it be known the child existed.

  Introducing Violette into Miss Lily’s household, with continued contact with ‘Mrs Maillot’, would have meant a way to find out where Miss Lily might live, or travel to, as well as a way of persuading her to further the Nazi cause.