‘James, you give me too much credit. I have never successfully seduced a man. Though I nearly managed to do so on a Belgian battlefield,’ she added, fairly. ‘Till the Germans interrupted us. My only affairs of the heart have been mutual.’ She carefully looked at neither Lily nor Daniel.
‘Sophie, you are not seriously considering —’ began Daniel.
She turned to him, her face blank. ‘All right. There is one more thing you do not know about me. I once was prepared to give my virginity to an aged French general in exchange for a car and driver, so I could prevent the use of mustard gas on the battlefield. I failed, both in the seduction and the prevention of mass casualties. But this . . .’
She stood. ‘I cannot stand these . . . these words. Sitting here . . . I . . . excuse me.’ She walked to the hall, hearing only silence behind her and, grabbing her hat and a walking stick in case somnolent snakes might bar her path, headed outside.
Chapter 8
We all have a place that is our heart’s centre, or if we don’t, we need one.
Miss Lily, 1912
The Gipsy Moth circled the river gums. A mob of cockatoos screamed above her, heading for a newly seeded paddock. A wallaby peered from a bush, certain it was hidden, oblivious to the long black tail marking exactly where it was.
And Sophie walked.
The sun warmed her back, a low sun still, rising further up the sky each day until midsummer. You saw the sun so rarely in England and, when you did, it was usually diluted. Only the day’s growing or diminishing darkness showed the changing seasons. But then England had its winter bareness and then the spring glory of its leaves . . .
She missed it. Missed Shillings’s mossy comfort and grandeur; how could she not love a place of such green and gentle beauty, where she possessed inherited privilege as a countess, which was a different power entirely from that of owner of a business empire, a fact which hardly registered on Shillings estate but mattered so deeply here?
The cicadas were still singing. It would be a long late Indian summer then. The shadow of an eagle passed. She looked up, but it was hidden by the glare as it rode the thermals up the sky.
The mechanical wasp had landed. The children would be a famished horde, racing in for lunch, but Mrs Jenkins would handle that. And there was the river . . .
Walking her land steadied her once again, as though for a time its heartbeat had become her own. She was not sure how or why she felt this connection to the pale earth, the white-trunked trees. Her father had been a New Zealander who had served in the British Army; the mother who abandoned her at three weeks of age was English. Even her beloved governess, Maria Thwaites, now married to Major Andrew McPherson and living north of Edinburgh, had been English too. At least half her childhood had been spent in Sydney, near her father’s corned beef factory headquarters, not on Thuringa, which in those days had been merely a place to keep cattle in blissful unknowing until they were trucked away.
Perhaps it was Bill, the native woman who had been as much her mother as Maria, who had passed this love to her, as well as the knowledge of how to light a campfire or know when the rains would come.
Yes, she missed Shillings. But only here did she feel entirely herself, through the almost tangible threads that bound her to the earth; this earth, this wind, this ever-flowing river, those banks of sand. This love was all her own.
And it had grown as she had grown. She had left Thuringa only to gain the polish needed to become an acceptable squatter’s wife. She had outgrown the young man she’d first thought to marry and now owned his father’s property as well as hers. She had been part of the great machinations of European politics, had met and liked or distrusted many of the key players. She had played small parts too, and all of them unknown: blackmailed a driver through a battlefield; travelled to Germany to face Bolshevik revolutionaries; and taken a journey far more dangerous and desperate than James’s to rescue Nigel. She had loved and lost and lost and loved . . .
And I am not that woman now, she thought, as she sat on the sand, her legs tucked under her skirt. Not a ‘lovely lady’, even if the skills were second nature to her, her back even now relaxed but erect, her face held as if charming the sun.
The younger Sophie would have laughed at James’s proposal; she would have grasped the challenge, sought Miss Lily’s advice and direction, and been sure she would achieve everything required of her.
But now? Would she even have the same drive to enlarge her father’s business empire had he died only recently? That girl had not known friendship, the kind she had now with Midge, and Lily, Green and others. She was a mother, and owed her children a mother’s duty.
Except her children would never lack for love or care. She already left them for weeks at a time. If she went to England they would come too, for the best excuse of all to return there would be to show the young earl his estate, and the tenants their new, very young protector, despite her recent assertion that Danny was too young for those responsibilities. Nor did Sophie doubt James’s assessment, his urgency, or that he would care for her and shepherd her through this so that neither she nor her family would be hurt by any repercussions. Queen Mary liked her — she had been godmother to Sophie’s first true friend, dear departed Mouse. The queen would undoubtedly invite her to at least a quiet afternoon tea, to talk about the past, though not, perhaps, if her name was linked romantically with the king’s without a prospect of marriage.
Oh, yes, she was suitable. Accepted by ‘people like us’ but not so deeply one of them that anyone would think she aimed for the throne herself — though after Wallis Simpson perhaps that confidence might have ebbed.
The heart of the matter — the heart of her — was that she did not want to do this. David, once a friend, even a knight errant, was the man who had unthinkingly sent his friend, her beloved husband, into danger and then was too much of a coward even to face his own culpability and comfort the widow left weeping. Though that could be an excuse to seek him out now . . .
She did not want to . . .
But Sophie Higgs, daughter of the corned beef magnate, pupil of Miss Lily, as well as the Countess of Shillings, has also known almost from birth that she must do her duty.
She picked up a handful of river sand, as if it might keep her anchored, then let it trickle through her fingers.
She trusted James. If he had flown all the way here he must think not only that she could do this, but that it must be done.
The cockatoos flew above her, vast white wings among the shadows, squawking scornfully. Duty. There was never an escape from duty.
Chapter 9
What is duty? Duty is what you know you must do, yet wish desperately that you did not.
Miss Lily, 1910
Back at the verandah Daniel had instinctively risen to follow Sophie. Lily laid a hand on his arm — a woman’s hand, a feather touch. ‘Give her a little time. She’ll go down to the river. Give her half an hour. She needs to feel the sand under her feet and listen to the water. She needs to find herself again.’
‘Sophie knows exactly who she is!’
‘Do any of us?’ asked Lily softly. ‘And Sophie has just been explaining quite how complex a life she has led.’
A woman’s voice. A woman’s poise. A woman’s face, though slightly shadowed, as he realised he had always seen her; either in a subtly lit corner of a room or under a wide hat. And yet the tone was that of a husband, not a sister-in-law.
James Lorrimer has known for years who Lily is, who Nigel is, thought Daniel. But Sophie has never trusted me enough to tell me.
And that, he realised, was the true source of the pain he felt.
He sank into the chair next to her.
‘You need a whisky,’ said James.
‘He needs to know,’ said Lily.
‘Lily —’
‘I know he has not been vetted. But I have known Daniel Greenman for years. If we don’t tell him, he’ll make his own enquiries, possibly dangerous ones.’ The Engl
ishman made an impatient sort of shrugging gesture probably meant to signify grudging assent. Lily turned to Daniel. ‘As you know, James is the . . . co-ordinator of the intelligence service I work for. He has known me as both Lily and Nigel for decades.’
‘How did no one guess you . . . your secret?’
She smiled. ‘Did you? Even though the Australian light is so much harsher than it is at home. I have spent decades perfecting a woman’s skills then teaching them to others. Sophie enchanted me from the first day I met her. My other girls that year were my poor dear goddaughter, Mouse, who died in childbirth during the war; Emily, now Mrs Sevenoaks, and Hannelore, Prinzessin von Arnenberg.’
‘So you turned back into Nigel to marry her?’
‘Lily planned that Sophie would marry me,’ James spoke dispassionately. ‘The war intervened.’
‘And I left for France as Nigel Vaile with the Shillings volunteers. Sophie organised hospitals in England, then in France, then refugee centres. And yes, we did meet then at the end of the war, when I was Nigel, not Lily. I asked her to marry me. She refused. She flew to me eleven years ago simply because she believed that I was dying. But I lived, thanks to Sophie marrying me and managing my surgery and recovery. Then Nigel officially died in Germany, and I became,’ she smiled, ‘as you see me now, but permanently. Except, I am afraid, when I bowl a cricket ball.’
James looked at her. She shook her head. ‘I will explain later. Will you still ask Sophie to marry you?’ asked the person he had known as Lily.
‘You are giving me permission as her ex-husband?’
‘No. I am asking as someone who loves her, and wants her happiness. She needs you. The children need you.’
Daniel glanced at James, who was imperturbably tasting a scone. It seemed he even understood that the true parentage of Sophie’s children was uncertain.
Daniel gazed towards the river, where Sophie was just visible among the trees. ‘I can accept her past,’ he said at last. ‘But not a future where someone can literally fly down at any time and demand that my future wife seduce our king.’
‘I doubt the occasion will arise again,’ said Lily wryly.
‘Surely there are other measures that can be taken —’
‘I have been flying for a fortnight in six different craft made of cardboard and string,’ said James with feeling. ‘Do you think I would risk that — and the happiness of a woman who is one of my dearest friends — if I did not think this was necessary?’
‘And you really think Sophie can do this?’
‘I think she has a chance,’ said James.
‘Far more than that,’ said Lily. She looked from one man to the other. ‘I have known David since 1916. He doesn’t want a lover. He wants a nanny. It’s no coincidence that la belle Simpson has no children. She is David’s nanny, who tells him what to do. At the same time she makes him feel like a man — something Freda and his other lovers were unable to do. I know Sophie better than either of you. David will trust her. She is “one of us” but also an outsider. She can offer sympathy when the establishment does not. She can be a confidante.’
‘But the gossip,’ Daniel said harshly. ‘Sophie won’t be able to put something like that behind her. And it will harm the children as well.’
‘There will be no gossip,’ said James Lorrimer, his scone neatly disposed of.
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
‘In fact I can,’ said James smoothly.
‘What if the man does expect her to sleep with him? Can a king order a subject to his bed?’
‘No. Nor would David try to do so.’ Miss Lily smiled. ‘How many times has he consummated his affair with la Simpson, James?’
‘Four times in the past two years.’
‘My word. You people even know that?’
James smiled. ‘The love life of a king has always been well known within his household. If Sophie can convince David that he is being used, for money and by England’s enemies, if she can give him the confidence to be the king England needs, then there will be no need for more.’
‘Sophie is Nigel’s widow,’ murmured Miss Lily. ‘She can be his trusted friend — deeply, totally understanding, both of the man and the king. And with the special . . . hold . . . David’s conduct around Nigel’s death affords her. The British establishment know she will eventually vanish back to Australia, to be no further threat.’
‘More than anything else, David wishes to feel like a true king,’ said James. ‘Like Hitler or Mussolini.’
Daniel found an unexpected choke of laughter. ‘But neither of those are royalty.’
‘I did say he was not very bright. Interestingly, Herr Hitler too has . . . a complicated absence in matters of the bedroom.’
‘So discreet,’ murmured Lily. She gave a charming grin. ‘If only Nigel were here and you could speak more frankly.’ She turned to Daniel. ‘If you forbid this, Sophie will not go.’
‘If I forbid it, I am quite sure she will go,’ Daniel said drily.
‘Forgive me. I should have said — if you show that you are deeply upset by this she will be loyal to you. And when Britain is under the jackboot of Germany . . .’
‘She will blame me.’
‘She will blame herself.’
‘And what if she fails?’
‘Doesn’t every general ask that as he sends his troops into war? This is as much war as the fight with bayonets. There are simply fewer players.’
Daniel smiled suddenly. ‘You are very good indeed at influencing men.’
‘Ah, you noticed that,’ murmured James.
‘Of course he did,’ said Lily. ‘Will you marry Sophie?’ she asked again.
‘Yes, if she will have me.’
‘Of course she will. And will you come with us to England?’
‘I would not dream of being left behind. But people — at Shillings . . .’
‘They know that their old earl is dead. They are familiar with Miss Lily, from her annual visits there for decades. No one has ever questioned why the two are not seen together.’
She smiled, a little wistfully. ‘It is an out of the way estate, no road through it leading to anywhere, except the river. Dreadfully inbred, I suppose, but good sound stock so we don’t have babies with fifteen toes and fur. Green is from the estate, as are all the servants we didn’t bring with us. Go to Sophie, Daniel. Reassure her. She knows she has to go — Sophie would never neglect her duty. But she does not want to do this alone. It will be far easier with you there beside her. And tell her . . .’ Lily hesitated, then added more firmly, ‘Tell her that she may tell you everything and anything about me that you need to know. I am part of Sophie’s life. You have a right to know who I am, to Sophie and to myself.’
‘Thank you, Lily — no matter what happens between Sophie and myself, know that you are loved not just by her, but by me too.’ Daniel stood, crossed the room, and kissed her cheek. A soft cheek. He — she — must depilate each morning, and perhaps each evening too. Her scent was roses and gardenia and extraordinarily lovely. ‘Did we fight the Great War for nothing?’ he asked, both Lily and the man she had been.
‘We fought because we had to,’ said Lily quietly. ‘Because we had no choice if we did not want our country pillaged by a man who hated England. And now there is another madman who hates us and who has the largest, most efficient army in the world.’
‘You have not just been sitting on the verandah knitting,’ remarked James.
Her eyes gleamed at him. ‘Did you ever think I would? Find Sophie, Daniel. She knows in her heart she has to do this. Comfort her.’
‘Always,’ said Daniel Greenman.
Chapter 10
A true lady is known by her fingernails. She may have ridden to hounds, picked flowers in the garden or driven through a desert, but she will always have worn gloves to do so. Her nails will be immaculate. Be wary of anyone who claims to be of the upper crust, but has dirt at the edges of her nails, where it is hardest to remove. She will
either not be a lady at all, or be an eccentric one. The latter, of course, may be interesting indeed.
Miss Lily, 1903
Violette sat on the stockyard fence and watched the tiny plane descend. It looked exciting, far more so than seven years of learning mathematics with Miss Letitia, which might be useful when she had her own house of fashion, and geography, history and much else which might not. Those seven years had been broken by the visit to Paris and Shillings, but they had dragged nonetheless.
The work with her mother, though, had been unexpectedly interesting. Green had an eye; she could create a pattern and cut the cloth, and was totally wasted as a lady’s maid, in Violette’s opinion.
The ‘self-defence’ classes with her father she had also enjoyed, from learning to shoot with an accuracy greater than Grandmère, who indeed only used her stolen pistol at short range, and when it was necessary, naturellement. It was interesting that her father, Jones, was a man most intelligent, yet did not seem to realise that the skills he taught need not be used only when one was in danger.
The aircraft lowered almost level to the ground, rose briefly, lifted by the soil’s heat, then landed, running along the flat paddock, then turning to roll back nearer to the house. The four children clambered out across the wing, yelling and chattering, then ran towards the kitchen, presumably so that all could admire their adventure and provide themselves with the lamingtons and the scones Mrs Jenkins had been making, as well as her chilled lemon barley water.
Violette slid from the rail and the pilot too left the plane, unbuckling her flying helmet in the spring heat. Violette noted that most of her hair had been lost to scar tissue too.
‘Bonjour,’ said Violette politely.
‘Bonjour. You are French?’ The woman did not stop, looking at the ground, not Violette, keeping her face at least in shadow.
‘Belgian. Mademoiselle . . .’
‘Madame,’ said the pilot coldly. ‘I am married.’
‘Excusez-moi.’ Violette did not ask why she was ‘Miss’ in English and ‘Madame’ in French. ‘Did the Boche do that to your face?’
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