Lilies, Lies and Love

by Jackie French

  And then she would come back and wait, not with Aunt Sophie, even though she might be frightened if she woke with no one here. Violette would leave the cellar light on, at least. But she herself must wait, hidden by the bushes by the front door, in case the count came again or others came to relieve the guards.

  She glanced at her knife with regret as she walked from the butler’s pantry, considered, then made her way down the short flight of stairs to the kitchen. A carving knife was too big and one for paring vegetables far too small, but that one for opening oysters almost perfect, though she would still ask Mr Lorrimer to replace her own exactly as it was. Which he would do, for he would be most pleased with what she had done tonight.

  Or would he? She glanced back at the bodies. People nowadays made a fuss about bodies, not at all like the war, or the years after the war when collaborators had to be dealt with.

  Mr Lorrimer would perhaps find three bodies inconvenient. But only those who knew Aunt Sophie had been kept there could link her to this house or to the bodies, and they would not speak, for if the guards knew and were innocent, why had they not helped her or, at least, called the police?

  She could wash in the sink now without worry about the clank of pipes. The scullery even had a nail-brush. It worked well on the blood splatter on her shoes, which she had hoped no one would notice till she could change them. Black shoes hid bloodstains well. A loaf of bread, roughly cut, and a fat German sausage lay on the table. She helped herself to both, for she was hungry.

  Ah, a camera! Interesting, and not to be left here. She hesitated about opening it and exposing the film. It undoubtedly showed Aunt Sophie as she would not wish others to see her, but might possibly also contain photos of her captors.

  But that was unlikely. She snapped the camera open, removed the canister of film, and pulled it out. She thought that would destroy the images sufficiently, but to be safe she put on the coat and shoved the film in the pocket. The empty camera could be left there. Her gloves would not have left fingerprints, and she had been careful where she had touched it so as not to smudge those that might be there. Now to change gloves, and put on the scarf — the latter especially an excellent disguise if the police asked about strangers in the area.

  She walked up the stairs, stepped carefully around the blood, checked on Aunt Sophie again then, on impulse, kissed her cheek.

  One day, almost of a certainty, she would kill that count. In the meantime, she would, just now and then, imagine how best it might be done.

  She left the house and began to run with long, comfortable strides to the phone box.

  Chapter 46

  Of all our senses, scent is perhaps the strongest, and the one we most ignore. Fresh-cut hay, sunlight, a slight rankness from not quite clean clothes — all affect us deeply without our realising why.

  Miss Lily, 1900

  LONDON

  Sophie woke to the perfume of freshly ironed starched linen, the soap Daniel used when shaving, Lily’s scent of gardenias. Yet there was a memory too: gardenias mixed with citrus, as well as the salty tang of blood, and images of bodies grotesquely tangled.

  She realised she was afraid to open her eyes.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Lily.’ Safe. She looked. Lily sat in the armchair next to the bed. Daniel lay propped up on pillows next to her, though he was fully dressed except for his shoes. An arranged tableaux, she thought, shying away from memory; Lily indicating her and Daniel’s respective positions in Sophie’s life now. And this was her bedroom at Vaile House, the one she had once shared with Nigel, that would be inhabited one day by Danny and his wife . . .

  No, she remembered. War is coming. We must sell the house; London would not be safe. And I planned to sell anyway.

  . . . and found that she was crying, seeking refuge in planning and pragmatism as she had done so often during the war, pages of accounts that had been a barrier against the moans from the wards beyond her office, the ragged starving children among the refugees. Accounts had insulated her during the Depression too. But there came a time when you had to face the world again.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked quietly, and even those words were enough to send a shaft of white lightning cracking her head in half while the rest of her trembled.

  ‘Shh, darling. Drink this. It will help.’

  She sipped. It was absurdly sweet. She felt nauseated but also craving the darkness she had left or . . . or something . . .

  ‘Keep your eyes closed,’ said Daniel. ‘This will pass, but it will take a few days, or even a couple of weeks.’

  ‘We have until tonight,’ said Miss Lily.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sophie again, her voice a breath this time, so that her head only received a small earthquake and not a volcanic wrenching.

  ‘The Countess of Shillings has had a bout of food poisoning for the past week. Lobster mayonnaise is said to be the likely culprit. One must be so careful of anything made with raw egg. I have been slightly affected too, so it was almost certainly the lobster mayonnaise. Rose and Danny know you are recovering. You have an appointment with James, Winston and the king tonight. His Majesty has been calling for you every day, and sending flowers, too.’

  Sophie opened her lips to ask again. Lily bent forward and touched her hand.

  ‘What did not happen,’ she said softly, ‘is that you went out early to meet James, but instead were seen by the doorman entering Hannelore’s apartment at what might have been her invitation, or one made without her knowledge. You did not return. The prinzessin had been blamelessly and very prominently at a charity tea party at Wolverhampton attended by the wives of three MPs and a bishop the day before and had stayed there overnight.’

  ‘Conveniently so,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Or perhaps not,’ said Lily. ‘For most of her days are spent in similar activities. We did, however, tell her you seemed to have disappeared, and she informed us that the only person who had a key to her apartment, except the servants, is her uncle.’

  ‘. . . saw him . . .’ managed Sophie. ‘What’s . . . wrong . . . with . . .’ light crackled into rainbows, if rainbows were swords ‘. . . me?’ she finished weakly.

  ‘Drug withdrawal,’ said Daniel briefly. ‘You have the marks of injections on both arms. Heroin and plain morphia, I think, but mixed with something else. Normally it takes more than a week . . .’

  A week! But she did not risk the exclamation.

  ‘. . . for drug dependency to be established, but I suspect the doses were large. You were taken to a house outside London owned by a Mr Hampton-Smythe. Mrs Hampton-Smythe has been suspected for some time of supplying certain elements in society with the substances they need. A police raid on their home this morning discovered not just a large quantity of drugs but three dead bodies. The police, however, did not discover the bed in the cellar where you had been tied up nor any evidence that you had been there at all.’

  ‘. . . saw Dolphie there . . .’ Sophie squeezed out the words. ‘No. I mean, heard him there. Smelled him . . .’

  ‘You were not there,’ said Lily quietly. ‘The injection marks on your arms are unmistakable. If you claim to have been there it will be assumed you went there as an addict, unable to do without your supply while the Hampton-Smythes have been on the Riviera where, I hope, they have already been detained, but for drug supply, not kidnapping. There is no evidence they even knew of it.’

  Lily shrugged. ‘They probably did, but trying to prove it would gain us nothing but embarrassment and far too much scrutiny from the press and society. And Count Adolphus . . .’ She paused. ‘It would have been easier to have you killed. An overdose of drugs — if the king’s own brother can be an addict so can the Countess of Shillings. You could have been deposited outside a certain Soho club at four am. Instead Dolphie took the considerable risk of keeping you alive, even allowing you to recognise him.’

  Sophie had not thought of that; had thought of little else but survival. But perhaps Dolphie did, indee
d, still love her, or protected her as his niece’s friend . . .

  ‘It may have been done from affection,’ continued Lily calmly. ‘Either for you, or for his niece, who, whether she is a double agent or not, is honest in her feelings for you. But he is also very aware of the game we play. They move their pawn to influence the king. We move our knight. They remove the knight and replace the pawn. That is not quite how chess works, but you see my point. They only needed to remove you long enough to force His Majesty to publicly announce he intends to wed Wallis Simpson.’

  Sophie tried to speak again. Daniel laid his hand gently on her lips. ‘The Bishop of Bradford broke the news of the affair in the press. That was why James wished to see you so urgently. In fact the bishop’s speech merely referred to the need for the monarch to lead the nation by good example and was referring to his forthcoming coronation. The bishop had been informed of Mrs Simpson’s existence, and was extremely careful not to refer to it. But the newspapers seized on his speech as an excuse to make the details public.’

  ‘Which meant David had no choice but to affirm that he did, indeed, wish to marry Wallis Simpson unless he wished to seem cowed by parliament,’ said Lily, with what might almost have been sympathy. ‘If you had been here —’ She broke off.

  If I had been here, David might instead have told the Prime Minister and the press that he was in love with me, thought Sophie, which would have condemned me to months — if not a lifetime — with a man I could not respect, and could never love.

  She tried to clear the cotton wool from her mind. No, she could have admitted friendship, but made it clear it was nothing more. But her very presence would have given David the courage to say nothing or, rather, to say words others would have crafted for him, words that did not commit him as he was now committed . . .

  ‘The Baldwin government is adamant he cannot be allowed to marry Mrs Simpson,’ Daniel said. ‘If he does so, the government will resign, forcing a constitutional crisis, as the opposition will not accept the marriage either. The country would be entirely without government. The king has pointed out that if the Archbishop of Canterbury will not marry them, David can in fact marry Mrs Simpson elsewhere in the world and his marriage will almost certainly be recognised in England. There would be no point in parliament resigning after the event. I doubt he thought of that scenario himself. I doubt Wallis Simpson did either — she left the country as soon as the news broke and has even been doing her best to dissuade him from marriage. I imagine Herr Hitler would be delighted with either a fascist queen or a Britain with no functioning government.’

  ‘. . . not what I was going to ask . . .’ Sophie managed. She was finding it hard enough to visualise even herself as a functioning unit without bothering about David.

  ‘Violette followed the count, on James’s instructions, and he led her to the house where they were keeping you in the cellar.’

  Memories, damp walls, darkness. Suddenly she never wanted to shut her eyes again, despite the pain of light.

  ‘James had others looking for you, of course, but the count would have noticed a car tailing him once he was out of the city. He did not notice Violette. She —’ Daniel stopped suddenly, as if he did not wish to add more.

  Nor did Sophie want him to. The image of the bloodstained men, the tangled limbs, flashed before her again.

  Sophie had known the girl had the capacity for murder when they accepted her into their extended family seven and a half years before. But Violette had seemed — manageable then, her threats amusing, her attention diverted to safer talents.

  And James had destroyed that. Or David had or Adolf Hitler — or even, perhaps, it would always have happened, some time, somewhere.

  ‘Where is Violette now?’

  ‘It seemed best for her not to be seen here. She is staying with Ethel and will return to Paris tomorrow.’

  ‘Good,’ whispered Sophie. She could not quite face the reality of Violette now, but cried, hard, for the woman Violette might have been. She cried because she needed to see her children too, but knew it would frighten them to see their mother so fragile, probably white-faced and sunken-eyed.

  She cried because she would never be free of the war; cried for the girl she had been in 1914, the girl who had vanished and become a lovely lady, never to be free of duty to her country again. Cried because Lily, who she loved, had ultimately betrayed her, tangling her in affairs of the state when she could have stayed home to be a wife, farmer, businesswoman, mother.

  But even Lily had not known there could be war like the Great War . . . no, she realised, of course Lily had known. Lily had been born on the North West Frontier among horrors as terrific as any in the Great War.

  But Lily had also planned that Sophie’s life would be spent peacefully in drawing rooms and on croquet lawns as James’s wife, no matter what wars raged elsewhere. Lily had not sent her through battlefields, nor to face revolutionaries to rescue Hannelore. She had only brought her to London to captivate a king and that, too, she might have been expected to do as James’s wife.

  She cried because, after all, she had freely chosen this. She was not — what was the word Daniel had used? — a sociopath, like poor, dear Violette, who after all had saved her. But she still cried for the woman she, too, might have been.

  They let her cry, the two adults she loved most in all the world. Two people who knew she needed to cry, even though it hurt. But when she opened her eyes again Daniel held a hypodermic.

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘It will be easier if you have small doses to get you through withdrawal.’

  ‘No!’ She ignored the earthquake as she sat. ‘I won’t.’

  Lily took her hand. Sophie wanted to wrench it away, childlike, to say ‘go away!’ Instead she listened, as she would always listen, this Sophie Higgs-Vaile who Miss Lily had created. ‘Sophie, you are needed. You must appear capable . . . be capable . . . to understand tonight what you must do. You need to sleep, to eat and then meet His Majesty.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Daniel.

  And she did. For this was the man who had spent years carving crosses for every man he had been unable to save during the war. This was the man who had achieved the greatest simplicity on earth, in order to build his life again. A good life, doing good things. Miss Lily’s life was . . . tangled . . . but Daniel’s had been straight, even if the world at one stage might have thought him mad.

  Daniel knew the right things to do. And so she held out her arm and watched his face as he readied the hypodermic.

  Chapter 47

  The way a man kisses a woman’s hand is telling: only a cad, a gigolo or lover will touch his lips to skin, but to kiss the air from too far away shows disdain or even ridicule. A true gentleman, in every sense of the word, knows how to kiss just above the fingers. A woman of charm knows how to smile as he rises, her eyes smiling too as they meet his.

  Miss Lily to her lovely ladies, 1902

  SUSSEX AND EAST LONDON

  The car, an anonymous grey, arrived at the phone box where she had been told to wait, sitting on the winter cold grass in the darkness. The driver had merely enquired, ‘Miss Jones?’

  ‘I am Miss Jones.’

  He opened the back door for her, shut it, and began to drive. The window between them was up, preventing conversation except through the speaking tube. But the driver’s silence had told her he was not there to answer questions, nor provide explanations. He might not even have known the answers, merely been told to pick up a girl at a phone box.

  The night seemed darker, fir trees on either side, their evergreen closer to black even in daylight, and impenetrable now. When the forest passed, and she could glimpse houses in the flashes of headlights, they too were dark and silent. It was as if all life had vanished from the world, except this car.

  Was Aunt Sophie safe? She had not even dared use her name on the phone, merely given her own location, and then the location of the house.

  Where was the car takin
g her? Suddenly she thought of those dead bodies, the legality of her position. She had killed three men, and she was not the police, nor even officially employed by the government. Her duties as apprentice at Madame Patrice’s establishment did not include the disposal of kidnappers.

  She had of course ignored the law many times, for justice of course was more important than a law, especially as laws were made by men and so often extremely stupid. But she had never done so openly before, when others — possibly many others — might know of it. She had left herself open to many charges, she realised, from breaking and entering to theft and murder.

  But it had been necessary, to save Aunt Sophie. And besides, Mr Lorrimer had organised this. Violette suspected, though she had never been told, that both her parents had killed in the past at Mr Lorrimer’s orders, or had been prepared to.

  Mr Lorrimer, presumably, would take care of everything. In fact the very anonymity of this car, the silence of the driver, might be yet another way to ensure that Violette Jones had never seen that house, had been in Paris, not England. Not that she had been worried that the police could hold her long, but escaping, hiding, giving up her plan to be the most sought-after vendeuse in Europe, would have been hard.

  A quilt lay on the seat behind the driver. She wrapped it round herself, found a Thermos underneath it, and a tin. This was reassuring. You did not leave a flask for one you intended to dispose of, or hand over to the law.

  The flask, containing soup with vegetables and beef, was not seasoned sufficiently, but it was hot and she was hungry. The sandwiches in the tin were better, for the English understood sandwiches as they did not understand soup: thick slices of cheddar cheese with shredded lettuce, smoked salmon with cream cheese and chives, egg and cress, all most acceptable, and further evidence that this was part of a plan most well organised.

  She would have liked to doze after that, but a lingering suspicion about where, exactly, she was headed kept her awake. Daylight crept across the land. The land was cultivated now, growing the vegetables that would travel to the Covent Garden Markets; then houses, and then, once more, fog, so the car snailed along the streets, and she was unable to see where they might be.