But now she was a member of a family, too. ‘What about Daniel and the children? Will there be any way I can keep in touch with them once I get to Europe?’
She already knew the answer before he replied simply, ‘No.’
Tea. She needed tea. She felt the pot under its cosy. Still warm. She poured herself a cup, sipped, found it stewed and bitter, then looked back at Nigel. He looked at her, that old, indefatigable love warming his gaze. She looked away.
She had risked her life before. Her hesitation now was for her family. But Bob — and Lily and Nigel — were right. Rose and Danny were strong and resilient, with a father and stepfather who loved and supported them, and friends and neighbours too. Daniel had his clinic. Midge and Harry Harrison and other friends and neighbours would always be there for him.
And Higgs Industries? She had taken on the chief executive role in 1937 to prepare for a coming war that few took seriously. But members of the board of directors could step in. She could only hope they could shuffle diverse data into patterns, find ways to transport goods as ships were sunk and railways commandeered, accept that they must make use of as many alternative methods of food storage as they could to reduce the amount of metal used — all while continuing to prioritise the welfare of her workers and their families.
She sipped her tea and tried for a normal tone. ‘So, who trains these lovely ladies?’
‘Two lovely ladies of past years. You were here with one of them.’
With Hannelore lost and poor Mouse dead there was only one possibility. ‘Emily is here!’
‘And doing a most excellent job. The other is Dorothy — I should warn you we only use assumed first names here. Dorothy was at Shillings three years before you. There are other instructors for skills like garrotting your opponent.’
‘Dorothy and Emily haven’t recognised you?’
‘I stay away from the Hall. But to women of their class a handyman is as invisible as a woman is to a Colonel Blimp. I believe, of course, that you would have recognised me even if you had never known me as Nigel.’
He lifted her hand and kissed it.
Sophie flushed. It was the first intimate gesture between them since his supposed death, despite living as Lily at Thuringa for several years. He moved back slightly. ‘James is nominally responsible for Shillings now, but he has a wide portfolio. Dorothy — referred to as Miss Dorothy — is in charge of the day-to-day running of the organisation. Emily teaches charm and the complexities of political connections.’
He stood. ‘I’ll show you to your room. It’s not as luxurious as the Hall, but you’ll be comfortable.’ He smiled at her. ‘Mrs Goodenough will bring us dinner. She doesn’t trust me to give you a sufficient welcome home meal.’
‘My home is Australia. And you, cooking?’ She had never known Lily to cook — those lessons had always been with Mrs Goodenough.
‘I place my week’s meat ration in a pot with herbs and vegetables and a decent libation from the family wine cellar, much of which has been moved here, simmer on a low heat and eat portions each night with potatoes in their jackets or Mrs Goodenough’s bread.’
‘It sounds excellent.’
‘It is. The vegetables vary with the season, as do the herbs. As for meat — I do draw the line at Spam or whale, but there is sometimes a spare rooster or hens too old to lay, or even a hare, and the estate provides firewood.’
He made his way across the living room and opened a door to a winding staircase that smelled of old wood panelling and fresh lavender polish, a familiar scent that almost made her cry again. ‘Mrs Goodenough has promised us her special crumpets with honey for tea tomorrow. I was unable to tell her you would arrive today. Loose lips sink ships and all that. We are unlikely to have any Nazi agents at Shillings — James vets the staff here a lot more thoroughly than the other agencies do theirs — but we stay careful.’
He gestured up the stairs. ‘Yours is the first room on the right. The bathroom is next door — plenty of hot water, as it’s heated from the kitchen fire.’
The last fear — that he might expect her to share his room — vanished. Though the years of their marriage after Nigel’s surgery had been characterised more by quiet comfort than by passion, and there had been no sign he might prefer that to change now, she was not comfortable sleeping in any man’s bed but Daniel’s.
He saw her relief; she saw it hurt him, and wished . . . No, she had no idea what to wish for at such a moment. Because this man was Nigel, despite the accent and moustache, but Lily had vanished, as surely as if she had indeed been killed in France.
Sophie was not sure she could bear it.
‘I need to move the sheep from around the tarmac. A handyman’s work is never done.’ Bob smiled at her and vanished.
Chapter 9
Mrs Goodenough’s Apple Jelly
2 pounds apples (any variety, but crabapples are best; red-skinned ones give a clear red jelly)
White sugar
Water
Slice but don’t core or peel apples. Cover with water. Simmer till soft. Strain. I bung mine through a strainer, then pour that juice through a clean old stocking — the more finely you strain out the pulp, the clearer your jelly will be.
For every cup of juice add 1 cup of sugar. If sufficient sugar is not available, you may use half the amount, or even none, and the jelly will still set, but with less sugar the jelly must be eaten quickly as it will soon go mouldy. Simmer, stirring often, till a little dabbed on a cold saucer sets. Pour into clean jars at once and seal.
Blackberry and apple jelly: replace a third of the apples with blackberries, or loganberries, mulberries, raspberries etc.
Rose petal, lemon leaf, mint or other herb jellies: add mint leaves, rose petals, scented geranium leaves, a few dried cloves, chopped fresh ginger root etc to the final stage of jelly simmering. Use a slotted spoon to remove them before you pour the jam into jars. This technique will give you exquisite and very interesting jellies. The savoury ones are good with cold meat, the sweet ones excellent with scones or pikelets.
A small room, its bay window seat with a view across the hothouses and then to the orchard. A faded chintz-covered chair, a silk bedcover that had once been blue, but now showed only traces of colour, a Persian carpet so old one had to guess its original pattern, though the muted tones were still lovely. Pillows that smelled of sunlight and lavender.
Her bag was not just in her room, delivered presumably via the back door: her clothes had been unpacked and her dresses even ironed. Someone with a maid’s skill still resided at Shillings and had been sent to ensure she felt cared for. A small apple-wood fire had warmed the room and scented it. It had been years since she had smelled apple wood . . .
The bathroom did indeed have a plenitude of hot water, as well as pre-war gardenia bath salts. She bathed, wondering if Lily had stocked her cellar with bath salts and perfumed soap as her ancestors had stocked up on burgundy and port.
She hesitated before she dressed, eventually choosing a pre-war evening dress — burgundy silk, the one she would have chosen if this had been a dinner at the Hall, and long enough not to require the stockings she refused to buy on the black market. Her hair no longer needed a maid to arrange it, nor even a permanent wave for its curls — Thuringa was home to much comfort and beauty, but Bald Hill did not have a hairdresser she would trust with the chemicals needed.
The corridor and stairwell were cold as she walked back down to the living room, but the fire snickered contentedly there, too.
Bob Green, it seemed, changed only into clean moleskins and a jersey for dinner. He saw her look and grinned, the awkwardness of earlier apparently dispelled. ‘It might be remarked upon, if anyone passed the window and saw me in evening dress, or if there were an air raid and the neighbours raced in to share the cellar.’
‘You have air raids down here, too?’
‘I don’t think there is anywhere in Britain that doesn’t. We make sure there are no vehicles that can be seen
from the air, at least.’
‘And wooden sheep on the landing strip.’
‘We try not to have our people use the train — an unexpected increase in passengers at a local station is one of the best ways of deducing where there may be factories or troop movements. George mostly flies us in. We’re on a training route to the RAF — or, rather, James had a training route diverted this way — so the number of flights above Shillings is not remarked on. If you go for a walk, a pilot may waggle his wings at you.’
‘I’m too old to elicit wing waggles.’
‘Nonsense. Do you mind if we eat in here? It saves trying to keep the dining room warm.’
Mrs Goodenough entered before Sophie had time to speak, carrying two bowls of soup.
Sophie stood to take them from her. ‘You shouldn’t have come all the way down from the Hall.’
‘Goodness no, your ladyship. Not but what I would have, to see you home again. But I live next door now. I lend a hand up at the Hall, but in an advisory capacity.’
It was not a phrase that Sophie had ever expected to hear from the lips of Shillings’s former cook–housekeeper. ‘And I couldn’t leave Mr Green to cope all on his own, could I?’ Mrs Goodenough added. She smiled at Sophie and vanished.
Watercress soup, the soup Sophie had sipped the first night at Shillings; there was no first course in the austerity of war-time, even for a homecoming feast, but Mrs Goodenough had casseroled pheasant with cider and apples (pen reared, not shot, Bob assured her), roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Purée Crécy and fresh peas with mint, and after that a raspberry soufflé. Hazelnuts and quince paste followed, as Mrs Goodenough said goodnight.
Sophie took a hazelnut, undoubtedly picked from the hedgerows. She had never seen any grown in Australia. Quince paste . . . quince trees and her first love, Angus, in the Great War. What was Angus doing now? The Home Guard, perhaps, with his artificial legs. Had Angus been happy?
Though Angus had not quite been her first love. It had been puppy love that brought her to England to acquire the polish to be the wife of a squatter’s son. Then Dolphie, who she had loved, would have kept loving, if he had not been German and unable to reckon with such conflicting loyalties. She had met James at a Friday-to-Monday just before the 1914 war was declared, the same party where she had said farewell to Dolphie and Hannelore, the two of them and James so sure the war Sophie could not quite believe in was coming.
She and James had been — suitable. She would have married him if she had not met Angus and known passion, if she had not realised by the end of the Great War that she belonged in Australia, not at English political dinner parties. Had she loved Nigel because she had loved Lily, as teacher and friend, the mother she had never known? Or had she first loved Lily, intuiting that Nigel loved her, too . . .
‘Who knows about you?’
‘That Lily is dead? Or that I’m not?’
‘Either. Both.’
‘Dorothy, Emily, and all newcomers only know Miss Lily is missing. Some of the old Shillings establishment and the village may guess that Bob Green is another incarnation.’ Bob smiled as he added, ‘Hereward and Mrs Goodenough certainly know, as do Jones and Greenie of course. Otherwise only James.’
She had not realised how alone Bob was. There had always been Jones and Greenie to support Lily or Nigel, a friendship so close she had sometimes been jealous of all they had shared. Hereward and Mrs Goodenough would always regard him as ‘his lordship’. James was mostly in London.
Bob had endured this for three years.
‘Are James and Ethel still . . . friends?’ she asked quickly. ‘Ethel never mentions him in her letters, and I haven’t liked to ask.’
James Lorrimer, dapper, impeccable and possibly the greatest epitome of a gentleman in England — his antecedents had been refusing peerages for centuries — and Ethel, six feet two in her size twelve shoes, who, as well as her work at the Ministry of Food, defiantly remained on the board of her father’s Yorkshire cocoa empire and at times resembled one of the draught horses that pulled his wagons — were an unlikely pair. James had been destined to marry a lovely lady, if not Sophie. But when Sophie had last been in England he and Ethel were undeniably close. Ethel had even accepted Violette’s help to achieve beauty, or rather, display the beauty that had always been there, all two hundred pounds of it.
‘Ethel is a secretary to the Ministry of Food, which means in essence she runs a large portion of it.’
‘I know what she does. That’s not an answer.’
‘It’s the only one I have. Ethel’s pacifism is as strong as her nephew’s. James may not kill directly, but his actions lead to death. James hasn’t mentioned her in three years.’
That was a tragedy. But there were so many tragedies in war . . .
‘May I see her before I leave?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll try to arrange it, but it may not be possible. From tomorrow you become “Miss Jane” or the Comtesse de Brabant. No one else apart from George and Emily, who will be discreet, and Hereward and Mrs Goodenough will be allowed to know Sophie Greenman is in England. The Hall servants have orders to avoid the classroom areas from nine am till five pm. You won’t have luncheon with the others. Even your teachers will only know you as “Miss Jane”.’
She stared at him. ‘I can’t even write to Daniel while I’m here? To the children?’
‘James sent a cable this afternoon. It will be sent to Daniel from Townsville, saying you’ve reached there safely, but that the problems at the factory are going to take a while to sort out. You can write to Daniel and the children care of James — he’ll try to get any letters to them via air, rather than sea mail. They will appear to have come from Townsville too. I imagine Daniel will understand any oblique references. He is probably best placed to decide the right time to tell Rose and Danny that you’re in England, not Townsville.’
‘You’re not afraid they might find that exciting enough to tell their best friends?’
‘You’re afraid they can’t keep something so important a secret?’
She considered. ‘No, not afraid at all.’ Her voice was proud. ‘I didn’t think so,’ said Bob Green, who in another life had been their father.
Chapter 10
It is said that a good breakfast sets you up for the day. If you have arranged to have the time for a good breakfast — porridge, at least, or a chance to linger over toast and coffee or a pot of tea — you have almost certainly also arranged your timetable to set you up well for the day.
Miss Lily, 1939
James was sitting neatly at the table in the drawing room when Sophie came down, her sleep disturbed by the change in time zones. It was now set with a breakfast cloth, with boiled eggs in small cosies, excellent toast, a minute dish of butter, and a lavish silver dish of marmalade. Mrs Goodenough presided with a coffee pot, wearing her cook’s apron — not a maid’s, which would have been well below her dignity.
Mrs Goodenough beamed at her. ‘It’s a joy to serve real coffee again, your ladyship.’
‘A friend of mine grows it for his own enjoyment in Queensland, and sends boxes of the beans to us. I hope you have had a cup too.’
‘Truth to tell, your ladyship, I’ve never taken to it. But I do like its smell. I hope you enjoy proper English marmalade again, your ladyship. I had six girls making jams and fruit puddings from the moment Mr Chamberlain came back from Berlin waving that scrap of paper. Hereward made sure the cellar was well stocked, too. If you have to announce peace, I said to him, then it isn’t going to happen. I laid down a few barrels of sugar too, and don’t you call me a hoarder, because there was a good supply of sugar from the colonies still arriving back then.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I did the same.’ Sophie sat opposite James. ‘Thank you, Mrs Goodenough. This looks wonderful.’
‘The tea is only Japanese, I’m afraid. His lordship had tea bushes sent here from Japan almost half a century ago, and they’ve been a godsend since the rationing. The Japa
nese is better drunk without milk, though you are welcome to it . . .’
‘I like it without. Thank you, Mrs Goodenough. It is so wonderful to be home, to see you.’ Sophie smiled. ‘The toast smells amazing. No one makes bread like you.’
‘Well, I always did have a hand for it,’ admitted Mrs Goodenough, pleased and flustered. She backed out of the door with only a hint of a curtsey.
‘Good morning, James. Where is Bob?’
‘Feeding pigs in galoshes and overalls. Good morning. Did you sleep well?’
‘As well as could be expected.’
‘Bob says you have agreed.’
‘Actually, I simply didn’t entirely refuse,’ said Sophie drily. ‘I suspect I would have agreed eventually. “Bob” knows me extremely well.’
‘Sophie, I can’t tell you how vital this is. Hannelore had access to the most influential members of the German military and government. More importantly, I trust her judgement. She believes there is a growing and influential movement among the high-echelon military against the Führer.’
And where is Hannelore now? thought Sophie. Simply being discreet for a while? Her means of communication lost? Or held against her will . . .
But she would not think of that now. Instead she said, ‘Royalty matters, even if they do not rule.’
‘Of course they matter. Our king and queen do nothing practical, but by smiling and saying keep your chin up, and staying in London despite the Blitz, they engender real courage in their subjects. The perception of leadership, even where there is none, is extraordinary.’
Sophie beheaded an egg: impeccable, of course, the white set, the yolk perfect for dipping toast. She dipped, chewed, poured herself a cup of the fragrant tea. ‘Ni— Bob gave me the outline. When do I began preparations?’ She bent back to her egg.
Legends of the Lost Lilies Page 6