Legends of the Lost Lilies

by Jackie French

  Danny was silent. He knew how to manage a property. He also knew how to love it. Cattle, fences, water troughs and windmills were reasonably simple and mostly ran to a timetable. The Higgs business empire did not.

  ‘I can do it,’ said Rose calmly.

  ‘Yes, I think you probably can. But they won’t.’

  ‘I’ve seen how Mum handles them. I’ll be right.’ Her voice was just slightly too confident, her hand on the lemonade glass slightly too tight. ‘I rang Dr Patrick this morning.’ Dr Patrick was the doctor the telegram had promised, sent from Sydney by Dr Edwards, the Superintendent of Callan Park Mental Hospital, to take over the Bald Hill Clinic. ‘I asked Dr Patrick about Pa, too —’

  ‘You talked to a stranger about Pa!’

  ‘He’s a psychiatrist. It’s his job to help people like Pa! It turns out he knew all about him being John after the First World War.’ Her voice shook slightly. Another part of the family history that had been kept from them — the years when their father had been a man called John.

  ‘Does Dr Patrick know how Pa was cured back then?’

  ‘He said he thought it was probably just time and quiet in the bush. He said not to argue with Pa or plead with him to come back.’

  They had tried this repeatedly, with no success. Pa had just smiled at them and offered them native sarsaparilla tea boiled in an old baked bean can, and promised he would be home ‘in a day or two’, which he had been promising for a fortnight now. ‘Dr Patrick said Pa might be doing what he knew would make him better.’

  ‘We just leave him there?’ asked Danny incredulously.

  ‘Dr Patrick will go out and talk to him often. But he said we need to go there every day, too, so he doesn’t forget there’s a life here to come back to — just talk to him about what we’re doing, but not try to get him to come back.’

  ‘Of course we need to keep going out there. He needs food to begin with.’

  Rose was silent. This morning Pa had offered them leftover rabbit stew, thickened with watercress and some kind of sweetish tuber. The bed of piled-up bracken and tussock inside the tree had been neatly covered with a blanket, and the ground swept with a broom made from young wattle branches. There had even been logs pulled up around the fire as if he expected company. He had seemed happy, pointing to where the first star would shine tonight and the tree it would shine directly above. He had even asked if she and Danny were happy, and seemed relieved when they both assured him they were, because their first tears and incredulity had distressed him, though they had not brought him home.

  ‘Rosie, things will be all right, won’t they?’ It was the question Danny had asked when they were four years old and shadows threatened in the nursery.

  She answered just as she had back then. ‘Don’t worry. Tomorrow the sun will shine . . .’ She stopped, for tomorrow Mum would still be away and probably still not have sent any sensible answer to their telegrams, and Pa would still be living in a tree. She held out her hand. Danny gripped it hard.

  They had each other.

  Chapter 27

  The Führer’s Leberknödel

  Although an avowed vegetarian from 1937 onwards, Herr Hitler consumes his favourite liver dumplings in a vegetable broth, as well as sausages, though the latter are delivered to his mistress, Eva Braun, and only after midnight, to be discreet. Nonetheless he vows that when he rules the world, all shall eschew the eating of any flesh at all, except, perhaps, liver dumplings. A cup of finely minced liver is blended with a cup of breadcrumbs and two eggs, chopped parsley, a little nutmeg. The small balls are then boiled in a broth of celery and onions and served as soup.

  From Notes on a Lecture by James Lorrimer, MBE, 1943

  SOPHIE

  ‘Sophie?’

  She knew the voice. If she kept her eyes shut she might imagine the last week had been a dream. Her mission was still to come and now she lay on linen sheets at the house that had been rented for her, and the pain in her feet was from high heels and the pain in her back and breasts would be forgotten if she could just slide back into the lovely dark waters of deep sleep . . .

  ‘Sophie, you must wake up.’ The words were spoken in English.

  She opened her eyes. Dolphie did not smile at her. He looked, instead, unbearably weary, eyes sunken, the jacket of his grey uniform removed.

  This was not the house in Paris, nor any place she had ever seen. It was a hotel room that smelled strongly of turnips, decorated in a combination of clashing florals that could only be French. A zinc bathtub steamed next to the bed, which was indeed covered in linen, its quilt rolled to the end of the bed, for which she was thankful, as even the weight of the sheet was almost unbearable. But only almost. She realised she had been drugged with whatever she had been given back in 1936 to keep her sleeping through her kidnap. Tonight it had not just brought sleep, but some relief from pain.

  ‘I need to clean your injuries while the water is still warm, and I need you to promise you won’t make a noise. If anyone suspects you are here we will both be shot. Do you understand? No word, no cry.’

  She wanted to say she had already been shot. She managed a minute nod.

  ‘Good.’ He pulled the dress down — it had been torn so much he hardly had to move her to remove it. The strange chemise was more difficult, as the many layers of blood-soaked silk were embedded in the wound in her chest. Sophie gazed down, vaguely curious. She had been shot in the chest, but she was not dead.

  ‘This will hurt. I’m sorry. But I am glad their aim was good, and they did not hit you in the neck or lower stomach.’ He picked up tweezers and began to extract layer after layer of the silk.

  ‘What?’ she whispered.

  ‘The bullet-proof tunic — or nearly bullet-proof — was my great-grandfather’s. He wore it in case of assassins. Genghis Khan is said to have invented it — layer after layer of silk. Ah, yes — the bullet hasn’t penetrated far.’

  Sophie glanced down, moving her eyes, not her neck, which seared with pain even with a tiny movement. A shallow wound and much purple bruising. She shut her eyes again.

  She felt hands carefully slide down her knickers, heard the dip of a washcloth in water. He began to wipe, beginning with her face and then her hair, or rather with her scalp, for she could feel no pull at all. For some reason, her head had been shaved clean while she slept.

  Neck, breasts, avoiding the scabs, stomach, legs, some prolonged scrubbing of her feet, the merest wipe of her pudenda, then gently turning her to lie on her front and washing her back and buttocks as well.

  It felt wonderful and hurt like knives piercing every nerve.

  ‘You need to drink. You’ve lost a lot of blood. I will put towels under you in case you want to urinate. Please, again, do not speak.’

  She felt vaguely irritated. Men demanding that she speak, insisting she was quiet. But nothing felt quite real, including the soup he held to her lips, a chicken broth, perhaps with honey added.

  She sipped, kept sipping, stopped when he removed the cup and placed a tablet on her tongue.

  ‘Sulpha,’ he said. ‘Hopefully there will be no infection, but your feet were filthy and injured toes are susceptible to bacteria. I will give you morphine before we leave in the morning, but no more till then unless the pain becomes unbearable. If it does, tap the spoon against the glass.’

  She moved her eyes a fraction; saw the glass on the bedside table and the spoon; again gave a tiny nod. He offered her another spoonful of soup.

  This could not be a dream. If it were, he would be saying, ‘I always dreamed of stroking your naked body, but not like this.’ And yet his touch was more than kind.

  ‘I will try to explain what has happened, but I’m not sure how much you will remember of this by tomorrow night — tomorrow’s dose of morphine needs to be large enough to make sure you don’t cry out in your sleep as we travel, though, as you will be strapped to the back of the car in one of my trunks, so hopefully Georg won’t hear you. Georg is my driver at th
e moment.’

  Not a coffin then. A trunk.

  ‘Violette telephoned me. I had . . . convinced . . . her it was in her interests and her salon’s to do so if you ever contacted her. Unfortunately, she called the Gestapo first,’ he sounded angry, ‘which was not our arrangement at all. I was not even in Paris, but if I had been I doubt I could have prevented what happened once you were in custody. The only way to remove you from Fresnes was by bribery, and even then the guard had to be able to tell himself he was only passing me a dead body, though why he thought I should want it I’m not sure.’

  He hesitated. ‘It must be painful to know Violette betrayed you.’

  She blinked twice at him, to indicate a query. He understood. Dolphie had always understood. Or almost always.

  ‘I suspected you might come. An SOE agent admitted under torture she had heard of another organisation that was sending “stuck up tarts to suck up to officers” into Europe.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘She saved her life with that, though I expect when the story of her war is told she will have given away no information. Somehow no agent who survives has ever given information under torture. The agent also said it had something to do with lilies. Miss Lily’s network operating still, and not just Hannelore.’

  A cascade of blinks.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, Hannelore is safe, and yes, I discovered her . . . communications, though she will not tell me how long she has been betraying her country, nor what information she has given. I have managed to keep it discreet. She is confined to the Lodge for her health, a consumption of the lungs.’

  Sophie shut her eyes in relief, then opened them again when even that seemed about to lure her back into sleep. She knew the Lodge, had been there for a few deeply romantic hours after the Great War, when it seemed that she and Dolphie and Hannelore would find lifelong happiness together there and in Australia, before realising that both expected that she — and the Higgs fortune — would stay in Germany to help rebuild its power.

  Her escape with Greenie and Jones’s help had not been romantic at all, but she still remembered the beauty of the Lodge, dilapidated as it had been after the war. It was set in the woods of the estate, with its own home farm, and by a lake, where swans sailed.

  At least she no longer had to pretend to be a young swan. Just now she felt like one that had lost its feathers and possibly the use of its wings.

  ‘Hannelore has to remember to cough into a bloodied handkerchief when anyone visits, though few do,’ Dolphie was continuing. ‘And, of course, the phone has been disconnected, and I have her supervised, so she can’t send messages. I’m taking you there, assuming we can make it that far without discovery.’

  The Lodge was certainly preferable to Fresnes. It would be a joy to see Hannelore. But the woods near Munich were a long way from Paris, and the Lodge presumably staffed by servants loyal to the Third Reich. She raised her eyebrows slightly.

  ‘How will we prevent you being discovered? You will need to travel in the trunk — I have told my driver that it contains classified papers, which is why it is so heavy, and must be guarded at all times, and taken to my room immediately when we arrive at the destinations on the way. If you are discovered in my room, we must pretend you are a prisoner from a labour camp sent to work for one of my properties, and that I decided to . . . make use of you. If you are discovered in the trunk I will complain angrily that I have been sent a worker who cannot work, and I am returning you as an example of the quality of labour we have been sent, and you are confined in the trunk to punish you.’

  He shrugged. ‘We can only hope that whoever I spin that last story to is extremely gullible, but I can think of no better explanation for your presence. I will then relent and say that I will take you back. I shaved your head to make you resemble a prisoner . . .’ he grimaced ‘. . . as well as to remove the conspicuous peroxided hair and the lice. And no, I cannot pass you off as my mistress, as one look in the mirror would make that obvious. You would also need papers, even with me, and I have no way to procure forgeries. But I believe I can get you to the Lodge safely, and once there, you won’t have to stay hidden for long.’

  Two blinks. He smiled at her wryly. ‘Why? Because, Miss Mata Hari, in a few weeks Hitler will be assassinated.’

  Chapter 28

  Sometimes the wisest speech you can make is to say, ‘I don’t know.’ The world is vast, and even the best informed can only know a fragment of a speck that you think was once a cake crumb. Add another speck and you may suddenly see it was once part of toast with honey, and that the world is completely different from what you thought it.

  Miss Lily, 1939

  They were not travelling straight to Munich. Dolphie stated it would be suspicious if he not only suddenly appeared in Paris on the day of Sophie’s execution, but then went immediately to his sister, a known associate of Sophie’s, even if that had been long ago, and Hannelore was presumed to be a loyal supporter of Adolf Hitler. Instead they would detour to Austria.

  ‘I am the head of my own section in Vienna,’ he explained a few nights later. ‘So luckily I rarely have to report to superiors. We should be at the Lodge in about a fortnight.’

  But she was sure that before she had lost consciousness that first night, he had told her Hitler was to be assassinated in ‘a few weeks’. How many weeks was a few? And how, and why, and by whom?

  Sophie was still unable to move or even comprehend much — a combination of pain, her injuries, exhaustion from the day cramped in the trunk, as well as the effects of the drug. But she could speak tonight, even if she had little breath.

  ‘You are Sicherheitsdienst?’ she whispered. ‘Is that how you know what . . . what will happen to the Führer?’

  He smiled at her from his seat at the table where he was dining on pale sausages boiled with cabbage. This room was larger than the one the night before, with a sofa that thankfully he could stretch out on to sleep. It smelled of boiled cabbage instead of turnip. Her meal was slices of the same sausage in a vegetable soup, with bread made perhaps almost entirely from wheat. He had fed her spoonfuls slowly and meticulously, insisting she eat it all before he began his own meal, the second course of the three he had ordered, suitable for a German officer of his rank.

  ‘Did they teach you about the Sicherheitsdienst in England, or do you have a particular interest in German organisations?’

  ‘England,’ said Sophie hoarsely, knowing she wasn’t giving him information of value. ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘No, I did not,’ he agreed pleasantly.

  ‘Dolphie, please.’ Every word was an effort. ‘Why did you rescue me?’

  His blackmailing Violette to inform him that a potential Allied spy had arrived was understandable. He might believe, too, that she had far more information to reveal, including about his niece. But he had not interrogated her, nor even subtly questioned her, much less handed her over to more experienced inquisitors.

  That, perhaps, was to come. She had no way of knowing even where they were, much less where they were truly headed. It could easily be Berlin. Just now she had no choice. She couldn’t even stand, much less plan her escape. But if he truly was taking her to the Lodge then somehow she might manage a phone call, or even send a postcard or an advertisement that James’s agents would see.

  ‘Because unfortunately there are few people I trust, and none who could be spared simply on the possibility that you might come to France. If Violette had kept to our agreement, you would not have needed to be rescued.’ He ate a bite of the now cold sausage.

  ‘Not . . . an . . . answer,’ she managed. The drug that had kept her sleeping in the car was wearing off, the pain encompassing her again.

  He put down his knife and fork. ‘Very well. In the beginning my arresting you would simply have been a propaganda coup. Those fools in Paris have no idea of your true value: not just a dowager countess, but known and trusted by those in power, including their Royal Highnesses and Churchill. Once you were known to be i
n Germany — comfortably in Germany, not tortured by some little nameless sadist — the prime minister and the king would have had no choice but to agree to a high-level prisoner exchange.’

  ‘Not Hess!’ The Nazi third-in-command had parachuted into Scotland more than a year before, ostensibly at the request of Hitler himself, to offer peace terms to what he believed were high-placed Britons with fascist sympathies: England could keep her Empire in return for giving Germany freedom in Europe, and joining forces against the Soviets. But Hitler had repudiated the offer; and so had the man Rudolf Hess believed would help him make a treaty with Churchill.

  ‘Does Hitler want Hess back?’ whispered Sophie slowly.

  ‘Not particularly, though his confinement in England is embarrassing. Perhaps you would be exchanged for many prisoners, not just one. That would be up to others. I would simply be the one who had . . . acquired you. But now . . .’ He sat silent, as if wondering how much to tell her.

  ‘Now what?’ she whispered at last.

  ‘Now things have changed. It is ironic. My job is to hunt Hapsburg loyalists who remain opposed to the Third Reich and wish to reinstate the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, with its policy of “live and let live” for ethnic groups, religions, even Jews.’

  Sophie carefully kept her face blank, so that he did not guess she already knew his occupation, information that presumably came from Hannelore.

  ‘They are mad, of course, but there are a surprising number of them. We’ve already sent about four thousand Hapsburg loyalists to Dachau.’ He considered his plate, sighed, then picked up his fork again for the last piece of sausage. Even for a Gestapo colonel, it seemed, congealed sausage was the body’s fuel and should not be left on a plate.