At last Doris arrived with tea and biscuits, to conduct the morning ritual of washing, dressing, hairstyling. A white dress; discreet lace; pearls; hair looped in a slightly more complex way than usual.
‘Have you seen the earl?’ demanded Sophie.
Doris looked uncomfortable. ‘No, miss.’
‘But he has arrived?’ Had he missed his train? Did earls take the train? Perhaps he had a yacht to bring him from France …
‘I can’t say, miss.’
Sophie frowned. If the earl had arrived, his valet would have arrived too. No matter how late at night they had got here, his valet would be waiting in the servants’ quarters for the bell to ring. Or perhaps an earl’s valet slept in an adjoining room …
Sophie carefully did not run downstairs, was hardly breathless at all when she entered the breakfast room.
Miss Lily sat alone, at her usual place, her face backlit by the winter sun from the window, her dress of blue silk deeply embroidered in an even richer blue, her scarf of cream chiffon shot with threads of silver, her hair, like Sophie’s, dressed with an easy complexity to suit Christmas Day.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said. Did Sophie imagine a lack of her usual warmth? ‘I hope you slept well?’
‘Yes, thank you. And merry Christmas! I hope his lordship has arrived safely.’
‘His lordship sent a wire,’ said Miss Lily, spreading a small section of her toast with strawberry jam. ‘He is unable to come to England this year.’
It was a blow: both the news, and the blunt way it had been expressed. Sophie bit back questions, filled a bowl with porridge, then decided to ask them anyway. ‘Why?’ She deliberately didn’t add the civilised extra words.
‘You would need to ask him that.’ Miss Lily pre-empted her next question. ‘You would also need to ask him, not me, why he prefers to spend his time in the East, and not on his estate or taking his seat in the House of Lords.’
‘You don’t know why?’
‘My cousin has discussed it with me, Miss Higgs. I was explaining how you might find the answers to your inelegant questions, rather than alluding to my own ignorance.’ The voice was still the most beautifully measured Sophie had ever heard — but she had never heard it cold, till now.
Why the change of mood? Because Sophie was a colonial, and a colonial wasn’t worthy of answers? Perhaps it was time that a colonial was not fobbed off. ‘Who are you?’ Sophie demanded bluntly, glad that breakfast meant that even Jones was not always in the room, hovering behind them.
‘I beg your pardon?’ The voice was even colder now.
‘I can’t find you in Debrett’s or Burke’s Peerage, or Landed Gentry either. There are people you might be — I mean who might be you. But they are all doing other things. Married, I mean, or living in other houses.’
It had occurred to her, briefly, that Miss Lily might be the earl’s mistress, too unsuitable to wed. But one did not install a mistress in the ancestral home and allow her to invite guests, year after year. Nor could she imagine that Miss Lily would allow herself to ever be unsuitable.
Miss Lily’s voice remained light, delicate, faintly amused. Too carefully amused? ‘What conclusion have you come to?’
‘That Miss Lily is a name you have chosen for yourself.’
The elegant eyebrow rose slightly. ‘Perspicacious of you.’
Which meant that she was correct. ‘And that you exist only here,’ continued Sophie slowly.
Miss Lily looked at her without speaking for so long that Sophie put down her spoon.
‘Very good,’ said Miss Lily at last.
‘You mean … you really are someone else?’ She hadn’t really believed it — had thrown it into the orderliness of breakfast out of disappointment and anger.
‘Of course not,’ said Miss Lily calmly, nibbling and tucking toast and jam. ‘I am myself. But it’s true that I only use the name Miss Lily here, when I receive young girls.’ The word turned to ‘gels’ as she pronounced it. ‘The rest of my life is … different.’
‘Are you really the earl’s cousin?’
‘I am closely related to him, a member of his family. Cousin is not quite the accurate term. I would be grateful, however, if you would not tell the other girls. It is something each may possibly discover herself. Yes, I exist only here, and only from January to April.’
‘But I came here in September …’
‘I made the decision to meet you.’
‘Because of my father’s wealth? The earl’s investment?’ Sophie was curiously disappointed. The last three months had been the first time she had felt like herself, and not a corned-beef heiress.
‘Yes, because of your father, but not because of his wealth, though that has meant the possibility of a true season for Lady Alison.’
‘What other reason could you have for making me one of your lovely ladies?’
‘Please,’ said Miss Lily, and this time there was iron in the quiet words, ‘do not use that term.’
‘I’m sorry. But where do you usually live? Who are you? I don’t understand …’
Miss Lily stood. Somehow Jones was back in the room, ready to usher her out. ‘It is not necessary for you to understand. Miss Higgs, I know you will not like this, but I think it best that you attend a finishing school after all. Doris will go with you. You may spend a week with the other girls, to make their acquaintance, and then …’
A slap on the face would have been less shocking. Sophie forced her voice not to tremble. ‘Because I ask too many questions? Or because I have guessed the answers?’
‘I might reply that it is because you begin your sentences with “because”, and make demands of your hostess.’
Sophie stared at her. To be dismissed like this … Surely Miss Lily didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to go to school! But the true devastation came from Miss Lily’s desire to see her leave. Suddenly she realised how much Miss Lily meant to her — not just Miss Lily’s insights, or her kindness to a colonial.
She had thought Miss Lily liked her. Truly liked her. She had been wrong.
‘The true reason is that, on reflection, you will … not fit … with the company of the other girls, or not yet. Three months at the school will remedy that.’
It was as if the idyll of the last months had shattered, a toy made of sugar that she had played with, believing it to be real. Miss Lily couldn’t really be telling her to leave! ‘Miss Lily, please! I’m sorry. I’ll stop asking questions. Please don’t send me away!’
Miss Lily glanced out the window. ‘It will be a wet walk to church,’ she said. ‘I think we should take the carriage.’
She cried, up in her room, as soon as they had returned from church. She had at least managed the Christmas ceremony dry-eyed. She cried not just for the loss of Shillings, which she realised she had come to love, but even more for the loss of her hostess’s conversation, which had not just opened windows onto the world but washed the ones she had already known too, so that life looked clearer, different because it was more distinct.
She cried because Miss Lily did not want her to stay, and that was the hardest to bear of all.
And then she dried her eyes, washed her face, and lay for half an hour with a wet flannel upon it. Because if Miss Lily was not the friend and protector she had assumed, then Sophie refused to let her see her anguish.
She had been wrong. Miss Lily had enjoyed her mistakes because they were mistakes, the inelegancies of a colonial. Miss Lily did not dislike her, but neither did she like her enough to help smooth over any difficulties Sophie might have with three young aristocratic women. Sophie had been too used to having her father’s money buy her whatever friendship she wished to have. Miss Lily had even warned her at their first meeting. Friendship cannot be bought.
At last she rose and rang the bell for Doris to dress her for luncheon.
She and Miss Lily opened gifts after luncheon: an almost silent meal, Miss Lily for once offering neither advice nor conversation. For the fir
st time it was as if she, too, were hiding strong emotion. Sophie considered pleading to stay, apologising yet again for discourtesy. But if this was a punishment for defiance, the temerity to argue would not help her case.
The drawing-room fire snickered. Down in the servants’ hall the servants, too, celebrated Christmas, leaving the two women more entirely alone than at any time during the past months. Even Jones was absent.
Sophie’s first gift was a natural wool jumper, still rich in lanolin, and undyed, knitted by Miss Thwaites, the wool spun by old Mrs Amber, who was married to one of the Thuringa stockmen. Sophie breathed in its scent of sheep, of lanolin, smelled the shearing shed again, and home. Wool protected from the heaviest downpour, though it tended to stretch if you let it get too wet. She wondered how it would cope in England’s constant drizzle. The gift left her crying — just a little — for her home. She tilted her head, so Miss Lily would not see the tears. The cicadas would be singing, the bushfire smoke smudging the horizon. She hoped that Moonbeam Joe was exercising Timber.
The jumper’s shearing-shed scent brought the memory of Malcolm too. She had sent him hand-hemmed and embroidered handkerchiefs, on the advice of Miss Lily. A purchased gift would be inappropriate on many levels. He had sent her a book of Robert Burns’s poems.
‘I expect his mother suggested it,’ said Miss Lily dryly.
Sophie opened the flyleaf. Ever yours, Malcolm. The words were perfect, loving but not improper. They could have come from a textbook on what to write to a girl with whom one had an Understanding, not an engagement.
Her father had sent a sapphire brooch, large as a bauble on the Christmas tree. She looked hesitantly at Miss Lily, the open box in her hand.
‘I expect he bought it himself,’ said Miss Lily, and suddenly her voice was gentle again. ‘Miss Thwaites would have chosen something a little … smaller. He must love you very much, my dear. In my experience men rarely select gifts; usually they merely arrange for their purchase. Wear it sometimes with your friends. Gifts of love should never be rejected.’
Miss Thwaites had found and sent what Sophie had hoped were the perfect gifts for both Miss Lily and the earl: two small paintings of blue hills and drooping gum trees, simply framed.
‘The painter is Australian, but he studied in Paris,’ said Sophie hesitantly as Miss Lily opened hers. ‘It’s not of Thuringa, but it could be. Our trees have white trunks like that, though the soil isn’t as red …’
‘It is beautiful,’ said Miss Lily. ‘I will treasure it.’
The words were perfect too. Sophie saved them to use again, when any gift was presented to her. But she doubted, now, that they were true. There was no reason for Miss Lily to treasure a gift from a colonial.
‘This is for you, from me, my dear,’ said Miss Lily, passing her a rectangle wrapped in parchment silk. Sophie opened it carefully, then gazed at the contents: two notebooks, covered in pale yellow silk.
‘You will need to make detailed notes during the season,’ said Miss Lily. ‘Each person you meet, their background, their likes and dislikes, and later, when you are a hostess yourself, what meals you have served them, so you don’t repeat the menus, unless they particularly like a certain dish. The smaller book will fit in a concealed pocket in your skirt, for easy reference.’
They were perfectly appropriate gifts, and deeply impersonal. Sophie forced herself to smile as warmly as her hostess. ‘They are beautiful. Exactly what I need, as always, Miss Lily.’
She was the rich Miss Higgs: perfectly dressed, about to attend a select school, then meet the Queen, and celebrate a London season.
It was the emptiest Christmas of her life.
Chapter 17
Imagine a person with every right stripped away: no right to participate in the way their world is run, no right to live with whom they want or even to borrow money to buy a house or sign a lease for a safe place to live. That is the state of every woman in England now.
You would think that person lacked any power at all. This is why women’s power has always been in some way secret. And some powers are among the most secret of all.
Miss Lily, 1914
The Prinzessin Hannelore (‘You will call her Prinzessin,’ instructed Miss Lily) and Miss Emily Carlyle arrived on the mid-morning train, either together or on friendly terms by the time the coachman opened the door for them — the prinzessin first of course — at the house.
Sophie watched them unseen from up on the balcony, ready to retreat into her room as they came upstairs. As she was not the hostess, it would not be appropriate for her to meet them till after they had been greeted by Miss Lily. She was still in her room, trying to memorise the rules of precedence and apply them to the names marked in pencil for her in Debrett’s, when she heard the voices outside that told her that Lady Alison Venables had arrived also.
They were to all meet at tea, and so at five minutes to four exactly she walked downstairs in a soft, champagne-coloured wool skirt and fitted jacket, riesling silk blouse, her pearls, and high-buttoned boots a shade darker than her skirt, her hair plaited and tied in a loose knot behind, making her feel like a schoolgirl. But she appreciated the subtlety of Doris’s suggestion. She was the social inferior of these girls. Best to suggest it with her hairstyle, she thought enviously, like a puppy crouching before a bigger dog before it joined the pack.
She counted to four before she opened the door. This entrance must be perfect, to show Miss Lily, the three girls, and herself, that she too could achieve perfection, if she chose.
Three girls’ faces turned: the prinzessin’s round and red-cheeked, the smile friendly, the eyes both amused and intelligent; Miss Carlyle both slightly porcine as well as clear-faced and lovely, as though a pig had learned its beauty secrets well; Lady Alison sitting slightly apart from the others, a blonde in pale blue cashmere, with a narrow head and long neck, totally still except for her fingers, which plucked at her cuticles.
Miss Lily gestured to Sophie to take the final seat as she made the introductions. She watched the four of them for a moment, then began to pour the tea, each gesture as fluid and direct as the liquid placing itself inside the cups.
Jones handed around crumpets, slices of fruitcake, and asparagus spears (forced in steaming manure pits on the estate) wrapped in bread and butter, then left. Sophie ate an asparagus roll; too much danger that a crumpet would drip or a cake crumble. Lady Alison’s hands worked on a single crumpet, nibbled but never finished. The prinzessin and Miss Carlyle finished two each with dispatch, and neither dripped nor made crumbs.
‘I hope the Channel crossing was smooth, Prinzessin.’ Miss Lily ate a cherry from her piece of fruitcake with her silver cake fork.
‘Lord George’s yacht was most interesting.’ The prinzessin reached for a third crumpet. ‘The journey here was interesting also.’
‘The park is looking beautiful.’ Lady Alison’s voice was tentative. Sophie glanced at her. She’s as scared as I am, she thought. No, I’m nervous. She’s scared.
What could make a girl from such an impeccable background scared?
‘Do we have to make small talk?’ Miss Carlyle dabbed at the butter on her lip with her napkin, then placed it precisely on the table beside her. ‘We have less than four months here. I’d hoped for more than pleasantries.’
Sophie forced herself to take another asparagus roll, and not let her surprise show. What did Miss Carlyle mean by ‘more than pleasantries’? The politics of which Sophie was supposed to be so ignorant? And was ignorant, she admitted to herself, although she at least now knew her ignorance existed.
‘You’ve been in the house for less than two hours.’ Miss Lily’s voice was light. ‘A few days to get to know each other, for you to know me, is not unreasonable. Besides, Miss Higgs will only be here a week. I hoped you would enjoy each other’s company, so that she does not feel such a stranger when the season begins.’
‘Then Miss Higgs won’t be —’ Miss Carlyle stopped.
The pri
nzessin glanced at Sophie, then at Miss Lily, with a final look that might have been one of warning at Miss Carlyle. She leaned forward. Her voice was light. ‘Miss Higgs, you must excuse us. Miss Carlyle and I have discovered we share a most deep interest in politics with our hostess, but we mustn’t bore everyone else with our preoccupations.’
She’s used to making awkward situations go away, thought Sophie. She knows exactly why I’m here too: so that Lady Alison can have her season paid for. Miss Carlyle doesn’t. Across the room Lady Alison lifted a hand to her lips, then forced it back into her lap.
Sophie felt she was trying to put together the jigsaw of European politics again. Something was happening in that room, but she didn’t have enough pieces to work it out. She thought of the pieces she did have: a hostess who didn’t quite exist; three girls of rank who most certainly did; her own three months of lessons.
Lessons, she thought. They are here for lessons too. Political lessons, the sort Miss Lily believed even young women needed. Some young women. Lessons that would make them part of Miss Lily’s network of friends, helping each other understand and influence the male world.
It fitted. But it still did not explain the secrecy.
The silence had gone on too long. ‘I’m interested in politics too,’ said Sophie calmly. ‘But entirely too ignorant. You would have a boring afternoon instructing me.’
Miss Lily met her glance. And no, thought Sophie, I’m not imagining approval there, or warmth. Miss Lily smiled. ‘Shall we play a game, then, instead of discussing pleasantries or politics? A game for a cold afternoon by the fire.’
‘Your English games are most interesting.’ The prinzessin’s tone was pleasant. ‘I have played charades many times at home.’ She turned to Miss Carlyle. ‘I think I have told you that my governess was English?’
Miss Carlyle remained silent. Good attempt, Prinzessin, thought Sophie, but Miss Carlyle is annoyed. She’d hoped for something, and now for some reason she won’t get it till I’m gone. But why not begin political discussions now? Why bother about boring a mere colonial? Was this, too, part of the secrecy, and those secrets could not begin until the temporary visitor had left?
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 14
