Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  ‘Not a close friend?’

  I’m sorry, Hannelore, she thought. ‘No. But she … she was against war. Liked England. Talked of wanting to marry and live here, if she could. I think she might think she can help England with this.’ Not quite a lie. Not quite the truth either.

  He scrutinised the paper again. ‘I’ll have to show it to someone,’ he said abruptly. ‘Will you stay here?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Lieutenant Armitage nodded. He turned again as he left the room. ‘You really will stay here?’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ she said.

  She drank the pot of tea, and then another pot; she visited the bathroom, was offered toast and a slice of ham for luncheon, accepted, ate. By late afternoon and a slice of fruitless fruitcake, dyed dark with stewed tea, she had booked a room in the hotel for the night.

  Lieutenant Armitage was there at breakfast. He looked tired, stubbled, and was wearing the same clothes, even more rumpled now. Another man accompanied him, older, a blue scar down one cheek, scars on his hands too. No uniform, but official. She came and sat at their table.

  ‘Miss Higgs, this is Major Ericson. Major, this is Miss Higgs.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Higgs. I say, would you mind coming with us to our facility? We’d be honoured to have you.’

  A calm, easy invitation, designed for the ears of the other breakfasting guests.

  ‘Of course, Major Ericson.’

  A car waited outside; the driver carefully did not look at her, or them. Lieutenant Armitage sat in the front, the major with Sophie in the back.

  No one spoke.

  Out of town, between hedges, birds trilling — didn’t they know that there was a war? And then a sentry box with an arm like a train crossing. The sentry raised it, saluted as they passed.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘My office, Miss Higgs,’ the major said.

  There seemed little point in asking more.

  The drive wound between rhododendron bushes, untrimmed. It ended in a gravelled courtyard, beside a red-brick Victorian mansion hideous with tiny turrets. The driver opened the door for Sophie before he opened the doors for the others.

  At least I don’t seem to be under arrest, she thought. Or maybe they are polite to ladies they have arrested.

  A woman sat at a desk in the front hall, the first non-nursing woman Sophie had seen in a uniform. Women ran much of the war effort, manned the factories, but not in official uniform. She nodded briefly to the men and looked curiously at their guest.

  ‘This way,’ said Major Ericson.

  His office was at the back of the building. Once, perhaps, it had been the housekeeper’s room. It looked out onto lines of recently built huts.

  ‘Please take a seat, Miss Higgs.’

  She sat. The chair was hard. Lieutenant Armitage had vanished.

  ‘This letter: who did you say it was from?’

  ‘I didn’t say, Major Ericson.’ I have to charm, she thought, but imperceptibly. Play this wrong and I will be arrested. She said confidingly, ‘Do please understand, Major. There were German students at a finishing school, in Switzerland. Later, during my London season, there were German visitors too, of course, including guests of Their Majesties at Windsor Castle.’ That should stop him, she thought. Even this man would baulk at questioning the royal household about their guests. ‘I truly believe that whoever sent this to me must be a friend of England, trying to help. I don’t know any more than the formula I gave Lieutenant Armitage, in an envelope sent from Switzerland.’ She let him assume there had been no letter with it. ‘At least I thought it looked like a formula. The only person I knew who might understand it was Lieutenant Armitage, so I brought it to him at once.’

  ‘Have you shown it to anyone else?’

  ‘No, Major Ericson.’

  ‘Do you know what it is for?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about … science or chemicals.’

  ‘I … see. You are Australian, I believe? Where have you been staying while you have been in England?’

  ‘At Wooten Abbey, with the Dowager Duchess of Wooten. I am a friend of the family. The Abbey is a hospital now — I help with the nursing.’

  His expression grew even more respectful than when she had mentioned the royal family, who had tactfully assumed ‘Windsor’ instead of their German name. But the dowager was as English as a Bramley apple. ‘Have you been writing to German friends of yours during the war?’

  ‘No, of course not. I said whoever sent this must be a friend of England’s, not of mine. Perhaps they sent it to me rather than implicate a closer friend.’ Like one of the royal family was left unsaid. But she saw he understood her meaning.

  ‘I see.’ Major Ericson seemed to be wondering what to do with her.

  Someone screamed. No, it was an animal scream. Sophie had heard noises like that when a grass fire raced across one of the Thuringa paddocks. She had run to her bedroom and put her pillow over her ears …

  The noise came from one of the sheds outside. Sophie heard Lieutenant Armitage’s voice yell something. She was on her feet, running, before the major could stop her.

  ‘Miss Higgs! I insist —!’

  The back door was open. She had reached the shed before the major caught up with her. She shook his hand off her arm and opened the door.

  A small room, a glass partition. Two officers, on this side, their faces white — Lieutenant Armitage and another man. And beyond them …

  Three sheep. Or they had once been sheep. Their eyes were gone. Blood soaked into the wool. Their mouths were … no longer mouths. Foam seeped out, and bloody foam from their nostrils too.

  ‘What have you done to them?’ She wanted to scream, but it came out as a croak.

  ‘Your formula, Miss Higgs,’ said Major Ericson. He seemed comfortable with the sheep and her reaction, but not her disobedience.

  She stumbled back to his office. ‘Tea,’ Major Ericson said to the woman outside, before shutting the door. He sat behind the desk again, waited till the tea was served, then waited until she had drunk half a cup. He seemed less suspicious, as if the shock and violence of her action proved she had no understanding of what she had brought here.

  ‘You are to forget everything you have just seen.’ Major Ericson said this as though no other option could be considered. ‘Forget you ever saw the paper. Do you understand?’

  She nodded. ‘I … I’ve seen men who have been gassed. It’s not like that.’

  ‘No. This is a new formula. More powerful. More … useful.’

  ‘There was a name too. Ypres. And a date. Do you think that’s where and when the Germans plan to use it?’

  ‘Miss Higgs, I must say: do not ask any more questions. Do not even think of this again. Can you undertake not to tell anyone?’

  ‘Of course I won’t say anything. But you’ll warn the men at Ypres? You’ll make sure the men have the right kind of gas masks and other protection in time?’

  ‘No questions, Miss Higgs.’ He waited. If he thinks I will talk about this, he will imprison me, she thought. Not in a real prison, of course. Just where I can tell no one what I have seen.

  ‘No questions,’ she whispered. ‘I … I am so glad I brought it here, Major Ericson. It is all so … so awful. I will be glad to forget it entirely. Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  He relaxed. ‘Armitage will see you back to the train. You will go straight back to the Abbey.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I want to do.’

  Major Ericson nodded. He’d like to keep me here, she thought — keep me somewhere, anyway, to make sure I don’t talk. But you can’t keep a duchess’s guest locked up unless she makes a fuss. If I were a man, just possibly. Not a young woman, not even now.

  And what can a young woman do?

  Chapter 55

  Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

  Chaplain Merryweather’s sermon the morning he died, 1916


  8 JULY 1917

  Lieutenant Armitage sat in the back of the car with Sophie this time. The glass was pulled across so the driver couldn’t hear their conversation. ‘There’s a train to Wooten in an hour’s time.’ Lieutenant Armitage’s voice was tired. ‘I’ll wait with you till it comes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sophie pretended he offered from courtesy, not mistrust.

  ‘It’s the Northern Line. You change at Little Hamnet.’

  ‘I know. It’s the way I came before.’ She risked a question, now she was away from the immediate threat of arrest. ‘Lieutenant Armitage, the major is going to warn the men at Ypres, isn’t he?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Lieutenant Armitage?’

  ‘It’s best if we don’t talk about it. If you never talk about it. This is a German weapon, but it can be ours too. We need time to develop it, make stocks of it, work out how to best attack the enemy without affecting our own lines. We can’t let the Germans know that we know about it.’

  ‘But the men!’

  ‘Miss Higgs.’ Lieutenant Armitage was trying to control himself again. And he is too inexperienced, thought Sophie, to realise how much he is telling me. After all, I’m just a woman … ‘If the Germans can’t use the new gas successfully next week, they will simply try again. In the long run, warning our troops on the ground makes no difference.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, thinking. ‘But in the short run, those men will be dead.’

  Lieutenant Armitage stared at her, an inarticulate man trying to find words, an officer who was not allowed the normal military responses of court-martialling, imprisonment or killing someone who might oppose the army that he served. ‘We have been butting heads for three years now, Miss Higgs. Them and us. Guns aren’t going to end this war. But a weapon like this, one that can wipe out a whole army — this might do it. If the Huns are going to use it, we need to as well.’

  We have added submarines, aircraft, mines, steel flechettes, tanks and chlorine gas to war in the past three years, thought Sophie, and still death balances death — weapon for weapon, mud for mud, bloody corpse for bloody corpse …

  The car stopped. It was dusk, the light of the single gas lamp all but crushed by the dimness.

  The train came, two hours late. They had hardly spoken, sitting in the first-class waiting room with a man carrying an umbrella, and a woman in a headscarf with a little girl.

  Lieutenant Armitage helped her onto the train. Polite, she thought. Minding his manners even if he will let all those men die.

  How many men were killed in each gas attack? Hundreds? Thousands? The papers never said. And this gas was so much worse. A weapon that might end the war …

  She knew no one at Ypres, except for Dodders, and there was no way to contact her; nor would the army possibly listen to a woman who drove an unofficial ambulance, rejecting military order. Possibly Malcolm, even the earl, could help her, but she had no way to find out where they were either, much less contact them.

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant Armitage. You have been very kind.’

  At last, ‘Thank you, Miss Higgs. If your … acquaintance writes to you again, you will let us know?’

  ‘Of course. I’m so very glad I came to you. Glad it’s all in the right hands. I don’t have to worry now.’

  She had said the appropriate thing. He smiled and gave her a mock salute. She smiled too, at him, at the soldier who gave up his seat mainly for her — a corner seat where she could look out at the darkness. The train lurched, then began to chug.

  She got out at the next station. The train to London wasn’t due till morning, so she dozed, sitting in another first-class waiting room. Before the war it would have been shut after the last train. Now there were all too many who had to wait through the night at stations like these. At least in July her feet did not freeze.

  The station tearoom opened an hour before the train was due. She washed her face and combed her hair, then ate a boiled egg — from one of the stationmaster’s hens, she supposed. She could see them running about. They sensed the train before she heard it, stalking off the lines and into the grass beyond minutes before the engine appeared.

  By some miracle first class was half empty. She found another corner seat and dozed again till London.

  The gaslights had been lit by the time she arrived at the house — fewer of them in these war years. ‘Miss Higgs! Her Grace didn’t say you were coming.’ Ffoulkes stood aside to let her in.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ffoulkes. She must have forgotten.’ A smile, implying that the dowager’s mind was failing, not just her body. ‘I hope it’s not too much of an inconvenience if I stay tonight.’

  ‘No, of course not, Miss Higgs.’ Ffoulkes didn’t ask where her luggage was. ‘Tea, Miss Higgs?’

  ‘I’ll clean up, if you don’t mind. It’s been a long trip down.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Higgs. I’ll send Gwendolyn up to you, miss.’

  A bath, thought Sophie. And Alison had left some clothes there, though the skirts would not quite fit without some adjusting, of course. It should have hurt, thinking of wearing her dead friend’s clothes. Instead it felt as though Alison were with her.

  ‘How long will you be staying, Miss Higgs? I’m sorry to ask,’ Ffoulkes added, ‘but Cook will want to know. It is difficult to get provisions these days, miss.’

  ‘Whatever you have will be fine. Please, no fuss. I’m just here for the night.’

  ‘Very good, miss,’ said Ffoulkes.

  The clothes fitted, once Gwendolyn had rapidly hemmed the skirts — she was no lady’s maid but her sewing was good. Sophie selected half a dozen garments, from serviceable serge to elegance and dinner dress. She had no idea whom she might have to charm to get a message to Ypres, but the correct clothes must be part of her armoury.

  It was good to be clean, well fed, wearing a fresh nightdress. She let Gwendolyn bring her cocoa in bed, sipped it, smiled. ‘Leave me a candle.’ Since the air raids, the gas had been turned off when the household slept. ‘I’ll read awhile. You go to bed.’

  ‘Very good, miss. What time would you like to be called?’

  ‘Seven o’clock. I need to catch a train.’ The train to Dover didn’t go till midday, but she needed to go to the bank first and convince the manager she was indeed the Miss Higgs who should be allowed access to her father’s accounts.

  She waited till the house was quiet; waited another hour for safety, then lit her candle.

  The stairs creaked. But what did it matter if Ffoulkes heard? She was a guest who wanted something to read for a sleepless night. Why shouldn’t she go to the library?

  The books were still dusted, the desk polished, waiting for the duke to return and sit in that leather chair and call for whisky. His desk drawer was locked, but she found a paper knife and forced it open. Ffoulkes would see what she had done, of course, but by then she’d be gone.

  The drawer opened. She picked up the tiny pistol lying inside. Her father had kept a gun in his desk drawer too; so did the villains in a dozen novels, so she’d assumed that it would be a general rule.

  It seemed it was.

  She put the pistol and ammunition in her — Alison’s — dressing-gown pocket, and climbed back up the stairs to bed.

  There were scrambled eggs for breakfast. Sophie wondered if they had been sent down from the Home Farm, or were they the house’s entire weekly ration? Either way, she ate them and was glad.

  ‘I’m sorry there is no marmalade, Miss Higgs. Cook says she hopes you don’t mind plum jam.’

  Oranges, like sugar, had to come on ships that were vulnerable to German submarines. Plums were home-grown. ‘Of course not, Ffoulkes. Please thank Cook. This is a wonderful breakfast.’

  ‘I will be sure to tell her, Miss Higgs,’ he replied coolly.

  Ffoulkes knew about the pillaged desk already, she guessed. But what could he say? He couldn’t call a constable to arrest Her Grace’s friend.

  Could he?


  ‘May I make a telephone call, Ffoulkes?’

  ‘Of course, Miss Higgs. May I get the number for you?’

  ‘It’s an international one. I’m sorry, I don’t even know what it is. It’s for a Mr James Lorrimer, at the British Embassy in Washington.’

  ‘I am sure the operator will assist, Miss Higgs. I will fetch you when the call is through.’

  ‘Thank you, Ffoulkes.’

  It would be night there. They would have to wake him, but he, of all people, might know someone at Ypres, and a way to contact them. If only she had the address of the Earl of Shillings. But war security had removed his address from the letter he had sent her. Even if she had known it, it might have taken too long for a letter to reach him, and the letter would most certainly have been censored of everything she needed to say. Even his connections might not be high enough to get word to the commanders at Ypres.

  She had eaten three slices of toast and plum jam — it was really very good jam, not too sweet, like many pre-war jams had been — before Ffoulkes returned.

  She stood, then sat back down when he shook his head. ‘I regret that Mr Lorrimer is not available, Miss Higgs.’

  ‘Did you say who was calling?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Higgs. The butler said that he is away inspecting factories, and not contactable until tomorrow, or possibly later.’

  And what could she have expected him to do, from the British Embassy? Countermand the War Office here in England? Possible, but unlikely. She’d had to try, and was now grateful that she need not put him in the position of refusing her plea to try to help, nor of risking his career by accepting. ‘Thank you, Ffoulkes.’

  Deeply, desperately, she wished she could talk to Miss Lily. Miss Lily, who loved her country, even if others might condemn what she had decided was best for it. Miss Lily would have given her courage. Sophie could almost imagine her voice …

  ‘Could you call me a taxicab please, Ffoulkes?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Higgs,’ he said.

  Chapter 56

  In the words of St Paul, ‘I have fought the good fight. I have run the race well.’ What more can any of us do, but what we know is right, and pray for courage and strength to keep doing it?