She took his hand, warm, still hardly calloused. A batman’s work was not hard labour. They walked, arm in arm, towards the house.
He sat alone, the sun from the dining-room window upon his face, revealing his features more clearly than Miss Lily ever permitted. It was that, more than any words, that showed Sophie how distant he must feel, after the years of war, from the woman who was still part of him.
He stood as they entered. ‘Coffee? Mrs Goodenough has managed kedgeree too.’
‘An answer first,’ said Sophie. ‘Nigel, I just told Jones that if you’d asked me to marry you that first Christmas, I’d have said yes.’ She took a breath. ‘But I’m not the girl I was before the war.’
Her voice had strength now. ‘You made me into something, in those few months at Shillings. Something I would never have been without you. You gave me the courage to be myself, the skills to make others accept me as that too. I’m not going to stop now, nor will ten thousand other women when the war gave us the opportunity to finally be ourselves. I’ve seen women on the battlefield driving ambulances with no army officers needed to direct them, carrying men across the craters. I’ve seen girls not out of their teens running canteens. I’ve seen a nursing sister run an entire first-aid station that had been set up by women, stitching wounds when the surgeon and his table were blown to smithereens. Do you really think those women will be content to be “lovely ladies” after the war? To go back to their drawing rooms or kitchens?’
‘They’ll demand the vote? Those over thirty have been given it now.’
‘More,’ said Sophie. ‘Much, much more. What use is a vote if you can only vote for men, or have to choose between the differing visions men have for the world? We may not be lovely, we may not even all be ladies, it may take us years, more wars even, but we will be ourselves, not appendages of husbands, not just daughters, servants, mothers, wives.’
‘And you?’
She needed to smell gum leaves. She needed deep blue sky. She needed home, and she needed Australia to be her home. It was home she longed for now, more than any man, a place where she instinctively knew she would find who she was, and who she might become, in this world beyond the war.
And that could never happen with Nigel, or Miss Lily. Impossible even to imagine Miss Lily in Sydney, or at Thuringa.
She sat next to him at the table, close enough to smell cologne, not Miss Lily’s perfume. ‘I belong in Australia. It’s why I refused James Lorrimer, though I never loved him, not as I love you. It’s not just because I grew up there. I need to go back for the same reason as my father started his empire there.
‘England is too rooted in tradition. All women already have the vote in Australia. Maybe I will stand for parliament in our electorate against Mr Overhill. Perhaps my father will accept me as part of Higgs’s Corned Beef. Maybe I will start a … a cheese factory, employing the million women who will never have husbands after this war.’
‘Sophie … I … I need you.’ Nigel attempted a smile. ‘Need you to tell me about mechanical harvesters and convince us all they’ll work. Need you to …’ His voice vanished. Jones moved to the dining table, took his hand and held it.
‘To convince you that Nigel can be as powerful as the young women Miss Lily taught? That you are lovable, as you convinced me that I was, and not just for the money from corned beef? I do love you, Nigel. I’ll stay as long as you need me, which won’t be forever. And I’ll come back if you need me again.’ She met his eyes. ‘You’d never consider living in Australia, would you?’
‘Of course not.’ The words were a chorus, Nigel and Jones together. They glanced at each other, smiled, and almost as one person turned to Sophie.
‘You will stay, won’t you? For a while?’ The earl’s grip tightened on his friend’s hand.
She stood, then bent and kissed his cheek, then Jones’s. ‘I’ll stay as long as you need me,’ she repeated. ‘And I’ll love you till the seas gang dry. You and Miss Lily.’ Suddenly she realised she was beginning to love Jones too. She bit back laughter, only slightly hysterical. Was love — deep love — ever convenient? Her father and her poor, silly mother; his illicit love for Miss Thwaites. ‘Now I’ll go and tidy myself before breakfast, as Miss Lily taught me to do. No,’ as Jones began to rise, ‘stay there. I can find my way to my room. That’s what I’ve just been saying, I think. It’s not all up to you now — not up to men, or earls. It’s women’s responsibility as well.’
Jones reached out his arm to comfort Nigel as she left the room.
She brushed the tears away. She only had to walk back into that room to find comfort too. But home, and the life of her own she might forge there, called too deeply, and no amount of love could make it different.
Chapter 68
Well, my dear, it seems that we both still continue. But how?
The Earl of Shillings to the Dowager Duchess of Wooten, 1919
10 March 1919
Dear Miss Higgs,
I hope you are in the best of health. I trust you will not mind my writing to you. My name is Gladys Muff, Miss Higgs. I work at Brandon’s factory. I have been helping to do the accounts there because George Brandon, he cannot see.
I would like to marry him, Miss Higgs. George says he won’t marry me because of what he looks like. He is worried I do not know what it will be like. He thinks our children will be ashamed of him. I say our children will be proud and I will make sure of that, miss.
George manages very well: you would be glad if you saw him now. He wears a hat down over his face. It looks a bit strange, but people do not notice much. It were a shock when I first saw him, but that is years ago now. I do know what I am doing, miss. I really do. George has a house just down from the factory. He uses a cane to get there, and he has the house all worked out so he can get around. He does not cook much, mostly eats bread and cheese, but that will change when we are married.
I am writing to you because I think he will do what you tell him. If you tell George he should marry me, he will. I hope then you will come to our wedding, miss.
Your most obedient servant,
Gladys Muff
Sophie stayed at Shillings for two weeks, till Nigel’s and Jones’s leave was over, and then another week to make sure the estate ran smoothly with them gone, then drove herself to Sergeant Brandon’s wedding, staying at the duke’s London residence, where Ffoulkes never mentioned, nor had quite forgiven, the broken desk.
She returned to Shillings; interviewed a new estate agent and secured a loan for a mechanical harvester from her father through Mr Slithersole, who also organised its purchase and transport from the United States; she talked to surprisingly accepting tenants about not just how the harvester could be used, but also how it could be hired out to other farmers for income; she gave orders about repairing fences and gates. She bought ewes and a most expensive ram, and gently explained why the beloved horses would not be replaced.
The vicar brought her eight men, still white with shell shock, who needed jobs. She put them to work planting trees, quietly, away from the other workers.
She stayed a further month with Nigel and Jones when they returned, to take the weight of lordship from Nigel while he walked his woods and smelled the air of home, as the earl rather than Miss Lily.
Mr Slithersole booked her a passage on the Cape of Fortune. She spent a weekend in London, drinking vast amounts of cocoa with Ethel and her suffragette friends; admired Ethel’s motorbike and the care Sloggers had taken with Dodders’s precious vehicle, but refused a short escape with them to Wales or Scotland; then drove herself up to Wooten for a final fortnight with Her Grace. She spent most of that time sitting by the old woman’s bedside, both of them remembering, or in remembering silence. The duke and his new wife treated her as family; Doris and little Sophie visited often, Sophie looking wonderfully and heartbreakingly like Alison. Nanny still dozed and remembered, with Sophie added to that memory jewel box. I am so rich in families now, Sophie thought.
; But the future? Ethel and Sloggers had women’s equality to fight for, true university degrees and votes for all women, even if some had been granted the vote in the new Act; Nigel, Jones and the dowager had their estates; James had the future of his nation. Only Sophie seemed still adrift. But she must find her place in Australia.
The last afternoon at Wooten she walked in the orchard, and picked bluebells for Alison’s grave. A storm was coming, thunder far off, reminding her of the noise of the big guns. It would never leave her now.
She sat under the lichened apple tree, blossom sparkling as if war had never been, where she and Angus had once lain, with the mail in her lap. So many letters these days, so many friends across the world, women she had worked with, friends bound forever by the war and unbreaking chains.
But she opened none of them. Instead she took out Angus’s again. She’d kept it. Somehow it reassured her to know that he was safe, that she had not destroyed him with her foolhardiness, even if he no longer loved her, perhaps had never loved her, had just needed her in his time of vulnerability.
She took it out and read it once again.
What did Glenda Quince look like? she wondered. If Angus could fall out of love with Sophie so soon, and into the arms of Glenda, it had been no love on which to base a lifetime together.
Glenda Quince. Quince paste at their picnic, under the apple trees.
Sir Alan Crabtree. Glenda Quince.
She stood up, brushed the grass and leaves from her skirt, then strode back to the house to look up Debrett’s, and then to cancel her passage home.
Chapter 69
Love comes in so many flavours, or like waves, perhaps — some cold, some hot, some high and crashing, others sweet and creeping gently to your feet. There is no one kind that suits us all, nor perhaps is there one kind of love that will suit us our whole lives. But luckily, there doesn’t have to be, for love changes too.
But this I do know about the happiest couples I have seen: love came unexpectedly, but those who had the strength embraced it anyway, and were fulfilled.
Sophie, writing many decades later to her granddaughter, undated
The village was worn, as they all were: the gardens still full of vegetables, not sweetpeas; no old men lingering on benches outside the pub — there was still no time for old men to linger; and the young men, those too crippled to work or with their lungs rotted by gas, were still too sensitive to the stares of others to take up the benches in their place.
Sophie stopped at the blacksmith’s for fuel and directions, and ignored his raised eyebrows at the sight of a woman driving a car — her own car — as well as at her question. ‘Captain McIntyre? You’ll find him in Simpkin’s old cottage, miss. He moved there two weeks ago last Tuesday.’ He winked at her. ‘Young man wants his own place, don’t he, not under his ma’s eye. Two miles past the church, miss, then turn right where McMaster’s barn used to be.’
‘Used to be?’
‘You can’t miss it, miss.’
She didn’t.
It was a small house. She had expected that. One storey. She had expected that too. The ivy had been recently hacked away from the front door and the wisteria trimmed above the windows, which gave her hope.
The door was plain wood, unpainted. She knocked, once faintly, her hand trembling, and then another harder knock, so the door left a dirt smudge on her glove.
‘Come in.’
She opened the door. The inside was a single room: a narrow bed against one wall, covered with a grey army blanket; a fireplace, with a tripod and pot; a sliced cabbage on the table; four chops, uncooked, on a plate.
He sat in the room’s only easy chair, a blanket over his lap. He stared as she came in. ‘Sophie! How did you —?’
‘Find you? Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks asked a friend of her husband’s.’
Angus flushed. ‘Forgive my not getting up. I was just getting changed. Got muddy checking the partridges this morning.’
‘Not at Sir Alan’s estate with your Miss Quince yet?’
‘Next month,’ he said easily. ‘Filling in down here for a friend.’
‘We’re lucky to have such good friends.’
He looked at her warily. ‘Yes, aren’t we? I’m afraid I can only offer you tea.’ He nodded at the pot on the fire. ‘The water should be about at the boil.’
‘Thank you.’ She crossed to the table, found a round brown teapot and a canister of tea. One for each person and one for the pot.
‘Excuse my not getting up,’ he said again.
‘Don’t worry on my account.’ She smiled at him: a perfect smile, moist lips and steady eyes, her fingertips trailing her hair back from her forehead, all the charm Miss Lily had taught her. ‘We are past all that sort of awkwardness between us, aren’t we? Or we should be, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’ He sounded awkward, though. Ah, she had made him say yes. Now for a question he can answer … ‘How do you get water from a pot on the fire into a teapot?’
‘I use a teacup.’
‘Excellent strategy. Your strategies are always superb, Captain McIntyre.’
‘If they were excellent, you wouldn’t be here. I’m sorry there’s no cake.’
‘There’s a hamper with ginger nuts in the car.’
‘No ginger nuts for me, thank you.’ His voice was dry. ‘I’m sorry, there’s no milk or sugar either.’
‘I’ve lost the habit of them too.’
She handed him his cup and saucer and sat on the room’s only other chair — a hard one, armless — and sipped her tea. ‘I think there is quince paste in the hamper as well. I remember how you like quince paste.’
He looked at her cautiously. ‘I’ve only had it once.’
‘Ah. A memorable once, though.’
‘Yes.’
He wasn’t helping. She put the cup down on the floor, suddenly impatient. ‘A coincidence that your fiancée should be called Quince.’
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘And Sir Alan Crabtree? Quite an orchard.’
‘Sophie, what are you saying?’
‘There is no Sir Alan Crabtree in Debrett’s. No Crabtrees at all, in fact. Or Appletree or Orangetree, just in case you forgot what kind of fruit was employing you. I didn’t look up Banana. Though Sir Alan Banana has a ring to it.’
‘I did say my strategies aren’t the best,’ he said. ‘Yours were always infinitely superior. But I worked hard on that letter.’
‘Yet the truth seeped through it anyway. Why did you try to lie to me?’
His eyes were honest as they looked at her. ‘Because it’s best.’
‘Why? I’d hoped,’ she added, ‘that I was the one person in the world you could tell the truth to.’
‘Sophie, you are the one person in the world I must lie to. I lied to you because you are a woman of courage and compassion.’
‘And a woman of courage and compassion doesn’t sail back to Australia leaving a man who has lost a leg?’
Silence filled the room. A lark called outside: a long liquid note. Five years ago I didn’t know a lark’s call from a nightingale’s, she thought.
At last he said, ‘Exactly.’ He looked at her for a moment, then added, ‘Don’t say it doesn’t matter. Don’t you dare say that.’
‘Of course it matters! It matters you were hurt! It matters I wasn’t there! It matters that you are here alone, that you —’
‘Sophie, don’t cry.’
‘I will if I want to.’
He gave a muffled laugh. ‘Sophie, I can’t wipe away your tears for you. I haven’t got my leg …’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t mean my real leg. I mean my artificial leg. I’ve been having trouble with it — the damn thing keeps going at the knee. The blacksmith took it this morning to repair it for me. It should be back by now. There must have been an emergency.’
‘I called in to ask the way and he was shoeing a horse. Your leg is sitting by the blacksmith’s forge while he shoes a horse?�
��
Suddenly she was laughing too, as well as crying.
‘General Sophie, riding to my rescue, just as I was afraid you would.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I can’t marry you. And not because of my leg.’
‘I don’t see any such thing. My father has only one leg.’ She sat back on her hands and knees, then abruptly lifted the blanket.
He drew in his breath, moved to stop her, realised it was too late.
It was better than she had expected. She had expected a bandaged stump. This had healed clean, just above the knee. There was no sign of ulcers or the lingering infections of so many amputees. He had a skilled surgeon, she thought, remembering others she had seen, then grimaced at what ‘lucky’ meant these days. She would need to make arrangements for him on the ship …
She held out a hand to him, smiled, waited for him to take it. Instead he took it only briefly, then pressed it back, against her body. ‘Sophie, there is no other way I can think of to say this. I can’t marry you.’
‘But you said that there is no Miss Quince.’
‘There isn’t. But one day there will be, when I can manage a bit better. I will be happy.’
‘And you and I wouldn’t be? We would have our own property, in Australia. A large one. You’d love it, the river and the hills …’
He looked at her steadily. ‘You’d look after me, wouldn’t you? You’d give me a property, and a life. And I would let you, as I always let you. Sophie Higgs, who shot at two men and outfaced a German officer so we could escape, who seduced a général into lending her a car and driver, who organised a large part of the war effort in France and Belgium for over a year …’
Cold seeped through her. ‘Is that why you don’t want me? Because I killed a man and shot another?’
‘No. Never think that. I have never admired a woman more. But it is because you shot them, and I could not have, even if I’d had the pistol.’
‘Angus —’
‘I do love you, Sophie.’ But it was offered as consolation. Already he looked as he had that night in France: part overwhelmed, part apprehensive that a woman had overwhelmed him.
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 51
