Dedication
To the hidden heroines of history —
and to all the women whose heroism continues
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
About the Author
Book 1 Miss Lily's Lovely Ladies
Copyright
Chapter 1
When I was young on the North West Frontier men spoke of ‘when the war is over’. War does not stop on the day of ceasefire. Somewhere, always, the hounds of war snuffle in the gutters, hunting for the next battle.
Miss Lily, 1914
THE BAVARIAN SOVIET REPUBLIC, GERMANY, 30 MARCH 1919
HANNELORE
The attic smelled of mouse and long-ago-eaten musty apples. Hannelore crouched behind the upturned bed, pistol in hand, and listened to the rats scrabble below. Bolshevik rats, hunting through the snow-slushed street.
Hunting her.
On the floor below her, old Anna screamed. She gabbled a plea. A shot rang out, so loud an icicle dropped, spear like, from the roof beyond the attic window. One shot. You did not need two to kill an old woman in her bed.
The pleading stopped.
Hannelore had counted three shots since the rebels broke down the door. Helga and Joseph must be dead too. She was alone.
Footsteps scrabbled upstairs. Rats in big boots. Well-fed rats, in this land of hunger. Yells, crashes, as doors were flung open.
A year ago she had been Prinzessin Hannelore von Arnenberg. She supposed she still was, though the revolutionaries had abolished titles and ownership of property through all the Räterepublik, the Bavarian Soviet Republic. You did not need a mob of men to hunt for one young woman, but it was worth it to capture a prinzessin.
Hannelore had always known she must give her life for her country. She had thought that would mean a diplomatically useful marriage producing more diplomatically useful children. That future was gone. The men would rape her before dragging her to the firing squad. Rape was what men did, in war. But she would not let them rape her. If men behaved like rats, they deserved to die like rats. The pistol felt warm in her hand, enamelled pink, inlaid with silver. A prinzessin’s pistol, with six bullets.
The attic door crashed open. She waited till two figures stepped into the room. Two shots. Two bullet holes in two stomachs, the look of astonishment that men always acquired in that second when they realised their prey had won. Hannelore had nursed enough men in the war to know that a bullet to the stomach was lethal . . . eventually.
Other men paused at the doorway now — bearded, filthy, in the rags of German uniforms, their red armbands showing they fought for the Munich Soviet, hungry, but for power, not food. The older ones pushed the most junior forward. The Soviets were all equal, except, of course, they weren’t. Yet they still hesitated.
She managed to shoot four more of them. Six rats, bleeding, groaning on the attic floor now. Helga would have had to scrub away the blood, if they had let her live . . .
Her pistol was empty. But these fools obviously had not calculated how many bullets her pistol held, did not realise that she was helpless.
Which was exactly what Hannelore had hoped.
She was not going to let these men rape her, unless they liked to rape the dead. Even rats did not do that. Sometimes men did.
She stood so the bed no longer sheltered her and aimed her pistol at the door.
She felt the bullet that entered her heart as coldness, rather than pain. The one in her leg she hardly felt at all. Such foolish men, to waste a bullet in the leg.
She smiled as she fell. The Prinzessin Hannelore von Arnenberg was no use to the Bolshevik Republic now. And she had given her life for her country, as she had been bred to do, not this socialist republic but the earth, the trees, the people of her Germany . . .
Sophie would understand that, she thought vaguely, as pain burned a thousand fires through her body. Sophie knew how one might love a country, but despair sometimes of its people. Dear, Sophie. Happy Sophie, safe home in Australien among her kangaroos . . .
She never would visit Sophie now, Hannelore realised, as hands grabbed her, as cold turned to dark.
Chapter 2
For two years I created and managed three hospitals and a refugee centre. I was a person. Then the war ended. I became ‘just a woman’ again. No matter what society may decide, my dear, never think of yourself as ‘just a woman’.
Sophie in a letter to her granddaughter, undated
LONDON, 1 MAY 1919
‘Darling, you need a maid,’ said Emily, Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks, gracefully lifting her tea cup in her most perfect drawing room, its walls covered in pre-war pale striped silk. Emily inspected Sophie’s stockings, shuddered elegantly, and added, ‘Desperately.’
Sophie reached for another apple tart. They really were excellent. A sponge cake crowned with sugar-dusted hothouse strawberries took pride of place on the top tier of the cake stand; small currant cakes, watercress or celery and cream cheese sandwiches the lower tiers. The maids of honour and the apple tarts, adorned with cream, were presented on matching platters.
On the footpath outside this house, a young man, legless, almost invisible in the yellow fog that licked the soot-stained buildings, sat propped up beside a sign reading Wounded veteran, offering boxes of matches for threepence to grey-faced passersby. Few stopped. Wounded veterans, legless, armless, or faces burned away by mustard gas, were commonplace these days. Down at Waterloo Station a torso with a face of desperation under his knitted cap waited helplessly for passersby to drop a coin into his cap. What if one day his wife, mother, sister, lover did not return to wheelbarrow him home. What then?
You had to shut your eyes to manage to smile in England now. Even Sophie, who all her life had stubbornly seen as much as she could. Even she could not bear to look too hard. How could you bear to see what you could not help? Or at least not enough to make a difference?
A few streets away she ha
d seen children scrabble in the Thames mud, hunting for firewood, finding mostly what their fathers, brothers, uncles had found in the trenches before them: frostbite, hunger and mud. Sophie wondered if Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks had ever even experienced mud, except at a foxhunt, of course.
Prime Minister Lloyd George had promised England ‘a land fit for heroes’ in the last election. This Year of Victory 1919 had not seen that promise kept. A million men already were unemployed — naturally no one counted the women cast out of work with the end of the war, or the wan-faced women, in grey flannel, walking wearily to the grey jobs that soon would be returned to men, at man’s wages, not the pittance given to women. Much of the army still waited to be demobbed; the government afraid of the growing desperation and violence if even more men were turned out to a land where no jobs waited. But did some employers want demobilisation delayed as long as possible, to keep wage costs down?
Britain, the colonies, had danced, prayed, laughed when the ceasefire had been declared. They had not understood. They still did not.
This was not the land of peace. The Peace Treaty with Germany had not even been agreed to, much less signed. Officially this was only a ceasefire, though most of Europe, America and the colonies tried to blot out the knowledge that the war — officially — was yet to be won.
Who still had the will to fight in 1919, when almost every country in the war was exhausted emotionally, economically, and by the influenza that had killed faster and more efficiently even than the guns?
Outside this drawing room widows, or members of the even vaster army of wives whose husbands had returned from the trenches mentally or physically unable to work, fed their families with a rind of mousetrap cheese, withered potatoes or a half a mouldy cabbage. There was little else to be had for the majority in this post-war England, still suffering from the German blockades, and the diversion of ships from food shipments from the colonies to the returning colonial troops home as fast as possible, before they too muttered rebellion.
One in seven men dead. One in seven too severely damaged in mind or body to work. A nation still on food stamps. Sugar, butter, even bread was severely rationed — but not in the home of Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks, or any of the ‘upper 600’ families who had estates to supply them not just with bread and cream, but hothouse pineapples.
Here, in this drawing room that smelled of pot pourri and apple wood, privation was for others. Mrs Colonel Sevenoaks would never be an ‘other’.
Yet even Emily had spent four years wondering if the young man next to her at a dinner table might be alive the next week, the next month, and too many of them had not. Emily might be one of the few across Europe who had not missed a meal the entire war. But she too had scars.
Sophie bit a tiny portion of crust and apple, felt its buttery smoothness, and lost her appetite. She swallowed anyway. ‘Why do I need a maid? I’m not arguing,’ she added. ‘But how did you know I don’t have one?’
‘Your right stocking seam is crooked. And white stockings! Darling, white went out an age ago.’ Emily automatically stroked her own beige silk, the seams perfectly straight. ‘Your dress is excellent —’
Sophie raised an eyebrow. Her wardrobe had been recently resupplied by the best private dressmaker in Paris, replacing the faded, louse-ridden garments of her war.
‘— but there is a small stain on your collar,’ continued Emily. ‘And while your outfit was perfect for the sun this morning, it isn’t for this afternoon’s fog. A maid would have checked the weather forecast. She would also have advised you that with this year’s short skirts, high heels are a necessity, if one is not to look as short-legged as a penguin.’
‘Ah,’ said Sophie, trying to imagine how she would have coped fighting a war and its ramifications in high heels. She inspected her seam, but didn’t straighten it, in case Emily’s butler entered with more hot water for the teapot, and his nose lengthened another two inches at the sight. But Emily — damn her slightly porcine aristocratic nose — was quite correct. Two years of running military hospitals and a refugee relief system in Belgium and France, two years nursing at Wooten Abbey before that, had made her temporarily forget the social necessity of a good maid.
‘I don’t suppose you could suggest one?’
‘Darling, I’m not an employment agency,’ said Emily sharply. Sophie’s war service — and her failure to gain the prize of a good marriage, the ostensible aim of the debutante season that Miss Lily had prepared them for so well and so unconventionally — had let Emily forgive Sophie for being richer and more beautiful. But Emily was still . . . Emily. ‘It’s almost impossible for anyone to find good servants.’ She did not add ‘especially for a colonial’, but the implication lingered among the scents of buttered teacake and pot pourri.
‘Munitions work has made girls think themselves too good for domestic service,’ continued Emily. ‘And why should Lloyd George give those ex-servicemen just lounging around the pubs an allowance when there are footmen’s and gardeners’ jobs going begging?’
Possibly because having spent four years in the trenches saving your life those ex-servicemen don’t want to spend what is left of their own lives polishing your silver, thought Sophie. And alcohol dimmed nightmares — for a while — as well as provided camaraderie, with colleagues in the pub who understood all they would not repeat back home. But she didn’t argue. The reconciliation with Emily was still too fragile, just like the ceasefire that had been prematurely called ‘peace’.
And Miss Lily had also been correct. Women needed a network of other women, even in this post-war world where women over thirty had recently been allowed to vote, where women of good breeding might even visit each other, unchaperoned and unaccompanied even by a maid or footman, as Sophie was doing now. Although of course she was not well bred, just wealthy enough for that fault to be forgiven.
Emily reached for a currant cake. ‘Surely Miss Lily could find you an adequate maid,’ she suggested, just slightly too casually. ‘Or is Miss Lily still . . . absent?’
Did Emily care about Miss Lily? Or had her husband, now in the Home Office, an official reason for finding her? Miss Lily’s covert efforts before the war to balance the power between Britain and Germany might now be seen as treason.
‘As far as I know Miss Lily won’t be returning,’ said Sophie truthfully, ‘but I don’t think she took her maid with her. I wonder if she might be free.’
Green would be perfect. Discreet and deeply capable, thought Sophie. Green was born at Shillings; she had worked for Miss Lily for twenty years; and she already knew Sophie by reputation. ‘I’ll call Lord Nigel at Shillings and ask after her.’
Emily straightened in shock, though still swan-like, in her chair. Every girl who passed through Miss Lily’s tutoring emerged swan-like, and gracefully flirtatious. How else could a woman influence a world that men ran both politically and domestically? Miss Lily’s ‘lovely ladies’, were also — discreetly — intelligent. ‘You’ve actually met the notorious Earl of Shillings?’ Miss Lily instructed her pupils at the earl’s country estate, but never when he was in residence.
‘Notorious?’ asked Sophie carefully.
Emily shrugged. No wrinkle appeared in the cloth of her embroidered blue dress — another benefit of having a maid who knew exactly how to iron and alter one’s clothing so that it hung like an extension of one’s body. ‘He’s never appeared in the House of Lords. Or anywhere in society for years. A total mystery. But you’ve met him?’
‘I’ve met him.’
Sophie didn’t add that Nigel Vaile, Earl of Shillings, had recently asked her to marry him. And that she had refused, not because she could not love him, but because he was too deeply bound to his land to let her be Australian.
It was time to return to gum trees, the blue gleam of the harbour, to darling Miss Thwaites, to the Higgs corned-beef empire and her father. She had a duty to do first, though.
Sophie closed her eyes briefly. She was so tired of duty . . . just so tired.
If only there could be true peace. A secure peace . . .
‘Where did you meet his lordship?’ demanded Emily eagerly. ‘What is he like?’
Sophie opened her eyes. ‘I met him at Shillings, early this year. He was on leave, and invited me to visit.’ Which was true, even if not the whole truth. She forced a little social vivacity back into her voice. ‘He was weary, like so many officers. He spent nearly all the war with his regiment in France. Quite a lot of people met him there,’ she added, slightly maliciously. Emily’s husband had never seen active service. ‘At the moment he’s trying to get Shillings back on its feet.’
‘A complete waste of his time, darling. I’m amazed he doesn’t realise that. The old estates just aren’t profitable any more, not with Land Tax and neglect during the war. More tea?’ Emily poured more hot water into the teapot. ‘Hubert is selling all but the Home Farm and the house to some Americans. We’re keeping enough rough country for some shooting, of course. London property is more profitable and far less work.’
Income from property and country estates was socially acceptable, possibly because the owner of that income did not have to work for it, but could employ agents. The money from Sophie’s father’s corned-beef factories was not acceptable — especially as it was still being made by Mr Higgs himself. ‘Old money’, like Colonel Sevenoaks’, no matter how it had been obtained, was superior to new money. Enough time made society blind to the source of money.
But Sophie’s ‘new money’ was also large new money and a great deal of it had been spent by experts to make sure that Sophie was presented at court. Sophie was now ‘presentable’ in every sense. Except, she thought, for her crooked stockings, the stain on her collar, the incorrect shoes.
Emily sighed. ‘Even the house needs a terrible amount of work to be livable again. The gardens were all dug up for potatoes and cabbages during the war, of course. It’s going to take a regiment of gardeners to get them decent again. Everything has become so terribly shabby. I’ve convinced Hubert we really do need bathrooms now. It’s not just that guests expect them — even maids these days object to carrying bath water upstairs. Those moving pictures have given them all quite ridiculous ideas above their station.’
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