The Lily and the Rose

by Jackie French

  ‘My friends will be worried.’

  ‘I sent them a note. I told you.’

  ‘You were so very confident I would stay.’

  ‘Sophie, you need to stay, a few days only. We need to talk again.’ He spoke as a count, a man used to being obeyed.

  ‘And I want to leave, now.’

  ‘It is not safe to use a lantern!’ he repeated.

  She forced her voice to stay steady. ‘I don’t need the cart or a lantern. I am used to riding by moonlight. The horse will follow the track and road.’

  ‘Sophie, you must accept that I have to protect you —’

  ‘And you must accept that I will make my own decisions.’

  He did not answer. Hannelore said nothing, lying on the bed, but an expression impossible to read flickered in her eyes.

  Sophie stepped towards the door, then stopped, as Dolphie blocked her way.

  She had never been truly frightened before. Not even under fire in Belgium. She had been scared then, but mostly that she could not carry out her mission, not for herself.

  She was scared now. She was not even sure what she was scared of — the foreignness of the lodge, the desperation in Dolphie’s eyes, which she had seen in almost every man who had fought, who had learned to make little of the loss of life, who was used to the strange moralities of war. Perhaps she was most frightened of her own feelings.

  Nigel had been right. This land was so much more foreign than England. She had not understood. Worse, she still did not understand. It was not safe for her to stay, even for a few days, in case she blundered again . . .

  ‘Do you give me your word you will take me back as soon as it grows light tomorrow?’

  ‘Sophie, Hannelore needs you.’

  Hannelore pushed herself painfully up on her pillows. ‘Sophie, do not listen to him. Yes, I need you. I need to think of you being happy. And if that is with your kangaroos . . .’ she attempted a smile ‘. . . then that is what it must be. You have seen my wounds are healing. Helga nurses me well.’

  Dolphie looked at her sharply. ‘Hannelore, I think you need to consider what you say. Sophie, Helga has made up the bed for you here. You and Hannelore can talk, remember past times.’ He tried out a smile. It did not quite work. ‘She can tell you what life is like, to be an aristocrat in Germany. My lands may be taken, but not my title, nor hers. Once Germany is stable again you will have opportunities here no amount of money from corned beef could ever give you.’

  My money in exchange for your title, thought Sophie, and the deference due to an aristocrat. She met his eyes. ‘I think Hannelore needs to sleep, not talk. And you have not given me your promise to take me back.’

  ‘Hannelore —’ he began.

  ‘— was a nice little ruse to get the Higgs fortune to Bavaria?’ The voice behind them was soft. Sophie hadn’t even heard the door open. Jones stood to one side, a pistol in one hand, a lantern in the other. ‘No point calling for the servants,’ he added. ‘They are a little . . . tied up at the moment. Miss Sophie, would you mind opening the window?’

  ‘This is an outrage —’ began Dolphie.

  ‘I reckon luring a young woman into a revolution so you can get her money is a bit of an outrage too,’ said Jones, as Sophie opened the window. A figure moved out of the bushes. Green, also with a pistol in her hand.

  Jones gave Sophie a wolf-like grin then turned a harsher countenance on Dolphie. ‘You didn’t think we would let her go into the unknown, did you? That horse was so lame I could hardly bicycle slowly enough to stay out of sight.’ He did not mention the tufts of wool along the road.

  ‘And you will carry her away on your gallant bicycle now?’ demanded Dolphie.

  ‘In a car, and we won’t be stopping either, so don’t bother sending messages to your pals to grab us.’

  Dolphie looked at Sophie. ‘Sophie, you truly wish to go?’

  She longed to stay to tend Hannelore. She wanted to keep arguing till she found out the truth about the information she had been sent about the mustard gas and Ypres, for she did not think she had found it yet. Nor did she think Jones’s assumption was correct — that Dolphie’s letter had been a trick to get her here so he could seduce her, marry her, re-establish himself with her money. Or at least, not entirely.

  But she spoke the truth when she said, ‘I don’t want to live in Germany. Or — forgive me — marry someone who hopes for a future where he may be an enemy of my country again. Hannelore, may I at least give you money? I brought a draft from a Belgian bank.’ She reached into her bag just as Dolphie grabbed her arm.

  ‘We cannot afford for you to leave now. Someone may see the lights! Cars must always be a curiosity at this time.’

  ‘It’s bright moonlight,’ said Jones. ‘I’ll drive without lights till we are far from here.’

  ‘You will put us in danger! I cannot allow you to do this.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jones, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But I don’t take orders from you. I’m taking Miss Higgs with me.’

  ‘And I will shoot Miss Higgs if you try,’ said Dolphie, the pistol in his hand pressed into her back.

  Sophie was not sure whether to laugh or cry. Of course Dolphie would not shoot her, just as he had not when they met at Ypres. She straightened, tossed the bank draft onto the bed, then turned slightly so that her own small pistol touched his stomach. A pistol she would not use any more than he would his. But this farce needed it, if she was to leave tonight.

  Would Dolphie have taken her pistol, if he’d guessed she had one? Would he have left the knitting needles? Why was it so much easier to imagine shooting a man, than stabbing him with a long metal needle . . .

  ‘Are you hoping for a suicide pact where we die in each other’s arms, Dolphie? You will need to crank up the phonogram again so we can do it properly, singing an aria. Or you can let me go.’

  He glanced down at the pistol in her hand, pressed now to his side. ‘This is becoming a habit, Sophie,’ he said, almost sounding like the Dolphie she knew.

  I must tell James about the bitterness I have heard today, she thought vaguely. There is much in this that the British government needs to understand. The war continues . . .

  Dolphie released her arm. Hannelore still had not touched the bank draft.

  ‘Miss Higgs and I will walk out of here while Green keeps you covered,’ said Jones. ‘She can shoot a pheasant at a hundred yards, so I’m pretty sure she can shoot a Hun at five. Or a prinzessin. Excuse my not bowing,’ he added to Hannelore.

  Hannelore must recognise him from her time at Shillings, thought Sophie. Though Jones had never spoken like that when he was the butler there. Perhaps there is nothing she wishes to say.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, lost for any other words, or for enough to make sense of everything she felt. ‘Take care, both of you.’ She was about to add that Hannelore had her address in Sydney and Thuringa. But suddenly she wished to say goodbye forever to this land of war and revolutions.

  A thought struck her. She turned at the door, and looked at Hannelore, watching her wide-eyed and silent from the bed. ‘Use the money to start a factory selling canned soup. That may be beneath the dignity of a prinzessin, but it may also be the best you can do for your country now.’ She did not glance at Dolphie as she walked out the door and into the passageway.

  Jones walked behind her, still holding his pistol, as she held hers. But there was no pursuit, just as there had been none near Ypres, more than two years earlier. Even when Jones started the car, the headlights off as he had promised, there was neither light nor movement from the lodge.

  Within half a minute it was lost behind them, behind the trees.

  Chapter 18

  Portable Soup

  Excellent for voyages of the physical, not emotional kind.

  1 lb mushrooms

  10 lbs carrots

  10 lbs cabbage

  10 lbs tomatoes, if obtainable

  10 lbs celery

  1 gill sugar
>
  10 lbs chicken bones

  Cover in a scrubbed copper with water. Boil for five hours, adding water as necessary. Strain. Boil the clear liquid till thick. This may take overnight, on a low heat. Allow to set into a dense jelly. Cut finger lengths and wrap each piece in greased paper, and then oilcloth. Keep cool and in as dry a place as possible, preferably in a metal-lined chest, with sachets of raw rice to absorb the moisture. Dissolve one square in a bowl of boiling water and drink hot.

  Miss Lily, 1914

  They drove through darkness, but the cart tracks showed white even in the blackness under the pines. Jones waited until they were several miles down the road before putting on the headlights.

  Sophie sat silently in the back seat with Georgina, Green in the front with Jones. Their luggage was strapped behind them.

  Sophie did not speak. In truth, she did not know what to say — to thank Jones for her rescue? To reproach him for not following her orders? She was not at all sure she had needed to be saved. The high-pitched drama might have been unnecessary.

  Or it might not.

  Nor had Jones ever agreed to follow her orders. He obeyed Nigel, if he obeyed anyone at all. It had been a mistake to think that although he played the role of butler and batman, who served both his master and his country, he was their servant in the sense of unquestioning obedience. Nor was Green simply her maid. She had accepted that implicitly when she had heard Green’s story. Jones and Green — and Miss Lily — had been involved in ‘challenges’ long before Sophie Higgs had come to Shillings.

  It did not matter. He and Green had extricated her. The job she had come to do — find Hannelore, help her, to see if she and Dolphie might make a life together, was completed.

  It was time to go home.

  They drove through villages, strangely intact after the rubble piles of Belgium and France, through fields and forests. Georgina dozed, not even waking when Jones stopped to refill the car with cans of petrol fastened at the side. Green took over the driving while Jones slept beside her; he had the talent for sudden deep sleep that those in the trenches achieved — or soon died when weariness made them inattentive.

  Sophie slept as well. She woke to pale gold morning light, an alpine meadow, an inn with wooden fretwork and the scent of coffee, horse droppings and frost-rimmed cabbages from the field behind the inn.

  ‘Breakfast,’ said Jones, briefly.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sophie, just as briefly, to him, to Green, and then to Georgina. ‘I’m sorry. This has not been . . . pleasant.’

  To her surprise Georgina smiled. ‘You never promised me a pleasant journey. Look at the sunrise.’

  Sophie looked. Cream and gold rising above an alpine skyline where snow shone vivid pink. Gaudy. Postcard. Almost heartbreaking beauty.

  ‘And there is a sunrise every day,’ said Georgina softly. ‘No matter how hard the night. An old native woman told me that.’

  ‘She was wise,’ said Sophie, then followed Jones and Green to the scent of coffee, to wide, bowl-sized cups of hot chocolate and rye rolls with caraway seeds hot from the oven, spring butter still dewy from the dairy, none of which she could eat.

  Chapter 19

  It is easy for me to sit here, comfortably giving you advice. It is harder to remember advice, even one’s own, when one is in pain, either of the body or the heart. But that is when you need to find your wisdom most.

  Miss Lily, 1914

  HANNELORE

  Breakfast was potatoes, cooked with milk and butter, served in a cracked porcelain dish, with a well-polished silver spoon.

  Hannelore dismissed Helga with a carefully placed and grateful smile. Despite the drama of last night she felt stronger this morning, as she had each day since her rescue. Today she would feed herself.

  Dolphie had not yet appeared. She did not know if he was trying to follow Sophie, or swallowing his failure by checking his snares and traps in the woods. She had nearly finished her breakfast potatoes when he opened the door.

  She put the bowl down. ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Gone. I walked along the road to check they got away safely. They have.’ He sat on the hard, wooden chair by her bed, his voice emotionless, the shadows black under his eyes.

  ‘Why did you say those things last night?’ she demanded in sudden anguish. ‘You could have compromised. Allowed me — and her — to spend part of each year in Australien. So many wives spend a part of the year in their own countries, in Denmark, in Switzerland. No, you could not have become an Australian factory manager. Never! But she is Sophie! She would have accepted that!’

  ‘You do not understand.’

  ‘That is right! I do not!’ She had dreamed so long of having Sophie as a sister, or technically an aunt. Yes, Germany must always be her duty, but a little time in Australien, far away from hardships and winter — could she not have had that?

  ‘What of the next war?’ asked Dolphie quietly. ‘Hannelore, you know, as I know, that there must be another, if Germany is to rise again. Germany cannot prosper without the industry of the Ruhr, without the land the French wish to steal from us, if we cannot pay what it is impossible to pay. It may take us ten years, or twenty, but Germany must fight again. And Sophie would be our enemy.’

  ‘But her children would be German. And what could one woman do . . .?’ Hannelore became silent as she remembered exactly what one woman might do, what she had once dreamed of doing, what Sophie had already achieved.

  ‘Perhaps she would do nothing, by the time that day came. Could do nothing, made helpless because she could not be an enemy of her children’s homeland. And that would be the worst of all. I could not do that to her. Not to Sophie.’

  She would not cry. Her body had learned that tears did nothing but pass the time. She’d had such dreams, until today, till Dolphie and Sophie had shredded them, as cleanly as an assassin’s bomb would have turned her parts into splatters of bone and flesh.

  Perhaps that would have hurt less than this. At least, she thought drearily, it would have been quick.

  ‘May I have more potatoes?’ she asked quietly. It was the only thing she could think of to get him to leave.

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course.’ He slipped out of the room to fetch them.

  Hannelore gazed at the peeling plaster of the ceiling. What could she replace her dreams with now?

  Chapter 20

  I recommend you always travel with Bath biscuits. They settle the stomach, and survive everything from a ship voyage to a camel trek in the Hindu Kush.

  Miss Lily, 1914

  Sophie forced herself to drink soup on the train two nights later, as well as dutifully eating on the Bath biscuits Green handed her throughout the day, knowing that food meant energy and she must keep hers.

  There had been no pursuit, had perhaps been no risk of any; nor had they come across gangs of desperate men, though there had been distant shots during both the days and nights, hunters after deer or rabbits, or men. Once she had seen the decomposing bodies of two hanged women, dangling, heads down, from some trees: a warning or retribution to be killed so publicly then left. She knew from her time in Belgium how long it took a body to go from white to pink to purple to grey then black.

  It seemed Jones had purchased the car in Munich. Sophie did not ask from whom, or how; nor did she ask how he disposed of it once they reached Switzerland and took the train to Naples, green meadows around them, white-dressed alps above, leaning cliffs of snow that gleamed icily and seemed about to fall.

  The train was Italian, old-fashioned, bare brown varnished wooden walls and pale creases in the brown leather seats, and a single restaurant car where they ate at a white-clothed table, Jones and Green now automatically sitting themselves with Sophie and Georgina. Those in second and third class ate in the same dining carriage, but at the other end, on bare wooden benches, bringing their own cold sausage and bread and ordering big straw-wrapped flasks of a rough red wine to go with them.

  Sophie ate little: ra
dishes with butter and a few green almonds. She shook her head at the offers of omelette and braised rabbit.

  But it seemed they were not to go to Naples. They left the train on Jones’s orders soon after crossing the Italian border, where another chauffeur awaited them.

  The chauffeur, a thin intense man with no English beyond ‘Good evening’, even though it was ten in the morning when he collected them, drove them to the coast in a low-slung green car, onto the back of which their luggage had to be strapped in an unsteady pile.

  A rowing boat waited, tied up by the long boardwalk. It carried them, two by two, out to a waiting yacht. Jones, Nigel, James Lorrimer or even Mr Slithersole had decided they would take ship for Australia from Gibraltar, not from Naples, though it had almost certainly been Nigel’s contacts — or Miss Lily’s — who had provided the yacht on which they were to sail there.

  Sophie was seasick, which excused her from meals, decisions or trying to make sense of the past weeks. Georgina and Green spent most of the time up on deck with Jones, looking in on her every half-hour to make sure she had sipped from her glass of water and nibbled a dry biscuit, both of which she managed without heaving.

  She, who had once longed to see the world, was content now to face the wall and try to ignore the sway of the yacht. And then at last the yacht stopped, but not for the day and night’s respite on dry land that she craved. The yacht’s dinghy would take them directly to the quay. Their ship was to sail that night.

  Green sponged her clean; she dressed her, as though she were a child, in a pale blue linen dress that had miraculously been steamed and ironed, a matching hat, pale silk stockings and high heels, the clothing that would pronounce her ‘upper crust’ when she boarded. Georgina appeared, similarly elegant in darker blue. Only Jones wore the flannel trousers and jersey he had worn since Germany.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said briefly, as Sophie stood for a few blessed moments on land, though that too seemed to heave and sway. Above them stretched the orange, rocky mountain of Gibraltar, the white huddle of buildings and steep narrow streets, the bustle of docks.