‘Don’t you think it would be safer to say we don’t know where she is?’
‘But we do know,’ said Nigel quietly.
‘Nigel, you aren’t her father, are you?’
He smiled. ‘Not unless she is in her thirties and half Japanese.’
‘I think Hereward would have mentioned if she had been Japanese. Besides, he described her as young.’
‘And she is looking for a mother, not a father . . . Come on. It will take time to change. I don’t want to keep her waiting too long.’
Chapter 18
Some lives flow like quiet rivers. Others have waterfalls and rapids disrupting them. I have found that when an early life is full of waterfalls, your acceptance of their existence means waterfalls tend to keep appearing.
Miss Lily, 1913
Transforming Nigel into Miss Lily was not going to be as swift as Nigel had hoped. He had forgotten Green was staying up in London for a few days and was not expected back until the afternoon. Sophie suspected a dalliance, or even no dalliance but the pretence of one, to make it clear to Jones that love and friendship did not mean marriage, or not for Green.
Nigel needed to shave and his wig needed restyling from the evening elegance in which Lily had last appeared to something more suitable for the afternoon. Nor, as ever, would he let Sophie help with the transformation in the small dressing room adjoining their bedchamber.
Finally, intensely curious, she went downstairs to the small drawing room and rang for Hereward. ‘Tea,’ she instructed when he appeared. ‘Crumpets as well as cake and sandwiches.’ Toasting crumpets was a useful activity when conversation flagged. The best friendships, Miss Lily had said, were made while toasting crumpets. ‘Please show Miss, er, Shillings in.’
‘If you would like me to remain, my lady?’ enquired Hereward.
She smiled at him. ‘I am sure I can manage. Thank you.’
‘I could ask Mr Jones . . .’
Jones would be assisting Nigel. ‘Mr Jones has already been informed. Thank you, Hereward.’
Hereward backed out, his posture expressing reluctance, deference, impassiveness and a willingness to protect her ladyship against tigers or young persons. Impressive, thought Sophie. She sat, waiting for the click of Miss Lily’s heels. But Hereward ushered the interloper in first, with Ackland, the first footman, behind him, carrying the tea tray and Dorothy following with the cake stand.
‘Miss, er, Shillings, my lady,’ announced Hereward.
‘Thank you, Hereward. Please leave the tea things. I will pour. Miss Shillings, it is good to meet you. Do sit down.’
Hereward and his minions vanished behind gently closing doors.
The girl — for she was only a girl — did not sit. She stared at Sophie suspiciously. ‘Why is it good to meet me?’
Belgian accent, thought Sophie, not French. Interesting. Her white dress was too young for her — she was probably thirteen or fourteen. New shoes, machine-made but of reasonable quality.
And the girl was beautiful. Blonde hair, curling naturally in a simple bob under her chin; perfect skin, blue eyes, a fine-boned face that was instantly familiar . . .
And a coincidence, she told herself, nothing more.
‘I am glad you are here because I was bored,’ Sophie admitted frankly. ‘Hereward said that you believe my husband’s relative, Miss Lily, is your mother. That is impossible, but not boring.’
The girl glared at her. ‘She is my mother! How can it be impossible? Why should my grandmother lie to me?’
‘I can think of many reasons for the impossibility, including the fact that while I have a relative by marriage called Lily, our family name is Vaile. Shillings is our title. It is also unlikely that our Lily was anywhere near Belgium when you were born, or even conceived.’ She smiled frankly at the girl. ‘I assume you were born in Belgium, and in wartime?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lily was elsewhere during the war, nor was it a time for a casual visit to Belgium. And I can think of many reasons why someone might lie, including an attempt to get money.’
Sophie held up her hand as the girl stepped forward in anger. ‘I am not accusing you or your grandmother of lying. I am merely saying I can think of good reasons — even kind reasons — why it would be better for a motherless child in a poor and war-wracked country to be told she has an absent and well-connected Englishwoman as her mother.’
‘It is true!’
‘Then tell me the circumstances. Please do sit down. Tea or coffee? Though I can call for cocoa if you wish.’
The girl grimaced. ‘Not cocoa again. And I do not like tea.’
‘Coffee then. Please, have a sandwich. I recommend the cherry cake. May I call you Violette?’
The girl shrugged, a graceful shrug. ‘It is my name. What do I call you?’
‘Your ladyship,’ said Sophie wryly. ‘Now, tell me why you think we are related. Ah, Lily!’ She stood as the door opened, then moved to kiss Miss Lily’s cheek. She smelled once more of roses with subtle undercurrents. ‘This is Miss Violette Shillings.’
Blue eyes under blonde hair stared at the same colour eyes, under hair that was almost the same shade, except for Miss Lily’s carefully placed streaks of grey. The resemblance was unmistakeable. No wonder Hereward had not called the police.
But Sophie believed Nigel completely when he said he could not have fathered this girl. His brother and father too had died long before this girl could have been conceived. His second cousin did not resemble him and, anyway, had spent the war safely as a clerk in a Birmingham office. There were surely no other close relatives who might be this girl’s parent — she and Miss Lily’s other ‘lovely ladies’ had carefully hunted through Debrett’s in that winter before the war trying to find any.
Miss Lily sat, her back as always to the light, clad in a fashionable low-waisted grey silk, pleated for the last four inches above the hem and unmistakeably Schiap’s work, surely purchased by Green in Paris, and a silver chiffon scarf at her throat. She smiled, that perfect, inclusive Miss Lily smile. ‘My dear, before you call me Mother, I have to tell you frankly — I have never had a child.’
Violette shrugged again. ‘You would say that.’
‘This is true.’ Miss Lily smiled at her again, warm, accepting. No one but Miss Lily ever smiled like that, thought Sophie. That small taste of Miss Lily again in France had only reminded her how much she missed her.
‘An unmarried woman of good family cannot openly acknowledge she has had a child,’ Miss Lily continued. ‘But of course unmarried women do have children, and there are accepted ways to cope with this. If I’d ever had a child, it would have been adopted by a tenant on this estate. The child would become my protégée, educated, cared for and very much loved. If his lordship had not wanted that — and some men would not — there is money enough for a child to be adopted overseas. But I would have visited often —’
‘But you did not!’ said the girl fiercely. She spat, neatly, on the carpet. ‘I have not come here for money. Or for a mother. You do not deserve a daughter.’
Miss Lily looked at her seriously. ‘Then why have you come?’
‘To kill you,’ said Violette.
Chapter 19
The problem with ‘duty’ is that once you have accepted it applies to you, its demands never end. Each of you, my dears, need to decide: do you want a normal life, or duty?
Miss Lily, 1913
Sophie reached for the bell pull. Violette moved faster, a knife at Miss Lily’s throat. ‘Move back, onto that chair,’ she directed Sophie, nodding to one far from the bell pull.
‘Why?’ asked Sophie. ‘If you are going to kill Lily anyway — who is not your mother, by the way — why should I not call for help before you stab me too?’
‘Because you want to hear why I am going to kill her. And because she needs to hear what she has done before she dies.’
‘That sounds almost reasonable.’ Sophie moved away from the bell pull, her heart pounding.
She felt an unruly desire to laugh. This was melodrama — East Lynne with Sarah Bernhardt in the lead: ‘Dead! Dead! And never called me mother!’
And yet the knife was real, as real as the girl’s anguish.
Miss Lily moved, slowly, pushing the knife a little way from her neck. ‘Then tell us,’ she said quietly.
‘You wish to hear? You wish this ladyship to hear as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Lily.
‘Very well.’ Violette put her hands — the right one still holding the knife — into her lap. ‘I heard this from my grandmother, you understand? A good woman. A trustworthy woman.’
‘I accept that,’ said Miss Lily.
‘In 1914 the Boche had invaded our country. The things they did, the things they had been trained to do to make us fear them, my grandmère told me of these things.
‘Many left, became refugees. Others stayed. Some, like Grandmère, stayed to fight. They became La Dame Blanche, The White Lady. Thousands of them, but secret, most known only to their best friends, and the best friends only known to their sisters . . .’
‘I know of La Dame Blanche,’ said Sophie quietly. ‘They collected intelligence in plain sight, and passed it to Britain . . .’
‘Yes. That is why Miss Lily came under another name, for secrecy, but Grandmère knew her real one. Why you came.’ Violette nodded to the woman next to her. ‘You came to live among us, to pass information back to England. But also, Grandmère said, you came to have a child. By 1915 there were many unmarried women who had children, raped by the Boche. Women like Grandmère pretended they were the orphaned children of a daughter, killed in the bombing, or made up another tale, so the children did not live in shame.
‘When I was born, Grandmère said I was her granddaughter. The villagers, of course, knew this was not true. But the Boche were fooled.’ Violette’s blue eyes met Miss Lily’s. ‘But you know this.’
‘I don’t,’ said Sophie. She had lost all desire to laugh now. If they kept the girl talking perhaps Jones or Hereward would come, or Miss Lily would be able to grab the knife . . . ‘Did she pretend your mother was her daughter too?’
‘My mother — her,’ Violette gestured slightly at Miss Lily with the knife, ‘was not there, not since I was a few weeks old. There had been a railway bridge. The English sent explosives to blow up bridges. A man is too noticeable in wartime, but a woman? You blow up a bridge, sit and cry, Grandmère told me, and the Boche, he comforts you instead of dragging you away. “Monsieur, I am so scared,” you cry. He may even buy you coffee . . .
‘Grandmère had two daughters, Charlotte and Suzanne. Suzanne and you, Miss Lily, you go to destroy the railway bridge. And, poof, it is blown up. But Suzanne does not come back. You do not come back. Instead the Boche come. They make Charlotte stand against a wall and her friend Colette too. The Boche say they planned the bridge attack. They make Grandmère watch as they bayonet them, many, many times, before they die. They bayonet Grandmère too, in the left hand, so that she remembers. And then they go.’
‘My dear,’ murmured Miss Lily. ‘I am so sorry. To have lived with this anguish, and now to tell it to strangers. This must be heart-wrenching for you.’
Violette stared at her. ‘A good word — heart-wrenched. I will remember that one.’ She gathered herself and returned to her story. ‘There is only one way the Boche could have known about Charlotte and Colette. Someone must have told them. And who could it have been, for only five women knew of the plot?
‘But Grandmère would not believe Suzanne would have told the Boche. She could not believe her Miss Lily would tell them either. Others said she was a fool to trust a stranger. It was a mystery, one with no answer, even once the war was finished and the Boche were gone.
‘Grandmère had money, money you had left with her. That money kept us, all through the war and after. Not well, you understand, but enough, an old woman and a child. We moved to the next village, where there was a cottage enough undamaged, we grew our vegetables, we kept some geese. Grandmère did sewing, turning old clothes into new. There was enough money for me to go to school, to take singing lessons when Soeur Marie said my voice was good. Grandmère was . . . heart-wrenched . . . but we had each other. There was no grave for you or for Suzanne, but every Sunday we left flowers on Charlotte’s at least. We prayed for all of you, for my aunts, for my heroic mother, who had died facing the Boche.
‘I was four years old when you came back to Belgium. Were you looking for us?’ Violette looked at Miss Lily contemptuously. ‘You did not find us. Because the moment you walked into our village everyone knew that if you were still alive, then it had been you who had betrayed my aunts. The only way you could have walked free from the Boche was by selling my aunts, betraying them, allowing them to be killed while you waited out the war in prison, perhaps, escaping from revenge back to England once the war had ended. You did not care about the women you left to die. You did not care about your baby daughter, who must now live with the shame of what her mother had done. You saved yourself.
‘Perhaps you returned to Belgium because you thought no one would know what you had done. Perhaps you thought that all who suspected your crimes would be dead, or that once the war was over no one would care. But La Dame Blanche, it still exists. Collaborators must be killed, or cast out, that was what Grandmère said. The others agreed. The Boche are gone but they will come again. No one ever betrayed La Dame Blanche, except for you.’
Dazed, Sophie thought, was this ‘return’ when I was in Belgium with Green and Jones? But Nigel did not come with us, Miss Lily did not come with us . . .
. . . unless Lily followed us. Was that why Green vanished, to ‘visit friends’, while I worked out the business contracts in Brussels? Was she meeting Lily, once again helping Nigel to be Lily?
‘Only you were not killed,’ said Violette, savagery behind her eyes. ‘Many want to kill you. But you are English, and one day the organisation you worked for might be needed again. But after that, no friend would speak to me again.
‘Grandmère told me your real name then, how you lived in an earl’s great house in England. Then five years ago Grandmère died,’ said Violette flatly. ‘No one would take me in by then, not the daughter of a traitoress. I go to an orphanage, then the sisters send me to a kind lady who offers me a home.’ She spat again. ‘A home where kind gentlemen come who like the pretty girls. I had the knife I used to kill the geese. This knife I used on one of them. I left. I used the voice, the pretty singing voice, that Soeur Marie had trained. I eat from rubbish bins and sleep in doorways so I save my pennies to get to England. Sometimes I think I should go to Soeur Marie, but I do not want to be a nun.’ She shrugged. ‘And in Belgium perhaps the police look for a girl who used a knife on a man, too. Perhaps even Soeur Marie, she would feel she must give me to the police.’
Did Violette kill her abuser? Sophie wondered. Somehow she did not think so, despite the lessons in killing collaborators, perhaps even seeing them executed. But she did believe this girl was capable of murder.
‘And all the time I know this happened because of you. My aunts dead, because of you. Grandmère’s hand injured, because of you. I must fight my way out of that room with the old man and all because of you. And then I think,’ said Violette calmly, ‘that I will kill you.’
‘And that will make it right?’ asked Miss Lily gently. ‘Killing me will make the women of La Dame Blanche accept you? You will have a life again?’ She shook her head. ‘It won’t work like that, my dear.’
Sophie stared at her. Lily couldn’t be admitting that this story was true. It was impossible that she could be a mother. Nor could Lily have worked with La Dame Blanche while Nigel was with his regiment in France.
‘If you kill me,’ said Miss Lily quietly. ‘You will be taken by the English police, and hanged. I do not want this to happen. Truly, my dear, after all you have been through you deserve a life, and happiness . . .’
‘I will escape from your police . . .’
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‘And be found.’
‘I am very good at not being found,’ said Violette.
‘Perhaps. Yes, I think probably you are. But wouldn’t you rather have a mother? One who did not mean to abandon you? One who will love you, look after you?’
Violette laughed sharply. ‘You pretend that you love me?’
‘No,’ said Miss Lily.
‘Then what do you —?’ Violette stopped, as the door opened. Once more the knife was at Miss Lily’s throat.
‘Lily!’ said Green, Jones standing behind her. ‘Hereward said —’ She stopped as she saw the girl, the knife. Jones reached down as if tying his shoelace.
‘Green, darling, I am glad you are here,’ said Miss Lily calmly. ‘This is Violette, your daughter, the one you thought was lost.’
Green fainted, just as Jones’s blade pinned Violette’s sleeve to her chair. Miss Lily pulled out Jones’s knife. She kneeled by Green, supporting her. Violette stood, dazed, her own knife still in her hand. ‘Green, my dear, it is all right now . . . Sophie, ring the bell for more tea, please? Jones, could you help me?’
Sophie rang the bell, staring at the scene. She had never realised how alike Green and Miss Lily were. Green was generously endowed bosom-wise, but the very shape of their faces, their blue eyes.
Jones stayed in the doorway, staring at the girl, then at Green, now blinking in Miss Lily’s arms. ‘If she is your daughter, then who is her father?’
‘You, of course,’ said Miss Lily. ‘Your Christmas leave in 1914, I expect. Green?’
‘Yes,’ whispered Green.
‘You didn’t tell me?’ Impossible to tell the emotion in Jones’s voice. Possibly he himself did not yet know either.
‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ stammered Green, still gazing unbelieving at Violette. As Sophie watched, the girl lifted her skirt slightly, and secured her knife under her garter.
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