The Lily in the Snow

by Jackie French

  Green’s voice still shook. ‘And then I thought that she was dead.’

  ‘Not worry me!’ Jones stared at her, then back at Violette. ‘I had a daughter and you didn’t want to worry me?’ He turned and left the room.

  ‘I think I hate you all,’ said Violette.

  Chapter 20

  Life is constantly unexpected. That is its charm. Most of the time, at least.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SOPHIE

  Green sat, sipping sweet tea, on the sofa. Violette sat as far from her as possible. But at least, thought Sophie, she wasn’t trying to kill anyone. Jones had not returned.

  ‘I was injured,’ said Green finally. ‘That was why I didn’t come back. The explosion — well, let’s just say that we weren’t trained sappers or engineers. I knew nothing of the plot until that night. Suzanne was killed. I’d been trying to stop her, but I reached her too late. I . . . I ran. I don’t know how far I ran . . . I woke days later, in hospital . . .’

  Violette snorted. ‘Easy to say. Convenient, n’est-ce pas?’

  Green impassively lifted her skirt, her petticoat. The scars stood out, red even after all these years.

  Violette stared. ‘You may have been hurt another time.’

  ‘I might have,’ said Green wearily. ‘But I was not. I was wounded in October 1915. The people who sent me to the village tried to find you or, rather, your aunts and grandmother. At last they told me your Aunt Suzanne had died, that your Aunt Charlotte, her friend Colette and your grandmother were killed by the Germans in retaliation for the destruction of the bridge and train, and that they had killed you as well. Probably the villagers told any questioner that to keep you and your grandmother safe, especially if she was still working for the Dame Blanche.

  ‘I . . . I believed you were dead. Of course I believed it. No one betrayed you, not me, not Suzanne. Probably the Germans found out who Suzanne was after they found her body next to the detonator. That may be why they killed Charlotte and Colette — neither of them would give the Germans information. That would be why your grandmother moved, in case the Germans decided to question her again or kept watch on her associates in the village, and so she could continue her resistance work. And you have explained why, when I went back to Belgium, I couldn’t find your grandmother or anyone who would admit they had even known Madame Larresse.’

  ‘Our name is Dumarche,’ said Violette.

  ‘Your grandmother must have changed her name, too, when she moved villages. It would be safer. I did leave flowers on the graves of Charlotte and Colette,’ Green added quietly.

  Violette frowned. ‘But if your name is Green, why did you pretend to be Miss Lily Shillings? That was not even the name you used in Belgium. And Mrs Maillot, my friend now, says that a relative of the earl should be called Vaile, not Shillings.’

  ‘I was doing other war work,’ said Miss Lily quietly. ‘But my name was known in intelligence circles, and the powers that be decided it would be useful if there were two of us for a while.’ Sophie noticed she had neither confirmed nor denied that she was Nigel’s half-sister. She had once assumed Lily was Nigel’s cousin. Possibly their ostensible relationship was fluid. ‘Miss Green here took my name, as no one she was likely to meet would know me.’ It was even pretty much true, thought Sophie. ‘As for my name, my mother was not married to my father. I’m the earl’s half-sister, and an illegitimate one. They gave me the name Shillings as I was not entitled to Vaile.’

  And that was a fairly good cover story, thought Sophie, close to what Grandmère had been told. And a safe one to give to a volatile young girl, as there were no records of either a Lily Shillings or a Lily Vaile if anyone tried to investigate the truth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Green simply, still gazing at Violette. ‘I . . . I could say I didn’t abandon you, but I did. Even being with La Dame Blanche when I was pregnant was abandoning you too, knowing I might be killed, which would have meant your death too. I could say that it was war, that I was trying to liberate your country, but that does not excuse me. A mother’s greatest duty is to her child. I failed you. Time and again, I failed you. And nothing can put it right.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Sophie.

  They all stared at her. She shrugged, hoping hers was as graceful as Violette’s earlier one. There were gaps in Green’s story, and Violette’s, and Lily’s, too, large ones, but this was not the time to explore them.

  ‘There is a lot you can do to put it right. You can begin to be a mother. Violette, you do not have an aristocrat in your family tree, I’m afraid. Green is my maid. An extremely good one, and my friend as well. She is also extremely well paid. We think of her as one of our family. Whatever you need or want — within reason — you can have. Education —’

  Violette snorted.

  ‘Don’t rule it out. Have you ever even thought what you could have if money were no object? You can travel with your mother, dress most beautifully, learn to fly a plane or explore the Amazon, if that is what you crave. Greenie, do you want to be her mother?’

  ‘Of course,’ whispered Green.

  ‘Well?’ Sophie asked Violette.

  ‘Fly an aeroplane?’ asked Violette thoughtfully. ‘Ladies fly aeroplanes?’

  ‘Two I have known.’

  ‘You will do no such thing!’ said Green. ‘Aircraft are far too dangerous —’

  ‘Perhaps a mother who left her baby to blow up a railway bridge might allow her daughter some latitude,’ said Miss Lily quietly.

  Violette looked at each woman thoughtfully. ‘I like your dress,’ she said to Miss Lily. She turned to Sophie. ‘Your house is most pleasant. I may live here?’

  ‘As long as you promise not to kill anyone. Or use a knife for anything except cutting up your food. I am serious,’ Sophie added. ‘All of us in this room have known what it is to fight for our lives. All of us know that once you have had to kill or even accepted you will do it if necessary, then you are profoundly changed. So I do want your promise. As you said, this is my house. If you and your mother are to stay in it — as I very much hope you will — then you must give me your word.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Violette. ‘I will not stab anyone.’ She paused, then added, ‘Or, if I must, I will tell you first.’

  ‘Good enough for now,’ said Sophie. ‘I am glad you like good clothes. Greenie, darling, I think you have your first task as a mother. Clothes, whatever of mine might fit, and the Blue Bedroom, I think. That was the one I used when I first came here.’ She smiled at Violette. ‘I was almost as prickly as you are back then, though I didn’t try to stab anyone. But we . . . all of us . . . have a lot to teach you, if you would like to learn.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Violette.

  ‘That is a beginning. Greenie, would you like me to come with you?’

  ‘No. Thank you,’ said Green. ‘I think . . .’ She stopped, as if trying to straighten out all that had happened in the past thirteen years, as well as what must be done now. ‘Would you mind if Violette used one of your nightdresses for her first night here? I will make other arrangements tomorrow.’

  ‘You have complete charge of my wardrobe, as always,’ said Sophie. ‘Have a good day, Violette. We will meet again at dinner. All of us.’ She stood. ‘Welcome to Shillings, my dear,’ she said.

  And suddenly she was back nearly sixteen years earlier and Miss Lily was welcoming her.

  Chapter 21

  There are times when even the most finely tuned charm fails. I recommend a slightly longer than usual hat-pin, topped with a pearl and kept extremely sharp, or a letter opener, of better quality metal with a keener point than is usual.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SOPHIE

  Miss Lily took a slice of cherry cake. Her hand trembled slightly as she held her cake fork. ‘Do you think that was wise, Sophie?’

  ‘Having Violette stay here? Probably not. But we can’t send her and Green to a hotel. Green is family, and Violette has been abandoned once. We can’t abandon her
again.’

  ‘And Jones?’

  ‘He and Green will have to sort it out. Or he and Violette. It’s interesting she doesn’t seem to have wondered who her father was. But then she has lived in a world of women most of her life. Or perhaps she was afraid that her mother was raped, and did not want to know she had a father capable of that.’

  ‘Jones is my best friend.’

  ‘I thought I was your best friend.’

  ‘You are my wife.’ Miss Lily looked at her dress, her ringed hands, then shook her head, suddenly helpless. ‘He is my oldest friend, then. This will tear him apart.’

  ‘Then maybe when he has put himself back together again he will be even better than before. Lily, you know what I am going to ask, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Why was Green using my name?’

  ‘Not just that. You and Nigel and Green and Jones. You’ve had a life together I’ve never shared. Decades of it. You’ve given me hints, over the years. I haven’t pried.’ Sophie stopped, then admitted, ‘Perhaps I didn’t want to know. But now I do. I want to know about the relationship between you and James too. I know there is one, has been one for a very long time. I guessed that when you arranged for me to meet him as a suitable husband. And, yes, I did realise it was an arranged meeting. Of course I did.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Miss Lily.

  Sophie looked at her steadily. ‘You will tell me. Nigel wouldn’t.’

  ‘You could try asking him,’ said Miss Lily.

  ‘Nigel is my husband. He wants to keep me as his wife, I think, so he can continue to be a husband. Nigel’s wife does not need to know about Lily’s past.’

  ‘You are . . . perceptive,’ said Miss Lily. ‘You always were. I love you, you know. Whoever I am.’

  Sophie smiled. ‘I’ve always known that.’

  ‘Very well.’ Miss Lily took a deep breath. ‘I’ve always told you the truth, just not the entire truth. The rape when I was a young soldier on the North West Frontier, the years in Japan when Misako taught me to be a woman of grace and charm. Jones was there for all of that, of course. Then Green arrived from Shillings, trained by my mother to be the perfect lady’s maid, and she taught me to be an Englishwoman. All that is true.’

  ‘And leaves most of your life unaccounted for,’ said Sophie. ‘Yours and Green’s and Jones’s.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Miss Lily.

  ‘So where does James fit into it?’

  Miss Lily looked at her hands. She still wore a wedding ring, the only external link between her and the Earl of Shillings — an oddity for a single woman, but Sophie felt deep happiness it was still there.

  ‘We were staying in the south of France. I couldn’t face England yet. Nowhere fashionable, just a fishing village, with a small but good hotel. And I met a friend from school, perhaps the only close friend I ever had back then. He was . . . different . . . too, though neither of us admitted it even to ourselves back then. No, he did not feel he was a woman. He liked men. He was on holiday, with his lover, being discreet, like me. He had begun to make a name for himself in the Foreign Office. I stared at him across the hotel dining room. He noticed the stare, noticed me . . .’

  ‘And recognised you?’

  ‘No. But knew he had been recognised, and that his relationship with his lover was fairly obvious. He looked so terribly afraid. And so I told him who I was, and how I came to be there, and he understood, or at least he understood my feelings about as much as I could understand his.’

  James, thought Sophie and then, no, James is too young to have been at school with Nigel. And she was reasonably sure James was not a homosexualist. ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Morton Langton-Montgomery. Monty. He died in 1919, one of the first influenza victims. He was in disgrace by then, cast into some Foreign Office backwater, as were all of those who had too openly pursued peace with Germany, trying to keep power balanced between us. It is so easy to believe in hindsight that there was never any chance of peace.

  ‘Monty and I talked a lot, in those first weeks in France. He envied me the ability to be myself, for most of the year at least — Nigel Vaile must put in an appearance now and then, but mostly I was free. I told him I envied him having a purpose in his life. I did not want to drift, and yet Miss Lily was doing just that . . .

  ‘And that was where we ended it. But six months later a letter was forwarded to Cairo — Jones and Green and I moved every few months back then, so that no one would get to know us too well, or begin to question my background too closely. Yes, a drifting life.

  ‘Monty offered me another kind of life. Miss Lily, travelling with her maid, and her butler, could find information that a member of the Foreign Office could not.’ She smiled at Sophie. ‘Everything I told you girls about wishing to teach women to use the only power they had was true. But my growing involvement in Monty’s world meant that others selected the girls who stayed here, coaxed their families to let them come to an isolated manor house in England . . .’

  ‘You were a spy,’ said Sophie bluntly. ‘Recruiting other spies, even if they did not know their friendship might be used to gather intelligence.’

  ‘At times. Mostly I was what you might call an agent of influence. Sometimes an extremely persuasive influence. Egypt, Japan again — it was so good to be back there — ensuring the continued alliance with England. Thanks to Misako I understood the culture far better than any Englishman. Australia — you would have been just a child then, four or five. James wanted to know if your federation might diminish the former colonies’ loyalty to the Empire. I was able to tell him that possibly the contrary was occurring, that the new nationalism meant you all wanted to show England what Australia was capable of.’

  ‘And so England killed more than sixty thousand of our men,’ said Sophie. ‘Cannon fodder to spare the English.’

  Miss Lily looked at her, startled. ‘I didn’t know the numbers . . . I didn’t think . . .’

  Sophie rescued her. ‘Did you like Australia?’

  ‘Very much. Little culture, but one can create culture.’

  Sophie raised one eyebrow, very much as Miss Lily had taught her, and her friend laughed ruefully.

  ‘I am sorry, my dear. That was discourteous.’

  ‘Perhaps a little,’ said Sophie. ‘And when did James come into all of this?’

  Lily reflected. ‘Monty introduced me to James in 1912 or so. James is the only one now in the intelligence community who knows that Nigel Vaile and his occasional half-sister Lily are the same person. It was . . . necessary . . .’

  ‘Because he fell in love with you after his wife died?’

  ‘Perceptive woman. Not quite but, yes, there was . . . an attraction. James accepted who I am, even if he didn’t understand. I was useful and he liked me. You can rely on James Lorrimer for two things: loyalty to his country and loyalty to his friends. And then the war.’ Miss Lily steepled her hands. ‘I could have been valuable, despite my association with the peace with Germany movement. I could have redeemed myself. But the Earl of Shillings had an inescapable role to play to lead his men to war, the men from his estate. Miss Lily was forced to vanish for the duration. Which of course left those who knew of her with the impression she had washed her hands of England altogether.’

  ‘And so Green became Miss Lily, a loyal patriot for the war effort, and anyone who matters knew she was working for our government,’ said Sophie slowly.

  ‘Yes. Green was given the birth certificate of a Lillian Shillings, showing her to be the illegitimate child of a woman who died young on the estate, as well as letters of introduction . . .’

  ‘I hadn’t realised how alike you and Green are physically.’

  Now Miss Lily raised an eyebrow. ‘Not a coincidence, my dear. My grandfather regarded the women of Shillings as his property. My father did too, to some extent. In return the families were given money, or better acreage, or their children positions here in the house. Green is probably Nigel’s cousin, or even the half-sister we pre
tend I am.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And she isn’t bitter?’

  ‘This is England, my dear. We all know our stations. But Green truly is my friend. She had no financial need to work after the war. I thought she stayed away from Shillings because of Jones. That relationship has never been easy. Possibly being with you allowed her to continue the styling she enjoys and could no longer do with me.’ Miss Lily shrugged. ‘And the life she led with you in Australia was certainly more interesting once Jones and I were no longer working in intelligence. I had no idea about Violette.’

  Sophie thought of the young woman now, hopefully upstairs and being introduced to the world of luxurious clothes and elegant hairdressing. ‘I’m just a little . . . concerned . . . about Violette being in the same house as Rose and Danny. She kept her knife,’ she added.

  ‘I know. But it would have been easy for her to find another, in this house. My father left a whole wall of swords, muskets and throwing knives in the billiard room’, said Miss Lily with a touch of exasperation. ‘But as you say, we have little choice. But I think Rose and Danny are safe. Violette’s anger will be aimed at Green now. Green is fond of the children but not doting, so Violette is unlikely to seek revenge by hurting them.’

  But there was doubt in Miss Lily’s voice.

  ‘We do have a choice, you know,’ said Sophie. ‘We could leave for Australia tomorrow, just you and me and the children. Let Green and Jones and Violette work out if they can be a family.’

  ‘And risk her stabbing Hereward?’ murmured Miss Lily.

  ‘Hereward didn’t win those medals and lose a hand serving cocktails. I suspect he would be a match for Violette.’

  ‘And you would see Daniel Greenman again.’

  Sophie was silent.

  ‘Do you wish to?’

  Sophie met her eyes. ‘I love Nigel. I love you.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

  ‘Then the answer is that I love my husband. I know my duty to my family. I don’t want to see Daniel again until he has found a woman to share his life with, till we can be friends and nothing more.’ And till my own physical passion ebbs a little, she thought. Till my body no longer aches sometimes in the night . . . ‘Do you miss the world of espionage?’