Violette is becoming one of the family, though I am concerned about her. She should be at school, but has stated she does not want to go, and what Violette doesn’t want, she doesn’t do. Nor can I see her as a teacher, nurse, lady’s companion or typist, which usually only leaves marriage. But she is still young and Nigel says she is quite capable of choosing her own future, if we let her see enough of the world to choose what it will be.
I have married a wise man, Midge, just as you have. We are both blessed with our husbands.
Only three months now and I will see you again, and Nigel, Rose and Danny will be with me and you can meet them too. We will return briefly to London to do some business there before we board the ship and sail from Southampton, but won’t come down to Shillings, which may still be in the hopefully not too appalling chaos of electrification and installing bathrooms.
Home! I cannot tell you how much I’m longing to hear cicadas again, or show Danny and Rose emus and kangaroos.
Please give my love to Harry, and to your ‘brats’, and to you always,
Sophie
PS Giggs and Timothy visited us for a few days last week — both thriving. Giggs sends her best wishes.
PPS Would you like a cuckoo clock? I gather they are rather the thing where we will be staying.
Violette put the letter back thoughtfully, then crossed to one of the leather armchairs so anyone who came in would never suspect she had been at the desk.
Interesting. Violette had not realised her ladyship was still so Australian. She had thought it was something that her patroness had cast off, like a moth-eaten cardigan, when she married. Why would a countess want to return to a land at the bottom of the world? Soeur Marie had shown them Australia on a map. It was far away from everywhere. It had much desert, and animals that jumped, and the most poisonous snakes in the world, which sounded most interesting, and must make the inhabitants either brave or extremely careful and possibly both. Admirable, but not a land you would long for.
And yet her ladyship did.
The words her ladyship had written about Violette herself were interesting too. Violette approved of the sentiments. She would indeed find her own way, but she was not sure that it would include marriage.
The most interesting part of that letter had been what was not in it. Her ladyship had made no secret that she did not wish for this ‘holiday’. But she had not told the woman who seemed to be one of her closest friends that the true purpose of going to Germany was so that his lordship could assess a German politician for the prince.
Violette had been told this was confidential, a matter only for the earl, his wife, her parents. But something else was planned too for this venture. She did not know what. She even felt that perhaps her ladyship did not know what it might be, either. But she had come across earnest discussions between his lordship and her parents, who broke off when they realised she was near.
She must find out. The betrayal by Mrs Maillot still hurt — not just that she had given affection to one who did not exist, but that she had been fooled. Violette had never been fooled before. She did not intend to let it happen again. Ignorance too often led to death.
The sound of the luncheon gong echoed in the hallway. Violette smiled. She had visited the kitchens that morning. Luncheon would be trout au bleu, from the stream in the Shillings park, dill sauce and new potatoes, with asparagus and strawberries from the gardens and cream from the home farm dairy. This was most superior to toasted cheese at the Worthy’s Teahouse.
This afternoon she would ride with her ladyship and her father about the estate, then play with the children for a pleasant hour. Her mother, inevitably, would then find a useful task for her to learn, like removing a soup stain from silk.
And through all of these activities she would listen. Violette was good at listening. For the time might come when she would have to decide whether to disappear once more — for a time, or permanently perhaps — or play a part in whatever his lordship intended.
This house was most pleasant, and the family too. But she had no solid role there. Being called a ‘protégée’ meant nothing. Parents who had done without a daughter for nearly fourteen years might well decide they had no need of one again, especially as they now had the legal power to compel her to go to school (as if a school could keep her!), or to apprentice her (the same) or simply leave her at Shillings while they adventured across the world.
Ignorance had cost Violette’s adopted aunts their lives; nor had Violette been able to save Grandmère. Grandmère had been good to her, and Violette had loved her, but Grandmère also had made no provision for what might happen to Violette after her death.
Violette had no intention of ever trusting anyone else to decide her fate again.
Chapter 39
Summer strawberries, the wild ones gathered in the forest, not the cultivated ones . . . every life should have just a little gluttony, my dears. How can you understand the desires of others if you do not indulge just a few yourselves?
Miss Lily, 1913
SOPHIE
The German fir trees made a dark tunnel above the road as the two Shillings vehicles bowled along it, stopping only twice for flat tyres and then a boiling radiator, competently attended to by Lloyd, Hereward’s youngest brother, only twenty and therefore unscathed by nightmares of war, and still with limbs and lungs intact. He glowed with an innocent joy each time he tended to a motorcar.
This road had, of course, not been built for motorcars. It was even more unsuitable than most, with many stretches almost too steep for the cars to manage at all. The third time the Silver Ghost faltered the adult passengers got out; the drivers, Jones and Hereward, unloaded the luggage and carried it to the top of the hill, while the family and the females walked.
The trees thinned as the walkers reached the crest, revealing a small alpine meadow open to the sun and occupied by four giant pale-brown cows, each wearing a bell that jangled like a more emphatic version of the Thuringa bell birds back home.
The grass there was too green. The German hills were green too, dappled occasionally with deer that looked like they had been crafted as ‘Souvenirs of Germany’, and the snow-capped mountains in the distance were far too regular and foreign.
The longing for home overtook her again. Sophie hungered for the stocky dark brown and white Australian Herefords; she craved trees whose branches did not form an almost impenetrable canopy, but instead angled their leaves to present as small a face to the moisture-sapping sun as they could. She also needed friends, she realised, and not just via letters.
The last four years had given her a husband, and children, and she still had the companionship of Greenie. She loved all of them, and Jones, and her Shillings family. But Greenie was decades older than her. These last four years had been spent almost entirely without the company of friends of her own age. Those she had in England were too far away, and too occupied with their own projects, to share tea and much needed conversation.
At least there would be Midge back in Australia. But when they returned to Shillings she needed to reassess her life. Retirement from the society of the world might suit Nigel. It did not suit her. Though there were no other ‘great houses’ near Shillings, that did not mean she might not find female companionship among the professional or business classes from which she’d come. If that lowered her social rank within fashionable England, they could lump it. Perhaps she needed a flat in London, or a club. Opening Shillings House was far too extravagant an ordeal, but staying at a Women’s Club for a few days each month, to attend to business directly at the Higgs office, and to catch up with Sloggers, Ethel, and yes, even Lady Mary, would be good . . .
The unburdened cars crept, complaining, up the road till they reached the crest too. A cow made a sound that was somehow not the decorous ‘moo’ of English cattle, nor the longer, stroppier sound of Australian livestock. Sophie looked around the meadow. The cows were moving to the other side, their bells clanking, and there was a convenient
absence of cow droppings there by the road. ‘Luncheon!’ she called.
Four picnic baskets, five picnic rugs, a scatter of cushions, one teddy bear and one stuffed zebra, both with chewed ears, and two small children in knitted reins to stop them investigating the cows too closely, were relocated to the meadow. Violette and Green unpacked the baskets while Jones and Lloyd decided the cars should make several journeys to the hunting lodge carrying a small part of the luggage each time, returning finally for the passengers.
‘It can’t be far as the crow flies,’ said Jones, map in hand.
‘Pity we’re not crows,’ said Green, as Violette fluttered her eyelashes at Lloyd, who was, fortunately, very focused on the Silver Ghost and not on an attractive young lady clad in a dust-coat and veiled hat. ‘Here, you’d better take this to the others.’ Green pointed to the fifth basket, intended for the servants’ luncheon. Apart from her, and Nanny and Amy still holding the children’s reins, the servants would tactfully eat on the other side of the line of cars. Jones would sit with the servants so that he and Lloyd could discuss the cosseting of cars.
‘What is it today?’ asked Jones resignedly. Sophie had given up scandalising European hotel kitchen staff by trying to persuade them that their Shillings employees should eat the same food as the family. Indeed, their own luncheons took so long to unpack, eat and pack again compared to the fresh rolls regarded as appropriate chauffeur food that if the staff ate as their employers were supposed to, they’d have only travelled half the distance each day that had been planned.
‘Fresh rolls — brown of course — cold sausages and cheese again, and I slipped in a few bars of chocolate. I might even save you an apple.’
‘You are a wonder of a woman.’
‘And don’t you forget it,’ said Green.
Sophie removed her dust-coat and veiled hat — thank goodness the fashion for pale limbs had vanished with the war — and lay back on the grass. A dandelion brushed her cheek, blown out to grey fuzz.
‘Mama?’
‘Ooph.’ Sophie tried to sit up again — but Rose sat on her stomach, Danny on her feet . . .
‘Mama play ball?’
‘After lunch, darling.’
‘Play ball now.’
‘Lunch first, Miss Rose,’ said Nanny firmly.
Sophie lifted her daughter off and sat up to gaze at the last hotel’s concept of a luncheon for aristocratic travellers — cold chicken; quails roasted in grape leaves; a galantine of duck already beginning to melt in its jar — all of which showed more experience with picnics on castle lawns than ones held fifty jolting miles away. There were also bread rolls — white, for People Who Matter, salade russe, a hunk of Roquefort and another of brie, late-season asparagus and early-season apples, a mess that was for one disconcerting second remnants in a surgeon’s bucket and then resolved into what had been sponge cake with raspberries and cream. It would probably still be delicious spooned up with the cutlery they had brought from home, for Heaven forfend that an earl should dine by the roadside with a fork that did not bear his crest, just as the (crestless) Shillings china occupied the third basket.
Champagne, wrapped in damp napkins, and barley water for the children; and stone jars of ginger beer, still cold . . .
Sophie accepted ginger beer and gazed at her family — Nigel, shadowed eyes, but smiling as if concerned about nothing except helping Violette to asparagus; Violette, sitting between Nigel and Sophie, which coincidentally put her as far away as possible from Green; Nanny feeding Danny mashed carrots and potato and Amy dabbing at Rose with a napkin as she gnawed at the leg of chicken she insisted on holding herself.
She wished she could tell Nanny that self-reliance was more important than neatness; but Nanny would not believe her, especially not when it concerned a girl.
The sun in the midsummer sky was still deceptively high when lunch and the ball game were over, and they descended in the motorcars again. This time only one flat tyre marred their progress.
Alpine meadows gave way to fir trees again, then fir trees to beeches, all lime-green dapples, all shadows and sunlight, and then at last two gateposts topped by lions. They had arrived.
The driveway curved among trees that were more regular now, with glimpses of a lake that also seemed too impossibly beautiful to be natural, with a small island just off centre, topped by what looked like ruined Roman columns. Swans swam by, looking as perfect as if they had been painted. The drive curved again . . .
‘Oh, my,’ said Sophie.
They had been promised a hunting lodge. This was a castle, the kind made from icing sugar for an indulged child’s birthday party (her own at eight years old, for example). Four turrets, long winding steps leading to a perfect door, yet all in miniature, no larger than Shillings. And yet something was missing . . .
Sophie glanced at Nigel. He grinned. ‘What is the one thing a real castle always has?’
She shook her head.
‘Defence walls. Turrets were first designed as lookouts for pouring boiling oil on your enemies. Narrow windows were created so archers could fire out and not be hit. Low doorways mean you can easily top off the head of an intruder. This imitation was built about forty years ago, I’d say.’
‘Why forty?’
‘That was when Ruffi’s father married his mother. American. Her people made their money in margarine and custard powder, I believe.’
‘Is that more or less respectable than marrying an Australian corned-beef heiress?’
‘Corned beef is far superior to margarine and powdered custard, my darling, as are you. Ruffi’s parents died when the Russians took their estates in 1916. They were Hannelore’s neighbours. Drat,’ he added. He nodded towards the front door.
‘Hello, hello,’ said Sophie. ‘What have we here?’
The staff were lining up, the butler and housekeeper at the head of a line stretching down to the tweeny, or whatever the German equivalent was. And the man in a red velvet waistcoat and green cravat must be their host — a host they had been assured they were not going to have.
‘I thought we were supposed to have this to ourselves for the month.’
‘Either Hannelore lied, or our host has changed his mind. Meanwhile, we pretend we expected this all along,’ said Nigel quietly.
Jones braked, but let the castle servants open the doors for Sophie and Nigel.
‘Ruffi, old chap.’ Nigel shook hands with the man in the red waistcoat. ‘Absolutely top hole to see you again. We met at the Embassy in 1912, wasn’t it? May I present my wife, Sophie?’
‘Charmed, my dear.’ The heels clicked. The mouth pressed to her hand was wetter than the occasion demanded. Ruffi was forty, perhaps, and just beginning to be rotund. His eyes sagged sleepily in wrinkles that Sophie suspected came from nightclubbing, not the open air. ‘You have captured a beauty, Vaile. But then your family always has.’
‘Thank you so much for your hospitality, Count von Hegenhof,’ said Sophie.
‘Call me Ruffi, my dear. Everybody does. Especially as our wretched government has banned all titles. Not that anyone pays attention . . .’ Ruffi ushered them through the lines of curtseying and bowing servants. Sophie cast a glance back at the children and Green and Jones. Even the twins were being bowed and curtseyed at. But there was nothing she could do politely except be ushered inside.
A hall, with a giant fireplace either side, large enough to roast the many oxen that had undoubtedly met just such a fate; a long staircase at the far end with too much gilt on the banisters; carved doorways leading left and right; and all about them trophy heads, taxidermied on the walls: deer, with antlers and without, two bears, a surprised-looking elephant, a lion, despondent, three tigers . . . and yet Nigel had said the castle was only forty years old.
‘You hunt?’ she asked Ruffi. He bent close to her, just slightly too close. ‘Confidentially, my dear, my father bought them all from a Jewish importer before the war. The old man couldn’t hit a wall at ten paces and nor can I.
But what is a hunting lodge without trophies?’ Ruffi smiled. ‘My interests are different.’ The eyes were half closed in a look that was not ambiguous at all.
An hour later Green had dressed Sophie for dinner. Her clothes had been carried up in the trunks, supervised by Hereward, and they had already been pressed and hung by the castle staff. That night’s garment was one of her more formal gowns — one she had expected to keep for Berlin, with silver lace over burgundy velvet, shoes in matching fabric — and she wore her diamonds: necklace, bracelet and a brooch pinned to a feathered toque for her hair, suitable for a formal dinner with one’s new host, for she would not otherwise have worn diamonds in the country.
It could be worse, she thought. Her room adjoined Nigel’s. Hereward had obviously insisted that Green, Jones and Violette be installed nearby, not in the servants’ quarters two floors up, and Nanny and the twins were down the hall. They seemed, in fact, to have all this floor in this wing of the house to themselves, ensuring at least a degree of privacy — there was even a small private sitting room across the hall from Sophie’s bedroom.
We can tolerate this, she thought, as the gong boomed for dinner. Not that they had any choice. But if this were a prison, it was a delightful one. The ‘castle’ even had central heating and bathrooms with mahogany, porcelain and gold fittings, presumably demanded by the American margarine heiress and, possibly, thought Sophie, considered suitable for an Australian purveyor of corned beef.
Hannelore would have suggested a ‘holiday’ in this place for a reason, before their meeting with Herr Hitler. But, on reflection, she doubted Ruffi’s castle was meant to remind her of her place as a member of the nouveau riche. For all Hannelore’s machinations, she still believed the prinzessin liked her, that she was even, in some deep way, loyal to her and to Miss Lily too.
Perhaps this was merely to be the holiday it appeared, a way of separating their lives in England from their experience to come in Germany, so that they could look more impartially at the issues the miraculous Herr Hitler put forward. But why was there now a host — one she suspected that Hannelore felt as little liking for as she did? Surely Hannelore would not think that a holiday with Ruffi would make them more sympathetic to Herr Hitler, or even feel more kindly towards herself.
The Lily in the Snow Page 22
