James turned his back to pour the hot water into the teapot. ‘She may know more than the Gestapo have probably considered. Shipping timetables from Australia, supply routes and destinations, the cargo capacity of the merchant marine fleet. The Germans with their Kaiser, Küche, Kinder simply do not see a woman as an industrialist. Sophie has possibly a better idea of the Empire’s trade than anyone in existence.’
‘And yet you risked her.’
‘As did you.’
Nigel nodded. ‘Me, more than you. If I had told her she owed her duty to her family, to her business, she would not have gone. I had to be persuasive. Lily . . . I . . . used to be skilled at that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said James softly. ‘We may yet get her out. Or she might survive as a prisoner till the war ends. Ravensbrück is bad, but not the worst.’
‘If they send her to Ravensbrück.’ They both knew that, as a spy, she might be shot at Fresnes instead of sent to indefinite imprisonment at Ravensbrück. Her aristocracy might even make an early death more likely. A countess who survived and recounted torture would be . . . embarrassing.
James poured the tea. As he lifted the teapot over the second cup Nigel said, ‘I would prefer to be alone. If you don’t mind.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very sure.’
They both knew he would not, could not cry with James, with anyone. Except, perhaps, with Sophie.
‘You won’t . . .’
‘Do myself harm? I have an estate, tenants and two children, even if legally none of those still belong to me. While there remains a chance I might be of use I must be ready to take it. So will you please go? Now.’
James left. He had just shut the front door after him when he heard the howl. He sat behind the wheel of his own car and bent his head. Now he could weep as well.
Chapter 25
A French Onion Soup, 1943
So — you must first queue for the bread, with the correct coupons, and then on another day for the onions, and on yet another — do not forget the coupons — for a small amount of oil or lard. You will queue for cheese too, but even with the right coupons and francs you probably will not find it. No matter. Take the stale bread, cut it into croutons and brown them by the fire till gold but no more. It would be difficult to find enough coal or wood to char them. Now chop the onions finely, the same quantity as bread, and sauté them in the oil or lard slowly. This will take at least an hour and again they must be gold, no blackened piece to make them bitter, and almost dissolved. Add water and leave by the fire overnight or simmer for an hour if you have the fuel, then add the bread. Leave to cool and then reheat, scattered with the cheese, if perhaps you have it.
This is not the best onion soup the world has seen, but it is excellent and far more gratifying than stale bread, water and some onions deserves to be.
SOPHIE
The SS Korporal lit the brazier while she watched: the better to build anticipation, she assumed. The poker was heated till the tip was red hot, then white. Her interlocutor ripped the dress from her shoulders — his strength impressed her as well as his ability to shock.
Then she stopped thinking and endured. The poker’s tip touched one breast, then the other. She smelled the flesh burning before she was aware of pain. She did not attempt to stifle her screams, nor her instinctive attempts to leave the chair, to crawl across the room. There was no need to pretend now, not before these two men.
The assistant looped a rope around her waist to tie her to the chair.
‘Will you speak now, your ladyship?’
‘Anything,’ she gasped. ‘But I know nothing you can use.’ She tried to keep her mind empty of all they could use, but did not know she had, from the long history of Miss Lily and Shillings and her network, to Hannelore (please, let her simply be staying discreetly silent for a while in Germany) or the tactics of La Dame Blanche, and most especially, the routes ships took as they carried corned beef to England, Egypt or Malta. Even Violette’s assassinations . . .
She arched backwards, trying to find the least agonising position, dimly aware of the poker in the brazier again. Hands pushed her roughly forwards. The poker pressed, slowly, dot by dot, upon each of her vertebrae. Screaming did not help, but there was nothing she could do but scream. The man who had wielded the poker seemed content.
‘There is worse to come,’ he commented.
‘Please . . . I will tell you anything. Anything! But there is nothing I know to tell . . .’
She sat slightly forwards as the corporal held one foot, and then the other, but another rope pressed her back on the burns on her vertebrae. She had known the next was coming, each toenail ripped from its bed. She did not even have the breath now to scream, or even the strength to breathe. She vanished . . .
. . . she woke, drowning, gasped for air, found agony as well, then breathed water, floundering, till her head was raised. She lay on her side on the floor, choking, heaving, realising her body had reached its maximum comprehension of pain.
It seemed her torturer accepted this as well. He peered down at her, puzzled and vaguely disappointed. ‘I did hope you had information. You are — interesting — your ladyship.’
Sophie wondered in the frayed thread that was left of her mind what Miss Lily, circa 1914, might have offered as a charming response to this. He obviously enjoyed defiance. Perhaps she should have offered him a little. But she could not care.
‘If you have nothing to give, then it must be the firing squad.’
She found to her horror that her body craved death. Her mind, too, wanted to sleep, to cease . . .
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. A man had written that. It seemed that she, at least, would not achieve his goal. It would not be midnight, and there would be pain.
‘Take her away.’
Footsteps. Then more footsteps, two more corporals. Each draped one of her arms over their shoulders, then dragged her, bloody toes dragging on the floor, screaming, as they went down the stairs.
She could not walk. The men threw her into the back of the van as if she were a dead sheep. They must have ridden in the front of the police van, for they were the ones who grabbed her hair to haul her out when the van reached Fresnes again, a journey that might have been five minutes or four days, for she floated in and out of consciousness and pain.
The two men hauled her back to the cell from which she’d come that morning. She was vaguely aware of the wardress watching, expressionless, of women banging their fists against cell doors, yelling encouragement. Sophie bit her lips, so the only sound she made was ‘Mmmmmm’.
They dropped her on the floor. She managed, finally, to crawl to the bed, then pull herself up on it, to lie curled in a foetal position on one side. She tried a humming that was not a scream. It helped. She could focus on the humming. She could not scream now, for that would terrify the other women on this floor.
A voice emerged, from the usual cries of ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ that accompanied any passage along the corridor. A woman’s voice, young. ‘Ave Maria . . .’
The other women quietened, till the hymn was over. ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’
Sophie found she wept.
‘Madame? Shhh, please do not speak.’ It was the wardress.
Sophie could not have spoken. She no longer had the strength even to hum.
Her dress was pushed down again. Sophie felt the coolness of a lotion on her breasts, her back, what must be dressings on her wounds and then a strange garment being pulled over her, like a multi-layered silk chemise. She felt her dress pulled up again, and fastened somehow at the top. Then two tablets on her tongue, water in a glass held to her lips, which she swallowed.
The wardress vanished. At last agony ebbed to mere pain. And then the impossible. She slept.
And woke and yet still felt as if she dreamed. Two SS privates hoisted her up with no more emotion than if she had been a sack of potatoes, or possibly less, for
a sack of potatoes had more value in war-time than a captured Australian countess. But if she shut her eyes again she was sure she would sleep again. She resolutely kept them open.
The wardress was absent.
The cries from the other cells this morning were different.
‘Go with God, chérie!’
‘We will not forget!’
‘May angels guard your rest.’
They know, thought Sophie vaguely, lost, a strange feeling this body was not hers, because her body would be in agony. To leave at dawn must be to go to death. Efficient. Get execution over early so the place can be tidied up for the day.
Her bare toes scraped down the corridor, the metal stairs. Agony did come then. She tried to think of love instead of pain, of Daniel, Rose, Danny, Nigel, Lily, Bob, crumpets and honey and the golden pre-war winter. Or that Jones and Green might suddenly appear, machine guns in their hands, to shoot her way out of this, as George swooped back to take her to Thuringa.
Thuringa. If she fixed her thoughts upon the river perhaps she might be granted a short afterlife there, to glimpse those she loved again, to whisper, ‘Goodbye, I love you,’ in the warm breath of sunlight that might be warmer, just for a moment.
Would those she loved ever know what had happened to her? Were records kept? No other prisoner even knew her name. She should have told them, screamed it out, so if any of the other women survived the war they might say, ‘Yes, she died by firing squad,’ and, if they were kind — and surely they would be kind — they would not add, ‘I think she had been tortured.’
Too late.
You should stand proud before the firing squad, who should be a squad, too, not just two old men who had not shaved, one with a stub of a cigarette he did not bother to remove. Instead she felt dizzy, as if she was about to faint. How ironic, to lose the last moments of life in a faint.
The men who held her shoved her onto a chair polished with dried blood and the sweat of those going to their deaths. From here she knew her body would be cremated.
She did not know if there were watchers. She did not care. Her world was pain. She wanted only to sleep, where pain would vanish.
Someone muttered an order, and then another. Shots and then more pain.
She fell.
She . . . thought.
Realised that she thought.
Realised she still felt pain too, that the pills must be dulling it, and her reactions too.
So she was not dead. Shot, yes. She could see blood covering the front of her dress, which had not been bloody yesterday as the poker had cauterised the wounds it made. Should she call out, or mutter at least, to let them know they had to shoot her again?
Someone shoved her into wood . . . a wheelbarrow. She should move, at least, for otherwise she would be thrust into the oven alive. She had heard they did not care if those who were cremated were still living after they’d been shot. No — this way she had a few seconds to focus on her first night with Daniel, diamond stars piercing the sky and love encompassing her as well as the heat of his body; the first glimpse of Rose, then Danny, the first red-faced and furious at being thrust into the world, the second pale and helpless; the moment she had informed Nigel she was marrying him, the love, the shock, the gratitude, the love. Daniel, lighting a swaggie’s fire for her after they had crept out one night to make illicit love naked among the stars, some above and some around them, floating in the river, and then billy tea, and laughter, at how shocked the children would be if they had seen them. Rose, practising her first ‘running writing’ at the desk in Sophie’s study; Danny training a sheepdog to ‘get away back’, turning to smile with pride at her when the dog obeyed. So much love . . .
A door clanged open. She felt the oven’s heat. And then another tablet, shoved into her mouth. She swallowed automatically. The door swung shut again. Someone held up her head, her shoulders, shoved what felt like a massive hessian sack down to her waist, then roughly pulled it down over the rest of her and tied it loosely below her feet, which for some reason had lost their pain.
The resistance? Had they rescued her?
The wheelbarrow moved. She made herself stay still, despite her skin trying to shriek at the scrape of hessian on her injuries. Then blackness fell like a shutter and she fell into dreams.
If you dream, you are alive. If you are alive, you can be aware you are dreaming. If you are asleep, you should not feel pain and yet she did: a dingo gnawing off her feet and then tearing at her breasts, and then her back, leaving only her face free to scream.
But I like dingoes, she thought, even when they take the lambs. She had never been afraid of dingoes. This dream is not correct, she thought. The dingoes vanished and a fire took its place, the campfire by the river, swaggies’ wood and transparent flames just snickering while the billy boiled until the flames grew red and sucked her down.
She woke to dark. She moved and found wood above her and below and on either side. A coffin then. For some reason, they had decided not to burn her so they had buried her alive.
The world lurched. Were they lowering the coffin? No, it didn’t feel like downwards movement. Was a coffin airtight? Would she suffocate before or after they had buried her?
It seemed a long way indeed to find a cemetery. And finally, she slept again.
Chapter 26
In this practice, which we have called ‘The Pursuit’, the shooter is started off at a run . . . on an obstacle course consisting of jumping a ditch, running across a plank over water, crawling through a suspended barrel, climbing a rope, a ladder and over a wall, finishing up with a one hundred yard dash . . . without warning or waiting, two surprise targets are pulled, one after the other, and at each he fires a ‘burst’ of three shots. The targets are exposed for no longer than it takes to fire three shots at the fastest possible speed.
The British Commando Pocket Manual, 1940
THURINGA, AUSTRALIA, JANUARY 1943
DANNY AND ROSE
Their mother was somewhere in Europe. Their father was camped in a hollow tree, and Aunt Midge had gently explained he was suffering from a form of shell shock from the war before they were born, and that he had behaved like this ever since that war until shortly before their birth. Their telegrams to their Aunt Lily saying Mum urgently needed stop Pa ill stop had brought only a return telegram suggesting they seek help from Aunt Midge, which they had already done, a promise of a doctor from Sydney, and Aunt Lily’s love always my darlings, but no explanations.
They sat on the verandah, two young people who had suddenly become adult in the past three weeks. Mrs Taylor fussed, bringing lemonade sweetened with honey from Mr Reynaldo’s bees, and scones with strawberry jam which neither of them wanted, but ate, because Mrs Taylor needed to help, and food was all she had to give.
Cicadas shrilled. The air smelled of gum leaves and cattle droppings and rosemary from the mutton being roasted for a lunch they would not want to eat, all that meat in war-time, though of course it could be eaten cold. Cockatoos screamed down by the river, the normal summer sounds and smells when nothing was normal at all.
‘I’m not going back to school,’ said Danny at last. ‘Thuringa needs a manager. I know Pa doesn’t work the cattle, but he made decisions. Besides, someone in the family needs to be here till Mum gets back.’ He did not add, ‘Or till Pa regains his senses.’
He glanced at Rose, wondering if she would point out that this would mean not only failing to do his Leaving Certificate, but abandoning school cadets, the Militia, as well as being drafted to fight in New Guinea. Farming was a reserved occupation. Although men and women in many farming families volunteered, they couldn’t be conscripted for the Militia, or ordered by Manpower to work at factories and other jobs essential for the war effort. Apart from producing armaments and uniforms, food for the armies and the Empire was the most valuable war work of all.
Strangely, he would have felt more comfortable with needing to stay here if he had really wanted to fight, as some of his frie
nds at school truly seemed to want to do. But it had been hard enough being away from Thuringa at boarding school. He had never admitted to anyone how much he shrank from the thought of leaving for New Guinea, to be lost in mud and jungle, hatred and destruction, for years, or perhaps forever.
But Rose had her own focus. ‘I’m not going back either. Mum’s desk is piled with letters that should have been answered weeks ago. It’s not like the old days, when there was a general manager and Mum just oversaw things. Preparing for the war, all that’s happened since — she’s taken over more and more control since that last trip to England.’
‘You don’t know how to run a business.’
‘I know enough to understand that someone needs to be at the head of one, especially now. Someone who can make decisions quickly and know they’ll be carried out. I know how to ask for advice, and I know how to take it, too. Higgs doesn’t need radical changes just now, but there are problems that need to be sorted out.’
Danny snorted. ‘You’re just going to march into the board meeting and say, “I’m taking my mother’s place”?’
‘Exactly,’ said Sophie Higgs-Vaile-Greenman’s daughter.
‘They’ll laugh.’
‘Then I’ll fire them. I’ll get Pa to sign a power of attorney. I’ll type out letters for him to sign about school, too.’
‘I think you need to be twenty-one to have power of attorney.’
Rose shrugged. ‘Then Aunt Midge can have power of attorney and she can appoint me to deal with Higgs.’
‘Do you have enough experience running a business?’
She looked at him patiently. ‘I don’t have any experience. But there are others at Higgs who do, in their various areas. What I do know is how the various parts of Higgs support each other — how when hail destroys a bean crop in New South Wales a bit of imagination means we can look for peas in Victoria. I’ve sat at Mum’s desk watching her work or discussed plans with her since I was three years old. I know how she leads, Danny. If there were others who could do this there wouldn’t be so many urgent requests for help on Mum’s desk.’
Legends of the Lost Lilies Page 20
