The Lily in the Snow Read online

  Dedication

  To Lisa and Cristina,

  who changed a single book that worked

  a little too well into a quite different series,

  and to Eve and Angela,

  who helped make it happen

  AUTHOR’S WARNING

  Two passages in this book contain the verbatim words firstly of HRH Edward, Prince of Wales, and later the words and beliefs of Adolf Hitler. The sentiments expressed by both are vile, inaccurate in every way, and abhorrent. Including them in this book was necessary, however, as the beliefs of those men led to so much tragedy. If we are to understand how the horrors of World War II happened, as well as the perversion of the philosophies of men like Nietzsche into the fascist belief that continues today, we need to know not just what those men stated, publicly and privately, but what they urged and, in Hitler’s case, forced or coerced their citizens to do. As both men are now distant in history, and yet gaining defenders in a world that has not personally seen the horror they unleashed, it is important that the men, and their ideas, be accurately portrayed.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Warning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Book 1 Advert Miss Lily and Her Lovely Ladies

  Book 2 Advert The Lily and the Rose

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  There is an art to feeding a man so he is no longer hungry, and yet longs for more.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  LONDON, 20 DECEMBER 1928

  VIOLETTE

  Rats scampered, frozen footed, across the snowdrifts in the alley next to Worthy’s Teahouse in Mayfair. The child stood singing by the doorway, angelic in her plain white dress, paler than the grey slush of London, her curls blonde, her face and fingers tinged with blue. Her voice soared, high and pure.

  In front of her, fashionable London hurried home dressed in fur coats, fur-lined gloves or fur-collared overcoats, arms loaded with Christmas presents, or with footmen to carry the parcels walking behind.

  Only those who paused to listen noticed that, though the words of the Christmas carols were English, the accent was French, perhaps, or Belgian. Others might wonder if the child’s thinness disguised her true age, closer to thirteen, maybe, than ten. None saw the calculation in her eyes. She made very sure that they did not.

  An elderly gentleman pushed open the teahouse door, then paused to drop a shilling in the cloche hat at the girl’s feet. Such small feet, stockingless, in shoes slightly too large. ‘Are you hungry, my dear?’

  ‘I am always hungry, monsieur,’ she said, presenting him with a smile that might have been worn by the angels in the battered convent, years before.

  He gestured to the doorway. ‘If you would like . . .’

  ‘Thank you, monsieur,’ she said demurely. She bent to pick up her hat with cold stiff fingers, wrapping it around its coins.

  He followed the girl inside. This would never do at the Savoy, of course, nor even at Simpson’s. But taking a shabby child into the warmth of Worthy’s for a cup of tea was so obviously a charity.

  The room smelled of toasting teacakes and damp shoes. He sat across from her and watched her read the menu, her hat and its coins on her lap, the snowflakes melting in her blonde curls. It was not easy coiling naturally straight hair in rags each night to ensure ringlets, but the effect was worth it.

  ‘Hot chocolate, monsieur?’ the girl asked shyly, glancing up with wide blue eyes.

  ‘Of course, my dear.’

  ‘And may I perhaps have buns?’

  He smiled expansively. ‘Anything you wish.’

  ‘Buns and cheese on toast? Oh, thank you, monsieur!’

  He gestured to the waitress.

  Worthy’s service was efficient. The cocoa and buns were brought immediately. The kind gentleman waited till she had sipped her hot drink and eaten half a bun quickly but delicately. ‘What is your name, my dear?’

  ‘Violette, monsieur.’ The girl finished the first bun, and began on the next.

  ‘It’s a miserable day for a child all alone in a big city,’ he suggested.

  She raised blue eyes to him. ‘Oh, yes, Monsieur.’ The answer might have been an admission that she was alone, or simply agreement. She finished the second bun, then smiled as the toasted cheese was placed in front of her.

  ‘You are French?’

  ‘Belgian, monsieur,’ she said shyly, as if she did not like to correct such a knowledgeable man.

  ‘A refugee?’ he asked, sympathetically. The Great War had been over for a decade but some, at least, had not returned home, their villages destroyed or haunted by the atrocities they had suffered.

  ‘No, monsieur. I have come to England to find my mother. Her name is Lily Shillings. She came from a village called Shillings too, but I cannot find it on a map.’

  She offered the information, as she always did, in the hope that it might elicit information, an ‘Ah, I know the family well’ or ‘You mean Shillings in Yorkshire?’ But the man showed no sign that he knew the name.

  ‘How did you lose her?’ The kind words did not quite disguise his, still unspoken, quiet planning. ‘During the war?’

  Almost every family across the British Empire had been fractured by the war, but those countries where it had been fought had suffered worst, homes turned to rubble, farmland to blood and mud, families running in the night.

  ‘Yes, monsieur.’

  The gentleman didn’t query how a Belgian child had an English mother. Violette was used to that. This conversation was simply to establish that she was, indeed, unprotected, and to suggest that he, a nice man, grandfatherly — though of course he would think of himself as virile, an elder, not really old — might help. He touched her thin bare hand briefly with his gloved one. ‘What will you do when you find your mother, my dear?’

  Violette finished her cocoa before she answered. Usually she ga
ve an answer the gentlemen would like — ‘I will never leave her side’ or ‘I wish so much to be loved’ — before quickly pocketing whatever tip they left on the table then escaping into the crowd before he offered her a warm, safe . . . and, presumably, discreet . . . place to stay.

  But this was the third teahouse and friendly gentleman today. Violette was no longer hungry and the money in the hat would pay for her lodging. And so she smiled at him, her first genuine smile of the day. ‘When I find her I will kill her, monsieur.’

  She took the last slice of toasted cheese with her as she left.

  Chapter 2

  Middle-class girls dream of being wives and mothers. Girls of the upper echelons know that others will care for their children, their meals, their clothes. They dream of alliances, and their families plan them. Those alliances bring power.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SHILLINGS, 18 JANUARY 1929

  SOPHIE

  ‘Pardon the intrusion so early, your ladyship, but the Prince of Wales is in the breakfast room.’

  Sophie opened her eyes. She had been dreaming: gold grass that crackled underfoot and white-trunked trees; a green-eyed man with sun-kissed skin, bare chested as he sat on a stump of wood and carved his crosses.

  She blinked at the small, nervous maid in the doorway. Beside her Nigel woke and yawned. The room smelled of the apple-wood flames twisting up the fireplace, her own perfume and the bay rum Nigel used after shaving. Outside the wind stroked the old stones of Shillings Hall. ‘Did you say the Prince of Wales, Amy?’

  ‘Yes, your ladyship. In the breakfast room, your ladyship. Sorry, your ladyship.’ Amy bobbed a curtsey.

  Well, thought Sophie, today at least would not be boring.

  Three years earlier she had flown across the world to save the man yawning beside her. Her reward: a husband she loved, twins she adored, an estate run by the excellent agent she had appointed, a household that ran perfectly.

  She was beginning to realise that a happy ending might be a slightly dull one.

  Though, of course, she now had a title too, and a prince who felt free to inhabit their breakfast room.

  ‘Did His Royal Highness say what he wanted?’ asked Nigel sleepily. Presumably not breakfast, thought Sophie. The Prince of Wales rarely ate breakfast or luncheon, convinced, despite his acute thinness, that he was chubby.

  ‘His Royal Highness said he was due to launch a ship at Southampton this morning, your lordship.’

  ‘Which is probably why David has vanished in the other direction,’ murmured Nigel. The heir to the throne’s habit of not appearing at official functions was legendary to those who knew him, though of course never mentioned in the press. The public wanted a prince charming, and should have one.

  ‘Tell His Royal Highness we will be there immediately.’ Nigel swung his legs out of bed.

  ‘Nonsense. Stop pandering to him,’ said Sophie. ‘You need to shave and Green needs to do my hair properly. James and Hannelore are coming to lunch, remember?’ She turned back to Amy. ‘Please tell His Royal Highness he has to have a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge before I get there. Tell him he’s as thin as a match with the wood shaved off and that I will be seriously annoyed if I don’t see a nearly empty bowl in front of him.’

  Amy looked even more terrified.

  ‘Just tell him we will be there as soon as we can,’ Nigel assured her. ‘Would you mind seeing that his guards get breakfast too? In the library, I think. His Royal Highness always forgets they need to be fed.’

  Nigel turned to Sophie as Amy shut the door. ‘Darling, he is the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘And I am an ignorant colonial and so I don’t know one is not supposed to order a prince to eat his porridge. Besides, David likes women ordering him around.’

  Nigel paused, his hand on his brocade dressing grown. ‘Has David made a pass at you?’

  ‘Of course, darling. It would have been rude of him not to. David does like married women. How do the Americans put it? Married women never tell, rarely swell, and are grateful as hell. But he was sweet when I said no.’

  ‘You should have told me.’ It was impossible to interpret Nigel’s emotions from his words.

  Sophie hesitated. Intercourse had become an impossibility for Nigel since the surgery shortly after their wedding. Nigel, of all people, knew that did not mean the end of physical satisfaction for Sophie, and nor had it. But Sophie knew that even a touch anywhere abdominal could mean agony for Nigel. Although managing well, he still had days when pain from what the surgeon diagnosed as growing adhesions — places where the scar tissue was growing into other organs — made it difficult to leave his bed. The condition was not usually dangerous, but that did not lessen the pain, or the exhaustion pain brought with it.

  Sophie suspected that sexual desire might lead to pain too. She was the one now who subtly warded off Nigel’s even subtler sexual overtures.

  Was this a mistake? They had never discussed his limitations or desires. They should have, Sophie realised, just as she should speak of the man who was as likely as Nigel to have fathered the twins who were now probably spitting out their own porridge in the nursery down the hall.

  Sophie had slept with John just once, a night of desperation and joy in his hut at Thuringa, before her wild flight across the world to be with Nigel before the operation that might have killed him. That extraordinary man with dark green eyes, so different from the dapper Prince of Wales. And from Nigel, whom she loved . . .

  ‘You will never need to reassure me,’ said Nigel quietly. ‘If you wish to have an affair —’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Nigel reached for his dressing gown, rather than ring for Brooks, his valet. ‘You will one day.’ He spoke with the confidence of a man who knew women well.

  Sophie thrust away the memory of the scent of gum leaves and fresh sweat. This was not the day to discuss the complications of sex, not with a prince of the realm hopefully now scoffing porridge below. ‘Well, if I do have an affair,’ she said lightly, ‘it wouldn’t be with David. I am far too outspoken to be a prince’s mistress.’

  ‘You’d demand Home Rule for Ireland and legal contraception instead of a diamond bracelet?’

  ‘At the very least.’ She smiled at him, this darling man she would never regret marrying, despite her longing for deep blue sky and blue-hazed hills — and the occasional slow burn of a body that longed for love. Sweat and twisting limbs, not discreet, soft loving touches in the night, the call of a mopoke as if it were laughing at them, the thud of a wallaby startled by the sounds of human passion . . .

  She thrust the memory away again. Nigel had always known Rose and Danny might not be his. He knew she had loved the man who had called himself John to honour his twin brother, dead in the Great War. Some had called ‘John’ a saint. Sophie knew that he was not, or not if sainthood demanded celibacy.

  Sophie had loved Nigel for years; she had loved Miss Lily even longer. But she had not married him when he had first asked her, after the war, but almost a decade later when he had needed her to save his life, and Shillings. She loved Shillings too, the isolated estate wrapped in its ancient hedges and stone-walled fields. But this cold grey morning she longed for the scent of the billy boiling on a campfire of eucalypt branches, of summer sweat, and for the uninhibited yelling of cicadas.

  ‘Homesick?’ Nigel asked.

  Darling Nigel. He always understood her. ‘A little. It’s the long winter days.’

  ‘You used to love snow.’

  ‘That was before I got chilblains in makeshift hospitals in France and Belgium,’ she said drily.

  The door opened. A good lady’s maid never knocked. Green was the perfect lady’s maid. She was also one of Nigel’s oldest friends, almost as close as Jones, who had once been the Shillings butler and was now Nigel’s secretary, godfather to the twins and, since Green’s return from Australia, once again her lover. Green was entirely happy for others to have husbands. She merely did not want o
ne for herself.

  Green placed the tea tray on the side table. Three teacups, not two. A maid who was a friend drank tea with you. ‘The Prince of Wales —’

  ‘Is in the breakfast room. I know,’ said Sophie, pouring the tea, smoky and fragrant and imported from Japan, then handed Nigel and Green their cups. She took a Bath Oliver and nibbled.

  Green sipped her tea. ‘Actually he’s up in the nursery playing horsey with the twins.’

  Sophie grinned. David was impossible. Moody, demanding, irresponsible, but how could you not like a prince who appeared at dawn to play horsey with your twins?

  ‘With a bit of luck Nanny will order him to eat up his porridge too.’ Nanny had once had her own name, but had been shocked when Sophie had used it. Sophie had not made that mistake again. ‘The green wool dress and jacket?’ she added to Green, as Nigel crossed the room to the door that connected to his dressing room, where Brooks would be waiting, today’s tweeds warming by the fire.

  ‘The claret silk dress with the ruby beading,’ said Green firmly. ‘After all, he is the Prince of Wales. You might not get a chance to change for lunch either and the prinzessin always dresses beautifully.’

  ‘Royal poise. Hannelore would make a hessian sack look stunning.’ Sophie gazed out at the snow. ‘Motorcars,’ she muttered. ‘I liked it better when it took most of a day to get here by train. Now people can invite themselves whenever they like.’

  ‘You could have said no,’ said Green mildly, sipping her tea.

  ‘Hannelore is my oldest friend, even if she keeps inviting me to Germany to meet this miracle politician of hers. I am never going to Germany again, and she should know why. And James . . .’

  Sophie took another biscuit. James Lorrimer, public servant in the most literal sense, spymaster and confidant, had once asked her to marry him. Through most of the Great War they had both assumed that she would. Now he too was a friend. ‘James will want something too.’

  ‘He hopes you’ll open the London house again so you can keep an eye on upper-class bolshevism,’ said Green.

  Sophie sighed. ‘I have attended six extremely cold and very boring meetings with Lady Mary, and given James my report. The British communists are good hearted, ineffectual and carefully ignorant of what is really happening in the Soviet Union. As far as I am concerned Nigel and I have done our duties to our countries, and more.’