Lilies, Lies and Love Read online

  Dedication

  To Lisa, Eve, Nicola, Gemma, Cristina, Angela, Kate

  and the fabulous team of women who create this series

  Contents

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  The Miss Lily series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  I have always told you the truth, my dears, but never the whole truth. Have I ever told anyone the full truth? Will I ever? I do not know.

  The words Miss Lily thought but did not say to her four young ‘lovely ladies’ in the spring of 1914

  SHILLINGS ESTATE, ENGLAND, SEPTEMBER 1936

  The two planes flew above the trees, machine guns chattering, dark shapes within a darker night. Death erupted in the sky. The old man stared as night melted into flame.

  His mind screamed. It was 1917 again, the hail of gunshot, metal burning green and yellow. But this was over England, not Belgium or France, the plane’s wreckage falling onto Shillings Hall. The victor’s wings waggled as it headed after further prey.

  Was the falling aircraft the enemy’s or one of theirs? The old man didn’t care. Everyone he loved was in that Hall. He tried to run, but could not move. His heart cracked. He could not bear it. Not again . . .

  A shadow ran across the gardens.

  ‘Help them!’ the old man shouted desperately. But his cry made no sound. Then the screams of others, and timber falling.

  The shadow reached the burning door, and pushed it open. Flames licked the air. The old man heard a voice he knew above the crackling fire. ‘Albert, grab my hand!’

  ‘Grandpa! Grandpa, wake up!’

  The old man blinked. He found himself in bed, sheets tangled, Gladys at his side.

  ‘You were moaning in your sleep, Grandpa. Are you all right?’ She began to tidy up his sheets.

  A good girl, Gladys. He touched his cheeks and found them wet, but there was no need to weep. ‘It’s all right now,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is, Grandpa?’

  ‘Shillings Hall is burning. But he’ll save them.’

  Gladys glanced through the window at Shillings Hall. A single light shone serenely in the butler’s pantry. Albert was probably checking the household accounts. Her son, Albert Hereward, the Shillings butler, Gladys thought proudly.

  She took the old man’s hand. ‘Grandpa, there’s no fire. You had another nightmare, that’s all.’

  War had burned nightmares into her Albert’s mind, too, the kind of nightmares his dad might have had, if he’d ever come home from the Somme. Life was full of nightmares after the Great War. Gladys thanked God there’d never be another one.

  Old Mr Hereward shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. It’s war, girl!’

  ‘The war has been over for eighteen years, Grandpa,’ she reminded him gently. Her father-in-law had told the authorities he was only thirty-eight, instead of well over fifty, to join up in 1916, that year of anguish when it had seemed impossible England would survive.

  He gazed at her, part of him still far away. ‘His Lordship!’ he muttered. ‘The old Earl, Master Nigel. Master Nigel was there, among the flames!’

  ‘Grandpa, don’t you remember the earl’s funeral? The young master is ten now and living way off in Australia. He’s safe. The family is safe. And so are we! See, look out the window. There’s no fire at the Hall. It’s just a dream.’

  The old man looked at her. ‘It’s coming again,’ he said. War is like a wolf, he thought, creeping silently before it leaped to swallow you. ‘I saw it, girl. Shillings will burn. England will burn!’

  And yet the earl had been there. Old Mr Hereward lay back and closed his eyes, suddenly comforted. Danger, yes, but rescue too. ‘He’ll be back again,’ he whispered, as Gladys straightened his quilt. ‘He’ll be here for us.’

  The earl would never let his people down.

  Chapter 2

  A man and woman may choose from an infinite variety of shared activities. But eating a meal together, just the two of them, when they might dine instead with many or alone, implies friendship.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  LONDON, SEPTEMBER 1936

  In a small exclusive restaurant near the Strand — one so exclusive it still offered private rooms to its most important customers (which did not mean those who possessed money, though money was essential, too, of course) — England’s most unlikely couple dined.

  James Lorrimer came from a family so distinguished it needed no titles. His ancestors had refused an earldom. He himself had rejected a knighthood for his management of the intelligence network he had founded. His refusal had not been merely to keep that network discreet.

  James Lorrimer believed that the most unobtrusive diplomacy was the most powerful. His personal preference was also to be unnoticeable: his clothing was impeccable but circumspect, just like his choice of dining room.

  But no one ever ignored his companion. Ethel Carryman commanded respect, all fifteen stone of her: from the deference of sergeant majors and generals, who had somehow found themselves obeying her commands on the railway stations where her canteens operated in the Great War, to slightly stunned obedience from the slum landlords of East London where she now ran a women’s clinic, dispensing food, clothing, education, hope, and even, it was whispered, contraception. The sound of Ethel Carryman’s size twelve shoes thudding up the stairs of a flea-ridden tenement was enough to make a landlord hurriedly agree to install running water, and even a new latrine in the courtyard.

  Tonight, she was respectably clad in two acres of hand-made green lace, gathered with a gold-tasseled cord at her hips but otherwise unadorned, as if the dressmaker had given up. She peered at the empty plate on the table. ‘Any more of that fish paste on toast?’ she inquired. ‘I missed my lunch.’

  James smiled slightly. He pulled the cord for the waiter. ‘Two more caviar en brochette, if you please.’ He waited till the man had left before adding, ‘You also seem to be missing your accent.’

  ‘You mean the posh one they tried to pound into me at school?’ Ethel grinned and reached for his bread roll, slathering it thickly with butter.
‘Aye, I have at that. A good Yorkshire accent takes government wallahs by surprise. Except for you, of course. Once you’ve got a bureaucrat on the left foot they promise you anything, just out of shock. I got permission for a family planning centre today.’ She swallowed the last of his roll — she had already eaten her own — before adding, ‘You’re looking tired.’

  ‘I usually am.’ James blinked. It was true. His work consumed him. It had been his life since Cambridge. But he had never admitted how weary he had become before, even to himself.

  ‘You’re looking even peakier than usual tonight. Ah, thank you,’ she added, as the waiter placed the two plates on the table, lifting the silver domes that covered them.

  James grinned as the waiter tactfully closed the door behind him. ‘I was waiting for you to say “Good grub, that”.’

  ‘Not to a waiter. He needs to think he’s serving someone who deserves caviar en brochette.’ James noted that she spoke the French words with no hint of a Yorkshire accent, nor did she seem embarrassed to switch accents when she was with him. This woman trusted him, just as he trusted her.

  In his work — in his life — trust like that was rare.

  Ethel handed him one of the small squares of buttered toast heaped with grey caviar pearls. ‘Eat,’ she instructed.

  ‘Yes, Nanny.’

  ‘And tell me what’s wrong.’

  He tried to find a place to start. A blinkered nation refusing to re-arm while Germany had built thousands of fighter planes in a single year? The Führer, Adolf Hitler, screaming speeches about a Third Reich to come — a repellent fantasy of Germany leading the world with its Aryan super race? And all too many upper-class Englishmen agreeing with him? It was so very easy in Britain to blame a conspiracy of Jewish bankers for the Great War, rather than admit that the English themselves had been perpetrators of its horrors.

  The most urgent problem was a new king who ignored almost all his official duties, instead petitioning parliament for hundreds of thousands of pounds beyond his own personal wealth to spend on jewellery for his mistress, Mrs Wallis Simpson, currently divorcing her second husband. Mrs Simpson was a possible bigamist and an avowed fascist, with such deep control over the king that he too had come to venerate the German dictator. He even hoped one day to emulate him.

  The small, slight and, to be honest, stupid Edward VIII had long planned to once again make Britain a ‘kingdom’, where the king did more than bow to the wishes of his parliament, and truly ruled. In his short rule he had already proven himself both inept and dangerous.

  God save them all.

  Ethel Carryman knew this. She, who was not part of his intelligence network, was for some reason the one person he trusted to hear everything and keep it to herself. Was it that Yorkshire accent? Or that he had found in her not just a deep intelligence, but a sense of duty to match his own, even if it was played on different fields?

  There had been few friends in James Lorrimer’s life. His first wife had died. Nigel Vaile, the Earl of Shillings, was now dead to him as well. Miss Lily, with whom he had perhaps been even closer, was far away. So was Sophie Higgs, who he still found difficult to think of as the widowed Dowager Countess, Sophie Vaile. Dowager sounded elderly, not like Sophie at all. But before Sophie had left for Australia again she had found him Ethel, the perfect woman, not to marry, but to have as a friend.

  James watched, amusement temporarily dousing his sense of slowly encroaching doom for the nation he loved and served, as Ethel consumed the last of the ‘fish paste’. But it was time to get to the heart of this night’s discussion.

  ‘I had a visitor today.’

  ‘Did you now? Who was it, then?’

  ‘Hannelore, Prinzessin von Arnenberg,’ said James, and waited for her reaction.

  Ethel paused briefly as she lifted her napkin to wipe butter from her chin. Hannelore, once Sophie’s closest friend, had blackmailed her and Nigel into a trip to Germany to meet Herr Hitler back in ’29, when the Austrian had only been an aspiring politician. The visit had led to Nigel’s death. Sophie and her family had fled to Australia. But all Ethel said was, ‘Don’t suppose the princess just called in for tea and biscuits.’

  ‘She wants to give us information.’

  ‘As a one-off or as an informant?’

  James felt himself relax even more. Ethel Carryman saw further than anyone he knew. ‘She offers a permanent . . . arrangement.’

  Ethel grinned. ‘Out of the goodness of her heart, I don’t think. What does she want in return?’

  ‘British citizenship for her maid, her maid’s sister and her maid’s daughter.’

  ‘And why would a good German want that? Or is her maid Jewish?’

  ‘No, an Aryan. Do you think the prinzessin would choose any other kind of servant? But the maid’s daughter was born blind. Her husband divorced her under Hitler’s new Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The maid came back to the prinzessin’s service. It seems the prinzessin is fond of both the woman and the child. The prinzessin is afraid her maid will be compulsorily sterilised and the child too. Or worse. They are killing children in Germany now,’ James added, his tone carefully emotionless.

  Ethel was silent for a moment. ‘So you agreed?’

  ‘How could I not? The maid will go to Germany to fetch her daughter — her sister is looking after her. They’ll bring the child to the prinzessin’s Mayfair flat, then we will help the maid and her sister and child vanish, under new names.’

  He smiled, dabbing his lips with his napkin. ‘The prinzessin can appear as startled as everyone else once they have gone. She needs to keep the trust of those in power if she is to have useful information to pass on.’

  ‘What if you’ve just brought two new spies into the country?’

  ‘I will make very sure they are nowhere near any source of information. A cottage somewhere remote but comfortable, in Scotland, perhaps.’

  ‘And was the information that the prinzessin gave you of any use?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said James slowly.

  Ethel raised a sceptical eyebrow. James shook his head. ‘It is possible she might have come to us anyway now Herr Hitler has begun to show his true colours. And I have always believed Hannelore loves Sophie like a sister. Hitler’s Brownshirts killed Nigel, after all. If the prinzessin had not blackmailed him and Sophie to meet Herr Hitler, Nigel would still be with us.’

  Like Sophie, the prinzessin had been one of Miss Lily’s girls before the war, girls carefully chosen to become part of her network of influence across Europe, working for peace, instead of the thousands of years of royal bickering and battles that had culminated in the Great War and its horrors. No girl — or woman — of the ‘lovely ladies’ knew more than a dozen of the others, but the network, with Miss Lily at its centre, stretched across most of the civilised world. Or, thought James, the parts of the world that believed themselves civilised, but were, in reality, just well-dressed brutality.

  Lily was an excellent judge of character. Her ‘lovely ladies’ were recommended by former students because their family position gave them the potential power to forge peace between nations, but accepted only if Miss Lily believed they carried a seed that might grow into a person who would want to do good.

  It was possible that Hannelore, Prinzessin von Arnenberg, might risk her life simply to try to keep peace between a Britain determined never to fight again and a Germany so humiliated they followed a leader planning to take over the world. But probable? He didn’t know.

  ‘So you trust her?’

  He smiled gently. ‘I didn’t say that. I’ll be interested to see what you make of her.’

  He waited for Ethel to say ‘I don’t have time. This spy stuff is your business, not mine’ or even ‘I’m not meeting the likes of her’. Ethel had made it clear she was his friend, but had no ambitions to be part of his network.

  But instead she said: ‘She’d make a good spy, I reckon. I saw her on the newsreel last week, in a gro
up with Mr Hitler. Pretty as a picture she was, though they say Mr Hitler doesn’t go in for that kind of thing.’

  James felt himself relax further. It had not been easy facing the woman not just responsible for Nigel’s loss, but for exiling Lily, whom he missed as the woman at the heart of his most valuable, and possibly only reliable, network. Fascism was entrenched even within His Majesty’s Secret Service, particularly under a king who admired Herr Hitler. James missed Lily deeply, professionally and personally, despite the regular exchange of letters.

  ‘I believe the prinzessin is useful to Hitler for other reasons. The Germans are still awed by royalty even if they have officially discarded them. And her uncle, the Count von Hoffenhausen, has a major role in the diplomatic corps.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Ethel, ‘would the prinzessin be spying for us or for them?’

  ‘Exactly. In fact we already knew the information she brought today.’

  ‘Which may mean she knew she was telling you nothing you could use.’

  James nodded. ‘But it’s time to act on it, nonetheless. The matter is becoming urgent.’

  The door opened. One waiter removed the empty plates. Another produced a salver with a silver dome over it. He removed the dome and began to carve the pheasant on the salver.

  ‘Should have ordered a goose,’ said Ethel, looking at its size.

  ‘We can bring another, if madam so desires —’ the waiter began.

  ‘You’re very kind. It looks delightful,’ said Ethel, the Mayfair accent reappearing.

  The waiter shut the door quietly behind them.

  ‘The prinzessin informed me that the contents of the “red boxes” — the confidential reports and parliamentary papers the king must see and sign — are now routinely copied and sent to Germany. Some of the boxes themselves are even sent to Germany, in one case for over three weeks, thus preventing the government from acting on those matters till they were returned.’

  ‘And you knew this?’

  ‘Many in government know it. Others too, from the police to military intelligence. We had to be sure the culprit wasn’t a member of the household and that the king didn’t know about it. He can be . . . careless . . . about matters of state.’ James shrugged. ‘But even more troubling: His Majesty has made no secret of his admiration for Herr Hitler and his wish for a close alliance between our countries.’