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A Scent of Lavender
Elizabeth Elgin
A captivating tale of forbidden passion and wartime friendship from the bestselling author of THE WILLOW POOL and ONE SUMMER AT DEER’S LEAP.It's 1940 and the threat of invasion hangs over Britain. But in the isolated hamlet of Nun Ainsty it is the arrival of the Army that turns things turned upside down – especially for two young women.Lorna Hatherwood, married to a man ten years older, lives a quiet life. Then she volunteers to read to blind soldiers at the nearby Manor and everything changes – because of a handsome medical officer named Ewan MacMillan. But their relationship could spell disaster…Then there is Ness Nightingale. A Land Girl billeted with Lorna, Ness is trying to forget a disastrous love affair. But when she meets Mick Hardie, a conscientious objector, she has to remind herself that she has vowed never to trust a man again …
ELIZABETH ELGIN
A Scent of Lavender
Dedication (#ulink_653b4230-7478-53f4-9eff-db2d0a8b351a)
For my mother
Katie Wardley
and for
my first great-grandchild
Katie Hall
Contents
Cover (#uda2201ed-9c9c-56fd-a24e-9dcc060eee98)
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Dedication (#ulink_a2b96656-2e9d-54ca-8676-e1a153b9f305)
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Keep Reading (#uc31ffad6-dcd8-5a49-91c8-55ea23399d21)
About the Author (#u284a9e8e-bf07-5da0-bb53-22c059d2ad59)
Also by the Author (#u6540c452-0a88-50d9-876e-21e3692cf043)
Copyright (#ue5ec51be-ed48-51a0-abcc-c8093e6c5411)
About the Publisher (#u9213d6cb-0658-5874-9dcd-befb52ca500e)
ONE (#ulink_ba19e2a2-c1f5-51e2-98bd-287b00abbc66)
Backs to the Wall (#ulink_ba19e2a2-c1f5-51e2-98bd-287b00abbc66)
1940
The month of June, and the world so impossibly beautiful that it hurt. Her world, that was; the little part of it that made her ache inside just to think she might lose it, now that losing Ladybower could happen. And losing Nun Ainsty, too, and everything that was dear and precious and familiar and safe.
Lorna flung her hat on the sofa then angrily tossed her prim white gloves to join it. Angrily, because she wasn’t getting her priorities right; because today her husband had gone to war and William going away into danger was surely more important than being invaded, even though invasion was a real possibility. Soon, some said. The tides were right. Stood to reason, didn’t it, that nothing would stop Hitler now.
‘What a time to be leaving you. God knows when I’ll get leave, the way things are.’ They had stood on the platform, waiting for doors to be slammed shut the length of the train, when couples would snatch one last kiss, whisper one last goodbye. ‘You’ll be all right, Lorna?’
‘Yes. You’re not to worry about me.’
Dammit, she wasn’t the only woman to see her husband go to war. Other wives managed, and so would she!
‘At least you’ll be all right for money – won’t go hungry waiting for the Army allowance to come through. You’re sure you can manage the bills?’
‘Yes, dear.’ William was talking pounds, shillings and pence again. ‘I do know how to write a cheque.’ She smiled to soften the rebuke.
‘And if you need help, there’s Gilbert and Nance, don’t forget. You’ve only got to ask, Nance said.’
‘Yes.’ Ask? Nance Ellery would be there in her WVS uniform, asked or not; self-appointed chatelaine of the village. And since the village had no resident vicar, Nance Ellery had taken to running the church, too, with a zeal fit to frighten St Philippa off her plinth. ‘You mustn’t worry about me, William. Take care of yourself. I’ll be fine.’ She wasn’t as helpless as he thought; she really wasn’t. All she wanted was the chance to prove it. ‘And I think it’s time …’ Doors were banging at the far end of the train.
‘Yes. Best be getting aboard.’ He reached for her, holding her close, patting her back, kissing her. ‘And I don’t want to be waved off. Too upsetting for you. Just give me a brave smile. No tears, eh?’
So they kissed once more and she waited until he was settled in the window seat of the first-class compartment, then held up a hand, wiggling her fingers in a gesture of goodbye. Then smiling tremulously she walked off, head high; was still smiling as she handed in her platform ticket.
And she would manage, she thought fiercely as she drove home. Grandpa had indulged her, then William had taken over. She had been a cosseted, obedient granddaughter and now, in the second year of her marriage was a cosseted, obedient wife. Nothing had changed. Not even her name. She walked down the aisle Lorna Hatherwood and had walked up it still Lorna Hatherwood. But when you marry a distant cousin, there’s a fair chance that you both share the same great-great-grandparents. And their name.
She drew in her breath then let it out slowly in an effort to sort out her muddled thoughts, find a reason for her dry-eyed lack of concern. And she should be concerned. Her husband had gone to war; she should be distressed and dismayed, and she was not, because William would be all right. William was always all right; he spent a great deal of time arranging his life so that absolutely nothing could or would dare to go wrong, even to joining the Army Reserve in 1938, when it was peace for our time, and Hitler had no more territorial demands in Europe. It was as if William knew a war would come and had set about arranging things to his best advantage.
He was an accountant, he had stressed, and it was a waste of a good brain to wait until war happened and he was forced to volunteer. And he was right, she supposed, because her husband would have made a poor job of being a foot soldier; would not have liked it one bit. So even before war was declared, William was a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Pay Corps of the Territorial Army, all set to become a barracks stanchion and to survive the fighting – if war happened, that was – whilst those less astute would stand a fair chance of being sent into danger. Or worse. And she did not blame him for doing such a thing, Lorna thought as she stuck out an arm and turned sharp right into the lane that led to Nun Ainsty. In his own mind he was doing his bit for King and Country, available for call-up long before his age group which, at thirty-two, probably wouldn’t have happened for many months. The fact that he had manoeuvred himself into a relatively safe job in the Pay Corps was up to him and his conscience, Lorna shrugged. As long as he was wearing a uniform she supposed it was all right. As always, William had got what he wanted and she would not weep for her loneliness. She would manage, she had vowed at the station, and discover for the first time in her twenty-three years what it was like to live her life without a man to protect her and smooth her way. Grandpa had gone to heaven and William had gone, nine months after war broke out, to the Pay Corps Somewhere in Wiltshire and from this minute on, Lorna Hatherwood had no one to look after her and no one to please but herself!
She fished in her pocket for her car keys and threw them to join the hat and gloves on the sofa, then gazed at the framed photograph of her husband in his uniform.
‘I’m not really as flippant as I’m trying to make out, William. I will miss you and I will worry about you even though you’ll be quite safe in Wiltshire for a time,’ she whispered. ‘But I need to find out what being my own woman is like, and not having to do what is expected of me, dear. I really do.’
Come to think of it, though, he didn’t have a lot of say in the matter. William was a long way away, and all alone. But then, if you thought about it, so was she.
She looked at the clock. Too early for lunch and anyway, she wasn’t hungry. Maybe a tin of soup, later on, and a chunk of bread. Right now, though, she was restless; she needed to come to terms with things, like William being a soldier for the duration and she being alone, rattling around in Ladybower like a pea in a tin can. Now, she must work out a timetable, eat three times a day as she had promised she would. Pity she couldn’t join something. She had thought, fleetingly, of asking Nance Ellery if the Women’s Voluntary Service needed anyone, but the thought of being bossed about by Nance put her off the idea. She would, of course, have to care for the garden now; seriously care for it and grow more vegetables as the government constantly reminded everyone. Digging for Victory, they called it.
‘So, Lorna – and this is the first and last time you’ll talk to yourself! – you’ll get smartly upstairs,’ she whispered to the frizzy-haired woman in the mirror, ‘change into something cooler, then go for a long walk and sort yourself out!’
And oh my word, she thought as she took the stairs two at a time, wasn’t life going to be one big barrel of laughs? She was tetchy already and William only three hours gone.
She made a moue of her mouth. She always screwed up her lips when in danger of tears, and tears would not do! There was a war on, the Germans were little more than twenty miles away across the Channel and hundreds and hundreds of our soldiers had died, not a month ago, on the beaches at Dunkirk.
So behave yourself, woman! Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Straighten your shoulders and get on with it like half the women in the country are having to do!
She took off her costume and best blouse, peeled off her stockings, slithered a flowered cotton frock over her head, then pushed her bare feet into scuffed brown sandals, tying back the thick mass of hair that William said she must never cut short. It wasn’t very ladylike, she supposed, to go out stockingless and gloveless but wasn’t she, from this day on, pleasing no one but herself?
Defiantly, she made for the front door.
The village of Nun Ainsty lay at the end of a long straight lane, the only way into it and out of it. At the top of the lane and across the busy main road was Meltonby, which had a general store and a school which Ainsty children – had there been any – would have attended. Meltonby also had a post office with a bus stop outside it and a regular bus service to York.
Lorna stopped at the lane end. Its real name was Priory Lane, but to Ainsty folk it was ‘the lane’, which they walked up to the main road or walked down to the scatter of houses that was Nun Ainsty. Not big enough to be called a village. A hamlet, really, a backwater, and she loved it.
She paused, watching the busy road, then looked down at her shoes as a truck of soldiers whistled at her as they sped past. She felt her cheeks redden. Men still dismayed her – apart from Grandpa God-rest-him, and William. Those two she felt at ease with but strange men, or men en masse like the whistling soldiers, she found difficult to cope with. All to do with her sheltered life, she supposed; because Ladybower and Ainsty had been the centre of her life ever since she could remember. She recalled when William, a tall, almost grown-up young man, had patted her head and given her a chocolate bar. She had blushed furiously and run into the garden. She would have choked on that chocolate had she known that little more than ten years on she would marry him.
But William had gone to war and she was trying to clear her head, get things in order in her mind. She turned her back on the main road and started off towards the village, face to the sun, and when she reached the pillar box, she would know she had walked a mile exactly. Thereafter, still trying to clear her head, she would walk around the Green, passing each house, maybe even stopping to tell anyone who might ask that yes, thank you, William had got away on time this morning and she was waiting to hear he was safely there, and what his new address was. She reached the pillar box and was about to turn left to walk the Green clockwise, when an unmistakable voice called,
‘Lorna, my dear! A minute!’
‘Nance. Hullo. What can I do for you?’ Nance Ellery always wanted something doing and Lorna had grown used to asking what it was.
‘A word. A word to the wise, you might say. I’m going to Meltonby.’ She nodded to the parcel in the basket of her cycle. ‘Half an hour, say …?’
‘Fine. Anything of importance, or just a chat?’
‘Tell you later.’ She never wasted time or words. ‘William got away all right, did he?’ she called over her shoulder as she pedalled off.
A word to the wise? Lorna frowned. A word of warning was it to be to a young wife newly deserted, about the dangers of being alone and fair game for serving men away from their wives and missing the comforts of home. And bed.
She turned right at the pillar box instead and walked the few yards to her home, because Nance Ellery was going to have her say and fill her head with doubts and innuendoes so that clearing it would be well nigh impossible.
She decided against soup for lunch and ate a chunk of bread instead. Then she took a hairbrush from the dresser drawer and pulled it through her thick, corkscrew curls, wincing as she did it, wishing her fair, frizzy hair was straight and sleek and black.
She glanced up to see Mrs Ellery leaning her cycle against the gate. She had been to the post office and back, and found time to change into her WVS uniform all in the space of half an hour. And because she was wearing her plum and green, Lorna knew that the word to the wise must also have a ring of officialdom about it because anything to do with the war or the church, anything remotely authoritative, warranted the wearing of the uniform.
‘My dear.’ Nance was a big woman and puffed a little, on occasions. ‘Can we sit down? The garden, maybe? We won’t be overheard?’
‘The garden it is. And there’ll be no one listening.’ The garden of Ladybower House was overlooked by Dickon’s Wood, and completely shut off. ‘But whatever is the matter? It seems urgent.’
‘It is, in a way. The thing is, Lorna, how many bedrooms have you got?’
‘Five. You know we have.’
‘Yes! But how many available? You’ve cleared the attics, haven’t you?’
‘Of course. As soon as the government said we had to.’ And the directive had made sense, Lorna supposed. Any room built into the roof space of any house was to be emptied immediately, because of the risk of fire bombs. Nasty things, fire bombs. They pierced roofs then burned fiercely and it wouldn’t have been a lot of use having to clear a way through years of clutter to get to the thing and put it out with sand. ‘We threw a lot of rubbish away, but what was left is stowed away in the small bedroom.’
‘Which virtually means you have two bedrooms only?’
‘I suppose so, but why do you ask?’ Nance was putting words into her mouth; that she had only one spare bedroom. ‘I mean, are you billeting again? Are you looking for places for evacuees?’ Lorna felt uneasy.
‘Not at the moment, though the way things are with the war, I soon will be, nothing is more certain!’
When war broke out, children had been evacuated from towns which would almost certainly be bombed. A straggle of children had walked around Nun Ainsty, labels on coats, possessions in brown paper bags. It had been Nance Ellery’s job to help the Billeting Officer find homes for them, Lorna recalled. She and William had been landed with four, and William had hated it. William and Lorna had no children of their own, nor were any planned in the near future, and William took exception to other people’s being thrust upon his peace and privacy. That they had quickly returned to Leeds and Manchester had been a relief, and her otherwise patriotic husband said he would set the dogs on the next Billeting Officer who showed her face at Ladybower’s door – if they’d had dogs, that was!
‘So it’s children again?’ Lorna was clearly worried.
‘Not just yet, and if you’re clever you can fill that spare room with an adult who’ll be no trouble, and company for you now that William’s away. A female, of course.’
‘W-what kind of a female?’
‘A female for Glebe Farm. A land girl.’
