Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 (24 page)

‘Damn,' he muttered. ‘Keys. The keys are in my jacket pocket, I think. Quickly.'

Poppy dug deep into the pockets but at first could find no keys.

‘Quickly!' Jack urged her. ‘I can hear dogs!'

Poppy's blood ran cold as she too heard the barking and baying of Basil's guard dogs, just before she saw the flashing of lights as their pursuers closed on them.

‘My coat!'

Leaning across her, Jack delved in his overcoat pockets, first the far side and then the pocket nearest to him. Finding the keys at last, he jammed one into the ignition but it wouldn't fit.

The next one he tried did.

‘Now all we need is for Bessie not to start,' he said, glancing up to see the first dog leap out of the woods and begin to run for the car. Quickly he turned the key and pressed the start button. The ignition failed to fire. Jack yanked out the choke and tried again. This time the engine coughed and mercifully fired. At once Jack engaged gear, released the handbrake and floored the throttle. The car leaped forward, just as the first Alsatian hurled itself towards them. As Jack accelerated down the road, Poppy looked back over her shoulder through the rear window to see two men jump up the bank from the woods on to the road. One of them had a rifle.

‘It's Leon with a gun!'

‘Duck!'

Poppy put both her hands on the back of her head and ducked as low as she could, having thrown an even more bewildered George into the foot well. Jack, with a glance in his driving mirror, first swerved the car violently then also ducked his head down, but not as low as Poppy so that he could still just about see the road ahead. He
kept swerving the car from left to right in an effort to avoid the shots he knew must follow, and follow they did, just as Jack saw a right hand corner ahead and steered for the safety it would afford them.

From the sudden sound above them it seemed that the first shot must have passed overhead, but the second drilled through the back window, shattering the glass and thumping into the cloth lining of the car roof. Jack immediately swung the car to the left, and only just in time, as a third shot smashed past his wing mirror. Seconds later he had swung them right again and to safety, well out of sight round the sharp right hand bend that introduced them to the top of a very steep hill.

‘You all right, Lady Tetherington?' he enquired politely.

‘I've been better,' Poppy replied, sitting back up.

‘At least it was only gunfire.'

‘Only?'

‘Yes. For a moment I was convinced we'd blown a tyre. Now that
would
have been serious.'

‘This is no time for good old British humour, Mr Ward. George and I have quite lost our
sang froid
. Now what?'

‘London,' he replied.

‘London?' Poppy echoed in amazement. ‘Dressed like this?' She stared down at herself. ‘I can't go to London dressed like this. I'm American. We like clothes.'

‘We'll stop off somewhere for the night, don't worry,' Jack assured her. ‘We can shop for some clothes for you in the morning.'

‘I think you might have to define that we,' Poppy said with a sigh. ‘I for one am certainly not going to go shopping in one torn nightdress and an equally ruined dressing gown.'

Jack Ward looked round at her, his face expressionless as usual.

‘We'll work something out,' he said. ‘Don't worry.'

The drive was a long and arduous one, and certainly had they not been in headlong flight it would have been a journey both Jack and Poppy would rather not have undertaken. The ordeal was made worse by the hole in the back window, and the cold of the car had Poppy shivering, silently, and sometimes not so silently.

After several hours on the road they arrived at a small nondescript town, somewhere, Jack Ward explained, in the south midlands, where he drove slowly round the streets apparently looking for an address, until a policeman with a torch suddenly stepped out in front of the car and flagged them to a halt. Before Jack could say anything, he put his head into the driver's window to demand what they were doing out at this hour of the night driving in a suspicious manner. Jack glanced at Poppy. She had sunk even lower in her seat, desperate for the policeman not to catch sight of her state of undress as Jack stepped out of the car to explain many things, including the shattered back window.

Poppy watched intrigued as he muttered something to the policeman, taking a small leather wallet from his inside pocket as he did so. The
officer's manner changed immediately, and he pointed in the opposite direction.

Turning the car round, Jack drove off in line with the directions he had just been given, until he pulled up outside a row of identical-looking semidetached houses.

‘Here we do be,' he muttered, assuming a country accent, and indicating for Poppy to disembark. ‘Sorry for the unguided tour, but at night all streets are grey.'

‘He seemed to be a friendly sort of policeman,' Poppy remarked in a whisper as they stood on the pavement by the car. ‘Rather helpful sort in fact.'

‘Yes,' Jack agreed quietly. ‘Wasn't he just?'

With the help of his pocket torch Jack found the house he was looking for, took a key from his pocket and let himself in, Poppy following in answer to his beckoning gesture.

‘This where you live?' she asked, once they were inside the hall.

‘No, no, not at all,' Jack replied quickly, opening the door into the living room and nodding for Poppy to enter. ‘Wait here, please. I won't be a minute.'

Poppy sat carefully on the edge of a square-armed easy chair, staring first at her still muddied legs and nightclothes, and then round the unlit room, wondering what on earth was happening, and into quite what her curiosity had led her. She was grateful for the warmth of the room, for its ordinariness, which seemed so welcoming after Mellerfont and its grandeur and discomforts. On the other hand, once she was thawing out a
little, she could not help wondering who or what her companion was. She really knew nothing about him other than that he had somehow to be connected to some sort of political opposition to Basil and his minions, which meant he must be what Poppy would deem a good rather than a bad egg.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the return of Jack Ward, accompanied now by a sleepy-looking tousle-haired woman busily doing up her tartan dressing gown.

‘This is Julia,' Jack announced. ‘Julia, this is Miss Smith.'

Julia looked up from her tassel tying, shook her long hair back from her eyes and nodded at Poppy.

‘Don't worry.' She smiled. ‘I'm quite used to this with the Colonel here.'

‘Julia has very kindly offered us a bed for the night,' Jack said, taking off the hat he had kept on despite the fact that he was only in his shirtsleeves. ‘She'll also find you something to wear tomorrow.'

Both Poppy and George, exhausted by their adventures, finally slept without stirring, so much so that when they eventually awoke it was late morning. Judging from the animated conversation she could hear drifting up from downstairs, Jack and Julia had risen well in advance of them.

As soon as Poppy entered the kitchen the conversation stopped, Julia engaging her guest in small talk while Jack excused himself to go and smoke his pipe in the small back garden. After a decent and ample fried breakfast and two cups of
excellent tea, Julia took Poppy upstairs and found her some suitably ordinary clothes from her wardrobe.

Jack looked up in some surprise when he saw Poppy coming downstairs dressed all but identically to Julia, in a short-sleeved blouse, a plain dark blue skirt, a black wool cardigan, stockings and a pair of wellington boots.

‘Our only failure,' Poppy explained, holding her spectacles up to the light to see if they required cleaning. ‘My feet are a little smaller than Julia's, and I'm afraid I floundered a bit in her shoes, so we settled for wellington boots and three pairs of socks to bulk them out.'

‘You never know.' Julia smiled. ‘You could start a fashion.'

Poppy laughed.

‘It could catch on!' she agreed, feeling suddenly strangely free and altogether differently daring, as if she was no longer herself, as if the clothes were going to allow her to go where she pleased, without people whispering and talking behind her back, which had been her experience over the last days and weeks at wretched Mellerfont.

Unsurprisingly the drive to London was considerably less eventful than their journey of the night before. Despite the fact that there were all sorts of questions Poppy wanted to ask her companion there was something about Jack Ward's manner that did not invite being quizzed. He had an inner authority that seemed to be all the more noticeable for the fact that he was not a handsome man, and this too made him seem more formidable perhaps than he truly was, but since she had put
both her life and also her future, to some degree, in his hands, she was reluctant to push her luck, whatever it might be.

They talked in fits and starts all the way to London. Poppy was soon all too aware that she was being interrogated, in however gentlemanly a manner; aware too that since her life was – to a greater degree than she might wish – in her driver's hands, she must present herself in a way that would make him understand the kind of person she knew herself to be, rather than the kind of person she might wish she actually was. She was therefore careful not to portray herself as someone forced into a loveless marriage by the social ambitions of her parents, blaming only herself for her foolish mistake, explaining that she had been such a sensational flop during the Season that it had taken very little for someone as sophisticated as Basil to turn her head. She was careful also to make fun of her looks as being of the kind that did not draw queues of dancing partners.

All of this seemed to satisfy Jack Ward.

In fact, without Poppy realising it, the more time Mr Ward spent in her company the more he was coming to realise that Lady Tetherington might prove to be most suitable for his purposes. Best of all she was still very young, and being very young would be game for anything. There was nothing braver, in his experience, than a young woman under the age of twenty-one. They were not so much reckless as joyous in the face of danger, coming to love it as much or perhaps more even than the passion of love. Danger was an aphrodisiac, as he knew only too well, and if all
went as he hoped, it would only be when Lady Tetherington looked back, when she was, like him, middle-aged, that she would realise just what risks she had run, and lie awake at night wondering at the pattern her life had taken. If she lived that long.

‘What are your feelings about Fascism, Lady Tetherington?' he wondered, making sure to keep his tone light. ‘I ask you this for good reason, don't worry. So don't be alarmed.'

‘I don't really have any,' Poppy replied. ‘Other than of course what you might call the normal ones. Such as thinking Mr Hitler the most awful kind of person, and of course the same goes for all his cohorts. I'm afraid until I was married I was a bit naïve, probably because my parents are not British. Fascism seemed to be just a foreign thing – something embraced by people over in Europe rather than by us.'

‘Fair enough. You could hardly say fairer than that.'

‘You could actually. I mean I can now – because of what's happened. And what I sort of suspected was happening at Mellerfont.'

‘That your late husband was in fact a Fascist?'

‘I think it's pretty obvious, don't you? Well, surely you must know, don't you? Because you looked as though you were part of the inner circle. I mean you'd got yourself pretty well in, well in enough to know what was going on.'

‘Not quite well in enough, as it happens,' Jack confessed. ‘When we first met, I think I was about to be rumbled. It was the shooting, oddly enough. Something I just can't stomach. Everyone from
my background is meant to be so keen on it, but I have never been able to muster an enthusiasm. Certainly, if you go walking on your land and you see a rabbit or a pigeon and take a shot at it, that I can understand, but not killing slow, defenceless birds reared for the purpose. It's not English. It's not sport. In England, in the old days, it would have been considered just not on.' He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘Anyway. I wasn't making quite the progress I'd hoped, and thinking I was about to be rumbled I bailed out.'

‘But not before you'd found out about Basil's journal, and the importance it has.'

‘It has an importance all right,' Jack assured her. ‘That lot of blackshirts don't convene just for the fun of it. Unfortunately all I discovered in my time in the inner sanctum was that your husband was possibly the best connected of them all, and the
soi-disant
real leader of the British Fascist party. Does that shock you?'

There was a long silence, and then Poppy nodded.

‘It does rather, I have to admit. I mean what about that Mosley chap?'

‘I can't say for certain, but it does seem your husband was infinitely better connected than Mosley, and rather brighter. I think that's why he was more deadly. He was if you like the
éminence grise
. The power behind the throne, something which I think he greatly enjoyed. Mosley liked to swagger about the place, which is why he and his wife are pretty closely watched. Your husband on the other hand, as you know, was quite different. The point is – and it's worth making – that
these people, the Fascists in our midst, are very much that. They're not just in the big homes of the rich, or floating about in idle society, they're everywhere – in newsagents, selling papers on street corners, in high office, in the armed forces, in factories and even teaching in schools. Half the fun for them is keeping their despicable beliefs secret, because like all fanatics they get a kick out of being a secret society – waiting, as it were, for their particular messiah to come, for the time when Hitler takes over this island, when they'll reveal themselves in their true colours, welcoming the invaders with flowers. Mind you, they're no fools. Don't you believe it. They know we're after them, and what's more they're trained to look out for us, knowing all the time that their hour may well come.'