Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 (27 page)

‘I'm Marjorie. And this is Billy. My – well. He's my sort of stepbrother really.'

Marjorie smiled at Billy who pulled a face back at her, doing his best to hide his blushes now he was confronted with what he immediately decided was possibly the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his whole life.

‘Hello, Billy,' Kate said, putting out a hand to be shaken. ‘Aren't you the lucky one? All these girls, and besides Major Folkestone and a couple of soldiers, you're the only boy here so far. I say, from your point of view it should be renamed Paradise Park!'

Billy blushed even more, frowning furiously and staring at the floor in despair.

‘Come on, Billy,' Marjorie encouraged him. ‘Help us find Kate's name.'

‘It's not there,' Billy said, after a moment.

‘Of course it is,' Marjorie scolded. ‘It has to be. You haven't looked.'

‘All right,' Billy shrugged. ‘Don't believe me.'

The girls looked first at each other, then back at the lists, this time even more closely.

‘He's right,' Kate said. ‘They seem to have left me out.'

‘Told you,' Billy said. ‘Told you.'

‘You can't possibly have seen, Billy,' Marjorie said in exasperation. ‘You didn't even look. You didn't have time.'

‘I told you,' Billy said, squaring up to Marjorie's irritation. ‘I did look.'

He walked off, leaving Marjorie staring after him with a puzzled frown.

‘What seems to be the trouble?' Mrs Alderman wondered, as she came to pin a new list to the board, one announcing the various times for the daily meals. ‘You two look a bit lost. Oh, it's you, Marjorie, dear,' she said, recognising her young friend. ‘What are you bothering with the billet lists for? You got your own little place, dear.'

‘It's Miss Maddox here, Mrs Alderman. She doesn't seem to have been allocated a bed.'

‘I've got my section all right,' Kate added. ‘But nowhere to sleep.'

Mrs Alderman consulted both the board and the list of names in the large ledger she was carrying under her arm. She scratched her head then shook it.

‘Strange,' she sighed. ‘I thought I'd done everyone. What I have done is fill all available beds—'

‘Oh dear, so I haven't anywhere to sleep?' Kate interrupted.

‘There's a spare bed in the cottage, Mrs Alderman,' Marjorie said. ‘There are two beds in my room so Miss Maddox could easily sleep there. If that's all right.'

‘That's the answer then,' Mrs Alderman agreed, closing her ledger. ‘Long as it's all right with you two?'

It turned out, at least from the look on Billy's face, to be very all right.

*     *     *

Later that afternoon the series of newly installed bells rang through the house, a signal for everyone to assemble once again in the main hall, where they found Major Folkestone and Miss Browne seated on a small podium awaiting them.

‘Quiet, please, everyone!' Major Folkestone called over the hubbub. ‘Quiet please!'

Everyone fell to silence and turned to face the major, who was placing some sheets of paper on a lectern in front of him.

‘Good, thank you – good,' he began. ‘First of all a formal welcome to Eden Park, and I hope you have all settled in. Now – I won't beat about the bush. This isn't a holiday camp or a hotel, so I'm not going to give you any tips about where you can swim or ride a horse or get your hair done or anything like that. Like Miss Browne and me, you are all here to undertake vital tasks, at a very important time. I don't need to remind you that we stand on the brink of war. I doubt very much if we'll go another week without a formal declaration and the commencement of hostilities.' He paused. ‘This might well be the most critical phase in our island's history since the Spanish Armada. We face a very dangerous foe, and if and when war is declared we also face the very real possibility of an invasion. We've seen the invaders off before, of course, and I have no doubt we shall see this chap off as well, but—' There was an outbreak of applause. ‘No – no applause, please. Very kind, I'm sure,' the major said with a nod, holding his hand up. ‘But I'm not addressing troops here – I'm not trying to rally you all to the call. I'm simply trying to put you in the picture. So that you may
understand why you have all been brought here at considerable trouble and expense, because if and when the balloon goes up you can put fun and games right out of your minds.'

He cleared his throat.

‘You've all been hand-picked, as you know, because you're said to be good at what you do. Just as importantly, you are also deemed to be trustworthy, loyal and utterly reliable. Good qualities – admirable ones, and when you understand the nature of the work we shall all be engaged upon you will see why it is so important that everyone here is trustworthy, loyal and utterly reliable. The operations in which we shall all be involved are classed as top security. You will be working for the government under the auspices of the War Office. In other words, the work we shall all be doing is classed as Top Secret. This means that each of you is required to sign the Official Secrets Act. For those of you who may be unclear as to what precisely signing the OSA involves, it simply means you are sworn to secrecy about every single facet of your work and existence here, as well as every single fact about Eden Park itself and any information that may come your way while you are engaged in the activities for which you are employed. Should you break the trust invested in you by revealing to any other person the nature of your work, the identity of your colleagues, or any information you have gathered in the course of your work, then if apprehended, charged and found guilty you will suffer the punishment that all traitors suffer.

‘Now I want this firmly understood in case in the
excitement or the heat of the moment you find yourself forgetting the importance of your work and its confidentiality. Loose tongues cost lives – and never more so than in this case, in the work we shall all be doing here – since we shall be dealing with the lives of agents and operatives. This place is so important it is as if you were at the Front itself.

‘Finally, I have to tell you that now you are all here, now that you have accepted the work offered to you by our field officers, there is no turning back. You may only leave here once you have obtained Special Leave, but even if you do you will still be bound by the OSA in effect for life. That means that if you commit treachery thirty years after leaving here and are discovered, believe me, you could still pay the ultimate price. As far as your day-to-day existence goes, no one leaves the grounds without a Special Pass, and that pass can only be issued by myself. So I strongly recommend you keep on the right side of me, especially in the case of compassionate leave – or
passionate
leave as I understand it is more commonly known.'

When the ripple of nervous laughter had died down, Major Folkestone continued.

‘You have all been assigned to a section, and each section has its Section Head to whom you are immediately answerable. But finally all roads lead to me, so if there are any special problems, tell your Head of Section, and they will tell me. Good luck to you all.'

Major Folkestone sat down to a round of applause that while respectful was more than a
little muted as the assembled company looked round at each other, all of them at last facing the facts of their new existence.

‘Cripes,' said Billy, when Marjorie and Kate had put him in the picture. ‘Will I have to sign it as well?'

‘You could do, Billy,' Marjorie replied. ‘I mean you are here for the duration, aren't you?'

‘Crikey,' Billy said again. ‘This is exciting, at least it's
really
exciting, not just not exciting like it has been up until now.'

‘Major Folkestone told me that if there is a war, he's got some special tasks earmarked for you, Billy.'

‘What?' Billy asked incredulously. ‘What sort of things?'

‘I don't know,' Marjorie said with a look to Kate. ‘He wouldn't tell me. It's too Top Secret.'

For ever after Marjorie remembered the look in Billy's eyes when he realised that even though he was too young to carry a rifle, he was not too young to play a part in the defence of his country.

Three days later, on 3 September, slightly earlier than predicted by Major Folkestone, Neville Chamberlain broadcast the Declaration of War. Everyone at Eden Park heard the broadcast, and at its closing stood up for the National Anthem. In the silence that followed they listened to Major Folkestone order what was now a platoon of soldiers stationed in the house to lock all gates to the Park, and to mount constant armed sentry patrols, while from the windows of their bedrooms
on the third floor of the great house its new inmates gazed out at the countryside beyond the estate walls, a land now seemingly forbidden to them, but a land whose freedom they must do everything in their power to preserve.

 

‘
One bond unites us all, to wage war until victory is won and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony may
be …'

Winston S. Churchill

 

Part Two

ENGLAND AT WAR

Chapter Eleven

The weather was cold and bleak, and Poppy Tetherington was no more. She had ceased to exist. She had vanished from the scene, leaving behind only rumour. Word was that her marriage to the late Lord Tetherington, although brief, had been such an unmitigated nightmare that on learning of his death she had upped sticks and fled from the hell that was Mellerfont, headed it was said for America, and no doubt the infinitely preferable company of her parents.

Not that anyone cared very much, the fact being that the now missing Poppy Beaumont had few friends and had attracted next to no attention in the Society in which her mother had been so anxious for her to move. As Lady Tetherington, so short and uncharismatic had been the tenure of Basil Tetherington's timid, bespectacled young wife at Mellerfont, that most who had visited the gloomy Victorian pile would barely have been able to put a face to her, let alone describe her character. The only gatherings she might have been expected to host had been the shooting parties from which Basil had largely excluded her, and as for venturing out, Poppy had attended one private dance and a couple
of large dinner parties at similarly disposed houses where she had spent the time either being ignored or listening dutifully to her fellow diners' post-prandial complaints about their husbands.

Poppy's disappearance from the social calendar, therefore, went unsurprisingly completely unremarked. Besides, at this particular moment in England's history, its inhabitants had things of far greater import to occupy their minds than the fate of a dead aristocrat's unmemorable young American wife. This suited Jack Ward's game plan admirably, as well as that of Cissie Lavington, the woman to whom Jack sent Poppy to be ‘turned around', as he called it.

Cissie Lavington was in her early middle age, good-looking in an even-featured handsome way, her strong face marred only by the black silk eye-patch she sported over her left eye.

‘Shot in the eye by mistake while horsing around,' Jack had told Poppy in advance. ‘Lucky not to have been killed as it happens. Not that she'd tell you that. She treats the whole thing as a huge joke. It just happened as the result of a bit of roughhousing.'

Happily she and Poppy took to each other at once, Poppy unaware that many of her pupils had found Miss Lavington altogether too daunting for words, thrown off balance at the outset by this tall, statuesque woman with her remarkable bone structure, lustrous auburn hair and her chainsmoking habit, the Black Russian cigarettes she so enjoyed housed in a long ivory holder, a prop she used to help describe any salient point she was intent on making.

‘They certainly dressed you up well, my dear,' she had remarked when Poppy and she first were introduced. ‘Wish I could afford rags like that. But on my pay all I can afford is drab.'

Poppy smiled at the obviously quite intentionally absurd comment, as the woman doing the complaining looked as though she had just stepped straight from the catwalk.

‘Manners are the first thing we're going to tackle, my dear,' Cissie had continued. ‘Not that one's manners aren't as good as gold, doncher know, but there's the rub, d'you see? Your manners I bet are more than a mitey
too
good, and all that. What we got to teach you, my lady, is disdain. You got to learn to look as though you have a bad smell under yer nose. Only people good enough for you are the people who are as good as you – and the Lord only knows they're few and far between, doncher know? Got it? You know the sort of beast I'm talking about. And that's the sort of beast we have to turn you into. Gawd help you. The sort of deeply horrid person that as far as I can twig poor you was married to. Yes? The sort of person who's so busy despising the rest of humanity that his woods become trees, and his trees become woods, and he wants to get rid of all those he considers to be beneath him, doncher know.'

‘Quite correct,' Poppy agreed, after a short pause, because it did seem to sum up Basil really rather well.

‘Does one remember why one took on and married this beast in the first place?'

‘One does,' Poppy returned gravely. ‘One thinks,' she went on, catching on to the game that
Cissie Lavington was playing, ‘one remembers, that is, that one's mother had been such a success during the Season, unlike one, that one had to end off one's months as a debutante having a wedding to make her feel she had been the great success she had undoubtedly been, most especially since she was leaving for America and all her friends in her luncheon club would have been disappointed if the whole thing hadn't ended in a titled alliance, d'you see?'

Perhaps because Poppy kept such an admirably straight face during her speech, Cissie Lavington found this unbearably funny, as she was meant to do, and dissolved into paeans of laughter, involving much spilling of ash down her silk blouse, before starting again.