Lilies Of The Field

By Maureen O'Donoghue

Invited back to Trewithian, Sally leaves her sophisticated life in London for the island home of her childhood.
She is drawn back into the warm welcome of the villagers, intoxicated by the heady scent of the lilies growing around the great house and by the blooming of a new romance.
Her homecoming seems perfect, until she stumbles upon a shocking secret from her family’s past – a secret shared by a murderous enemy determined that she will never leave Trewithian again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maureen O'Donoghue
• Release date: Aug 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476130699

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LILLIES OF THE FIELD

By

MAUREEN O’DONOGHUE

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Maureen O’Donoghue

Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

OTHER BOOKS BY MAUREEN O’DONOGHUE

WILD HONEY TIME

Winner of the Pen Club’s Frederick Niven Award

Available Smashwords 2013

JEDDER’S LAND

Smashwords 2011

WINNER

Available Smashwords 2012

THE TRUTH IN THE MIRROR

A modern relationship novel

Available Smashwords 2013

THE LAZY GARDENER

available 2013

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER ONE

Lilies always evoke Trewythian with their opiate perfume and erotic splendour. The Madonna lily is the family emblem, assumed during the Crusades to signify devotion to Our Lady and borne ever since on the blue field of the coat of arms. Lilies were carved on the newel posts of the wide staircase, molded in the friezes and cornices which decorated the high ceilings and painted in the portraits of female ancestors. In my memory, the house was always filled with vases carelessly crammed with this most exquisite of flowers and it was always summer.

As I picked up the small painting, the scent was so powerful that I was swept back instantly to the secret garden sheltered by ancient yew where my father had spent so many years cross-pollinating the Lilium candidum beloved by the family with oriental and North American species to develop new varieties and hybrids. I could see his head bent over the candelabra umbels as his camel-hair brush stroked the stigmas of each bloom with bee-like delicacy. Heat shimmered up from the earth and wrapped around the house so that it seemed about to evaporate and leave only an opaline mist in the air. There was no sound, not even a bird sang, but the tang of the evergreen mingled with the sweet breath of the flower beds and drifted up to the window where my spirit waited. For a few moments, I was overpowered by that conspiracy of delight and tranquility created by coming home. For I was brought up in Trewythian, on the moorland-covered island, before our exile.

The great house and its gardens were so surrounded by high walls and hedges that they were like an island within the island. For centuries, the sea had tried to invade the land and the moor had laid siege to the house. Each had exacted a tribute; the ocean gouging caves out of the cliffs and the moor taking lives, the lives of Trewythians.

Ann Trewythian, lost without trace in 1695; one hundred years later, Ben Trewythian sucked into one of the treacherous bogs and, from the next generation, John Trewythian frozen to death on Vodan Tor. My father said it was not the moor taking its toll, but the house withdrawing its protection, for each of these Trewythians had been in some form a usurper.

The family had made its fortune through shipping, first carrying silk and spices and tea, indulging in some unofficial but profitable plundering of Spanish galleons, then trading slaves and steaming with passengers to India and, most recently, through cruises. Our liners, many of which had been requisitioned by the government for use against the enemy during the Great War, had been magnificently refurbished by the Trewythian Shipping Line and were once again sailing monarchs, aristocrats and the very rich around the world in voluptuous luxury.

The long wing of the house was ours when I was a child; my father being the younger of two brothers and running the estate, while my uncle dealt with the business. Life had seemed idyllic until their quarrel, years ago.

Suddenly, raised voices had echoed around the great hall, shocking to hear in a setting where reserved politeness had always been the order, causing James and Richard and me to avoid each other's eyes and the servants to strain their ears and my mother to leave her davenport and move swiftly past me with a face set like steel.

The instant she opened the library door the shouting had stopped, to be replaced by a silence which was far worse, frightening and weighty with portent, unbroken during the days that followed and accompanied by strained expressions and the sensation that the entire household was creeping about its business trying to be invisible. My cousins succeeded in vanishing altogether until we were in the motor car ready to leave for the harbour, when they emerged, wide-eyed, from the shrubbery to wave goodbye.

Even as the island was fading into the past, war was being declared. My adored father, the anchor of my life, was snatched away to France and, at the London High School for girls to which I was sent, the privacy and freedom which had been mine were fractured once and for all.

There was no more time for the preoccupations of a country child, mysterious and absorbed, the solitary reflections in the refuge of leaf-covered branches or hollow trees, or by the microcosmic pools left in the rocks by receding tides. Now, there was a syllabus for the mind and exercise was provided in organised team games

There could be no aimless rambles across the empty moor and along the shore, full of pauses and detours which would have seemed without reason to an onlooker, but were to explore a gully, or watch a tribe of ants in their tireless industry, or track down the nest from which the ringed plover was trying to lure me by dragging her wing to feign injury, setting herself up with immaculate courage as my prey. And there, in a depression by my feet, the eggs would be, creamy with dark blotches, such perfect imitations of the surrounding pebbles that another step might have destroyed them had my sight not been keen. School walks were forced marches in crocodile procession around a park, keeping strictly to the paths.

Tall buildings reduced the huge skies I had thought were immutable to a narrow margin, which smoke and fog obscured so that the nights revealed no stars. Instead of the haunting cries of the seagulls and the persistent whisper of wind and sea, bells clanged and motor car horns blared and costermongers and news vendors shouted and swore.

My life, which had been peopled only by those I had known since birth, became crowded with strangers; pushy, urban girls at school, lofty, ambitious students later at college, and milling city dwellers everywhere. I had been like a snared animal in the beginning, agitated by inexpressible feelings and dumb against the invasion, an outsider. But gradually I had mimicked their phrases and mannerisms and assumed a camouflage of flamboyant clothes until I passed as one of them now.

Memories of the island and the house had been evicted from my mind, along with that lingering ache which accompanies recollections of a lost dream, a place to which there can be no return.

So tangible was the illusion of the scent and the resurrection of the past it had provoked that I was startled to come to myself again and find that I was still standing in the London gallery staring at the gilt-framed lilies spilling from their vase onto a mahogany surface.

Although the signature was illegible, the painting was obviously the work of a talented Victorian. With that period now so out of favour, it was worth at most a few pounds. Yet there was something familiar about it.

I raised my eyebrows in query at the man who had brought it in.

He shrugged. Belonged to some cove's aunty. She passed on.

A wiry man with thin, black hair, Bernie Smith appeared sometimes with paintings such as this, picked up at country auctions, or from unsuspecting householders in the West of England. Once in a while, he produced a real find.

Behind me, in the office, I heard the drone of David's voice discussing commission with a visiting artist.

Ain't you going to give your guv'nor a shout then? The dealer jerked his head in the direction of the open door, making it clear he knew I was an underling, with no financial status.

The fragrance of lilies still hung faintly in the air and the little picture settled, as though it belonged, in my hands. My father, had he been alive, would have loved it.

How much do you want? I asked on impulse, forgetting all the rules of bargaining David had taught me.

The dealer rubbed his chin and his eyes grew crafty.

That one? he countered, giving himself time to wonder if I had been promoted and to reckon how far he dared go to take advantage of my inexperience. Apparently I created no impression as a tactician, because he decided to play for the highest stakes. I couldn't let you have that one cheap. That one's eighteenth century Dutch, a genuine van Huysum. I'd stake my reputation on it.

Then it's a good thing you've nothing to lose, Bernie. David had appeared unexpectedly, showing his visitor out. He looked over my arm at the painting. That one's probably the result of some Victorian virgin trying to keep her mind off her fiancé’s manly contours. I don't think it's quite us, do you?

He turned to me quizzically. His own taste was for cubism and Picasso, very avant-garde.

Oh, I wasn't trying to act for the gallery, I said, flushing slightly. I'd thought of buying it myself. I...I rather like it.

Well, why didn't you say so? the dealer put in, not at all disconcerted by having his bluff called. For you, princess, no more than fifty quid.

You must mean five, surely, David said automatically, gazing at me with a disenchanted expression.

On my life, guv. I paid more than three times that for it and I've got to make a living, the dealer protested, taking the damp cigarette from his mouth and cupping it in his palm. 'A pony...twenty five."

Ten.

Fifteen.

Twelve guineas, and not a penny more.

I'm a martyr to myself and a pretty face. That's God's truth. Bernie Smith gave in, shaking his head, grinning, replacing the cigarette between his lips and holding out a hand for the money with practised flow.

It was four pounds and twelve shillings more than I had in my bank account. David put his fingers to his forehead in an exaggerated gesture of disbelief and faded back to the office as I scrawled my name and hoped that my cheque would be honoured.

If I'd known you had that sort of money to play with, Sally dear, there's a charming little Paul Wather you could have had, or the Claude Flight, a real investment, David chided, as I leant my purchase against the office wall a few minutes later.

You're asking a fortune for the Flight, I pointed out.

Ducky, if you can throw away golden sovereigns on pretty flowers that would hardly do justice to a calendar, you must be flush, he retorted, acidly. Whatever's going to catch your unerring eye next? Illustrated wall texts?

It reminds me of my childhood, I said.

How sweet, he murmured. What's childhood?

David had found me at the end of my last year at the Slade School of Art through an advertisement in a magazine which read, Menial wanted in gallery. Lack of experience and opinions necessary.

Without making an appointment, I had turned up at the chic premises off Bond Street wearing a frock, embroidered with Egyptian hieroglyphics, and sandals.

Terribly Tutankhamen, David had breathed. You'll do.

The gallery was as I imagined a Greek interior to be, divided by arches under a low ceiling. Careful lighting gave each work individual drama and created the impression of filtered sunlight as though a hot, bleached, skeletal country lay beyond the doors, instead of a mercantile thoroughfare. The paintings were modern and there were a few sculptures. The Epstein head in bronze, rather oddly given a discrete position in one corner, drew the eye nevertheless, but was not for sale. It belonged to David. I felt more comfortable here than I had felt anywhere for a very long time.

It was agreed I should start work that Saturday and as I was about to leave, naively basking in what I thought was his approval, he had beckoned me to wait, hurried into his office and returned with a piece of white paper which he thrust at me.

Trot along Oxford Street and find a pair of those divine strappy shoes with 'Louis' heels and some silk stockings, poppet.

I stared at the five pound note.

I couldn't pay this back and I can't afford to buy from West End shops, I said.

And my humble establishment cannot afford for you not to, David had replied, viewing my outfit with obvious fascination. You see, it doesn't matter what else you wear, dear child, as long as your shoes are expensive.

It was the first of many lessons he was to teach me. Flippancy masked his uncompromising intelligence and bitchiness disguised his generosity and a relaxed demeanour hid his expertise. Since that first meeting, I had not only been taught more by him about paintings and painters than in four years study of fine art, I had also learnt a lot (though not nearly enough) about the greed, chicanery, ruthlessness, hoaxing and outright forgery which make up the art business.

There had been no time to become acquaintances. Our friendship formed so fast that we had been like old friends straight away, swopping gossip and bickering and soon giving each other support when life bloodied our noses.

When David's wife left him, I had to conceal my surprise at discovering he was married. Until then we had talked of little but art and I had wrongly assumed he was what was sometimes referred to as 'a curiosity'.

Bleeding hearts always remind me of Valentine cards, so bourgeois, but I suppose you'll need some sort of explanation. He dropped his suitcase on the office floor and handed me the note she had left on their dining table. She always was a remarkably precise woman.

There was just one line of writing on the piece of paper.

'Bored with you and the grass on the other side is greener.'

I flinched.

Life was becoming just too tedious anyway; shirts perfectly laundered, fresh flowers about the place, dinner a deux right on time each evening. David rocked back on two legs of the chair with his hands behind his head. His full face looked flaccid, as though his skin had lost its elasticity. It's time one sought amusement.

I remember being unsure of how to react and rather embarrassed in case he broke down or made some kind of scene. Displays of emotion had always been frowned on in the family and I was still cocooned in the smug nescience of youth. I had not yet experienced betrayal.

She'll be back in a day or two, I offered, feebly. It's probably just some sort of gesture.

An indelicate gesture, ducky. She won't be back.

He wandered out into his cool gallery and stood in front of each picture in turn. At last, he lifted an abstract off its hook and carried it upstairs.

I need not have worried that he would impose his despair upon me. If anything, he became even more outré, flouncing impatiently away from prospective clients who could not make up their minds immediately, telling scandalous tales about everyone we knew, dashing out to shop compulsively and return with presents for the same people he had slandered and more and more pieces for the upstairs flat, into which he had moved. Paintings and drawings, busts and carvings, antiques and porcelain, even Victorian bric-a-brac: Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism., Vorticism, pastiche, no style or school was scorned. For a few weeks his own austere perception seemed to desert him. It was as though he were trying to replace her with beautiful artefacts, or perhaps with just one perfect object, which he could not find.

Every day he planned a new future, each more inappropriate to his temperament than the last. He would travel Arabia for the rest of his days, or buy a bookshop in Winchester. He would sell the gallery and become a country squire. He would sell the gallery, give the money to charity and become a tramp. He did not need possessions, he assured me airily, and an hour later appeared loaded down with more purchases.

Theatre outings and dinner parties organised to divert him from the forthcoming divorce failed, of course. His desolation was too genuine for his wit to conceal and it was piteous even to my own green perceptions.

I came across a photograph of David's wife in a drawer some time later, a gentle faced girl, with a long body and dark hair. It was easy to see why she had appealed to him. She was like a Modigliani. But the brutality of her departure was proof that appearances can deceive.

Then, without warning, it was my turn to be rejected and to need consolation.

I could not begin to understand what I had seen that lunchtime after delivering a painting to an American staying at the Ritz.

The daffodils were out in Green Park and, as I walked across the grass, there was my lover, sitting with his back to me. Although I had not known he would be there, I felt no surprise. Our relationship had been full of such coincidences, unplanned meetings, simultaneous notes, speaking identical words in unison, the echoing of the same thoughts; all of which had convinced me, although I needed little persuasion, that we were indeed destined for each other.

So I began to trip happily towards him, planning to put my hands over his eyes and hear him guess my name. Then I noticed a woman lying beside him, too close to be some stranger enjoying the sun. His wife, I thought at once, stopping, full of dismay and inquisitiveness, wondering how to take a proper look at her without being seen. Then he leant over, so that her head and the line of her body became visible and I saw that she was not his wife. I recognised Bea, the girl who shared my flat. And he was kissing her, which was not possible.

To the very young everything is forever, faith cannot be broken, principles are absolute, life will never end and, above all, love is eternal. Hurrying away so quickly from the scene, I was able to reassure myself almost at once that there had been a mistake. I had only glimpsed them, I had not really seen them. Nothing had happened.

In my naivety, to love was synonymous with being loved. I loved him, ergo he must love me. It did not cross my mind that the woman to whom he was married might also love him, since he said he did not love her.

Max broke promises and appointments and I made excuses for him. Bea bought more new clothes and went out most evenings. Trapped in the smothering courtesy of my own upbringing, I was unable to confront them and as, with agonising slowness, my disbelief was replaced at last by bewilderment, I finally packed and left one day without a word.

At first I took the train to the small house my mother had bought in Chichester after my education had been completed. She looked up from her tapestry and smiled her distant smile as I walked in. I wanted to run to her and tell her I had been deceived. I wanted to cry and be cradled. Instead, I drank the tea she offered and talked of the journey and the weather, and she eventually enquired politely if I planned to stay long.

Only for the weekend, I replied, although it had been my original intention never to return to London.

We made pleasant conversation about her charity work and my job, sitting one each side of the open fire, not quite strangers. It had always been so. My mother looked coolly upon the world and remained aloof, revealing nothing of herself and encouraging no exchange of confidences. As a child, my practical needs had been met and I had been subject to few tangible restraints. Later, she had raised no objection, as many parents might have done, when I decided to remain in the city and share a flat with Bea. My friends had envied me. I could not complain, but my visit seemed quite pointless.

On Monday morning I kissed her on the cheek and went back to town. I did not mention that I was about to accept David's offer to join him in the apartment over the gallery, although I was sure she would not have protested if I had. She would have assumed my upbringing had ensured my propriety in all matters.

Each night, David would mix cocktails with risqué names - Between-the-Sheets; Bosom Caressers and Bloody Marys - and produce a plateful of canapés, which he had made himself, to accompany them. My favourites were green olives stuffed with nuts dipped into Gentleman's Relish and wrapped in a strip of bacon. The writer Somerset Maugham served these in his villa in the South of France, David told me proudly, although I had been taught it was not really done to discuss food. He dropped them into my mouth as though I were a fledgling.

Once again, his exaggerated personality and my ingrained self-control colluded to cause us to behave as though nothing were wrong, which did not lessen my disillusionment, but did seem to soften my humiliation.

On this particular evening I waited until I could hear David humming contentedly in the kitchen before fetching my new picture. Gloating over it in his presence would have been insensitive and I knew it would have to hang out of his sight in the privacy of my own bedroom.

The pollen on the swollen anthers of the painted lilies dripped onto the pure white petals and seemed so real that I held the canvas away from my clothes. There was a fleeting memory of the way I had once tried to avoid being brushed by pollen on a staircase somewhere, instinctively drawing back from the wall as I passed, in case the brilliant yellow marked my skin with that indelible stain no amount of scrubbing can remove.

Where had it been? Botanical plant sketches decorated most of the walls of my mother's Sussex house. The school hall and stairs had displayed reproductions of Constable and Renoir and Gainsborough, and the main staircase at Trewythian was hung with hunting studies and the portraits of fleshy ancestors.

I held the painting above me. A twist of excitement squeezed my stomach. I had been quite small and exploring a musty, narrow staircase, afraid of being discovered, and I had looked up suddenly to see the huge lilies hanging over me, their bright powdery potency about to rain down on my hair and face. Where? I could hear my father laughing somewhere as I crept up on the memory step by step and caught, at last, the winding stairs leading to Miss Tarreg's room, where I had been forbidden to go as a child. This painting had hung there. Unlit in heavy shadow, it had seemed larger and darker then, but I was certain it was the same.

CHAPTER TWO

David was measuring out Calvados, brandy and sweet vermouth from a cabinet designed to look like a small bookcase.

Isn't it extraordinary? I relayed the coincidence to him. It must be fate.

Well, I expect you know best, but, frankly, it strains my credulity to believe that Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos would consider such a mundane floral daub worth the effort. He gave the exhibit a frosty glance while flamboyantly rattling the silver shaker like maracas to a Latin American beat; then, seeing my incomprehension, he added. The three Goddesses of Fate, dear.

All right, you explain how it left Trewythian and found its way to me, I demanded, defensively.

Your Miss Whatsit nabbed it, flogged it for a shilling to old Bernie, who knew you were the only client in London bird-brained enough to part with hard money for it. David strained the cocktail with a flourish and went on. Honestly, Sally, use your head. There are thousands of little exercises like that around, and the romantic piece of nonsense you saw in your infancy is still up the back stairs of the family pile covered with mildew.

I suppose so. Agreeing that he was probably right in no way lessened my pleasure in my acquisition.

Have a Corpse Reviver, he offered, graciously handing me a misted glass.

I could not sleep that night for longing for the island and the past, when everything had seemed so certain. I pictured again the lupine heather prowling down from the Tor, devouring the ridge over Yelland and the low hills above the village, attacking ancient pastures, inching forward until it was clawing at the old perimeter walls around the house of Trewythian, pushing through wherever there was a weakness. If a labourer from the village had not replaced and cemented the loosened stones, the wall would have fallen and the garden been swallowed back into the moor long ago. Like his father and grandfather before him, this worker had been set to the task as a boy and now he was an old man.

The heather saturated the island with colour, harshly verdant and most pervasive with new growth in spring, shocking as a purple flamed bush fire in autumn and dark as a waiting predator in winter. It scented our world and filled the air with bees. It concealed the perilous pools where the unwary drowned. It gave bedding to our beasts and the peat from which it grew warmed our homes. We strode across its tough and springy surface with enjoyment and hacked at its voracious hunger with blades of steel, yet we nested in it safely along with the birds far above the ocean on top of that massive formation of granite, isolated when the southern sea slowly spread northwards, cutting off England from Ireland three hundred million years ago.

Beneath Stag Height stood the manor, which had evolved century by century almost by stealth into an entrancing fusion of styles; the remains of a Norman ruin having been incorporated into later mediaeval fortifications constructed under royal licence against attack by sea. Stone from the island quarry had extended the building. A couple