Where Earth Meets Sky Read online

  ‘Before my marriage, I was a trained nanny, you see,’ she explained to Lily one day in the flower-scented drawing room. ‘I lived with some beautiful families – and some of the dear little ones still write to me, now they’re older.’ Her eyes filled every time she talked about her charges. ‘There’s not much I don’t know about small children.’ She gave a sigh then, also. ‘I should have liked more of my own, but it was not to be.’

  As time passed, she grew to require more and more of Lily’s company.

  ‘You’re such an intelligent, gentle girl, and so very lovely. I can teach you, you see, if you like. If you learn about looking after small children, and a little elocution to correct that accent, you could have a very promising future.’

  Over the last five years, especially with the arrival of her five grandchildren, who she looked after as often as her daughters-in-law would let her, Mrs Chappell had more than made up for Lily’s lost education, and had also taught Lily everything she knew about the care of young children: diet and feeding, how to play with and handle them and all their infant needs of warmth and cleanliness, their training and how to remedy their maladies. Over the years Lily learned all sorts: how to soothe a child’s temperature with a wet pack, to put an infant with croup in a mustard bath or induce vomiting with ipecacuanha wine, to paint a tincture of iodine on a patch of ringworm, or treat scabies with Balsam of Peru. Mrs Chappell’s training of Lily became a labour of love and Lily was an eager student, thriving as much upon affection as education. She taught her to read and write beautifully, and speak in a more genteel manner, flattening out her Birmingham accent.

  ‘You really are turning into quite a young lady!’ she said sometimes, watching her with pride. As Lily grew older and entered her twenties, Mrs Chappell didn’t want to let her go to another position in the world. She needed her too much herself. And Lily had no wish to go either, from this home where she was loved and valued, after the cruel beginning life had dealt her.

  Mrs Chappell never asked much about Lily’s past. Lily was grateful, since she could remember so little and what she could remember, about living with the Hornes, she preferred to push from her memory. Maud Chappell asked only a few gentle questions and Lily told her that Mrs Horne had been good to her, which she had, until she died, leaving Lily at the mercy of her drunken husband and cruel daughters. But she did not want to think of them, of the agony and loneliness of that time. And Mrs Chappell simply saw something in her that it suited both of them to develop. The other maids working in the house at that time had been envious and spiteful about Lily’s rise up the ranks.

  ‘You’re the favourite all right, ain’t you?’ they’d say. ‘What makes you so blooming special, Miss La-di-dah?’

  Apart from Cook, those maids had all gone now, and the new ones coming into the house accepted things as they were. Lily enjoyed their company – Mary and Fanny and Joan – and knew she was going to miss them terribly now the household was all to be broken up. Only Joan, the youngest, was staying in the family, as she was being taken on by Mr John Chappell’s wife.

  Lily gazed at her own face in the glass now, suddenly deeply confused and frightened. All these years she had had a place. Now she had to go out and face the world alone.

  That week, Horace and John Chappell, with the help of the staff who they kept on for the purpose, were clearing the house with great speed. Two of the maids, Mary and Fanny, were paid off immediately, and there were tearful farewells as they left the house for the last time with their modest bags of belongings.

  Lily found it heartbreaking, watching her home of so many years being taken to pieces and having no say in the matter. Furniture began to disappear, workmen in overalls came and took away dressers and cupboards, rugs were rolled up and now their feet clumped loudly on the bare floorboards. Mrs Chappell’s elegant curtains were taken from the windows in the drawing room. More than once, Lily found Cook weeping into the pastry in the kitchen, and she kept dissolving into tears herself. It wasn’t just the house. Although Horace Chappell was unkind, his brother John was a more gentle character, and she was genuinely fond of all their children, whom she had known since they were born. Now she would never see them again!

  As her illness progressed, Mrs Chappell had said, ‘What you need to do, Lily dear, when I’m gone, is to apply for a position in The Lady. You’re quite experienced enough to work as a nanny for a family after all I’ve taught you. You’re just the sort of girl a good family would be crying out for.’

  Remembering Mrs Chappell’s advice, she went in search of a copy of The Lady, a genteel women’s publication in which were advertised posts for nannies and companions. One hot afternoon she sat out on the terrace at the back of the house, half in the shade of a laburnum, and looked at the positions on offer. She drew a ring round two of them. One was for a family by the name of Clutterbuck, who had just had a baby girl and wanted a nanny very quickly. They lived in Dorset. Lily was not absolutely sure where Dorset was but it seemed a possibility. There was another similar in Scotland, but it was a place she always thought of as dreary and cold. But the third advertisement made her heart pick up speed. A nanny was required by a Mrs Susan Fairford, wife of Captain Charles Fairford of the 12th Royal Lancers, stationed at Ambala, India, for their son, aged two. The address to apply to was in Chislehurst in Kent.

  Lily looked up from the magazine and stared unseeingly at the rose beds along the side of the house. India! Her head reeled. She was bewildered, afraid and suddenly full of excitement. India was the other side of the world! It was so different she could barely imagine it, except for other pictures she had seen in books of people riding elephants and one she remembered of a huge, waving grove of something called bamboo. But she was already captivated. She already knew she was going to apply for the position and go far away from this place, now all that had kept her here was gone. She had no one now. For a moment she thought about Mrs Horne. She was the only person she had ever called mother – but she was not her mother. Why had Mrs Horne brought her up in her kindly but rough and ready way? What had happened to her real mother and father?

  ‘They did a flit one night, according to the neighbours,’ Mrs Horne had told her. ‘Hadn’t been there long, in any case. They said she was dark and pretty like a gypsy, and expecting another child. All I know is, there you were playing in the gutter, all alone in just a little camisole, in the pouring rain. But I don’t s’pose you’ll ever find out now, bab. Best not think about it.’

  Lily knew there was no hope of ever finding out about her origins, and it hurt too much, looking back. She had moved too far from Mrs Horne, from growing up in Sparkbrook. She would start again, clean and fresh, and with sudden resolve she hurried up the now uncarpeted stairs to her attic room, sat at her little table and took the references Horace Chappell had handed her out of their thick envelope.

  But looking down at the sheets of paper with her name at the top of Mrs Chappell’s glowing reference, that desperate, lost feeling washed through her again. Her name, LILIAN HORNE, was written in capital letters at the top in Mrs Chappell’s immaculate copperplate script.

  Little Lilian Horne. Whoever was she? Had she not been playing the part of someone else all these years, someone who Mrs Chappell needed her to be, and whose identity she had now taken on herself?

  She stood up and went again to the glass on her chest of drawers and her face stared back at her, strong-featured, with her burning dark eyes, her thick, wavy chestnut hair modestly fastened back and her demure, white-frilled blouse at her neck. It was the look of a respectable young woman, one who was now nicely spoken, genteel. Not an abandoned slum child fit only for the workhouse, the way the two Horne girls had made her feel. They’d always made sure she was a cuckoo in the nest, with their cruel tricks, their slaps and scratches.

  ‘Not Lilian Horne,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not a Horne and I never was.’

  She sat at her little table and opened its drawer, where she had some writing paper. Beside i
t in the drawer were three books. The one on top was a book of wildflowers, sketched by a John Waters. For a moment she picked it up and looked at it.

  Lily dipped her pen into the bottle of ink, and began, painstakingly, to copy out the references again, well instructed in mimicking Mrs Chappell’s elegant hand. At the top of the page, in large letters, she gave her name: LILY WATERS.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Miss Waters?’

  The maid had shown Lily into the parlour of the Chislehurst house to face a small, plump woman with a harassed expression and faded blond hair curling round the edge of a white bonnet. She found herself appraised by pale blue eyes, but somehow the experience was not as frightening as she expected. The house, though a fair size, was shabbier than the one in Hall Green! And she could hear children’s voices, squabbling in the background somewhere.

  ‘My name is Mrs Burton,’ the woman said, distractedly. ‘I am Mrs Fairford’s sister. Please, do take a seat.’

  She indicated an upright chair with a slightly moth-eaten seat cover, while she perched on another wooden chair nearby, her feet, in their laced brown boots, barely touching the floor. For a moment they both looked at one another. Mrs Burton seemed at a loss. She was obviously not used to the job in hand.

  ‘Well, you’re here, anyway.’ There was a pause in which Lily wondered what she was supposed to say, but this was followed by, ‘You have come all the way from Birmingham, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  The woman pressed the tips of her fingers to her forehead as if to gather her thoughts, then said, ‘My sister, Mrs Fairford, has asked me to find a nanny for her son, Cosmo – he’s just two years old. If my sister was in the country herself, she would be doing the interviews.’

  There was another awkward silence in which it occurred to Lily’s interviewer that she might peer at the references provided, holding them as far away from her as her short arms would permit.

  ‘These are very good – very!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mrs Burton rested the paper in her lap and squinted slightly. ‘Are you a proper nanny?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said, as Mrs Chappell had told her to, speaking slowly in her best, well-spoken English. ‘I’ve had a very good training and considerable experience of looking after five young ones. I don’t think I’d have any problem with one little boy.’

  ‘No, quite. And . . . What about India? You did realize you’d have to sail the seas? Live quite the other side of the world!’

  ‘Yes. I should welcome the adventure.’

  ‘Well, Susan hates it!’ This seemed to slip out by mistake and the colour rose in Mrs Burton’s cheeks. ‘Lord, I shouldn’t have said that. Most indiscreet of me. But she does. All those diseases. Of course, that was what led to . . . Oh, dear me, my mouth does run away so . . . She tries to make the best of it, though, dear Susan does. But the poor darling does so need help, what with Isadora being so . . .’ Once again she stopped. ‘Cosmo is not Susan’s only child. She has a daughter, who is . . . rather difficult. But she would not be your responsibility. Do you think you could adjust and be a help to my poor sister?

  ‘Well, I hope so – very much.’

  ‘Well—’ Mrs Burton stood up. ‘That’s very hopeful. I’ll be letting you know. But I expect you’ll take the post? You look the adventurous sort.’

  On the long train ride home, Lily already felt she had indeed begun on an adventure, was discovering in herself a taste for it. She kept saying her new name to herself. Lily Waters. That’s who I am now. It made her feel strong.

  Three days later a letter arrived, saying that her interview had been successful and if she was still willing to accept, the family would book her passage on a P&O liner to India.

  Chapter Four

  Ambala, India, 1905

  Lily’s first months in India were full of mixed, sometimes overwhelming, emotions.

  There was the journey to begin with, exciting, daunting, setting out to the other side of the world with nothing but hope and excitement, a small tin trunk containing her possessions and no clear idea of what she was going to find. The P&O steamer was an adventure in itself. She made friends with another nanny called Jenny, who was blonde and good-humoured and was on her way back out to a family in Poona after delivering one of the children to relatives in England.

  As they progressed east, the temperatures gradually rising, the two young women often walked out on the glaring deck to take the breeze blowing from the sea. Jenny, in a big sisterly way, was able to brief Lily about India.

  ‘You get used to it after a while,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The summer months can be hellish if you don’t go up to the hills, of course, though I expect your family will. And there’s a lot of social fun – parties and so on – for the adults and children. Just make sure you drink boiled water and wash your hands a lot. Lots of carbolic soap! It’s all right out there, really it is. You’ll soon settle in. Beats living in a backstreet in rainy old England, I can tell you.’

  The morning the boat gently nosed its way into the harbour at Bombay was one Lily would never forget. She stood on deck beside Jenny, the sun high, the humid heat alleviated by the breeze over the sea. The ship was rolling gently, the sea was a deep, ruffled green, and gradually the land came more clearly into view.

  ‘Dear old Bombay,’ Jenny said, shading her eyes with her hand. ‘D’you know, I loathed it all when I first came. But it’s grown on me. See the coast there – they call that the Ghats, that part rising from the sea – and then the mountains behind.’

  Lily thrilled with excitement at the sight of it. The high land in the distance looked a dull sandy colour, stained with patches of verdure lower down. Jenny had said the monsoon rains were not yet over and all the land was bright and green during the rainy season. As they moved closer, she began to see the city, a wide hotch-potch of white buildings, brilliant in the sun. The breeze dropped and gradually smells began to reach her, strange, alluring, sulphurous and scented. She felt the damp, heavy heat wrap round her. By the time they slid into the dock she was sweating profusely, her clothes limp with moisture, but she barely noticed, so enthralled was she by the sight of the bright colours and seething activity on the quay below, the white-uniformed band playing a toe-tapping marching tune and the busy, brown-skinned, different people of India.

  She said tearful farewells to Jenny at Victoria Terminus in Bombay as they both went to board different trains, Lily north to Delhi, on another leg of her long journey.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Lily, dear,’ Jenny assured her as she kissed her goodbye. The two young women had grown very fond of one another. ‘You’re one of the ones that will feel at home in India – I can tell.’

  It was true. Though it was all new and bewildering, beggars and teeming streets and everything strange, the heat, the food, the temples and mosques, yet amid all that she felt immediately happy and at home, as if this was a place where she was somehow born to be.

  The long train journey to Ambala Cantonment, across the great Punjab plain north of Delhi, was exhausting, as were the first days of getting used to the town and its ways. It was half native town, half army cantonment, and riding in a tonga that first afternoon, along a wide road through the cantonment, she caught sight, with an astonished gasp, of the huge, elegant residence of Captain Charles Fairford, in whose employment and family she had now placed herself.

  ‘So – you are the nanny they’ve sent?’ Susan Fairford held out her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said, shrinking inside. Her employer seemed as remote and frozen as the Antarctic.

  Mrs Fairford was petite in stature, with hair of a pale honey colour and a strikingly pretty face, with Cupid’s bow lips and wide blue eyes. She was dressed in a beautiful ivory gown with bows and flounces in the long skirt, the whole outfit nipped in tightly at the waist and showing off a slim, well-proportioned figure. As she spoke, Lily saw that she had little white teeth almost like a child’s. What was absent was any sen
se of warmth. The hand that she took to shake in introduction was small and unresponsive, like a dead thing.

  ‘Do sit down.’

  They sat opposite one another and Lily waited, hearing the ticking of the small ormolu clock from the mantelpiece. The room was at least pretty and feminine after the opulent, but creepy, hall, a museum to dead creatures whose heads and skins decorated the walls and floor. From the garden came the sounds of crows cawing.

  ‘My sister wrote to tell me that she thought you had sufficient experience as a nanny for my son. She also said that she liked the look of you. Knowing Audrey, I suppose she meant that you are pretty, though whether that is a qualification remains to be seen. I have had to trust my sister, being so far away. I hope she has made a wise choice.’

  All this was said in a distant, rather languid tone. Lily began to feel rather like a cow which has been brought from the market by proxy. Her heart sank further, but she told herself not to get upset. She had only just arrived and she had not met the boy yet. He was what mattered!

  ‘Well, I hope you think so,’ she murmured. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your children.’

  ‘You only need to concern yourself with one of the children,’ Mrs Fairford said sharply. ‘I don’t know if my sister explained to you that we need a nanny for our son Cosmo, to prepare him for going home to school in England. Our daughter, Isadora, will not be going home. She is not . . . She . . .’

  Lily watched the woman’s face. For a moment her composure had slipped and an expression of pained confusion passed over her face.