Wild Lily by K M Peyton Page A

are wrong. Nobody could. They are called after flowers, would you believe, Rose and Violet. More like Hemlock and Deadly Nightshade, I’d say.’ He laughed. Then he took Helena’s hand. ‘We’ll go down to the lake. Take her other hand, she will like that.’
    They walked with Helena between them, and Helena swung their arms and laughed, and wanted to run when the lawn started to slope downhill to the water. They ran with her, and when they got there they put her hands in the water and splashed, and took their shoes off and paddled where there was a strip of sandy beach. They showed her how the water deepened, took her out until it was up to her knees,and she understood to go no further, and stood wriggling her toes in the sand, laughing. It wasn’t difficult to give her pleasure.
    When they took her back, her keepers were dismayed by her splashed dress but Antony was short with them. ‘She loves the lake. Why don’t you take her there? It’s your job to make her happy.’
    ‘We do our best, Mister Antony.’
    ‘She needs to go out more.’
    ‘Yes, Mister Antony.’
     
    That evening, when Lily was back home and was sitting at the supper table with Squashy and her father, having scraped out the last of the rabbit stew she had concocted with the limp carcass her father had brought home from the harvesting, she asked Gabriel about Antony’s mother. Her father had been in the pub and she knew he was more talkative with the beer inside him.
    ‘Did you know her?’
    ‘Yes, she was always in the garden. She loved the garden and the flowers. I was a proper gardener in them days, not just a maintenance man like I am today. There was more of us, for a start. And the herbaceous beds – they was a picture. She loved them so. And the walled garden where she went with Helena – it was all beautiful. And she was beautiful too, a real lady. It was all different in those days.’
    ‘Antony said she spent all her time with Helena, and didn’t want him.’
    ‘I think that was true. He spent more time with us servants than with his mother, poor kid. But you could understand it, I suppose, the girl needing all that care. It don’t seem to have done him no harm though, not as I can see. Cocky young bastard.’
    ‘What did his mother die of?’
    ‘Oh, it was sudden, very unexpected. We was all shocked. It was one of them illnesses – her heart, I think, or summat like that. Meningitis? I dunno. Here one minute and gone the next. She had a lovely funeral, though, and all the flowers from our gardens – I was right proud, and she would have loved it, so pretty. They dressed Helena all in black – just a young girl she was then, your sort of age I suppose, or even a bit younger – and she stood by the coffin with all the white lilies, and then she lifted them up, a great bunch, and held them and started to sing – did you know she could sing? Such a weird sound, like a bird in the night time, standing there, and no one moved – made me think, what they say about swans singing before they die, not that I’ve ever heard it like, but it was like she was singing for her mother and she knew all about death and she just stood singing for her mother, not really sad but sort of triumphant – I don’t know how to explain it, but we was all dumbstruck. Not just us servants, but the old man as well. I thought he were going to pass out.’
    ‘Was this in the church?’
    ‘No. Outside the front door when they lifted the coffininto the hearse. It was an open cart from the farm, all covered in flowers and ribbons, with our own horses to pull it, and we was all going to walk behind it, even the old man with young Antony holding his hand, and that Aunt Maud, the old battle-axe, Mr Sylvester’s sister. Only half a mile to the church, but with that weird singing we was all sort of paralysed like and no one moved, until that Aunt Maud called out in a loud voice to the coachman, “ Drive on! Drive on! ” and that sort of broke the