Something terrible had happened between the three of them. It was the only explanation for the seemingly inexplicable, something horrific enough to justify what Ma had done. In what little time remained, Laurel intended to find out what that something was. It was possible she wouldn’t like what she found, but that was a chance she was willing to take. It was one she had to take.
‘Last question, Ms Nicolson,’ said Mitch. ‘We were speaking last week about your mother, Dorothy. You’ve said that she was a strong woman. She lived through the war, she lost her family in the Coventry Blitz, she married your father and started again. Did you inherit her strength, do you think? Is that what’s enabled you to survive, indeed to thrive, in a notoriously tough business?’
This time Laurel was ready. She delivered the line perfectly, no need at all for the prompt. ‘My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.’
Part Two
DOLLY
Eleven
London, December 1940
‘TOO HARD, SILLY GIRL. Too, damn, hard!’ The old woman brought down the handle of her cane with a thwump beside her. ‘Need I remind you I am a lady and not a plough horse in need of shodding?’
Dolly smiled sweetly and shifted back a little further on the bed, out of harm’s way. There were a number of things in her job she didn’t particularly enjoy, but it wouldn’t have taken much thought, if asked, for her to answer that the very worst part of being employed as Lady Gwendolyn Caldicott’s companion was keeping the old girl’s toenails tidy. The weekly task seemed to bring out the worst in each of them, but it was a necessary ill and thus Dolly performed it without complaint. (At the time, that is; later, in the sitting room with Kitty and the others, she complained in such lavish detail that they had to beg through tears of laughter for her to stop.)
‘There you are then,’ she said, sliding the file into its sheath and rubbing her dusty fingers together. ‘Perfect.’
‘Harrumph.’ Lady Gwendolyn straightened her turban with the heel of one hand, managing to knock ash from the wilting cigarette she’d forgotten she was holding. She peered down her nose and across the vast purple ocean of her chiffon-draped body as Dolly lifted the pair of tiny polished feet for inspection. ‘I expect they’ll have to do,’ she said, and then grumbled about it not being like the good old days when one had a proper lady’s maid at one’s beck and call.
Dolly pasted a fresh smile on her face and went to fetch the papers.
It had been a little over two years since she’d left Coventry, and the second year was shaping up to be a great improvement on the first. She’d been so green when she arrived—Jimmy had helped her find a small room of her own (in a better part of town than his, he’d said with a grin) and a job selling dresses, and then the war had started and he’d disappeared. ‘People want stories from the front line,’ he’d told her just before he left for France, when they were sitting together by the Serpentine, he sailing paper boats, she smoking moodily. ‘Somebody has to tell them.’ The closest Dolly had come to glamour that first year was the occasional glimpse of a finely dressed woman on her way past John Lewis to Bond Street, and the wide-eyed focus of her room-mates at Mrs White’s boarding house, when they gathered in the sitting room after dinner and pleaded with Dolly to tell them again how her father had shouted at her when she left home, and told her she was never to darken his doorstep again. It made her feel interesting and exciting when she described how the gate had closed behind her, the way she’d flicked her scarf over her shoulder and marched to the station—not so much as a glance back at her family home; but later, alone in the narrow bed in her tiny dark room, the memory had made her shiver a bit with the cold.
Everything had changed though, after the shop-girl job at John Lewis fell through. (A silly mix up, really, it was hardly Dolly’s fault if some people didn’t appreciate honesty, and the inalienable fact was that shorter skirts didn’t suit everyone.) It was Dr Rufus, Caitlin’s father, who’d come to her rescue. On hearing about the