The Legend of Nimway Hall: 1940-Josie Read online

  She was the current guardian of Nimway Hall and he was little more than a squatter. The sooner he realized that, the better they would get along.

  “Go easy on the frail old fellow, Josie. Wouldn’t want to shock him into heart failure.”

  “I think I’ll risk it, Father.” She lifted Bess’s bonnet, used her handkerchief to yank out the engine’s rotor arm, wrapped it and jammed the wad into the pocket of her dungarees, then ran up the wide limestone stairs, Winnie loping happily at her heels.

  Despite everything, she was happy to be home at last. She thumbed the brass latch, applied her usual shoulder to open the thick oaken door and—

  It didn’t budge. The latch hadn’t clicked either.

  The front door of Nimway Hall locked? Never in her life! She tried again, harder this time, met the same resistance, regrouped with a muttered curse then pounded the door with her fist.

  “Hallo, in there! Mrs. Patten? Mrs. Lamb? Someone’s locked the bloody door! Let me in!” Winnie braced her paws against the door, whined and barked in agreement.

  Three more resounding thumps before the door gaped open just wide enough to reveal the face of another young soldier who stepped into the slight opening. “Your business, madam?”

  “Correct, soldier, Nimway Hall is my business. My house. My front door. You’re standing in the foyer of my great hall. Now step aside.”

  “Can’t ma’am, until I see your—”

  “Where’s this colonel of yours?”

  The young man blinked. “In his headquarters, last I saw, madam. State your name, and if you wait here quietly, I’ll tell him—”

  “Thanks awfully, but I’ll tell the colonel myself.” Josie took a step back then rammed the door open, tucked her identity card into the startled soldier’s breast pocket and brushed past him into the vestibule, with Winnie at her side. “Come along, girl, we’ll find this colonel and—”

  “Ma’am you can’t just—”

  “Bloody hell—” Josie hadn’t taken but a few steps when she was stopped in her tracks by the most shocking and shameful sight imaginable. What had once been her family’s crown jewel, the great hall of Nimway, had been reduced to an enormous storage closet, the magnificent floor piled with crates and sheeted furniture, ages old palms and exotic ferns abandoned in their urns.

  Even the grand staircase was stepped with boxes and crates, the landing stacked with ladderback chairs, the bannister overhung with blankets.

  “Begging your pardon, Miss Stirling, here’s your ID. Welcome. I’m Sapper Lewis.” He haltingly offered the folded brown card as though certain she would command Winnie to bite off his hand. “You see, I wasn’t told to expect… I didn’t know… shall I show you to Colonel Fletcher?”

  “No need, Sapper Lewis.” Judging by her mother’s displaced piano in the far corner under the stairs, the sheeted shapes of gilded upholstered chairs and two matching sofas pressed against the wall, the ormolu mirrors and her grandmother’s collection of marble busts teetering on inlaid tabletops, the tinpot colonel was holed up in Nimway’s celebrated conservatory. “I know just where to find him.”

  Josie snatched the identity card from the sapper and followed Winnie along the path of sheeted obstacles—Mrs. Patten must have had kittens when the solders started manhandling the Chippendale!

  As she approached the double sliding doors leading to the dining room, she wondered if Fletcher had cleared out the enormous table that could seat forty when fully extended, and replaced it with a tank.

  Well, good. At least the table remained in place, its length reduced shortly after the war began to accommodate half its original number. The evacuees from the Blitz, Land Girls and various other itinerant lodgers who called wartime Nimway Hall home.

  Colonel Fletcher and his men added another ten mouths to feed, according to the requisition from the War Office. The only possible saving grace was that if she fed the soldiers from the kitchen of Nimway Hall, then by law, Fletcher must turn over his unit’s ration books to her. Which would then allow Mrs. Lamb to pool the rations and stretch the portions of protein and fat into a more extensive menu.

  Winnie skirted the table and led Josie past the fireplace facade with its two life-sized, scantily-clad marble figures of her many-times-great grandmother Charlotte, which had been scandalously live-sculpted by her as many-times-great grandfather, Marco.

  Josie turned as she hurried past. “Wish me luck with the colonel, Great-Granny. Though, he’s the one who’ll need it, once I get through with him!”

  The door from the dining room to the butler’s pantry stood wide open into the connecting corridor, the perfect sound tunnel to amplify the rumble of male conversation coming from the conservatory beyond.

  Near shaking with anger at the colonel’s presumption, Josie stalked down the corridor, intending to launch into a blistering tirade, but reached the doorway to the conservatory only to be stopped again, struck in the heart by the wartime alterations inflicted upon the elegant salon that still smelled of soft candlelight, sweet pipe tobacco and Shalimar.

  Winnie nuzzled her damp nose into the palm of her hand and Josie gave the soft muzzle a fond caress, clearing her head of the mist of memories and directing her focus where it belonged: on the enemy.

  On the four men at the center of the room—officers of various ranks, by the pips on their tabs—heads and elbows bent over the middle of the rare 17th century rectory table, which they had obviously abducted from her library.

  The gilded chairs that had once lined the room when it was filled with music had been replaced by a half-dozen tall metal filing cabinets fitted between the two north-facing Palladian windows, their shutters and blackout curtains shoved open to fill the room with afternoon light.

  Smaller tables had been stolen from other parts of the Hall, and were now loaded down with typewriters, telephones and in-baskets, pencils and inkstands. Two drafting tables sat beneath the southern windows. Three large clocks had been fastened to the wall above a bank of equipment with dials and gauges and long runs of wires strung every which way, making grandmother’s conservatory resemble Churchill’s warren-like headquarters under the Treasury building at Whitehall.

  And in the far corner of what remained of the conservatory, near the wall of French doors that had once spilled open to the cool evening air, freeing music and laughter out onto the stone terrace, to roam the lawns and down to the lake, was her great-grandfather’s massive oak desk, now decamped from its home in the east parlor.

  Doubtless now claimed by the venerable Lt. Colonel Fletcher. Whose ancient reflexes were so finely-tuned that he hadn’t noticed she’d been standing in the doorway for the past minute.

  “This field, to the north—”

  “Water table too high—”

  These soldiers, supposedly trained in stealth and defense, were still bent over their large document as she approached, so involved in the heat of their discussion that she was able to wedge herself between two of the men and ask, “Which of you is Lt. Colonel Fletcher?”

  She looked pointedly from man to man, surprised that they were younger than she’d expected. Handsome, crisp, welcoming. Until she found herself looking into the iron blue gaze of the man standing directly across from her. A gaze fierce and feral, that lit fires deep inside her, leaving her breathless, wordless.

  The man straightened, squared his broad shoulders until he seemed as tall as a tree. “Miss Stirling, I assume.”

  His statement was curt, polite, and sliced through her reverie like Excalibur through stone, a thunderous splitting of her world, between ‘before this day’ and ‘all the days afterward.’

  “Yes,” was all she could manage.

  “Lt. Colonel Gideon Fletcher,” the man said with an aristocratic nod. “Delighted to meet you… at last.”

  Dear God, this colonel was no grizzled veteran of the Boer Wars! He was thirty at most, though threads of gray ticked through the coal dark hair at this temples. A canted, serious brow dipped abo
ve those piercing blue eyes, jaw squared off in a strong, clean-shaven chin, lightly limned in the deep blue-black shadow of a beard. He was taller than the other men, lit from the side by the westering sun streaming through the windows, striking his broad-shoulders and glinting off his hair.

  And his mouth—it was quite perfectly shaped, full and firm, a wry smile tucked away at the corners.

  “Miss Stirling?”

  Josie blinked at the man, embarrassed to the bone for falling so far into his gaze, nearly swooning like a schoolgirl. “Yes, Colonel. I would have been home when you arrived, but you’re here a month beforehand and I was in London.”

  “So I understand.”

  “But you made yourself at home in my conservatory, not the accommodations agreed upon in the original contract.”

  “You may not understand, Miss Stirling, given your protected vantage point out here in Somerset, but orders change quickly during wartime.”

  “Do they, really—” you bloody, arrogant blighter, she wanted to add.

  “We have settled in nicely as you can see, with little enough trouble–“

  ”What a relief,” she said, with a smile, hoping he caught her sarcasm where she’d aimed it.

  “Now, Miss Stirling, if I may introduce my staff officers—” he gestured toward the three men exchanging easy glances around the table. They were handsome, physically fit and well-heeled, as though each had graduated in recent years from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. “Second Lieutenants Easton and Crossley, and Lieutenant Durbridge; you’re likely to be seeing them about, along with a few other members of our patrol. We are ten in total.”

  Josie gathered back her composure as each man offered a polite greeting before petting Winnie—who seemed quite taken with the lot of them—and stepping off to other parts of the room, until she was finally standing across the table from the colonel, who had stealthily gathered the large document and was rolling it into a tube.

  “Yes, I’ve already met a few of your men—Sapper Mullins in particular. He stopped me at my own front gate. Refused to let me drive through with my van unless I showed him my identity card.”

  “And did you show Sapper Mullins your card?” Fletcher asked as he slid the document into a large metal cylinder and screwed on the lid, all without taking his eyes from hers.

  “I informed the young man that I own Nimway Hall and that I needn’t show him anything in order to enter my own property.”

  “And—?” Fletcher frowned, his gaze hardening. “Did Mullins then allow you to pass through the gate without checking your identification?”

  “He did not! Even after he planted himself in front of Bess and I threatened to run him over.”

  ”Who is this Bess?”

  “My van.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t—?” What a dreadfully confounding man!

  “Run over Sapper Mullins.”

  “Of course, I didn’t!” How dare the arrogant man accuse her of such a… ah, then–that tucked away smile again—he was taunting her. “Because, Colonel, I didn’t want to bloody the front of my van.”

  “Good. I shall write up Sapper Mullins this evening.” He slipped a propelling pencil from his breast pocket and made a brief note on a card.

  Josie felt a guilty twinge, that she might be over-blowing the incident. “Do you mean to punish the man?”

  “On the contrary, Miss Stirling, I shall commend him for his bravery in the face of danger.” He tucked the pencil back into his pocket and the card onto a stack of loose papers in a wire basket at the end of the table. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Miss Stirling, you can’t have known that you interrupted a critical planning meeting, and that we are very busy with the war.”

  “You are busy with the war, Colonel?” The insult struck her like a slap to the face. “And I’m not? We’re not? Is that what you’re implying?”

  That dark brow of his quirked. “I don’t believe I understand your—”

  “You don’t understand? That you and your staff are meeting here in my conservatory, living under my roof, eating my food while the rest of us at Nimway Hall are merely out in the fields plowing, planting, bringing in the harvest, milking the cows, making cheese and jam, knitting socks and scarves, turning my badminton lawn into field crops so that your lot can plot and plan the war—”

  “Miss Stirling—” he glanced across the room at his staff, who ducked their heads and begun busying themselves at various, unconvincing tasks, before turning back to her with those cool blue eyes. “Perhaps you and I can discuss the rules of engagement later tonight. In the library?”

  “Oh, do we still have a library, Colonel? I’ve been gone four days, surely you’ve had time enough to remove the books to the cellar and install a munitions factory.”

  He let her protest fall to the tabletop between them. “Shall we say ten o’clock, then?”

  The colonel best learn who was in charge of Nimway Hall. “Half-ten.”

  Josie threw him a look that she hoped was haughty, turned abruptly to leave, feeling the man’s gaze following her as she and Winnie strode toward the door, completely unaffected by the man, by his rudely imposing size, the conceit in his tone, least of all by the suspicion in his scandalously blue eyes.

  Try as he might, Gideon couldn’t drag his attention away from the woman who was striding so imperiously toward the door, her lithe shoulders erect, head held high, the black dog prancing beside her, eyes raised in homage.

  From the day they had driven into the forecourt of Nimway Hall, everyone on the estate had seemed mad about their mistress, dazzle-eyed with deference, near swooning with admiration over their Miss Josie. In spite of the glowing reports, Gideon had expected the lady farmer to look a bit more, well… like a farmer: fingernails cracked with dirt and wear, horse-faced, cheeks parched from too long in the sun, thick shoulders and a sturdy gait.

  Miss Jocelyn Regina Stirling was anything but, her skin like peaches, with a spray of golden freckles across her high cheekbones, her limbs lean and athletic, blond hair out of sorts but silken as it escaped its bounds. And as she paused for a moment in the doorway and turned her implacably green gaze back to him, he drew a silent breath and set his jaw against her, accepting her challenge and dismissing his attraction as having been too long without a woman.

  Without the right woman.

  The very last thing he needed in the midst of this backwater posting was to waste precious time doing battle with the contentious lady of the manor. By all measures, the sort of woman who’d stick her nose into his business at every chance. He couldn’t let that happen, wouldn’t—not if he was to guard the most secret element of his mission, one known only to himself.

  “That girl knows how to fill out a set of dungarees, Colonel, if you don’t mind my saying, sir.”

  “I do mind, Crossley.” Minded the direction of his own thoughts even more. “And you’re a better man than that. Miss Stirling is the lady of Nimway Hall and will be treated with respect at all times. As will every person on the estate. I didn’t think I had to actually say that to the lot of you.”

  To a man, they were younger than himself by at least five years, each graduating from one Oxbridge college or another just in time for war to be declared and their particular specialties seconded into the Royal Engineers. Good lads, fine lads, if a bit rowdy when not attending to the work of the moment. And at the moment their work was to site and build a secret Operational Base somewhere on or near the grounds of Nimway Hall, to then recruit and train members of Churchill’s newly-formed secret army of Auxiliary Units who would occupy the base as a resistance force against an invading German army—all without the locals learning the existence of those units or the location of the base during or after completion.

  “Let’s begin where we left off before Miss Stirling arrived, gentlemen,” Gideon said, rolling out the large sketch of a map he’d concealed from the doubtlessly observant Miss Stirling. Her downward glance had been brie
f, but how could she not have recognized that the map on the table in front of them contained every detail of Nimway Hall and its grounds known in advance by the War Office. Stretching westward from the three farms of the lower fields, eastward up the hillside and through the ancient woods, north beyond the lake to another two farms and south to the boundaries of Balesborough village, with the eccentric Hall, its extensive stables, the old barn and scattered outbuildings at the center of its beating heart.

  Surely she noticed, just as she surely must have noticed him staring at her with as much naked interest as Crossley had so crudely described. Just as surely as she was, even now, plotting some offensive against his command of her fiefdom, a battle that would endure for as long as Churchill’s Special Operations Executive required the use of Nimway Hall, whoever was posted here—which looked to be for the duration.

  “Easton,” Gideon said, trying to shake off the woman’s influence over his thoughts, “you were reporting on the local topography.”

  Easton returned to the table with Durbridge, drafting compasses in hand. “As I was saying, sir, the site that we choose for the Operational Base must be well-drained–this is Somerset, after all—and, because the excavation must be done by hand, quickly and in secret, it must be free of rocky outcroppings and occlusions.”

  “We could hope for another badger sett like we dug outside of Minehead,” Crossley said, taking up a ruler. “Cut through that hillside of tunnels like a sword through butter.”

  “Unfortunately for us, Crossley,” Gideon said, “hoping won’t get the job done.” He hadn’t yet been assigned to the Royal Engineers at the time; he’d joined the group as its leader only a month before and still felt like a fish out of water. He’d supervised the construction of exactly one Operational Base in that time, but as his CO had said when he offered the posting, it was that or nothing. Better than sitting around the war on his backside, warming a desk at Whitehall.