Hope for the Innocent

Book 0: Hope Stapleford Mystery

by Caroline Dunford

Genres: World War II; Historical Mysteries; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

It is 1939 - World War II is looming, Oswald Mosley has awoken fascist sympathies among the British aristocracy and, in London, socialites are gathering for the start of the Season.

Enter astute, Oxford graduate Hope Stapleford, whose quick wit, love of books and keen observations set her apart from her peers. Her rebellious friend, Bernadette, has persuaded her to take part in the Season, and Hope expects little more than a round of dull engagements and dreary introductions. But when an innocent, young debutante goes missing from their very first house party, feared to have been kidnapped or worse, Hope's curiosity is piqued. With Bernie and their new acquaintance, the amiable rogue Harvey, Hope soon finds herself thrust into a web of political intrigue that threatens the very heart of the nation...

(P)2021 Headline Publishing Group Limited

Release date: January 23, 2020

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘I think, if you really must do this,’ said my mother, ‘that you would be far better off accepting Amaranth’s offer to present you at court rather than letting your grandmother do it.’

She was arranging flowers in a tall Chinese vase with a certain abruptness at the time. We were in the drawing room and neither of my parents had yet lit the fire. Their many years of living out in the Fens had accustomed them to a level of cold that I had quite forgotten during my warmer years up at Oxford. Several red and golden petals had already scattered onto the polished marquetry table. My father brushed them off with the edge of his sleeve and edged his chair closer to the unlit fire.

At home, on their country estate of White Orchards, my parents, as ever, presented an extraordinary picture. My mother, though of average height, always seems tall. Her wavy chestnut hair has recently begun to grey. She wears it long, the complete opposite of the current fashion, so it tumbles around her shoulders. This bohemian look was at odds with her fitted straight line blue dress that reached to her calves and onto which she had insisted her dressmaker sew large pockets – pockets which are forever stuffed with everything from string to crumpled notes (once, when I was little, I was almost sure I saw the butt of a handgun protruding, but my mother has always denied this).

My father sat there sucking the stem of his empty pipe. My mother had forbidden him to light it as the smell ‘got into everything’. He is very pleased with himself that he has finally been able to grow a beard – albeit a white and fluffy one, in striking contrast to his hair, which remains dark. It makes him look like an owl.

He wore an elegant velvet crimson smoking jacket complete with an embroidered yellow dragon. On his head he sported a fez with a golden tassel, which, when he thought we weren’t watching, he liked to swish from side to side like an elderly cat would its tail. Being round-faced, on the short side, and definitely comfortable of body, the fez doesn’t suit him in the least, but it is a recent present from my Uncle Hans and he loves it dearly.

Even as we spoke the large central pane in the main window of the drawing room rattled. Momentarily diverted, my mother said, ‘Bertram, have you not got Andrews to attend to that yet?’

‘Poor beggar’s still working away on the window of the second guest bedroom. Said it was fit to bust. Can’t have that happening to a guest, don’t you know?’

My mother sniffed. ‘Your language, darling! We have been socially isolated too long. We must have a party.’

My father’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘You don’t mean you’re going to take this bally thing on, do you, Euphemia?’ He cleared his throat and turned to me. ‘I say, Hope, why do you want to do this wretched thing? I mean . . . of course, you can, if you want to. But all those balls and parties and things. Not quite your style, hmm?’

He blinked at me, looking like a cross between a startled bird of prey and a fakir. I winced slightly. My father likes to keep up with things; things in the press, things in the world, and things young people say and do. However, he infinitely prefers the world to stay at arm’s length. He might be up with the world, but it is not to be up with him.

‘Nonsense, Bertram,’ interrupted my mother. ‘It will do the girl good. It’s about time she started thinking about what her place in the world will be.’

‘You mean marrying,’ said my father gloomily. ‘I suppose London might be the place to find a husband. As long as she doesn’t get involved with Fitzroy. He’s still working down there, isn’t he?’

My mother ignored the latter half of my father’s statement, instead latching on to the part that challenged her views on women’s rights. ‘That is not the only option open to a modern young woman,’ she snapped.

‘Yes. Yes. I know,’ said my father, ‘but it’s not as if she did particularly well at university.’ He glanced over at me. ‘Sorry, Hope.’

‘To allay your fears, Bertram,’ said my mother, ‘we will not be involved. A girl can’t have her mother as a sponsor.’

‘But you said Bernie’s mother is presenting her,’ objected my father.

My mother ignored him, as she always did when he made a point that contradicted hers. ‘Besides,’ she said. ‘I was never presented.’

‘Ah, now I see why your mother has stirred all this up,’ said my father. ‘She never got to do the circuit – or whatever they call it – so this is her hour to shine!’

‘Did you not hear me suggest that Hope avoids her grandmother as her sponsor?’ said my mother.

I felt the conversation was leaving my control and with it any hope of a resolution, so I broke in.

‘You are quite correct, Father,’ I said. ‘My degree is acceptable, but not of the calibre to suggest my future is in academia.’

‘Such a pity,’ said my mother. ‘When I think of the opportunities that could have been opened up for you . . .’

‘Being a ruddy mathematician,’ said my father with some force. ‘Don’t see much fun in that.’

‘If you are going to speak of my friend, and your daughter’s Oxford sponsor, with such disdain . . .’

‘I never said a bally thing about her . . .’

‘Will you stop using that idiotic word. It doesn’t even mean anything!’

‘What are you talking about, Euphemia?’

‘You know exactly . . .’

I withdrew quietly from the room. I knew from long experience that an acerbic and passionate row was brewing. My parents adored each other, but they did so loudly, quarrelsomely, and with their total attention focused on each other. It is the reason they have been able to live in rural desolation for so long. It suits my father, but my mother prefers company. However, she makes do with the occasional party as long as my father indulges her with enough contradictions.

Their voices rose in happy disharmony. I doubted they would recall my presence again before supper. I hoped that I had made my wishes clear enough that next time we spoke it would be considered a ‘done deal’ that I was to be presented at court. How well I might fare on the marriage front I had no idea, being brunette rather than fashionably blonde, and while I am fit enough, I have never been as thin-as-a-rail as is de rigueur among the flowers of the Beau Monde. Quite unforgivably, in the eyes of any editors of the popular fashion magazines, I have curves. I had no qualms about having to fend off unwanted proposals.

My godfather, Uncle Eric, who has known both my parents for a long time, had been strongly advising me by letter to find a separate way to establish myself. What he actually wrote was, ‘My dear girl, if you don’t get away from the pair of them, you will disappear utterly.’ Uncle Eric is one of the few people who are aware of the services my parents have rendered for the country in the past. It has been alluded to in my presence, but never explained. I have long suspected that they miss the excitement of that time – and that, in some small way, I was meant to make up for it. I haven’t. I was born on the last day of the Great War. I once overheard my mother describe me to my father as ‘disappointingly accommodating’. Then my father’s health declined a little more and their activities were curtailed even further. My father writes for the newspapers now, although he uses a different name, and my mother . . . I’m not entirely sure what she does, but she is often in her study with papers, writing letters and talking on the telephone that she had specially installed there. I don’t believe they are unhappy unless, of course, you count the problem of what to do with me.

The whole idea of being presented at court had been brought up by my grandmother, who had discovered, through some diabolical power, that my great friend Bernie Woodford was to be presented this year despite being, like me, in her early twenties and also an Oxford graduate. The idea that it wasn’t too late for me had caused her to condescend to pay us a visit. She had even ventured beyond the safe confines of her second husband’s residence, a Bishop’s Palace, which she rarely left as the Bishop was now extremely old and rather forgetful.

‘Hope Rose must be presented at Court,’ she had declared in her formal way. She has always hated the name Hope, describing it as ‘frivolously modern’. ‘If those Germans are about to do the dirty on us again, this may be her last chance.’

Of course, the conversation had then devolved into politics and I had quietly withdrawn.

Bernie had been adamant that it would be a great lark to do the whole season together. She had raised the idea a few days before our finals. ‘Think about it, Stapleford,’ she’d said, ‘parties, boys, adventures and maybe even meeting the Right One. Something to look forward to after all our hard work!’ I gave her a stern look. ‘Oh, all right, after all your hard work. Please!’

She was sitting on the end of my narrow bed in college, waving her arms about so wildly as she spoke that she knocked a whole sheaf of papers off my desk. Being Bernie, she ignored this completely. When I went to retrieve them, she said, ‘When will you learn? That is what your maid is for. Sit down.’

Bernie has champagne blond hair that in the right lighting positively glows. She pins it up into haphazard curls and waves that results in a style that reminds me of my struggles with geometry, they are so full of curvy complexity. She looks fashionable, if not downright sultry. She is tall and thin and wears a signature bright red lipstick that clashes with her hair. This, coupled with her faintly American accent, ensures she stands out from the crowd. She gazed at me with her large violet-blue eyes. ‘We get to meet the King,’ she said.

‘He’s already married,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Bernie, sniffing, ‘and, by all accounts, not the kind of man to take a mistress. Besides, he stammers.’

I couldn’t help pressing my hand to my forehead. ‘Woodford, you cannot talk like that. If anyone heard you . . .’

‘Pooh!’ said Bernie. ‘It’s only you I’m talking to. I know you’d never say anything. Mouth tighter than a clam.’

I sighed. ‘Why on earth would I want to go through such a charade?’

‘We’d get to spend more time together,’ said Bernie.

‘Tempting,’ I said, ‘but one sniff of a handsome man and you’ll be off.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Bernie, ‘but I’m more liable to behave if you’re around.’

‘Has your mother told you that you can only do the season if I do it too?’ I asked.

Bernie went a little paler under her powder. ‘I do think this ability of yours to leap ahead is a bit spooky. It won’t make you popular, you know.’

‘Who says I want to be,’ I said. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

Bernie dropped her head. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Stapleford, how else am I going to meet the Right One?’

‘By kissing a lot of frogs?’ I said.

Bernie reached out a hand to me. ‘Please, Hope,’ she said, breaking with college tradition, ‘with the war coming this is liable to be the last chance for me to meet him. Mommy will only let me do this if you’re there to keep me out of trouble.’

‘I never keep you out of trouble,’ I said. ‘I only clear up the messes you make.’

‘As long as Mommy never knows, that’s good enough,’ she said. Then she gave me her best tear-laden smile. ‘I don’t want her to send me across to the States. She’ll demand I’m married off in a month.’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I’m not one of your lovelorn suitors.’

‘No, you’re my friend. My best friend. My one true friend. You’re more like a sister to me.’

‘Stop,’ I begged, ‘you’re making me sick to my stomach.’ I sighed. ‘I’ll think about it.’

But in the end, it was Uncle Eric who convinced me. ‘You might as well,’ he wrote. ‘It’s more than time you began to know the right people. As you doubtless realise, it’s also liable to be a last waltz, if you follow me. I find there’s something about being at these crucial little moments of history that can be quite enlivening.’

I took this to mean that Uncle Eric knew something interesting was going on. Uncle Eric always includes at least three levels of meaning in anything he says or writes. But I doubt even he could have foreseen what was to come.

I suppose, for posterity, I should record the actual presentation, though I have to say that for me the best bit was the Lyons’ spread that was laid on afterwards. I wore a hideously expensive gown that Uncle Joe – my mother’s younger brother, the Earl – had bought me. It was all white and lacy. With my pale skin and dark hair, I feared I looked as if I had been dead for a week or so. While I’m perfectly comfortable with my unfashionably curvy figure, it had been squeezed and moulded to appear socially acceptable and, as a consequence, I was deeply uncomfortable. Bernie with her violet-blue eyes and champagne locks looked every bit a fairy princess.

A rather nervous princess, as it turned out. As the car drove up to the Palace she completely ignored the crowds who had come to watch the debutantes and wave at them. Although, considering the state of the economy, they would have been justified in throwing rotten fruit at us. But there you go, we of these lonesome isles do love our pageantry and tradition. One of my French friends believes this explains our national cuisine. (I doubt she meant this as a compliment.)

Bernie was repeating Miss Vacini’s instructions over and over, as if they were some mantra. ‘Approach the sovereign, two curtsies, and retreat.’ We both had decent trains on our dresses, so we needed to take care when reversing, but honestly, one could instruct a dog to do it (provided one had enough biscuits). It was hardly a challenging manoeuvre, but all debutantes had to attend classes to practise curtsying.

When we arrived at the Palace it was all long marble staircases and red and gold corridors, lined with so many footmen that I wondered if it had been a reserved occupation during the war. I feared that seeing so many young men together in one place would be overly intoxicating for Bernie.

Buck House, as the younger set like to call it, is not to my taste. Decorated for Queen Victoria, it is very overdone in that showy Victorian way. And it was cold enough to rival White Orchards. I don’t suppose one is meant to mention something like that, but we were all shivering in our thin dresses. I thought the whole place had a melancholy air and I didn’t envy the princesses growing up here. There was a tedious preciseness about the furniture and ornaments that weighed down every surface and which shouted that everything had to be just so – though this was the ceremonial chambers. Perhaps the royals themselves have more cosy sitting rooms somewhere, with nicely stuffed settles and blazing fires. I will have to ask Uncle Eric. He has doubtless been in them. I know he was very tied up with the business of the last King’s abdication. But I digress: the Palace was also, despite the huge windows, strangely dark, but that may just have been my mood.

We queued to be presented like lambs about to enter an abattoir, or rather fledgling young maidens about to be shoved out of the nest in the hope of finding a suitable match. The Season, on which we were all about to embark, was designed to train us to be good hostesses, demure wives of diplomats and the like, and to learn to observe and keep to the rules of our own set. It might be dressed up as parties and frolics, but there was a serious agenda underneath. We were being made into the ‘right sort’. Also, though no one would be so vulgar as to mention this, we were being auctioned off as breeding stock. It’s rumoured the Queen is absolutely bonkers about bloodlines and, as always, whatever the sovereign favours filters down through the ranks to become imperative. And of course the season has to begin with us debs being presented to the King. No presentation, no entry to the season; that is the unbreakable rule. I doubt the poor King remembers any of our names or even welcomes his duty. He’s had three years to enjoy his reign, and while his stutter is reduced, he never looks especially happy, poor man. No one ever imagined he would be the monarch, least of all he himself. The Queen, though, is a different matter: certainly from where I got occasional glimpses of her, I think she’s rather enjoying it.

When it came to my turn to be presented, my grandmother’s influence somehow overcame the court official who announced me as ‘Rose Hope Stapleford’ instead of ‘Hope Rose’. But it all passed very quickly. The King looked kindly, if a little nervous, while the Queen watched over him like a hawkish mother hen. She also gave a slight smile to each girl, but it was accompanied with a piercing gaze that ran up and down each of us with an intelligent scrutiny that surprised me. The King was undoubtedly the milder of the two. Then came the Lyons’ spread, with their particularly lovely lemon cake that I still remember. I’ve never tasted anything quite as good since.

Bernie was terribly excited. She barely ate a thing. I had not yet lost my interest in the buffet when she dragged me out to the garden, so she could show off her jade cigarette lighter and a pack of Abdullah’s in a jewelled case that she had secreted in her little silver link bag.

‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘That was heavenly.’

I was spared the necessity of thinking up something suitable to say – there were footmen everywhere – when I heard a small sob coming from the bushes. We had been very strictly warned against venturing off into the gardens on pain of ruining our reputations, and our shoes. So, of course, Bernie and I dove off in search of the curious noise.

‘Do you think someone has been ruined?’ whispered Bernie to me, as we ambled down some decidedly mossy steps. Despite it being a Royal Palace, we had been warned by our chaperones that unsuitable activity often happened in the shadows of the gardens.

‘Only if they were surprisingly quick about it,’ I said.

Bernie smothered a laugh. The muffled sobs continued. We traced them around the shrubbery and towards a small copse. A small, dark-looking copse.

‘I wonder if we should get someone to escort us?’ I said hesitantly. I’m not exactly the fearful sort, but the thought of having to explain a social faux pas to my grandmother can unsettle even the Bishop.

Bernie gave me what I felt, rather than saw, was a withering look. ‘Buck up, Stapleford,’ she said. ‘For England and King George.’ It sounded remarkably odd delivered with her American twang.

I sighed and stepped into the shadows. It was better if I went first. I didn’t want Bernie to stub her toes through her delicate little slippers and scream the place down.

‘Is there anyone there?’ I called in a low voice.

At that moment a ray of moonlight broke through the parting clouds, revealing a startled female face surrounded by golden curls and with the biggest, deepest blue eyes I have ever seen. Her face was stained with tears and yet she looked heartbreakingly beautiful (I look more like a ravaged beetroot when I cry).

‘Oh,’ said the girl in sweet melodic voice, ‘I am lost.’

Bernie, always the affectionate type, came forward and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. My eyes were now adequately adjusted to the dark and I could see the girl also wore a presentation dress. However, hers was not complete with all the trimmings and flounces my monstrosity bore, but took an elegant, figure-hugging form. It was an extraordinary match of demure and sexy. She looked quite wonderful in it. I was already more than half way to disliking her.

‘Do you mean that metaphorically or literally?’ I said.

‘I am afraid I do not understand you,’ said the girl with the faintest French accent.

‘That you are lost.’

‘Both,’ said the girl and burst once more into a flurry of tears that never once distracted from her innate beauty.

Damn her.

If Charlotte Saulier could be said to have one fault (and I considered her to have many) it was that she had no sense of direction whatsoever. When she told us that she was lost, she meant exactly that. She had also been so well brought up that rather than try to work her way back to the Palace, she sat down on a stone bench and cried prettily, waiting for a rescuer to find her.

She seemed particularly wet to me, by which I mean she had as much backbone as the Ritz’s best filleted Dover sole. However, Bernie took to her immediate. . .