Wild Lily Read Free Page A

usually had to tell him and actually said, ‘I wouldn’t mind trying it out myself if I had the time.’
    ‘When I know how I’ll teach you.’
    Antony could in no way envisage this and knew it wouldn’t happen, but his father gave one of his rare smiles in agreement. They ate and then went their separate ways, his father to his study and Antony to his own room. There was a sitting room, but it was never used. There was no family life in Lockwood Hall.

MAY, 1921
3
    Lily was helping her father in the grounds of Lockwood Hall. When she didn’t have other jobs to do – cleaning at the vicarage, running errands for Mrs Carruthers, washing pots in the Queen’s Head or mucking out the livery horses – she helped her father. Squashy trailed along with his dog, Barky, as usual. Squashy was eleven, useless but cheerful. Barky, a small brown mongrel of countless crosses from a village litter, was also useless and cheerful and the two were never apart.
    Gabriel had been instructed to make a smooth strip beyond the lake for Antony’s aeroplane, when it came. ‘I’m a ruddy gardener, not an aerodrome designer,’ her father grumbled. ‘It’s a farm job, flattening and rolling.’
    They stood in the spring sunshine on the side of the lake, looking out away from the house. The lake, clear and deep, ran like a wide river along the natural valley below the house. On two small islands on the far side from the house, someone a long time ago had made the once-fabulous but now decrepit grotto. Antony wanted to land his aeroplane ‘somewhere nearthe grotto’, on the far side. He was planning to build it a hangar, which would be hidden from the house by trees and the high mound of the grotto itself.
    ‘We’ll ’ave a look at it, and tell Mr Butterworth the state of it, and ’e can make it good,’ Gabriel decided.
    As they were standing outside the house, ‘having a look at it’ entailed a twenty-minute walk to the end of the lake where a bridge crossed it, and back down the other side. Where the bridge crossed over, near to the village road, there was a row of small workers’ cottages that faced the lake, one of which was the home of Gabriel and his children.
    Mr Butterworth was the man who farmed the estate. The estate staff tended to be closely related, descended from the estate workers before them, father to son. They had been severely decimated by the war and were still mainly the old and the young, only half a force, the strong middle contingent lost and buried in French soil. There had once been twelve strong young gardeners, but now there was only Gabriel and six what he called ‘useless young dopes’ from the village, just out of elementary school. He reckoned Lily was worth all six put together, although it wouldn’t occur to him to tell her so.
    They walked along what was to be the landing strip, up as far as the grotto, Gabriel marking the required distance as ordered by Master Antony, and deciding on the best site for the hangar. The space was certainly wide enough, bounded on the far side by the hedge that marked the estate boundary and a lane beyond.
    While Gabriel was pacing out his plans, Lily and Squashywent out to the grotto, attracted as always by this strange, creepy figment of the weird Georgian imagination. There were two islands quite close to the shore, and so close to each other that there was just a strip of water between them. They had been covered with great rocks, imported at great expense, built very high and now covered with a thick canopy of trees and undergrowth and swags of rampant ivy so the water between them was in a tunnel of verdancy.
    On one of the islands the famous grotto had been built inside the rocks. Its entry was beside the water at its narrowest part, a yawning cave mouth, now blocked off with a securely locked iron gate. A landing had been built at the waterside outside the cave mouth for visitors who came by boat, but the island with the grotto in it was near enough to the