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  About the Book

  1939: Europe on the brink of war. Lily Shepherd leaves England on an ocean liner for Australia, escaping her life of drudgery for new horizons. She is instantly seduced by the world on board: cocktails, black-tie balls and beautiful sunsets. Suddenly, Lily finds herself mingling with people who wouldn’t otherwise give her the time of day.

  But she soon realizes her glamorous new friends are not what they seem. The rich and hedonistic Max and Eliza Campbell, mysterious and flirtatious Edward, and fascist George are all running away from tragedy and scandal even greater than her own.

  By the time the ship docks, two passengers are dead, war has been declared, and life will never be the same again.

  With its intoxicating mix of murder mystery and fateful love story, A Dangerous Crossing is an enthralling novel in the great tradition of Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Excerpt from ‘A Woman of Means’, the 2006 Sydney Morning Herald profile of Lilian Dent

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A Dangerous Crossing

  Rachel Rhys

  For Joan Holles and all the other women adventurers

  4 September 1939, Sydney, Australia

  SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO policemen, the woman descends the gangplank of the ship. Her wrists are shackled in front of her and the men grip fast to her arms, but her back is ramrod straight, as if being held in place by the flagpole at the ship’s prow. She wears a forest-green velvet suit, the fashionably slim skirt skimming the top of her calves, and black stockings that end in green leather shoes with a delicate heel. Around her shoulders is a rust-coloured fox-fur stole, the head hanging down at the front as if it is watching how her shoes kick up the dust as she walks. The outfit is far too warm for the seventy-degree heat and the small crowd of onlookers feel grateful for their cool cotton clothes.

  A matching green velvet hat sits on top of hair that has been pinned neatly back. The hat has a veil that falls over her face. They have at least allowed her this modesty.

  She stares straight ahead, as if imagining herself somewhere quite different. She does not look around at the docks, where ships hulk out of the water, grey and pointed, like overgrown sharks. She does not gaze beyond them to where the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge fans out across the mouth of the estuary, connecting the south side to the north, or back the way the ship has just come to where the sandy beaches are strung out along the coast.

  She is seemingly unmoved by the smells and the heat and the lush green vegetation on the distant hills, all so different to where she’s come from. The rasp of the seagulls overhead and the hum of the insects seem not to register, and when a fly lands briefly on the decorative brooch she wears just above her right breast, in the shape of a bird, its eye a tiny studded emerald, she appears not to notice.

  There’s a reporter shadowing the trio as they make their way across the quay, past the throng of family and friends who are waiting to greet the new arrivals and staring with undisguised curiosity at the policemen and their charge. The crowd have been standing for hours in the heat, and the unexpected drama provides a welcome distraction from the tedium.

  The reporter is a young man with shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He seems uncertain how to behave. He usually covers the dock-beat, greeting the great liners that arrive from Liverpool or Southampton or Tilbury, quizzing the migrants on how they feel to have arrived at last on Australian soil. He likes his job. Since the government, with the help of the Church of England Migration Council, introduced the assisted-passage scheme to encourage more young women to travel to Australia from the UK, there are always groups of girls disembarking, eager to meet a genuine Aussie, their normal inhibitions melting in the uncustomary sunshine. They are usually only too glad to talk to him about where they’ve come from and their hopes for the future. Most of them will go straight into domestic service in one of the large homes in and around Sydney, many of them British-owned, where they’ll work as parlourmaids or cooks, for thirty-five shillings a week, with one day off, the shine of this brave new future wearing off rapidly in the dreary reality of domestic life.

  He wonders if this woman is one of them, also destined for domestic service. It’s possible. In his experience, most of them choose their Sunday best for their arrival in this new world. He knows he should ask questions of her, of the policemen by her side. The rumours have been building since the ship docked. This is his opportunity to make something of himself, to grab the front page rather than settling for just a few column inches on page fifteen. Yet there is something about the woman that stops him, the way her face, under the green veil, is raised defiantly to the horizon, even while her hands, in their thin white gloves, shake.

  He overtakes them and then turns back, so they cannot help but notice him. ‘Can you tell me your name?’ he asks the woman. He has his notebook out and his fingers grip tightly around his pen, poised to write, but she shows no sign of hearing him.

  He tries addressing a question to the policemen who flank her. ‘Who is the victim?’ he asks, walking backwards ahead of them. And then, ‘Where is the body?’

  The policemen look hot and agitated in their heavy uniforms. One is young. Younger even than the reporter, and his fingers on the green velvet of the woman’s arm are long and delicate, like a girl’s. He looks determinedly in the other direction so as to avoid the reporter’s questions. The other policeman is middle-aged and overweight, his square face red and shiny in the heat. He glares at the reporter through the half-closed, bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker.

  ‘Let us through,’ he says brusquely.

  Now the reporter is becoming desperate, seeing his chance of a career-making exclusive slipping away.

  ‘Have you any comment to make?’ he asks the woman. ‘Why were you on the ship? What brings you to Australia? How do you feel now that war has been declared?’

  The woman falters, causing the young policeman to all but fall over his own feet in their outsized boots.

  ‘War?’ she whispers through her veil.

  The reporter remembers now that she has been at sea for more than five weeks, and that the last time she had fresh news would have been when the ship docked in Melbourne two days before.

  ‘Hitler has invaded Poland,’ he tells her, his voice betraying the eagerness of the giver of powerful news. ‘Britain is now officially at war – as are we.’

  The woman appears to sway. But now the police are propelling her forward again. Her back straightens once more as the trio brush past him as if he weren’t there.

  The reporter knows he should follow them, but he has lost the appetite for it. There is something about the woman t
hat chills him. Something more than the rumours of what she is supposed to have done.

  Afterwards, when he hears the truth about what really happened on that ship, when half the country’s media is camped outside the prison, desperate for news, he will kick himself for not persevering. But for now he stands still and watches as she is led across the quayside and into the waiting car. The window is open, and his last glimpse of her as the car pulls away is her green veil fluttering against her face like a butterfly’s broken wing.

  1

  29 July 1939, Tilbury Docks, Essex

  ALL HER LIFE, Lilian Shepherd will remember her first glimpse of the ship. She has seen photographs of the Orontes in leaflets, but nothing has prepared her for the scale of it, the sheer white wall towering over the quayside, beside which the passengers and stewards scurry around like ants. All along the dock as far as the eye can see cranes stretch their long metal necks into the watery blue sky. She had expected the numbers of people, but the noise of it all comes as a shock – the harsh cries of the gulls circling overhead, the creaking of the heavy chains that hoist the containers from the docks and the jarring clang as they hit the deck, the shouts of the smudge-faced men who are supervising the loading and unloading. And underneath all that, the excited chatter of the families who’ve gathered to see loved ones off, dressed in their best clothes, their funeral and wedding outfits, to mark the momentous occasion.

  There is so much industry here, so much activity, that in spite of her nerves she feels her spirits stirring in sympathy, excitement skipping through her veins.

  ‘You won’t be short of company, that’s for sure,’ remarks her mother, her eyes darting around from under her best linen hat. ‘Won’t have time to miss anyone.’

  Lily loops her arm through her mother’s and squeezes.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she says.

  Frank is gazing at a couple standing off to the right. The woman is leaning back against a wooden structure while the man looms over her with his hands resting either side of her head and his face angled down so that the lock of his hair that has come loose at the front brushes her forehead. They are staring fiercely at each other, noses just inches apart, as if nothing else exists and they can’t hear the jangle of noises around them, nor smell the pungent mixture of sea and salt and grease and oil and sweat. Even from several yards away, it’s clear the woman is very beautiful. Her scarlet dress fits her body as if someone has sewn it in place and her full lips are painted a matching colour, dazzling against the sleek black of her hair. He is tall, solid, with a moustache and a cigarette that burns, forgotten, between his fingers. Though the couple are oblivious, Lily feels awkward, as if it is they, her family, who are intruding.

  ‘Fetch your eyes in off those stalks,’ she tells her brother sharply, then smiles, to show she was joking.

  Lily’s family have visitor’s passes so they can see her safely on board. Lily is worried about how her father will manage the steep gangplank, but he grips the rail and puts his weight on his good foot and ascends in this fashion. Only when he is safely at the top does Lily breathe again. They are getting older, she thinks, and I am leaving them behind. An acidic rush of guilt prompts her to blurt out, once they are all gathered on the ship’s deck, ‘It’s only two years, remember? I’ll be home before you know it.’

  The ship extends far deeper than Lily has imagined. The upper decks are for first-class passengers, while tourist class is below, and beneath that are the laundries and the third-class cabins. F Deck, where Lily’s cabin is housed in tourist class, is a warren of narrow corridors, and she and her family have to ask directions from two separate stewards before they find her cabin. Inside, there are two sets of bunk beds close enough together so that a person in one upper bunk could reach out a hand and touch the person in the other. Lily is pleased to see that her cabin trunk has already arrived, her name stamped on the end neatly in large capital letters, protruding from underneath one of the bunks.

  There are two women already in the cabin, sitting on the bottom bunks. Lily guesses the first is two or three years younger than her, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. She has a round, open face with pale blue eyes so wide and unfocused Lily suspects she ought to be wearing spectacles. The idea that she might perhaps be carrying a pair around in her bag but not wishing to wear them, in a small act of vanity, makes Lily warm to her on sight. Not so her companion, who looks to be at least a decade older, with a thin-lipped smile and a long, sharp chin.

  The younger woman leaps to her feet, revealing herself to be above-average height, although she dips her head to the floor as if to make herself smaller. ‘Are you Lilian? I knew you had to be, as there are only us three in this cabin. Oh, I’m so happy to meet you. I’m Audrey, and this here is Ida. And this must be your family. Australia! Can you believe it?’

  The words gush out as if the girl has no control over them. Her voice pulses with excitement, causing the wisps of fair hair around her face to quiver in tandem.

  Lily’s parents are introduced, and her brother, Frank, whose eyes glide off Audrey’s plain features as if they are coated in oil. Soon the ship will leave and I will stay on it with these two strange women, and my family will go home without me, Lily reminds herself, but it does not seem real.

  Lily’s mother is asking Audrey and Ida where they are from.

  ‘We’re chambermaids, working at Claridge’s hotel,’ says Audrey.

  ‘Not any more,’ Ida chips in curtly. She is wearing an old-fashioned, black, high-necked dress, and when she leans forward a sour smell comes off her that catches in Lily’s throat.

  ‘When we saw the advertisement about the assisted-passage scheme, we thought, “Well, why not?”’ says Audrey, ‘but we never really dreamed … That is, I never really dreamed …’ She glances at her older companion and the words dry up in her mouth.

  ‘Are you looking forward to seeing all the sights on the voyage – Naples, Ceylon?’ Lily’s mother coughs out the foreign words as if they are small stones she’s found on a lettuce leaf.

  ‘Got to be better than staying here, hasn’t it?’ says Ida. ‘If we go to war –’

  Instantly, Lily and Frank glance towards their father, who has stood all this while in silence, leaning against the wall.

  ‘We won’t go to war,’ Lily breaks in, anxious to head off the conversation. ‘Mr Chamberlain said so, didn’t he? “Peace in our time,” he said.’

  ‘Politicians say a lot of things,’ says Ida.

  A bell sounds out in the corridor. And again. The air in the cabin vibrates.

  ‘I suppose that means it’s time for us to go,’ says Lily’s mother. And her voice now carries a thin note of uncertainty that it lacked before. I will not see her again for two years, Lily tells herself, as if deliberately pressing the sharp blade of a knife against her skin. The answering jolt of pain takes her by surprise and she puts a hand to her chest to steady herself.

  ‘I’ll come with you on to the deck to wave goodbye,’ Audrey tells her. ‘My own folks saw me off at Liverpool Street, but I want to get one last look at Blighty. You coming, Ida?’

  The older woman narrows her little black eyes. ‘Nothing for me to see there,’ she says. ‘Who’d I be waving to? A tree? A crane?’

  On the way up to the deck, Audrey whispers in Lily’s ear, ‘Don’t mind Ida. She’s just sore because she didn’t get the full assisted passage on account of her age. I hoped that might put her off coming, but no such luck.’

  Lily smiles, but doesn’t reply because of the pain which is flowering out across her chest like dye in water. She watches her parents’ backs as they lead the way to the deck, noticing how her mother’s head is bowed in its best black hat, how her father clings to the rail as he climbs the stairs, his knuckles white with effort.

  ‘Is your dad always so quiet?’ Audrey asks.

  Lily nods.

  ‘The last war,’ she says.

  ‘Ah.’

  Now they are out in the open again and
joining the line of visitors queuing to go down the gangplank. Lily imagines herself grabbing hold of her mother’s arm. I’ve changed my mind, she’d say, I’m coming home with you.

  ‘You look after yourself, mind,’ her mother says, turning to face her. ‘A pretty girl like you, there’s some would take advantage.’

  Lily feels her cheeks flame. Her mother has never told her she is pretty. Other people have, Robert’s voice soft as butter – ‘You’re so lovely, Lily’ – but not her mother. Too worried perhaps about giving her daughter a big head, the very worst of female vices in her view.

  Mrs Collins appears beside them. She is a stout, pleasant-faced woman, appointed by the Church of England Migration Council to accompany Lily and the other seven young women travelling on the assisted-passage scheme to take up domestic-service employment in Australia. ‘Accompany’ is another way of saying ‘chaperone’, but Lily doesn’t mind. They met her at Liverpool Street so had her company for the duration of the train journey. Lily could tell straight away that her mother liked her, and that that would be a comfort to her in the days to come.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Shepherd,’ says Mrs Collins, and her wide, kindly face folds into a smile. ‘I’ll take good care of this one.’

  Frank is the first to take his leave. ‘Don’t forget to write – if you have any time between fancy dinners and balls and love-struck admirers!’

  Lily lands a soft pretend-punch on his arm, then pulls him into a tight embrace. ‘Look after Mam and Dad,’ she says in his ear. Her voice sounds lumpy and strange.

  ‘’Course.’

  Her dad gives her a long, wordless hug. When he pulls away, his eyes are glazed with tears and she looks away quickly, feeling like she has seen something she shouldn’t have.

  ‘We must get off,’ says her mother. She gives Lily a dry kiss on the cheek, but Lily can feel how rigidly she is holding herself, as if her body were a wall shoring up some otherwise unstoppable force.