Daughters, Sons and Shadows

Bill Cariad

Description

England, 1943...and in war-torn London Elizabeth Creacey and Katherine Swan, two student nurses at Saint Bartholomew's Teaching Hospital are brought together to form a friendship founded on tragedy. A friendship destined to dramatically impact upon the lives of many others throughout the next fifty years. Romance catapults Elizabeth into sexual awakening and into the world of a mysterious British army officer with a French accent and a mission. Elizabeth's wartime diaries surface in 1992, into the hands of the man who has slept with his brother's wife. In the midst of a 90's commercial power-struggle, this potentially destructive knowledge falls into the wrong hands and the emotional time-bomb explodes...

Sujets

• Romance
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783339655
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
DAUGHTERS, SONS AND SHADOWS

Bill Cariad



Publisher Information
Daughters, Sons and Shadows
Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Bill Cariad to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 Bill Cariad
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Prologue
Bordeaux region of France, village of Créon, a mid-July evening, 1942
In the house where she had once known great happiness with her husband, Matthew, and from the window of the room where she had given birth to her only child, Chantal saw the Gestapo coming for her and instantly knew three things. The first thing she knew was that one of the two men who should have been here to meet her tonight was a traitor. Since neither had shown up, which of them had sold her out? Her now wildly beating heart refused to accept her racing mind’s thought that both men might have been united by the Judas coin.
The second thing she knew was that she would be unable to withstand Gestapo torture without giving them what they wanted. Himmler’s thugs would want names, locations, codes, other precious lives in fact. And none more precious to her than that of her own son! Therefore the third thing she knew was that she must deny them what they wanted. She must deny them by ending her own life, by her own hand, before they reached her.
Chantal swiftly calculated the time it would take them to breach the front and rear doors; climb the stairs; break through the stout bedroom door, and figured she had ten more minutes of freedom left to her. The shock was like a cold physical force, gripping her limbs, squeezing her lungs, threatening to paralyze her where she stood fighting for breath with the bitter-sweet taste of betrayal drying her mouth. Her trembling hands fumbled for the pen and paper she would need for her message. She could hear their excited voices now, like baying hounds closing on helpless prey, as she quickly wrote Cherie ... I have been betrayed ... not much time left ... they won’t get me ... I’m using a bullet....
They were getting nearer; she could hear them on the stairs as she suddenly realized which one of the two men had betrayed her. She hastily added to the note then stood on the wooden chair to reach the wooden beam. In the beam’s secret compartment crafted by her son, she concealed her message. Her son would, she knew, come here eventually and he would find her message. And he would know she had denied them their prize and protected him by doing so.
They were shooting the lock away from the bedroom door when Chantal stepped down and kicked away the tell-tale chair and put the gun in her mouth.
County of Surrey, England, town of Carshalton, Friday 3 rd January 1992
Tentative birdsong and a misty damp dawn were combining to birth the new day upon which Jonathan Teale’s life ended. He died as he had mostly lived: quietly and without fuss. Right up to the day before his demise, the seventy-four years old founder of Teale & Lewis, a Carshalton-based firm of solicitors, had shown every sign of defying the grim reaper for a few more years despite the heart diagnosed as weak in 1939.
Destiny had decreed that it be his devoted housekeeper who found him. When she finally telephoned Jonathan’s son, Andrew, at 7am, it was to calmly state that she had been unable to waken mister Teale. Only when she requested that Andrew ‘Please come’, did her voice begin to falter. When she had delivered her news and re-cradled the phone, propelled by blind routine the housekeeper then went into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
An explosion will normally make itself heard immediately, its impact instantly felt by something or someone. In a split second it can destroy, or irrevocably alter, whatever stands in its path. Some explosions are detonated by remote control, their unseen initiators themselves unable to see or, arguably, even remotely regret the end result of their actions.
Then again, there are those forms of explosion predictably associated with matters of the heart. Like love and romance, lust and sex, volatile forces in the making, their emotive ingredients often blindly mixed by those who believe they merely play with fire. Blind to the hidden fuse sparked by the vagaries of human nature, they are unable to foresee how long it might take for their emotional time bomb to explode....



Chapter One
For a tear is an intellectual thing, and a sigh is the sword of an Angel King. (Blake)
County of Kent, England, Town of Shorncliffe, Monday, 22 nd February 1943
The police constable silently cursed his undoubtedly warm and dry absent sergeant, the German Luftwaffe, and the water which had found its way down his neck. Caped against the driving rain, his back to the wall of the building, the unhappy man stood facing an unlit road and a miserable night. Fifteen feet to his left, the public were denied entry by the damaged door which had earlier resisted the grunted efforts of several men; the blast-waves had shifted the door’s framework. A head-turn to his right, the hastily assembled blackout curtain ended in sodden ground-level folds; the improvised shield completely covering the arched roof and normally open ends of the porch walkway running the gable-end length of the building. Tonight the porch walkway served as both makeshift workplace for the ticket staff and access to the platforms of Southern Railway’s Shorncliffe station.
The police constable was there to ensure that anyone leaving the station didn’t turn left towards the misshapen structures barely visible in the rain-filled dark; his sergeant had classified those buildings unsafe following the prior evening’s damage. Consequently, the already overstretched Folkestone Fire Brigade would hopefully come tomorrow to control the demolition of houses already deemed to be on the point of collapse.
Newspapers had dubbed this recent spate of bombing which had started the previous month, as ‘The Little Blitz’. A title which had done nothing to lessen the impact. Enemy bombers over-running their primary targets invariably released their lethal cargo, regardless of what lay below, before turning and running for home. Last night Shorncliffe had lain below such a bomber and had paid the price of proximity to the main ports of Folkestone and Dover.
The gear-change sound of an engine engaging the incline approach to the railway station, carried to the policeman’s hearing and he turned to his right to watch the military ‘three-tonner’ labour into view. The army driver brought the transport to a halt outside the station’s entrance as the vehicle’s tailgate was released from inside and men of The Royal Artillery Regiment began jumping to the ground. The policeman called out to them, explaining the situation, and without demur the soldiers began filing past him and into the porch walkway. Before the last man had disappeared behind the blackout curtain, their transport had turned and was on its way back to the nearby Shorncliffle army camp.
The shivering sentinel was thinking about a lovely hot cup of tea when the two women approaching on foot came into his view. He recognized them, so, timing it to perfection and with the flourish of a matador, he parted the blackout curtain and directed them through the opening. The older woman ignored his pantomime, but he had the satisfaction of seeing her younger companion grinning her appreciation. His rapid movements had caused the rainwater to run down his neck again and with a heartfelt groan the constable released the blackout curtain and allowed it to fall behind the women.
Once inside the porch walkway, Margaret Creacey gripped the free arm of her companion as feet carefully found their way and eyes adjusted to wartime’s pre-requisite dim blue lighting bathing the scene before them. Her grip was briefly disengaged to allow for the transaction with the blue-faced ticket collector who still clutched in one hand the sheaf of rail warrants bequeathed to him by the departing soldiers, the last of whom courteously held aside another blackout curtain for the two women as they stepped onto the platform.
Following the soldiers, the two women immediately turned left to access the arched tunnel which would lead them to the London platform on the other side of the station. The light was better in the tunnel, and, seen close together, the two women were unmistakably mother and daughter. Both were tall and despite their outer rain-wear garments still somehow managed to appear elegantly slim in build. It was in the faces that the lineage was strikingly evident.
Framed by the headscarf which had allowed some of the dark hair to escape in curls now flattened by rain to her forehead, the face of twenty-three year old Elizabeth Creacey might have inspired the Raphaelite painters of centuries past. Her pale complexion perfectly contrasted the naturally dark eyebrows over clear blue eyes, and, despite the enforced absence of makeup, the finely sculptured nose and high cheekbones seemed to glow just enough to shadow the sharply defined jaw-line. The determined set of the mouth was the only outward sign of the tension wit