© 1999 by Michael R. Phillips
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2015
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—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-2954-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Cover illustration © Erin Dertner / Exclusively represented by Applejack Licensing
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
Prologue
Part I: Hidden Currents
1. House of Light
2. Plans and Schemes
3. A Name From the Past
4. Hidden Dangers
5. A Mother’s Prayer
Part II: London Society
6. Sister Suffragettes
7. Unwelcome Face
8. Machinations
9. Kensington Gardens
10. A Surprise at Hastings
11. Larger World
12. Two Fathers
13. An Invitation
14. The Derby
15. Setting the Bait
16. Garden of God’s Blossoms
17. An Offer
18. Society
19. Amanda’s Coming Out
20. Coronation
21. Reception
Part III: Cross Purposes
22. On the Other Side of the Lawn
23. Former Acquaintance
24. Disquieting New Book
25. Private Confidence
26. Memories of a Happy Day
27. Heathersleigh Hall
28. Brother and Sister
29. Neighbors
30. A Brother’s Prayer
31. Curious Invitation
32. Land, Power, and Conquest
33. Family Evening in the Library
34. Suffragette or Society Belle?
35. The Chest
36. The Ledger
37. Milverscombe and Its Secrets
38. Curiously Disappeared Bible
39. Catharine and Grandma Maggie
40. Curious Gathering
41. A Caller
42. A More Welcome Visitor
43. Marriage and God’s Will
44. Evening at the Theater
45. Planting Seeds
46. A Talk
47. Nr. 42 Ebendorfer Strasse
48. A Country Ride
Part IV: Divergences
49. A New First Lord of the Admiralty
50. Another Curious Invitation
51. Romantic Weekend
52. Melancholy Memories
53. Light . . . Or Darkness?
54. Hugh Wildecott-Browne
55. A Skeleton
56. Stormy Birth
57. Milverscombe Parish
58. Father and Son
59. The British Museum
60. Argument
61. Confusion
62. What to Do
63. New Shock
64. Denial
65. Geoffrey
66. Happy Day
67. Refuge
Part V: Hostilities Loom
68. Out of the Frying Pan
69. Serious Talk With the McFees
70. Unwelcome Letter
71. Curious Eyes
72. Shifting Loyalties
73. A Visit and a Conversation
74. Another Letter
75. Another Conversation
76. Derby Disaster
77. Confusion
78. Difficult Question
79. Mounting Tensions
80. Stealthy Escape
81. An Offer
82. Another Offer
83. Acceptance
84. The Black Hand
85. Return
86. Strange Sensations
87. Departure
Part VI: War!
88. Churchill and Rutherford
89. The City of Mozart
90. Subtle Shift in Loyalty
91. A Fall
92. Gavrilo Princip
93. Bedside
94. Alone and Far From Home
95. Attempted Abduction
96. Assassination
97. Ultimatum
98. A Sleeper Awakes
99. War and a Witness
100. Haze
101. Courage to Look It in the Face
102. Trapped
103. Muhamed Mehmedbasic
104. Coming of Life
Part VII: Behind the Lines
105. A Man’s Decision
106. Welcome Face
107. Surprise Proposal
108. A Recollection
109. Heartbreaking News
110. Kaffe Kellar Again
111. Arrows of Clarity
112. Terrifying Discovery
113. Ancient Mystery
114. Into Vienna
115. Maggie Prays
116. Suspicious Eyes
117. Chase
118. Too Close
119. Search
120. Station
121. Secret Business
122. Waiting
123. Final Encounter
124. Toward Home
Notes and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Fiction by Michael Phillips
There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate. . . .” Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, and set off for a distant country. . . .
Introduction
Progress, Rivalries, and Alliances
As you open this book, those of you who are continuing on in THE SECRETS OF HEATHERSLEIGH HALL series may want to skip ahead and get started with the story rather than spend time with a long introduction. Hopefully later you’ll find yourselves coming back for some historical background.
For those of you coming to this book without having read Wild Grows the Heather in Devon, I offer these introductory thoughts and observations in the hope that it will help you enjoy the book, and series, more thoroughly. This is a “historical” novel, and the early years of this century were historically very complex.
The story opens in Edwardian England during the opening decade of the twentieth century. These were happy times for the British people, an era of prosperity and British world domination.
It was a new era. Queen Victoria was dead. Her son Edward was on the throne. Prosperity and progress were in the air.
The past half century had been an enormously expansive and creative fifty years of ideas and change. Science had explored the perplexing puzzles of the universe, and seemed on the verge of resolving most of them. Man’s place in the order of things, according to the evolutionists, was accurately understood for the first time. The development of machines, the harnessing of electricity, and the explosive growth of invention had created an industrial power that seemed capable of accomplis
hing nearly anything man could envision. The automobile was barely fifteen years old, and now men were flying aeroplanes in the sky. The last reaches of the globe’s unknown corners had been explored. Advances in medicine and health care made life better and easier. Once dreaded diseases were slowly being conquered. A rising humanitarianism reduced human suffering on any number of levels. Women were stepping forward to occupy newly “emancipated” roles in the world. Work for most was easier and shorter. More people had more money and were working less to get it. In art and literature, music and philosophy, medicine and science, philosophy and politics . . . in all ways culturally the nineteenth had been a century of genius. As the twentieth century opened, therefore, expectations were high that the result of all this progress would be more of the same, with yet more lofty achievements.
Have I made it sound like a utopia? It wasn’t. There were problems too. All this progress came with a price.
Industry and modernization, and the raised standard of living of workingmen, brought new lines of division into society. No longer was the world defined merely by the fortunes of the very rich and the very poor. A third socioeconomic class had been born. It was called the middle class. This change benefited millions and contributed to the overall good. It carried with it, however, a consequence—the rising expectation of the masses.
Today you and I tend to take what is called the middle class for granted. That’s where most of us spend our lives and we think nothing of it. But back then this change, in a sense, turned all of society on its ear. A huge middle class was something altogether new—what today’s politicians would call a new “constituency,” with needs and demands that had to be addressed.
With the explosive growth of cities, mounting numbers entered this new middle class daily. With this growth came social and political power, creating a whole range of new cultural conditions. Steadily new voices made themselves heard, demanding larger and larger slices of society’s affluence. Not far behind was their cry for political representation. In such a climate were communism, socialism, and many diverse forms of liberalism born.
Unfortunately, the reality lagged behind the ideal. Every new constituency wanted change more rapidly than the institutions of their governments were prepared to give them. We recognize that very same problem in our own day, and it was equally true back then. Some of the more radical elements sought a wholesale overturn of society; others sought to gain their ends through the vote. In Great Britain the rising expectation of the masses led to the birth of the Labour Party and the suffragette movement. In Russia it would lead to revolution.
One thing was certain—the voices spawned by industry and modernism would be heard. Sound familiar? Everyone wants his or her voice heeded more than anyone else’s. These new demands would not go unmet. The eighteenth and nineteenth had been centuries of kings and queens, autocrats and tsars. The question was: To what extent could the old order survive in the new?
And there were other problems too. The most serious was the most obvious: The world was on a collision course toward war . . . but no one knew it.
You and I have the benefit of hindsight. As you read this book, you know World War I is looming on the horizon, just like you know the Titanic is going to sink. But the characters in the story, just like the men and women living in the years prior to those events, don’t know. And nothing could have been further from their minds. Understanding that, I think, makes their lives and responses all the more intriguing.
Calm appearances of society often mask turbulent undercurrents destined one day either to cause the collapse of that society from within or its destruction from without. Such social fissures had already begun to ripple through the underpinnings of a European exterior of equilibrium and tranquility long before the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. For yet a while longer they remained unseen. But slowly these cracks were widening.
But as I said, few knew it. One of those who did was Winston Churchill, whom you will meet in this story. We think of him as a hero of World War II. But as you’ll discover, he was an integral member of England’s leadership core during World War I as well.
Historians speak of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Yet rarely does a particular moment of history so thoroughly divide all that has come before with all that came after with such definitive finality as those years in Europe between 1910 and 1914. The chasm yawning between the new order which was approaching and the Europe of the old guard of recent memory, though but a few years separated them, was a gulf not of a decade or two, but of centuries.
As the twentieth century opened, Europe had reached stability and equanimity, which, built on a foundation of what was considered enlightened thinking, many assumed to be permanent. Wars had always been fought, of course. There had been terrible wars throughout the 1800s. But since Napoleon’s time these had all been small and localized. In Britain especially it was now felt that such an uncivilized way of dealing with disputes lay in the past. From these present times forward, reason and moderation, dialogue and diplomacy, would henceforth solve men’s difficulties. Yet the enforcement of this reason must still be backed up with military muscle. All the nations of Europe therefore built up their armies and navies, with greater and greater numbers of troops and ever more lethal and sophisticated weaponry.
Another factor was at work as well in the midst of these social, political, and military changes at the turn of the century. It was a force which, though it seemed perhaps healthy and invigorating to the human spirit, at a deeper level appealed to the basest emotions of egotism, pride, arrogance, and aggression.
That force was nationalism.
In many ways, national pride had been the inherent ideology of the nineteenth century. Every country and race in Europe was ruled with its own private ethnic passion. Though not so visible as that between Arab and Jew, European antagonisms and hatreds made the blood run no less hot in the veins of Teutons, Gauls, Poles, Anglo-Saxons, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgars, Bohemians, Slavs, Bosnians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Turks. Now these many diverse and passionate bloodlines rose to new heights in this age of patriotic fervor. Each desired its independence. Each lusted after its perceived right of territorial possession.
As you read, I think you will find yourself amazed at how contemporary some of these disputes are. Today’s newspapers are full of the very same ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes that led to World War I. You’ll read about the first Bosnian crisis and the second Bosnian crisis . . . and we’re still in the midst of a Bosnian crisis! The same regions are being fought over today. Almost a hundred years later we find ourselves wondering if two world wars and a protracted cold war succeeded in solving anything.
In spite of the optimism of reason, therefore, the nations of Europe continued to be ruled by complex military treaties and agreements. In the midst of a heating conglomeration of rivalries, all intent was to strengthen one’s own position and preserve the delicate and ever precarious borders with one’s neighbors.
The map of Europe had been redrawn in 1871 after a short series of wars climaxed by German unification. The next forty years saw rapidly shifting alliances between the nations of Europe. There was the Dual Alliance, then the Mediterranean Entente, then the Austro-German Alliance, then the Three Emperors Alliance, then the Austro-Serbian Alliance, finally the Franco-Russian Alliance.
Treaties, treaties, treaties.
Documents tried to predict every conceivable conflict that Europe’s hundreds of diplomats and advisors and negotiators could imagine. Every nation bartered and hedged against the others, trusting none, not even trusting its allies, only using them to gain its own ends while at the same time hopefully clipping the wings of its adversaries.
Again, to really understand these times, we have to go back a hundred years and realize how different things were. Militarism still dominated much of the world, not the peaceful harmony which exists between the powers of Western Europe today. And alliances we take for granted to
day were much less stable back then.
At the heart of Europe, the German temperament was neither a placid nor compliant one. Germany’s rise under Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s was of particular concern to France and England. She had grown into a formidable power which, if left unchecked, could become a force in Europe that none could contain. Since the great Bismarck’s time, Germany’s industrial might had become considerable, and its military had grown into the strongest on the Continent. Bismarck’s successor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, nephew of Great Britain’s King Edward VII, was well known to be expansively minded.
Gradually it became clear to many in Britain that Germany’s aim was nothing short of domination of the Continent. Britain and France, therefore, as the two chief western powers, sought to curb further German territorial ambitions. Germany observed their attempt and interpreted it not as defensive but aggressive, and spoke against the threat of its own encirclement. And with France and Russia now allies, she perceived this threat as a serious one.
With every shift in outlook, every incident, every change in leadership, every nation in Europe scurried to adjust its position. Times remained peaceful, but those who understood the shaky state of European diplomacy could not help being jittery.
At the end of the first decade of the new century, out of these constantly modifying rivalries and alliances had emerged the Triple Alliance—formed in 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—and the Triple Entente—formed in 1907 between Great Britain, France, and Russia.
The point of conflict where these shaky alliances all converged was in the east, in the Balkans, that dubious, debated, and long-contested region adjacent to three empires—the Russian, the Turkish, and the Austrian—and sitting at the critical juncture between the Black and the Mediterranean Seas. The three largest of the Balkan states, therefore—Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania—though not major powers themselves, became the focus of all Europe’s diplomatic maneuvering.
To Germany the scenario was simple: If the Balkans fell into Russia’s hands, the German-Austrian empire would be virtually encircled.
To France and Great Britain, the opposite scenario was equally clear: The Balkans must be preserved in order to prevent Germany or its ally Austria-Hungary from controlling Europe’s eastern seas.
But no forces of world climax bring about change merely in the abstract. It is across the pages of human life that history is written. Individuals make up the stories of the times in which they live.