THE WHITE LADY

JACQUELINE WINSPEAR

In memory of the wonderful writer and teacher,
Barbara Abercrombie, who died in 2022. Barbara was a UCLA Writers’ Program Distinguished Instructor, and my dear friend.

‘And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.’

– John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton (1834–1902)

‘Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.’

– Vittori Alfieri (1749–1803)

‘War is a thug’s game. The thug strikes first and harder. He doesn’t go by rules and he isn’t afraid of hurting people.’

– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The War Within & Without (1980)

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY JACQUELINE WINSPEAR

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

Kent, England 1947

Every morning as Rose Mackie leant over the bars of the wooden cot and picked up her three-year-old daughter, she gave thanks for the cottage. She gave thanks for the roof over her head, and she gave thanks for the fact that she wasn’t putting up with Jim’s mum and dad, and she wasn’t living in a London prefab set among the thousands of other London prefabs built in haste to accommodate families left homeless during six years of war. She gave thanks because her little Susie could run across fields in fresh country air, and the child didn’t have to wear a scarf over her nose to protect her tiny lungs from the lumpy yellow-green London smog that looked like something nasty the dog had brought up. Just the thought of those pea-soupers made Rose feel queasy.

A lot of things made Rose feel sick about living in London, the city its dwellers called ‘the Smoke.’ There was Jim’s family, for a start – in fact, his family alone amounted to a good reason not to feel very well at all. But here, now, Jim, Rose and their precious child were safe. Or as safe as they could be. They’d managed to get out of London, exchanging the Smoke for the quiet of the country. In the past year, since they had altered the course of their lives – forever, they hoped – Jim had lost that sunken look in his cheeks and those lines of worry that no young man of five and twenty should feel every time he ran his hand across his forehead. There were no longer dark circles under his pale-blue eyes, and he didn’t startle every time wind rattled the windowpanes. They had escaped London. They had run as far as they could from the bomb sites – and more than anything, they had dragged themselves out from under the fingernails of the Mackie family.