The Beloved Girls Read online

  Copyright © 2021 Venetia Books Limited

  The right of Harriet Evans to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  This Ebook edition was first published by Headline Publishing Group in 2021

  All characters – apart from any obvious historical ones – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 5107 7

  Cover and artwork by Laura Barrett

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Harriet Evans

  Praise

  About the Book

  Also by Harriet Evans

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: 2018

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: 1989

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Three: 1959

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Four: 1989

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Part Five: 2018

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Questions

  About Harriet Evans

  by Philippa Gedge

  Harriet Evans has sold over a million copies of her books. She is the author of twelve bestselling novels, most recently the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller The Garden of Lost and Found, which won Good Housekeeping’s Book of the Year, and The Wildflowers, which was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection. She used to work in publishing and now writes full time, when she is not being distracted by her children, other books, crafting projects, puzzles, gardening, and her much-loved collection of jumpsuits. She lives in Bath, Somerset.

  Stay in touch with Harriet on:

  @HarrietEvansAuthor

  /HarrietEvansBooks

  www.harriet-evans.com.

  Praise for The Beloved Girls and the novels of Harriet Evans

  ‘A gorgeous epic . . . It’s slightly gothic, wholly absorbing – I adored it’ Marian Keyes

  ‘This sweeping, absorbing story is a treat’ Adele Parks

  ‘Bewitching, beguiling and utterly beautiful, The Beloved Girls will pull you into their mysterious and enchanted world and never let you go. With a cast of compelling characters and a labyrinthine plot, it’s a page-turner of the most luxurious kind – a real escape’ Veronica Henry

  ‘Comfort reading of the highest order’ India Knight

  ‘A sweeping novel you won’t put down’ Katie Fforde

  ‘Richly layered . . . Unforgettable . . . This is a story to get truly lost in’ Isabelle Broom

  ‘This is the most gripping, atmospheric book, heavy with mystery and intriguing right till the end. I loved it’ Sophie Kinsella

  ‘She reels you in and then you’re hooked, right to the last page’ Patricia Scanlan

  ‘Atmospheric and altogether wonderful’ Lesley Pearse

  ‘I love it on so many levels, the immense feeling of place, the slow, irresistible sense of being drawn deep into the family and its story, and the strange hovering of menace somewhere in the idyll. Wonderful’ Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Spellbinding’ Independent

  ‘Gripping’ Irish Times

  ‘Gorgeous’ Stylist

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I was so enthralled’ Red

  ‘Epic, absorbing . . . Full of intrigue and emotion’ Fabulous

  ‘By turns painfully sad and heart-lifting, with characters that stay with you’ Good Housekeeping

  ‘Authentic and satisfying. An immersive mystery’ Woman & Home

  ‘A poignant tale’ Woman

  ‘Fabulously gripping’ Prima

  ‘Atmospheric and descriptive . . . Full of tragedy and hardship, love and redemption . . . Hugely enjoyable’ Psychologies

  ‘I was blissfully carried away by this intelligent (she’s as good as the great Rosamunde Pilcher), classy and superbly executed family saga’ Saga

  ‘A really superior modern saga, with utterly true to life characters’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘The reader becomes deeply immersed in this charismatic family’s fortunes. The result is that rare and lovely thing, an all-engaging and all-consuming drama’ Daily Mail

  About the Book

  ‘It’s a funny old house. They have this ceremony every summer . . . There’s an old chapel, in the grounds of the house. Half-derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there. Every year, on the same day, the family processes to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them –’ my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth. ‘And half for us.’

  Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?

  The answer lies buried in the past. It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes – a mysterious West Country manor house – where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. She and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . .

  ‘We need the bees to survive, and they need us to survive. Once you understand that, you understand the history of Vanes, you understand our family.’

  By Harriet Evans

  Going Home

  A Hopeless Romantic

  The Love of Her Life

  I Remember You

  Love Always

  Happily Ever After

  Not Without You

  A Place for Us

  The Butterfly Summer

  The Wildflowers

  The Garden of Lost and Found

  The Beloved Girls

  A Winterfold Christmas (e-short)

  Rules for Dating a Romantic Hero (Quick Read)

  This book is for anyone who needs it, with my love

  The twelve hunters are locals. Eleven lepers
will die in Christ if they accept the sacrament. The ten commandments are the word of God and must be obeyed even in this pagan place. Nine bright shiners are the diamonds in the family ring which Sylvia wore and Kitty would have inherited. Eight go into the hives in April for the spring harvest. Seven stars make up the Plough and when it is low in the sky that means August is here and we can collect. Six sides of the chapel, six sides of the cells. Five walkers walk with the hunters to the chapel every year. Four make the honey, the women’s work. Three rivals are the men, it must be men, who stand to gain the most if the pact is broken. They must be watched. Two beloved girls dress in green and white and walk behind the procession; they symbolize purity.

  And there is one alone, one outsider. They stand outside the chapel. They, like the lepers, are nothing, no one. They remind us inside how lucky we are.

  I’ll sing you twelve, O

  Twelve come for the comb, O!

  What are your twelve, O?

  Twelve for the twelve new hunters

  Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,

  Ten for the ten commandments,

  Nine for the nine bright shiners,

  Eight for the Spring Collectors

  Seven for the seven stars in the sky,

  Six for the six-sides of the comb,

  Five for the five proud walkers,

  Four for the honey makers,

  Three, three, the rivals,

  Two, two, the beloved girls,

  Clothed all in green, O,

  One is one and all alone, and evermore shall be so.

  Traditional Collecting Song, to the tune of

  Green Grow the Rushes, O

  Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr,

  The Autocrat of The Breakfast Table

  Young women they run like hares on the mountains,

  Young women they run like hares on the mountains

  If I were but a young man, I’d soon go a hunting

  To my right fol diddle dero, to my right fol diddle dee.

  Young women they sing like birds in the bushes,

  Young women they sing like birds in the bushes

  If I were but a young man, I’d go and bang those bushes

  To my right fol diddle dero, to my right fol diddle dee.

  Hares on the Mountain (First Version)

  Songs from Somerset, 1904, ed. Cecil Sharp

  Prologue

  October 1983

  I was twelve when I first went to Vanes. My mother had walked out on us the previous month, and I assume this is why we were invited. The postcard Sylvia sent my father asked us to ‘please come for a few days, and bring Janey. Oh do come Simon, surely you’ll come now?’ So Daddy and I drove down from London, insistent October rain following us all the way.

  My father and I often took day trips out from the suburbs into the English countryside. To Windsor Castle or the Chilterns; or to Stonehenge, when I was only five, when you were still permitted to scramble about the vast, lichen-covered stones. Daddy made these trips magical for me, peppering the day with jokes, talk of ancient kings, natural phenomena, songs, and excellent sandwiches. ‘All shall be well, little one!’ he’d say, if we hit traffic, or when a seagull on Lyme Regis beach stole my Nutella sandwich. ‘And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’ It’s Julian of Norwich. After he died, I found it in his wallet, torn from a library copy of Revelations of Divine Love. I hadn’t realised it was a quote from someone else until then.

  It’s strange to say it but I didn’t really miss my mother. I think I knew she didn’t belong with us. She made the house a dark, anxious place – she so obviously disliked my father, and could not engage at all with his mad schemes, his living in the future, his avoidance of his past. So the drive to Vanes, our first trip since she’d left, was exciting. Our shabby mock-Tudor semi was a tip and it was good to be going away, Daddy kept saying. He had picked me up from school early, so we left in good time. ‘She has corns,’ he’d airily informed my teacher, as I packed my pencil case, watched with envy by Claire and Ems, and the rest of the class. ‘Dreadful corns.’

  Miss Linton had smiled as we left. My father had that effect on people. ‘Goodbye, Mr Lestrange,’ she’d called. ‘Hope you feel better, Jane dear.’

  We laughed about it, in the car, eating Opal Fruits. I was designated DJ – we fought a little over that, since Daddy always wanted jazz, and I wanted pop music, but we were always able to compromise. Eventually, we settled on Kate Bush.

  ‘Kitty and Joss have exeats this weekend,’ he told me. ‘So you’ll meet them, too. They’re the same age as you.’

  I didn’t know what exeats meant but I nodded. I was with Daddy, and everything was all right.

  For most of the rest of the journey he was happy, singing old jazz standards, asking for coffee from the Thermos. But as we left the motorway and drove further west, through that thin strip of Somerset coastline above Exmoor bordering Devon where the countryside becomes dense, hilly woodland, peppered with ancient castles and grand remote houses, my father grew silent.

  ‘I haven’t seen them for so long,’ he said, a few times. ‘This feels very strange.’

  Eddies of swirling leaves rose and fell in front of us on the twisting lanes; periodically the green sea of the Bristol Channel flashed before our eyes, fringed by trees, then disappeared.

  ‘How do you know them?’ I asked, at some point, shivering in the rickety old Ford, which was always rather touch and go on long journeys.

  ‘Knew him in the war. I knew her mother in London,’ was all he said. He was quiet, for a long time.

  Then, abruptly, he added: ‘Sylvia’s wonderful. And I’m sure her children will be too. It’s a funny old house, Janey. They have this ceremony every summer.’

  ‘What kind of ceremony?’

  ‘There’s a chapel, in the grounds of the house. Half derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there.’

  ‘Bees?!’ I said, amused. I remember it really clearly. Bees, they were strange, alien creatures, and beekeeping was not something anyone I knew did.

  ‘Every year, on the same day, they process across to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them –’ my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth ‘– and half for us.’

  It was almost dark by the time we arrived, though it was not yet five, but the thick woodland behind the house seemed to cast all in front into gloom. I could hear a dog, barking frantically over the whistling wind as we trundled slowly up the driveway.

  As we got out of the car soft rain gently soaked us. The trees were darkest green and orange, and, above, the faintest sliver of a teal sky, gilded with silver and gold from the setting sun. A side door opened and a lantern overhead was switched on, throwing us into relief, like criminals caught in the act. We froze.

  ‘Ah! Come in, dear Simon, out of the rain,’ called a woman’s clear voice.

  ‘Shall we, Janey?’ said Daddy. He rubbed my arm. ‘Listen, old girl. They’re a bit – well, they’re different to us. But we go back an awfully long way. Sylvia’s invited us and it means a great deal to me that she did. I have to make sure she’s all right, you see.’

  The rain was coming down heavily now. Under the open boot, his face was cast into shadow, the light from the lantern an ugly, mustard colour. He looked tired, and suddenly I knew he didn’t want to be there.

  We grabbed our bags from the boot – my father’s capacious Gladstone bag, which was like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, it could hold anything, and my nylon pastel backpack which my mother had bought me before she left (a symbolic present if ever there was one). We dashed through the side gate towards the light, and someone pulled me inside.

  It’s funny, that first visit to Vanes was mostly spent in the house. Years later, when I stayed for the summer, I was rarely inside. We existed outside: on
the terrace, by the pool, scrambling along the steep, scented paths down to the beach, into the woods. And the chapel, and the bees.

  I stood in the hallway, dripping wet, as Daddy took off his coat. The house smelled of woodsmoke, and a metallic, waxen, turpentine smell. Inside, sound had a curiously deadened quality. In the cramped hall was a strange wooden half-table-half-box on tall legs, carved all over with leaves and fruit and bees.

  Above it was a portrait. It was of a youngish man, his body in profile, his head turning towards the viewer, as if caught in the act. The effect was odd, like a photograph, not a painting. I stared at him, his hooded eyes, the long, tapering, curiously white fingers. I didn’t like it much. I shivered in the cold, as Daddy held out his hand.

  ‘Hello, darling Sylvia,’ he said.

  The woman who had pulled me inside and was now standing under the swinging light bulb didn’t shake hands. She flung herself at my father. ‘Come here, oh come here,’ she said, and he wrapped his arms around her, and patted her hair, and gave a deep, strange, heartbreaking sound I didn’t understand. Not then, not for a long time.

  ‘You’re here,’ she whispered, looking up at him, when she finally released him. ‘Darling Simon. You’re really here. And this must be Janey.’

  She came towards me, clasped my face in her thin, small hands. She was like a girl. In fact she’d only have been in her late thirties, but I was twelve and knew nothing. This was Sylvia Hunter.

  ‘You’re very like your dad,’ she said, stroking my face, and the warmth of her motherly touch was repulsive to me – I moved away.

  ‘Joss! Merry! Kitty! Kitty! They’re here,’ she called, with a brightness which I knew well. We were always going to houses where people didn’t want us – Daddy misunderstanding invitations, or my mother not wanting to be there, and children who didn’t want to say hello.

  ‘What?’ A voice came from a room further down the dark corridor, a door banging open.

  ‘Sorry, darling,’ said Sylvia. ‘Look, Simon’s here. With his daughter Janey. Remember?’

  A tall, handsome man with a thin face and brown brackets of hair falling over his forehead peered round the door. His eyes narrowed when he saw Daddy.