Harper
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First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
Copyright © Alexandra Brown 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Alexandra Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007597390
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007597406
Version: 2016-04-25
For Mavis Holdsworth Mercer
26 November 1928 – 15 January 2015
My Doncaster nanny, a lady who was always very
kind to me xxx
‘Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer’s year – it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.’
–Anonymous
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Alexandra Brown
About the Publisher
Jessie Cavendish hadn’t been sure about uprooting from their elegant Chelsea mews house and re-locating to the quaint, but quite muddy, little village of Tindledale. Having grown up in a rural, close-knit, welly-wearing community, she knew first hand how incestuous they could be and how isolated they could make one feel. Yet, as she hiked on up to the highest point overlooking the valley, landmarked by the biggest oak tree she had ever seen, pausing to catch her breath as she slipped off her cardy and tied it neatly around her waist, she realised that the more she saw of this idyllic part of the world, the more she rather liked it.
Tindledale was surrounded by lush, undulating green hills dotted with lambs and an abundance of pretty wild flowers, pink apple orchards and strawberry fields. At its heart lay an adorably cobbled High Street, flanked either side with black timber-framed, white-wattle-walled shops with mullioned windows – it really was a special place. And Jessie wasn’t the naïve person she had been back then, when Sebastian had enticed her away to the bright lights of London, to the city where all the women lived fabulously glamorous lives in their pretty ballerina pumps, or so she had thought. But Jessie had grown to realise over the years that it was often far easier to ‘get onboard’, as Sebastian was fond of saying, whenever one of his big, life-changing plans was mooted. Plus, the children would be so much happier in the village school, with its postage-stamp-sized playground and quaint clock tower on the roof – no more navigating the super-shiny 4x4 (Sebastian had insisted she drive the triplets in the oversized, but extra-safe tank, but she hated it, much preferring her clapped-out, old and very small Mini) through the narrow, congested streets of London on the nursery school run.
Moving here would mean just a short trundle through the village where the triplets’ new friends were bound to live, and perhaps Jessie would meet and make some friends of her own too! Yes, far nicer than having the children cloistered away inside some archaic boarding school, as Sebastian had been planning for far too soon after their sixth birthdays, having registered the children’s names before they were even born – so at least she had managed to hold out for something in return, this time, for distancing herself from her old life, her family, her friends, her support network … But then Jessie