The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Read online

  ALSO BY EVE CHASE

  The Wildling Sisters

  Black Rabbit Hall

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2020 by Eve Chase Limited

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chase, Eve, author.

  Title: The daughters of Foxcote Manor / Eve Chase.

  Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2020. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020013903 | ISBN 9780525542384 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525542407 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction

  Classification: LCC PR6103.H45 D38 2020 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013903

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Eve Chase

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my family

  What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse

  GLOUCESTERSHIRE ENQUIRER 29 AUGUST 1971

  Body Found in Woods

  A body was discovered yesterday in the wooded grounds of a house in the Forest of Dean. The death is being treated as suspicious. Shocked locals told the Enquirer that the property, Foxcote Manor, is owned by the Harrington family, who moved in earlier this month after a fire at their London home. A resident from the nearest village, Hawkswell, who wishes to remain anonymous, said, “We’re all just praying it was a terrible accident. This sort of thing shouldn’t happen in a quiet place like this. Or to a family like the Harringtons.”

  1

  Rita, Forest of Dean, 4 August 1971

  The forest looks like it’ll eat them alive, thinks Rita. The light’s gone a weird green and branches are thrashing against the car’s windows. She tightens her grip on the steering wheel. The lane narrows further. Wondering if she’s missed the turning to the house or if it’s around the next corner, she takes a bend too fast, then slams her foot on the brake.

  Rita sucks in her breath, her eyes widening behind the Morris Minor’s insect-spattered windscreen. She’s not sure what she was expecting. Something smarter. More Harrington. Not this.

  Behind a tall, rusting gate, Foxcote Manor erupts from the undergrowth, as if a geological heave has lifted it from the woodland floor. The mullioned windows on the old house, a wrecked beauty, blink drunkenly in the stippled evening sunlight. Colossal trees overhang a sweep of red-tiled roof that sags in the middle, like a snapped spine, so the chimneys tilt at odd angles. Ivy suckers up the timber-and-brick gabled façade, dense, bristling, alive with dozens of tiny darting birds, a billowing veil of bees. It’s as far from the Harringtons’ elegant London townhouse as Rita could possibly imagine.

  For a moment no one in the car speaks. Unseen, in the trees, a woodpecker drums its territorial tattoo. Sweat trickles down the back of Rita’s left knee. Only now does she register her hands are shaking.

  Although she’s done her best to disguise it from Jeannie and the children, she’s been panicky ever since they turned onto the forest road, almost five hours after leaving London. It’s not just the worry she’ll kill her precious passengers. Every so often her vision has actually shuddered, disoriented by all the soaring trees, the lack of sky, and the knowledge of quite how hard a tree trunk is when hit at fifty miles an hour. Now they’ve survived the journey, she covers her mouth with her hand. Everything’s still going too fast. How on earth has she ended up here? A forest. Of all places. She hates forests.

  It was meant to be a London nannying job.

  Fourteen months ago, Rita had never been to London. But she’d dreamed of it longingly, the Rita she might be there, far away from Torquay, everything that had happened. And the metropolitan family—just like the Darlings in Peter Pan—who’d embrace her as their own. They’d live in a tall warm house that didn’t have a coin-gobbling electricity meter, like Nan’s bungalow did. She’d get a bedroom of her own, with a desk and a shelf, perhaps a view of the churning, thrilling city. And the mother she worked for would be . . . well, perfect. Someone delicate and kind and soft. Cultured. With tiny earlobes and fluttery birdlike hands. Like her own mother, whom Rita hazily remembered. Everything she’d lost in the accident. And that a bit of her kept searching for.

  On the morning of the interview, she’d gazed up at the Primrose Hill house’s sugar-white stucco and cascading wisteria, and immediately known this was it. Her new home. Her new family. She could feel a tingling sensation, like the first fizz of pins and needles, as she’d knocked on the smart front door, her heart scudding beneath her best blouse that didn’t look best in London. Now it’s her second-best blouse, packed in the boot along with any other clothes—practical, plain, rarely long enough in the arm or leg—she could salvage after the fire that tore through that London house last weekend. Even after the long cycle at the launderette, her clothes still whiff of smoke.

  Rita glances across at Jeannie in th
e passenger seat. Wearing a new haul from Harrods, she is defiantly dressed for London, clutching a black patent leather handbag as if for dear life. She looks fragile, upset. Her recent weight loss is painfully obvious in that cream crepe skirt, tightly belted, another hole in, a powder-blue cashmere twinset, and a white silk scarf, wound like a bandage around her stemlike neck. And she’s wearing those sunglasses again, the tortoiseshell ones, with lenses big as Hartley’s jam-jar lids, she always puts on after a night of crying.

  Jeannie hadn’t wanted to leave Claridge’s. (Rita neither: she’d never stayed anywhere she hadn’t had to make her own bed before. The maid wouldn’t even let her help with the tricky mattress corners.) Jeannie certainly hadn’t wanted to come here: “Monstrous place. Walter’s way of isolating me,” she’d whispered last night, out of the children’s earshot. Peering up at Foxcote Manor now, Rita can’t help but wonder if Jeannie was right.

  When she’d started the job, everything was different. She remembers Jeannie reading her reference out loud on the day of the interview, her slowly spreading smile, her hands stroking the sun of her heavily pregnant belly. “‘Loyal, kind, and adored by my four children. Brilliant with the baby. Not so good on laundry or cooking. Very nervous driver. Would hire again in a heartbeat.’”

  Walter hadn’t been particularly interested. A reserved man with a carefully curated mustache, sinewy in a slim-cut brown suit, he’d been friendly but businesslike. After briskly shaking her hand, he excused himself, blew some kisses in the direction of the kids, and rushed out to work, trailing the faint soapy scent of shaving foam. Back then, Walter was happy to leave all of the domestic decisions to his wife. He ran the Harrington Glass headquarters in Mayfair, not the family house. And he seemed perfectly nice. If there had been warning signs, Rita didn’t spot them.

  She’d never wanted a job so much. Carefully lowering herself to the sofa, she’d laced her hands together tightly, so they couldn’t fidget, and crossed her untidy legs at the ankle, tucking them in, as Nan had instructed (“It’ll make you look smaller, love. More feminine”). She tried very hard not to smile too much, to appear a serious professional, older than her twenty years. Worthy of such a plum post.

  Jeannie had called the then-five-year-old Teddy into the drawing room. “He’s delicious,” she said. And he was. Rita had to fight the urge to ruffle his curls. Then-twelve-year-old Hera appeared, less obviously delicious and, as if to compensate for this, offering a slice of cake—Jeannie called it pâtisserie—on a bone-china plate with a minuscule silver fork. As Hera shyly explained how to pronounce her posh name—“Here-rah”—Rita took the plate. It tipped and the cake, in horrifying slow motion, slid off and landed in the deep-pile carpet next to the potted aspidistra. Hera giggled. Rita caught her eye, then disastrously giggled too, and tried to disguise it as a coughing fit. Obviously she’d blown it spectacularly and would be sent packing back to Nan’s bungalow, cloying small-town life—and her own ugly secret. But that giggle, Jeannie told her afterward, had won her the job. She wanted the baby to have a fun young nanny, not some cross old boot.

  But the baby never heard Rita’s giggle. Or anyone else’s. She’s a tiny ghost doll, stiff, white, frozen in time, a presence constantly felt but never, God forbid, mentioned. And Rita . . . well, what is she now? Not just the fun young nanny. And she’s got more than what they’ll eat for tea weighing on her mind.

  Even the trees seem to peer down at her accusingly, shaking their leafy heads. “Our little arrangement,” Walter calls it. When he suggested it two days ago, Rita didn’t want any part. She felt such disquiet about his motives. “You want to think about it?” He’d snorted. “This is a job, not a dessert menu, Rita.” The choice was stark: agree or leave (“immediately, without a reference”), and he’d hire someone more compliant.

  “I have to remain in London, what with the business, so you must make notes on my wife’s state of mind.” Walter smoothed his rapidly retreating hair. “Keep me informed of her moods. Appetite. Quality of mothering. I’ll expect your absolute discretion, of course. My wife mustn’t find out.”

  Rita’s mind had raced. First, if she left, where would she go? How would she live? Nan had died a few months earlier—not a bad case of indigestion, after all—and the council had reclaimed her bungalow. She had been determined to give Nan a proper send-off and a gravestone. The cost had wiped out her savings.

  And she couldn’t bear the thought of walking away from Jeannie, Hera, and Teddy when they needed her most. It’d be like giving up on them. Or saying, “I can’t help you anymore,” even though she’s sure she can—she knows about grief, the way it scars you, not on the skin but on the soft suede of the soul inside. (And how it is to grow up different, like Hera, the one who doesn’t fit.) So yes, surely better she “report” on Jeannie this summer, fudging whenever necessary, than some strict new hire, she reasoned. Even this morning it felt like the right decision. But now that they’re here, enclosed by these somber, looming trees, in a spot so remote it feels like they’re the last survivors on the planet, she’s no longer sure. Her mouth is dry and metallic. It tastes of betrayal.

  “Rita?” Jeannie touches her lightly on the arm, interrupting her spiraling thoughts. Jeannie’s voice is thick with the morning’s medication, the reason Rita is driving. (“Funny, I see halos,” Jeannie observed over Claridge’s flawless poached eggs at breakfast.) “Are you ready?”

  “Oh, yes! Sorry.” Rita’s cheeks blaze. Her conscience lies too close to the surface.

  “Well, let’s get this bloody awful thing over with, shall we?” Jeannie whispers grimly. Rita nods and grapples with the gearshift. Forcing a smile for the children, Jeannie says in a loud, bright voice, “Well, hello, Foxcote! This is exciting. Come on, Big Rita. Drive in.”

  2

  Sylvie, Kensal Town, London, Now

  I heave the last cardboard box from the house to the car, hands on the bulging base so bits of me don’t fall out into the street and cause a scene. I glance back at the house, my eyes stinging. Is this it? My family home, like the marriage I’ve stuck with for so long, finally excavated of me?

  My married life has been bookended by moving boxes. Arrivals and exits. Whoops and sobs. When we first moved in, nineteen years ago, I was five months pregnant, a busy makeup artist with a carry-on case always packed, ready to easyJet off for a shoot abroad at short notice. I didn’t own a salad spinner. I’d never changed a nappy. My engagement ring—antique gold, pea-green emerald—had belonged to Steve’s great-aunt and made me smile every time I looked at it. The wedding would happen after I’d lost the baby weight (not all of it). I’d wear an ivory lace vintage dress and T-bar shoes, just the right side of Courtney Love. We’d dance to Pulp’s “Common People.” We’d be married forever.

  I couldn’t have imagined this street changing either.

  Cheap for Zone 2, it was home to a kebab shop, a resident loon, who shouted abuse at lampposts, and a thriving drug den. The front doors were painted a council rust red. Now those doors are mostly sludgy shades of charcoal gray. The kebab shop is a much-Instagrammed florist, selling dragon-red dahlias. There are five Sophies living on the street. Probably fifty juicers. If we had to buy our house now, we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We? That mental slip again. Keeps happening.

  I say, “Good-bye,” under my breath. I’ve been moving boxes out of the house into my tiny apartment for the last month, tentatively, while Steve’s at work. Now it’s done, I feel elated. But my heart aches. I can’t shut it as easily as the front door. So many memories remain in that house, stored like sunlight in a jar: Annie’s ascending height marks penciled on the bathroom wall; the baby-pink rose we planted to mark the grave of Lettuce, Annie’s rabbit; folders of tear sheets, editorial magazine work I did when starting out, well over twenty years ago, happy to be cool rather than properly paid. I’ve no storage space now. No garden, either. And way too many bills to settle on my own.


  A trial separation, Steve still calls it. He didn’t believe me when I first told him six weeks ago. We were eating prawn linguine in silence. I’d been away that week, working on a countrywear catalog shoot in the Highlands, involving lots of corduroy, shivering models, and driving rain. Steve had forgotten the bin day—crime A—so we’d be stuck with the recycling for another two weeks, and the bin was stuffed full already. But really it was about something else—other layers of rubbish built up in our marriage (crimes B–Z).

  I watched Steve decapitate a prawn with his fingers, humming under his breath. His face—the angular dark brows, the childhood BMX scar on his chin—was so familiar it was as if I couldn’t see him. “What have I done now?” he said, not looking up at me.

  I put down my fork. The words just tumbled out. “Steve, I can’t do this . . . us . . . anymore.” A moment passed. Steve blinked rapidly. He waited for me to apologize or blame my hormones. The music shuffled on to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Normally we’d quip about the irony. We didn’t. It felt like nothing would be funny again.

  “But I love you,” Steve stuttered, floored. And at that moment—8:11 P.M., 19 June—I knew he meant it, he really did, but also that he couldn’t imagine life without me, which is not quite the same. Then I thought about our eighteen-year-old daughter, Annie, out in Camden celebrating finishing her last A-level exam, sweetly oblivious, and I burst into tears. What was I doing?

  Love. Stability. An unbroken home. The moment Annie slid into the world, unfathomably precious, I’d promised her all of this. I didn’t mourn my lost freedoms, even though my career soon shrank like cashmere in a hot wash. I could no longer travel or work late into the night. I was exhausted. Even my feet were fat. But there was no getting around it, I was also deeply, shockingly happy, maybe for the first time in my life. My magnetic north had flipped. So yes, I’d get motherhood right. That was all that mattered. I’d give Annie absolutely everything I had.