Some places get into your blood. Barnsley is in mine, now. It’s one of the things that my mother handed down to me, alongside an aversion to the truth and an impulsive nature. I’m working on the last two, but I’m happy to keep the Barnsley connection strong, for as long as they all let me.
My friends would call it a #happyplace. It’s more than that, though. It’s a deep contentment, a sense of belonging. A breathing out and a relaxing of the shoulders. When I first arrived, it felt full of tension and sadness, but just like everything else humans throw at it, Barnsley cast off the melancholy. Now I know how warm the golden stone of the house feels in the summer sunshine. I hear the calling of the gulls and the splashing of the sea. I see the vast green of the lawn, the gardens in full bloom. Summer at Barnsley is heaven. Just like everybody said.
They found Daphne’s body the afternoon of the fire. After the storm. Washed up in a nearby cove. The police came and questioned us all. They watched the CCTV and read the notebook. There was a full autopsy. Daphne’s toxicology was off the charts. Accidental death by drowning was the verdict. She was killed by the thing she most feared, and it wasn’t Mrs. Mins.
Elizabeth and I talked about everything after the fire, after the incident on the boat. I had come down with the flu quite badly, but Elizabeth insisted on taking me out to the shell house again once I was feeling a bit better. She told me she wanted to explain herself. She tucked me into the camp bed with blankets and a hot water bottle, and it didn’t smell as bad as I remembered. As I lay there, she pulled out paper after paper, flicked through books, read letters aloud to me. It was a catharsis a lifetime in the making.
It turned out that Elizabeth had written every day since my mother left. She had saved reams of paper, all painstakingly written out by hand and then retyped on an old manual typewriter. There were novels, amendments to The House of Brides, the beginnings of a memoir. One of her half-finished manuscripts was called Hereditary Sin, and from what I could tell, it was loosely based on me. She snatched that one away quickly, with an apologetic smile.
And there was a file jammed with papers. Hundreds of rejection letters. All ending differently but saying the same thing.
We are sorry to say that your book does not suit our list at this time.
Sadly, we are not taking on any new clients unless we are completely passionate about their work.
You write very well, but not well enough, I’m afraid.
Perhaps you would like to resubmit in the future.
Some of them had been annotated by Elizabeth: white-hot pulses of rage scrawled in lead pencil. I didn’t blame her for her anger. Why should her sister have all the literary success, while day after day Elizabeth slogged away, somehow unable to get a break, even though she could write as well as anyone else?
Every morning, she told me, she would fortify with a strong nip and then head over water and land, making the long trek to the post office to collect the mail. Every day anticipating good news, or perhaps just some encouragement, and every day returning home again via the pub, despondent and then just plain drunk. Eventually the rejections came by email, and she could start drinking straightaway, in the comfort of her own home. The only light in her life was Daphne and the cookbooks she wrote with her. Without any recognition. It’s no wonder she got angry. I forgive her now.
The children are looking stronger with every day. Their skin is less sallow, their hair shiny and fair from the sun. They spend hours playing on the sand and in the swimming pool. Sophia seems to have regressed years, and is playing like a child; Robbie films everything with his GoPro. Boarding school is off the agenda for now. Agatha’s surgery at Easter went well, and she is moving around with only a crutch. In time, even that will go.
It’s not the day to do this, but I have been waiting all week for the right time, and it never arrives. I want to do it before tonight, before the first guests arrive and a new chapter at Barnsley House begins. I find Max in the garden of the cottage, where he lives with Mrs. Mins. I still can’t call her Meryl.
“Max.” He looks up, alarmed. Direct conversation is something we have mostly avoided since I revealed my identity to him. We have communicated in abstracts or through the children. His embarrassment floats off him in subtle waves. “I have something for you.”
Embarrassment is replaced by fear. His Adam’s apple moves in his throat, betraying his discomfort. The children’s voices carry up from the pool below, and I wish I was with them. They are in good hands with Juliet and Ophelia, though. I wish I were anywhere but alone in this garden, with Max. In desperation, I reach for my bag. My hands find the velvet box immediately; after days of checking, my fingers hardly need to be told. Max instantly recognizes it; before he can stop himself, his hands dart out to touch it. I fumble. The ring box, small and unmistakable, is revealed. “Why do you have this? Where did you get this?” His voice is firm, the vowels clipped. Formal.
Of all the things he could have asked, this, to me, is the least important. “I found it. In your bathroom.”
“I thought the ring was lost forever,” is what he says when he finally speaks.
“I found it in a pill packet in your bathroom when I was looking for medicine for Robbie.”
“Meryl found that ring once before,” he says, ignoring me. His skin is pale now, under his tan.
“I thought you might want the ring, for . . .” I can’t bring myself to say her name.
“My mother threw it in the ocean, down in the cove. Meryl was swimming and found it.” It’s an abridged version, but still, it matches up with Daphne’s story.
“We thought you might like it . . . for Meryl.” There. I had said it. It felt stiff, foreign.
“We?”
“Elizabeth and I.”
“The consolation prize?” he asked. There was sadness in his voice, but not the bitterness I was expecting. It had been tough for him, to relinquish control of Barnsley to Elizabeth and myself. He didn’t really have a choice, though, not once we all saw the CCTV footage. Not once we all had a chance to go over the accounts.
“I think the Stag’s Head was the consolation prize.”
Max allowed himself to smile a little. “Elizabeth would probably say it was Meryl.”
The sun was behind him, so I couldn’t see his face, only feel the intensity of his gaze. “Elizabeth never liked Mrs. Mins,” I agreed.
Max shook his head, laughed sadly. “No, that’s wrong. She hated Meryl.”
“Yes.” It was true. Elizabeth had said as much.
“It started before that.” Max took the ring box in his hand. Opened it, and stared at the ring inside. “Elizabeth was terrified I was going to marry Meryl long before Daphne came on the scene. She didn’t think Meryl was good enough. She didn’t think Meryl had what it took to be a Summer wife. Elizabeth talked me out of asking Meryl to marry me. She told me to find someone new. I was too young to know my own mind.” It was impossible to disagree with Elizabeth; I had learned that lately as we argued over menu plans, room rates, and public relations strategies.
“When I brought Daphne home, Elizabeth loved her straightaway. She would have loved anyone who wasn’t Meryl, I think. From the first, they were in each other’s pockets. I thought she would die of happiness when Daphne asked for help with her recipes. They loved the same things: Barnsley, cooking, booze. I couldn’t get a look in most of the time.”
“So that’s why—”
“Yes,” he said sadly. “I didn’t go back to Meryl until after Agatha’s accident. Until there was no chance of saving my marriage.”
I had one more question I hadn’t asked Max. I hadn’t had the nerve.
“What happened between you and my mother?” It was the final piece of the puzzle for me, really. The last obstacle between my old life and a new life at Barnsley.
“At first, I was angry about the sheep.”
I sighed, much more loudly than I had intended. Possibly even rolled my eyes.
“I know, I know. It doesn’t seem like much, but there was a lot of bad blood in the village about it.”
“And then?”
“And then the book came out. And after what she wrote about my mother—our mother—the sheep just paled in comparison.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t up to me to reveal Elizabeth’s secrets. She had tried to tell him, once upon a time, and he hadn’t believed her. Maybe that really was for the best.
The past was past, as my father said. As he had reminded me on the phone, when I told him I was going to stay on for a bit.
Dad had sounded contemplative then. I worried that I had upset him, just when we were starting to repair our relationship. But later that night he emailed me an A. D. Hope poem, “The Death of the Bird,” though with the internet situation, I hadn’t discovered it until days later. The poem had brought my mother solace during her dying days, he wrote, and as I read the second verse, I felt the same comfort.
Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.
With the poem, Dad had given me the gift of my mother’s blessing, and his own, to move on with my life, reassuring me that making a home for myself at Barnsley would not come at the cost of the one I already had.
Max was waiting for me to respond.
“That seems fair,” I said finally. I touched my necklace, remembering how it felt on my mother’s neck when she cuddled me. Holding on to the good memories.
Max played with the ring, holding it up to the sunshine, as if to see if it was real.
“I knew she wouldn’t have thrown it away. For all her faults, Daphne wasn’t cruel.” His voice cracked, and he stopped talking, his fingers absently stroking the worn felt of the ring box. “Daphne had her problems, but she was a genius with food. I adored her. She deserves her place in that book.”
“She had her own books.”
Max looked shocked, and then he nodded. “You’re right. She had her own books.”
“It’s better that way,” I said. Max’s eyes mirrored my feelings of relief and sadness.
I left him sitting in the sunshine and returned to the main house. Elizabeth and Leonard were setting up great long tables under the shade of the wisteria. There were overflowing buckets of big, blousy dahlias everywhere, ready to be arranged by Fleur. She and Dad would be down any minute. The view from the terrace made me stop, even though I saw it every day. Even though it was home to me now.
“It’s going to be so beautiful.” I sighed.
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “There’s a lot to do before it’s beautiful, Miranda. Here, Leonard, get on the other end of this. Hurry up, we haven’t got all day.” She picked up the end of a table before Leonard even had a chance to get to the end. He smiled and winked at me.
“I saw Max,” I said, grabbing a linen tablecloth from the pile and shaking it over the table. “I gave him the ring.”
“Good riddance,” Elizabeth snapped. “That ring’s been nothing but trouble.” Her own thin gold band flashed in the sunshine.
“I think it’s quite beautiful,” I said, remembering how I felt when I first found it. I’d never seen a stone like it before.
“Well, you won’t be getting a ring like that if you keep carrying on with him.” She gestured in Leonard’s direction.
Leonard shook his head, unable to contain a laugh. “She’s right, you know.”
I picked up two bottles of chilled mineral water from the ice boxes, went to Elizabeth, and threw my arms around her.
“Let’s not talk about rings and brides anymore. Tonight’s about us. The Summer women.” We had worked hard, it was true. All through the spring we had painted and cleaned and dusted and gardened, Leonard and Elizabeth and Tom and I.
We had planned a new menu for the restaurant, respectful to Daphne but with a nod towards my passions. To healthy eating and wellness. To plants and fruit and raw ingredients. We had the dodgy internet fixed, and I dipped my toe back into social media, tentatively at first, and then with great gusto. It didn’t control me anymore, though; once my work was done for the day, I simply logged off and forgot about it.
Tonight’s opening was going to tip us over the edge in terms of followers. The place was going to be filled with influencers and Instagrammers, bloggers and journalists. I was happy to let them do their thing, and I’d do mine.
Finally Elizabeth put her arms around my waist. She was getting better at physical contact, I had to say. “To Daphne,” Elizabeth said, raising her glass bottle.
I raised mine in response. “The last of the brides.”
We clinked the necks of the bottles together, a sister and a daughter standing together on the lawn at Barnsley, remembering the women who had come before us, imagining the women we would become.