Copyright © 2019 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.
Diary extract © Cynthia Asquith, Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries 1915–18 (London: Hutchinson, 1968)
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 2019
All characters – apart from the 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 5102 2
Cover illustration by Amy Grimes @ The Artworks
Design by Yeti Lambregts
Author photograph © Johnny Ring
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About Harriet Evans
Praise
About the Book
Also by Harriet Evans
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
I
II
III
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Reading group guide
About Harriet Evans
Harriet Evans is the author of eleven books and two novellas. She grew up in London and read Classical Studies at Bristol University. She worked in publishing for several years before leaving to write full-time. She has sold over a million copies and her last novel, The Wildflowers, was a number one e-book bestseller and a Richard and Judy Book club choice. Harriet lives in London with her family and likes old films, property websites, sloe gin cocktails, feminism and Bombay Mix, not in that order.
She’d love to hear from you – please contact her on Twitter at @HarrietEvans, Facebook at facebook.com/harrietevansbooks or via her website, www.harriet-evans.com.
Readers love Harriet Evans
‘A master at creating characters you feel like you know inside out, and wish you could meet in real life’ Heat
‘Heart-stopping and wonderful’ Sophie Kinsella
‘Perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Maeve Binchy’ Best
‘A delightfully engrossing read’ Red
‘Perfect . . . Reminiscent of Santa Montefiore with the emotional heart of Jojo Moyes. You’ll frequently find yourself uttering the words: just one more page’ Culture Fly
‘This brilliantly written portrait of a fascinating family in crisis is an emotionally intelligent, thoughtful and engaging read’ Daily Mail
‘A really superior modern saga, with utterly true to life characters’ Sunday Mirror
‘Fabulously gripping story’ Prima
‘She’s as good as the great Rosamunde Pilcher’ Saga
Harriet Evans. She brings you home.
About the Book
Nightingale House, 1919. Liddy Horner discovers her husband, the world-famous artist Sir Edward Horner, burning his best-known painting The Garden of Lost and Found days before his sudden death.
Nightingale House was the Horner family's beloved home – a gem of design created to inspire happiness – and it was here Ned painted The Garden of Lost and Found, capturing his children on a perfect day, playing in the rambling Eden he and Liddy made for them.
One magical moment. Before it all came tumbling down . . .
When Ned and Liddy's great-granddaughter Juliet is sent the key to Nightingale House, she opens the door onto a forgotten world. The house holds its mysteries close but she is in search of answers. For who would choose to destroy what they love most? Whether Ned's masterpiece – or, in Juliet's case, her own children's happiness.
Something shattered this corner of paradise. But what?
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
A Winterfold Christmas (e-short)
Rules for Dating a Romantic Hero (Quick Read)
For my Martha
‘The future is yet unwritten; the past is burnt and gone’
Inscription on the plaque of The Garden of Lost and Found
Sir Edward Horner, 1900
The children who played in the garden:
Helena & Charlotte Myrtle
Helena’s daughter Lydia Dysart Horner
Her children Eliza, John & Stella Horner
Stella’s son Michael Horner
His daughter Juliet Horner
Her children Beatrice, Isla & Sandro Taylor
Prologue
I
June 1918
For the rest of her life, after it happened, she would wonder if she could have stopped it. If she’d checked on Ned earlier – he had been so peculiar since their return from London – if she had understood what her husband really intended to do when he spent every last penny they had buying back The Garden of Lost and Found, if she’d not been sitting at her desk staring into space, remembering, if she’d noticed more, could she have stopped it? But by the time Lydia Dysart Horner reached her husband’s studio, it was too late to save perhaps the most famous – certainly the most beloved – painting in the world from the flames.
It was June. Liddy had been in the drawing room, the french windows open to the garden which was then at its most lovely, the perfume of jasmine, rose and lavender hanging faint in the air. Periodically, as she sifted listlessly through the ever-present pile of unpaid bills, she would inhale deeply, trying to catch the scent
of the flowers over the smell of musty books and carpets, gas lamps and Zipporah’s cooking: a leg of mutton, studded with rosemary. Liddy had cut the rosemary that morning, and she had also dug up the new potatoes herself, smooth gold nuggets in the black soil. She had picked the flowers for the table: heavy roses, lilac, geums, in shades of violet, dusky-pink, dark red, all from her garden.
They had come to this house twenty-four years ago almost to the day, one bright hopeful June afternoon when the willow wept in the stream beyond and the thrusting young green oak, which now towered over the house, was still a sapling. The countryside was at the height of its glory and they were weary and sick with travel. Ned had handed his young wife – they were both so young, no more than children really – out of the cart, and then carried her down the drive. She had sprained her ankle back at their old cottage – the dear Gate House, how long since she had thought of it! – and it was never quite right afterwards, not even now. Liddy could recall still how, as she was borne by Ned towards the threshold, she could feel the uneasy sensation of wanting to attend to her hair – the great coil falling down about her shoulders after the jolting of the cart on the uneven road – but his hands gripped her tight, his face shiny with exertion and with the furious conviction which drove him in everything, which killed him in the end.
‘Liddy – listen! There are nightingales in the trees, I’ve heard them at night. I’ve heard the songs they sing.’
The tall, strange house welcomed you in but would not really ever be owned by people, merely inhabited by them. It had been built in lichen-flecked golden Cotswold stone that stayed cool in summer and trapped the sunshine in winter. A Virginia creeper smothered the south side, lime-green in spring, raspberry-pink in autumn. Lacy white hydrangeas flourished beneath the study and dining room windows. There were owls around the door, squirrels above and, perched proudly atop the house, four stone nightingale finials on the roof.
They were on her doll’s house too, and that is how she recognised where he had brought her.
The memories, you see. They caught in her throat, that time, all those times.
John’s first steps, unsteady, determined, so tiny, so world-destroying, down the curved steps into the Wilderness, to find his sister singing her specially adapted song from Mother Goose that she used to sing him.
‘John John, the painter’s son, Stole a cake and away he rund.’
The frosted Christmas morning when Eliza crept out early and returned carrying trails of ivy and stiff sharp holly into the house, her face red with the cold.
The first time Mary came to stay, her sweet dark face at the door, tears in her eyes, and her honeyed low voice: ‘I can feel Mama here, Liddy – she’s here, isn’t she?’ But it had been eighteen years now and she did not even know if Mary was alive or dead.
The time of the painting – that golden summer when she sat for hours. The children – fairies, dancing in the garden, as the light faded, wearing their bird wings and Ned mad to catch it all, trapping the memories and the love and setting it down on canvas . . .
The trundle of the bicycle that iron-cold morning bringing the telegram, the birds frozen dead on the branches. All dead. She had tipped the telegram boy. Quite calmly.
Liddy had dreams in which another woman sat at the desk, this desk, her hair piled up like Liddy’s, and looked out down at the garden. This woman was not her, but she could never see her face.
It was hard to concentrate, that afternoon. The spring had been dreadfully cold and the sudden glory of summer that afternoon was especially welcome. Letting a butcher’s bill fall from her fingers, Liddy sat in near-content, drowsily listening out for the nightingales, the sound of a droning bumblebee at the glass only adding to her soporific state.
Then she caught the smell. Faint at first, sweetly spiced, the smell of winter.
But the fires were never lit in the house after Whitsun, at her direction. Nor was the smell in the garden. Darling, the gardener knew better than to light a fire when the birds might be nesting. And some instinct, some past muscle memory of disaster, made her rise and push past the desk out on to the terrace, where the smell of roses mingled more strongly now with the other.
It was the smell of burning. A fire.
Liddy ran towards the Dovecote, the ancient banqueting house on the edge of the grounds that was Ned’s studio. Already she could hear the crackle and spit of burning wood, then a splintering sound, and an unearthly, almost inhuman cry. She picked up her pace, the heels of her small silk shoes sinking into the soft earth, the heavy dusky-pink silk of her dress slick against her legs like water, and as she reached the small building and paused in the doorway she cried out, hands raised above her head.
Ned was standing in front of a leaping, greedy, orange fire. White sparks flew from the flames and he grabbed at them with his hands, clutching, waving, feet stamping on the ground.
‘Gone!’ he was shrieking, fingers manically plucking at the dazzling flashes of fire. ‘Gone! Gone! Gone!’ His voice, like a bird, high-pitched, screaming. ‘Gone!’
‘Ned!’ Liddy cried, trying to make him hear her over the roar of the fire. ‘Darling! Ned!’ As she reached him, she grabbed his shoulders to turn him away from the flames but he pushed her roughly aside, with the strength of a madman.
‘I’m going to do it,’ he said, and he didn’t look at her, but through her. As though she wasn’t there. The apples in his cheeks shone red. ‘I’ve made it vanish. A magic trick! It won’t haunt us any more, Liddy! It can’t hurt us!’
The heat made her face ache, but she stared, mouth agape. She knew what she would see even before she looked over.
The Garden of Lost and Found had been on an easel in his studio since Ned had bought it back, eight months ago. He kept it wrapped in brown paper fastened with string. This, she could see, had been undone, the seal broken, the paper roughly tied up again. She could see too the edges of the painting’s gold frame peeking out. And as she watched, Ned picked the package up and hurled it on to the fire.
Liddy screamed, as though in pain – the frame caught alight instantly. She lunged for the fire, eyes fixed on the paper, the gold frame melting, buckling away into nothing, disappearing before her very eyes, but he pushed her back.
Her children, their dear curved backs, the exquisite concentration, the wings that glowed golden in the setting sun – he had caught them, caught them perfectly and now they were burning. She could see no trace of them at all, only the plaque: ‘The Garden of Lost and Found: Sir Edward Horner, R.A. 1900’ and the inscription underneath, licked by the greedy, hateful flames.
The noise! How could she have known a fire could roar, and scream, like this?
She strained against him. ‘Ned,’ she sobbed. ‘Darling, how could you?’ She managed to drag him back a few steps, pressing her hand to his clammy forehead. He was icy, his eyes glassy. ‘Oh dear God – why?’
‘He won’t come back again. I’ve burned him. He’s gone away. She’s gone away. The little birds have all gone away,’ was all he would say.
Liddy drew his shaking body towards her. He was trembling, hardly aware of where he was. Fear plucked at her stomach, her throat.
‘Darling, come into the house,’ she said. ‘You’re not well.’
But he shoved her back. ‘I am well. I am well.’ He clasped her hands, as a thick, feathering black plume of smoke caused her to cough and her eyes to stream. ‘Now we won’t have to look at them again,’ he said, quite clearly, one side of his face in shade, the other orange-pink, licked by the light of the fire. ‘The fire has cleansed us. Now, Liddy, this too.’
He pushed her away, and reached for the little oil sketch of The Garden of Lost and Found that had always hung in the corner of the studio. With all her strength Liddy yanked it from him and turning, she pushed him out into the garden, setting the sketch down, then turned back to the fire. She grabbed all the clothes and rags she could, realising with increasing terror that the turpentine in them would send the s
tudio up in seconds. Everything else in it would be gone, too. There was a carpet rolled up on the floor: she hauled it over the flames, its weight pulling her hands on to the fire and she felt the searing, white-hot pain of melting flesh, smelled the sizzling of her own skin and looked down in surprise to see her own hands, burning. With more presence of mind than she had ever known, and some act of preservation for a future she could not see, with one hand Lydia held her silk skirt away, with the other lifted one leg and stamped, heavily, down on the carpet, on the fire, as hard as she could.
Up at the house they had realised what was happening. She could hear the cries, echoing down to them. ‘Fire at the Dovecote! Water! Bring water!’
She staggered out of the little building, eyes streaming. Blinking, she peered at her own hands, red and raw, and could not feel any pain. Zipporah and little Nora appeared from the kitchen, racing towards her. Nora’s apron fluttered out in the breeze from the fire as Zipporah threw a basin of water on to the flames licking at the edge of the carpet. Darling materialised from the tangled garden, pushing a wheelbarrow with a metal bath in it, spilling over with water, his ancient bow-legged frame steadying the wheelbarrow’s progress.
‘Mrs Horner! Madam!’ Nora was pointing in horror at the ground behind Liddy. Ned had collapsed to the floor, quite white. He half opened his eyes and there was some reason in them then. He beckoned her, and as she crouched down beside him, he said, quietly, in his old voice:
‘Liddy,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel well, my bird. I don’t feel well.’
He had been in the studio all that previous day, then out for a long walk most of the afternoon, not returning till evening, when they had dined with Lord and Lady Coote. He had barely said a word then, nor afterwards. He had been distracted, volatile: last night, he had come to her bed and taken her, the first time he had claimed her in many months, though she thought he barely knew who she was. That morning as she considered the passion of his late-night visit, how he cried as he reached his crisis, her heart ached for him, even though after all these years so much had happened to separate them. She knew he was at his lowest ebb, since John had been lost.
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