The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  Carys’s face was pale. ‘How? Did he – hit her?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Catherine smiled into her daughter’s eyes. ‘We didn’t understand them, what had gone on between them, not till it was too late. This is why I don’t talk about it, darling. It’s hard to explain. Janey was – well, it wasn’t before, but now it’s so clear to me,’ said Catherine, and her expression was sad. ‘Janey was cool. She’d had a terrible time. Lost her dad, and her mum really – she just wasn’t interested in her – and she was mousy and looked quiet, but she was a disrupter, you know? Liked to shake things up. Couldn’t stand injustice, or hypocrisy. What we call cancel culture – you know, I disagree with your opinion so I’m going to silence you. That kind of thing really wound her up. She was – a fish out of water in Vanes.’

  She looked away, out of the window into the dark night.

  ‘Vanes is one of those English country places that hadn’t changed in years, I see that now. It was full of antiques, furniture that had been there for centuries, possessions from other people’s houses that were sold on for money – everything was old, everything was about the past, about preserving that past. Any change to anything appalled them. And they – the Hunters – they never went anywhere else. Anywhere.’

  Carys settled herself on the seat. ‘Where is it, Mum?’

  ‘It’s near Exmoor. Somerset, but it’s almost Devon. It’s buried away, really hard to get to. The hills and the woods cut you off. You know, every time you looked out of the window towards the sea there was a different view. Even rain was exciting.’ She closed her eyes. She could hear it. The smell of rain, metallic and clean, on the hot flagstones, the noise muffling the sound of screams. ‘It’s surrounded by these ancient woods that had all these myths associated with them. There were families there with names going back hundreds of years. They’d have been smugglers, or wreckers; they’d wait for ships to founder on the rocks and collect the cargo. They’d rob dying men of the coins in their pockets.’ She saw Carys shiver. ‘And up at the chapel just beyond the house, where the ceremony took place, that’s where they’d come to repent of these sins . . .’ She was silent, trying to sound calm. ‘The house . . . I wonder what it’s like now, what state he’s kept it in.’

  ‘Who?’

  Catherine said after a pause: ‘Sir Joss Hunter. There were three of us. Jocelyn Raverat Hunter. Catherine Lestrange Hunter. Melissa Hester Hunter.’

  ‘You had a brother? A sister too?’

  ‘We called her Merry.’ Catherine stopped, in her tracks. ‘Her birthday was the twenty-fifth of April, you know. Tomorrow. I think about her in particular on her birthday. She loved celebrations. She loved the Collecting . . .’ She was silent for a moment, watching as Carys reached for her phone in her pocket. ‘But they’re just not the kind of people to reveal much of themselves online. You google them yourself, you’ll see. When I’m researching clients or prosecution cases, I go onto Companies House, local council planning sites, to see what tax schemes they’re involved in, what illegal extensions they’ve applied for. But Joss doesn’t need to do any of that. There’s nothing about him, nothing at all. I don’t even know if he’s married.’

  Catherine shivered, jumping violently, the taste of him in her mouth. A moist, peppery taste, his tongue hard. Cigarette smoke. The feel of his skull underneath his long, flopping hair, the bones moving as her fingers traced the shape of him.

  ‘OK,’ said Carys, tapping at her phone. ‘What the hell is the Collecting then? Loads of stuff’s come up about some ceremony and some bees.’

  Catherine said: ‘It’s another long story. But they don’t get it right. Don’t read the internet, Carys, not if you’re searching for answers. I look it up sometimes and, trust me, they don’t know what happened that day.’ She pushed her daughter’s phone down onto the surface of the desk. ‘Look up – OK, google Kitty Hunter Vanes, now.’

  Her daughter turned the phone round, the screen alight with rows of pictures. ‘There,’ Catherine said. ‘That’s not me, is it? And that’s not even the house. I don’t know where that is. This is why the internet doesn’t work when what’s gone before has lasted for centuries. They’ve got the wrong people. It’s Aunt Rosalind, not Rosamund. They don’t know why the bees attacked. Or who died. No one does, unless they were there. Even if they were still alive these people wouldn’t have the first interest in publicising themselves. Not the locals, not even the holidaymakers who rent the thatched cottages on the harbour and buy into it all. Least of all my family.’

  Carys was watching her, amazed. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You don’t have to, my love. I’m just saying, if you want the truth, don’t clog your mind up with the three or four conspiracy theory sites that are interested in it. Because they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction, isn’t that what they say? Don’t I see that in action every day?’ Carys shrugged. Catherine watched her and then cleared her throat. ‘This is the truth. Every August at Vanes there was a ceremony called the Collecting. We’d process across the grounds to the chapel on the outside of the boundary of the house, and we’d sing an ancient folk song.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Yep. A version of “Green Grow the Rushes, O!” only this version is called the “Collecting Carol”. It’s not found anywhere else.’

  ‘I did “Green Grow the Rushes, O!” at primary school.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Catherine. She nodded at her. She wouldn’t tell her what having to sit there listening to rows of little children sing that song had been like. The prickling along her neck, in her eyes, the primary urge to just get up and run run run away from what was coming. ‘So for the Collecting everyone has a role. There’s five bells, they’re rung by the Walkers, three spoons carried by the Rivals for collecting the honey. Is this on Google?’ Carys shook her head, eyes bulging. ‘Exactly. Two Beloved Girls are picked each year to walk with the procession. They have to be pure. They wear greenery in their hair. The Hunters go into the chapel and collect the honey from the hives inside the tombs that are stacked up on each side of the altar, in recesses.’

  Carys rubbed her eyes, her head down, staring at the floor. ‘This is – weird.’

  ‘Well.’ Catherine spoke softly. ‘Oh darling. I know. So there are bees in the unused tombs, where there weren’t any coffins. They’ve been there for centuries.’ She watched her daughter, whose hands were pressed on each side of the stool. More than anything else, she longed to reach out, to take her in her arms, there in the still, quiet night, to say she was making it all up, to go downstairs with her, heat up some of the leftover soup, snuggle on the sofa and watch two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine until she was falling asleep and could stumble upstairs again. To say, we’re normal. This isn’t in your life. It’s not going to hurt you.

  ‘There are different myths about how the bees got there, which we won’t get into. But, long ago, there was a priest, who came to live in the house, and people say he made a pact with the Devil. He invented the ceremony. He promised the bees he’d only take half and leave them half for winter.’

  ‘Why?’

  Catherine looked at her daughter. ‘You have to leave them some honey for winter,’ she said. ‘If you take too much, they’ll starve. They collect nectar all spring and summer, to store up food for winter, and they pollinate everything at the same time. Pollinating crops is pretty important to the survival of the planet.’

  ‘Well – I know that. I just didn’t ever think much about what they do all winter. So is that why bees make honey then? Kind of like all the ready meals in our freezer.’

  They both laughed, slightly too loudly. ‘I see now the result of letting you grow up in Zone 2 with a father who can’t name a single flower and thinks the only growing thing that matters is the coffee bean,’ Catherine said.

  Carys smiled. Then she said: ‘But, um . . . so, why did you leave, Mum?’

  Catherin
e took a deep breath. She looked down at the desk, the whorls of her fingers tracing patterns on the whorls of the wood. The silence hummed in her ears.

  ‘There was an accident. At the end of that summer. Janey and I – we had to leave. Things had happened. We’d found out some bad stuff about the family. Darling, I don’t talk about it much because it’s painful to remember, and a lot of it is jumbled up now. I don’t understand a lot of it myself.’ She opened her mouth to say more, to say all of it, and she couldn’t. She shook her head. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK. That’s fine.’ She jumped, as Carys put her hand lightly on hers. ‘Do you know what happened to Janey, Mum?’

  ‘She’s dead. Yeah.’ She nodded, convincing herself of it for the umpteenth time. ‘She’s dead. I left her.’

  ‘You left her?’

  ‘Look,’ Catherine said. Already she was struggling to see clearly. Too well she knew the fluttering, light feeling in her chest and stomach that meant she had stopped breathing with any depth, that meant soon her vision would go, her head would swim. ‘It didn’t pan out how we’d expected. We’d planned to get away that day, but she changed . . . she changed her mind. So – Janey stayed behind, and I – I left. I drove away from there and went to Europe. I worked in a few bars, travelled through France, and that’s where I met Dad.’

  ‘That’s what saved you.’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘Saved me? No. What saved me was going to Cambridge.’ Carys laughed. ‘No. I’m serious. I wanted to study. I wanted to learn. I wasn’t supposed to go. I was a girl, they did everything to prevent me from going, they wanted Kitty Hunter to be . . . decorative, beautiful, compliant.’ She had to stop herself shivering. ‘I arrived at Cambridge this mess of a girl, half formed, unsure about everything. I’d had a good education, but, boy, by the time I left three years later, my brain had been squeezed and pummelled and I’d learned – oh, how to concentrate, to really drill down, to question, to be scrupulous – all these things that are so important and that more and more don’t matter to politicians and companies and people who push rubbish on social media and call it a job . . .’ Carys rolled her eyes. ‘But I knew it was the only thing that mattered, Carys. We all deserve the same. It saved me. I was shy, I hated myself, I had no place in the world, and when I left I knew how to beat the most arrogant, self-assured prick on the bench, how to cut his arguments down to size, line by line, point by point.’ She realised she couldn’t catch a breath. She put her hand on her breastbone. ‘I’m sorry. It’s hard to talk about.’ Carys was thumbing a scrap of paper, smoothing it out like one of the red-tailed Fortune fish she’d always put in their Christmas stockings.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, shyly. She put her hand on her mother’s knee. Catherine looked down, wrapping her fingers around her daughter’s, squeezing so tight she felt the bones move.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Carys shook her head. ‘It’s fine. So your mother, your sister, the others – are they still alive? And you don’t want to see them?’

  Catherine shook her head.

  ‘My grandmother?’ Carys rubbed her forehead. ‘Mum – they’re your family – our family.’

  ‘But they’re not, to me, not any more.’ Catherine blinked, steadily. She had to stay calm.

  Carys said, very quietly: ‘Mum. Did they abuse you?’

  Catherine took her free hand. ‘No, my love. Not how you think. I need you to understand. This is in the past. It was an unhappy house. It all culminated in a strange, dreadful summer. I had to get away. They weren’t like me. I should have seen it earlier. Some people have to leave their families, leave them far behind, cut off all contact. Do you understand?’

  ‘Sure.’ Carys patted her mother’s knee, very lightly. ‘Claudia in my year, her mum doesn’t see any of her family. Something about when her dad died. And Mr Lebeniah.’

  ‘Well, exactly.’ Mr Lebeniah had a brother who periodically turned up, ranting and screaming about money that was owed him when the family had come to London. The children had found it terrifying, when they were small, and latterly had lost interest, though it was always quite a spectacle. He had a walking stick, which he used to shake, like a villain in a cartoon. ‘He’s crazy,’ the kind, otherwise unflappable Mr Lebeniah would say of his brother, drawing back the curtains, unlocking the front door after he was sure he’d gone. ‘I hate that fucking idiot. I don’t ever want to be near him again, until I can spit on his grave.’

  Catherine looked down at Carys’s piece of paper, the one she had been smoothing with her fingers. ‘What’s that?’ she said, sharply.

  Carys held it out. She looked scared. ‘I found it on the floor, the night of the break-in. When everything was all in chaos. I kept it.’ And she handed it to her mother, wordlessly. It was a teardrop-shaped piece of paper, torn from a glossy magazine.

  The Most Beloved Girl: Kitty Hunter, 17, already known as ‘the most sought-after beauty in the South West’ on holiday from boarding school Letham’s at Giles Leigh-Smith’s lavish 18th birthday party ball, with best friends the Hon. Polly Baring and Lucy Calthorpe. Beautiful Kitty Hunter, says admirer Nico Alexis, son of billionaire shipping magnate Aristides Alexis, is ‘the girl the boys are all after’. Kitty’s family, the Hunters, long established in Exmoor, hold a famed ceremony every year to collect honey from their ancient hives at Vanes, near Larcombe. Kitty and her twin, Joss, turn 18 next August. Kitty is looking for a pal to be the ‘Beloved Girl’ with her in this year’s ceremony. ‘It’s very arcane, but I rather love it,’ says Kitty, who says her interests include ‘history, law, walking Rory our family dog and planning my travels’.

  ‘Harpers & Queen, April 1989,’ Carys read at the very bottom of the scrap of paper, in tiny lettering. ‘Mum – Mum, really? You were . . . oh my God. You were a Sloane! I wish there was a photo of you. Were you in some early version of Made in Chelsea?’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘None of that was me. And when Janey came, ah, well. It all changed.’

  She looked into her daughter’s eyes. Carys’s pupils were huge, her nail-bitten fingers flexing and unflexing. Catherine took her hand. Neither of them said anything for a while.

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Carys pulled her hand away. Her voice trembled. ‘It’s very good. It’s almost all there. There’s just one thing that keeps bothering me.’

  ‘What’s that, darling?’

  ‘The window. I can’t explain the window.’

  ‘What window?’ Catherine didn’t understand for a moment, her mind back at Vanes. Gabled windows against a clear blue sky, the tiny window in the chapel. The roaring of a swarm, like a crashing wave. But then Carys pointed.

  ‘This window.’ She stood up, biting her thumb, and Catherine felt the thudding, fluttering feeling in her chest start up again. ‘The glass was all over the extension ceiling. Not on the floor here. If someone had broken in, like you said, they’d have smashed in from outside. The glass would have fallen in. And there was no glass in the room at all, apart from one or two shards. I don’t know, I-I think you’re lying.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About this – ’ Carys gestured around the small room.

  ‘Why do you think I’m lying?’

  ‘Because . . . because . . . something about how you’re downplaying it all doesn’t make sense. Is it Grant Doyle? Are you trying to protect him?’

  ‘No!’ Catherine reached out to her, but Carys shook her head.

  ‘Then who broke in? Did you let them in? And what’s it got to do with . . . all this?’ She pointed to the cutting. ‘Why are you telling me about it all now?’

  ‘Darling, you asked me about it! And can’t you see how hard it is for me to talk about it?’

  Carys nodded. ‘I suppose – that description, those Sloaney people. That really doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘It wasn’t. I don’t like talking about my family, Carys.’ She hated the indignation in her own voice, as if Carys wasn’t allowed to ask. She paused, taking a moment to
collect her thoughts.

  ‘Were they really posh?’

  ‘Not really posh, no. They liked to play up to it. My father was an antiques dealer. Charles Hunter Antiques. He had a card printed, in curly writing. He did the whole dodgy act up and down Portobello Road and Chelsea in the late fifties and sixties, scouring the place for bargains. And he’d charm old people into believing their heirlooms were worthless, buy them for a shilling and flog them for five times the price. He had an eye, I’ll give him that.’ She was silent. ‘Janey’s dad, Simon, used to say there was no better metaphor for Charles Hunter than his antiques business.’ She was smiling. ‘I’m trying to tell you as much as I can. I find it difficult to say it out loud after all these years.’

  ‘I understand,’ Carys said. Her voice was hoarse, her small lips wrinkled together because she was trying not to cry. ‘I want to believe you.’

  ‘Good. Look, about the break-in – I’m sure it probably wasn’t Grant. I think it was just – one of those things. No harm came of it, did it?’ She raised her voice, slightly, almost daring Carys to challenge her.

  But Carys shook her head. ‘Mum – don’t you ever think about going back? Confronting the past?’

  ‘It was rotten, all of it.’ Catherine pressed her hands to her face. ‘The honeycombs . . . Some years, we’d crack open one hive and they’d all have died, disease or predators or the cold, and you’d have no idea until you looked inside. Blackened, dried out, the honey gone. That was the Hunters. And I got away.’ She jabbed at the torn piece of paper. ‘Kitty Hunter, she escaped. She’s free.’ She felt the tension in her jaw, the ache. ‘You have to understand, my own beloved girl. I don’t want you to ever be a part of it. I wanted to keep you, and Tom, and Dad, away from it all and I did.’

  Catherine breathed out, trying to smile at her daughter. But as she looked at Carys’s face, and saw her eyes flicker away from her mother, towards the fresh putty on the window, only then did she understand that she had failed.