The Wildling Sisters
Eve Chase
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night's Dream
PROLOGUE
APPLECOTE MANOR, THE COTSWOLDS, ENGLAND
The last weekend of August 1959
None of us can bear to touch his belt, so horrifyingly intimate. But as we drag him across the lawn, it plows into the soil. He’s heavier than he looks, unwieldy. Every few steps we stop and catch our breath, startling in the dawn light, daring one another to look down at the unbelievable fleshy fact of him, the childlike abandon of his outstretched arms.
Daisies are stuck to him now, their pink-white petals opening to the sun that is rising at a worrying speed behind the orchard. There’s something very wrong about these daisies, stars in the dark sticky of his hair. Dot leans forward as if to pluck them out, sit down, and thread them into a chain over the hammock of her gingham skirt. If she did it wouldn’t make anything stranger.
Another few stumbling steps and Dot’s spectacles fall off. She starts to scrabble for them. We tell her to stop. There is no time. The birds are starting to sing, all at once, an explosion of noise, a wild loop of fear.
I try to talk myself down from blind panic: we are the same girls we were at the beginning of this long, hot summer. Applecote Manor still stands behind us, gazing sleepily over the valley. And in the meadow beyond the garden gate, our beloved circle of prehistoric stones, unchanged, unchanging. We need to get him much closer to those stones, away from the house, and fast—the orangery’s glass roof is glinting dangerously in the first rays of sun, even closer than we thought.
A whoosh of nausea folds me in half. I cough, hands on my knees. Flora slips her arm over my shoulders. Feeling her tremble, I look up, try to reassure her, but can’t.
Eyes full of fear and light, she blinks repeatedly, as if adjusting to something in my face she hasn’t seen before.
Pam, jaw clenched, starts tugging at his shirtsleeve. But the fabric is no match for the dead weight of his arm and it rips, the noise horrible, deafening. Dot smothers a sob with her hand.
“It’s all right, Dot—” I stop short, noticing a splatter of blood across her fingers.
I lower my gaze to check my own hands. Flora’s. Pam’s. My stomach roils again. Our summer dresses are butcher’s aprons. We all look like we killed him now, not just one of us. Sisters. Bonded by blood.
1
Over fifty years later
Crime. Crowds. The way a big city forces girls to grow up too fast, strips them of their innocence. It’s time for the family to leave London, move somewhere gentler, more benign. They’ve viewed a number of houses in the last three months—the estate agents’ mandate: rural, roomy, a fixer-upper—but not one that Jessie felt could be called home. Until this moment, standing in Applecote Manor on a late January afternoon, feeling like she’s being filled up with sunlight.
It is in a right state, of course. They couldn’t hope of affording a house like this otherwise. Evergreens are packed hard against the orangery’s windows, threatening to break them, scatter the wooden window seat with poisonous berries like beads. The stone flags on the floor undulate, rising in the center of the room as if a creature might be pushing up from the earth. But Jessie is already imagining oranges dangling, blood-warm and heavy in the hand, the glass doors flung back to the euphoria of summer, the peal of girls’ wild laughter.
Her face soft, opening, Jessie tracks the paned glass as it climbs to its geometric peak, a feat of Victorian engineering that promises tangy Mediterranean fruit in the English climate among the woolly pippins. Something about that optimism—control through enclosure, a sort of forced nurturing—whispers in her ear: isn’t she trying to do something similar, only with a family?
Jessie glances at Bella, who is slumped on the window seat, pecking out a text on her cell phone. A twist of too-long legs and inky hair, her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter is the striking spit of her dead mother, the first Mrs. Tucker. Sensing Jessie’s questioning gaze, she lifts her pale, aquiline face, narrows her eyes to glossy pupil-filled cracks, and answers it with a look of fierce refusal.
Jessie’s glad Will didn’t catch it, that look. Hands stuffed boyishly into his coat pockets, her husband is gazing back into the shadows of the adjoining kitchen with a sweetly furrowed air of recalibration, struggling to square the rural dream—an urban male fantasy of chopping logs, foraging, probably sex outside—with the eerie sound of birds fluttering in cave-like chimneys, the sense of imprisoned pulpy damp, this terrifying, thrilling isolation.
Beneath the shearling of her favorite lambskin jacket, in a 1970s style that suits these rough-hewn surroundings, Jessie’s heart quickens. She tucks her autumn-red hair repeatedly behind her ears, ordering her thoughts. For she knows there’s a huge jump between viewing an old country house on a winter afternoon—filmy silver light filtering through skeletal trees, moody and strange, like something dreamed—and the stress of moving hundreds of miles away, shedding their city skins. It would be an act of reckless blind faith, like falling in love with Will had been. But the house simply feels right, as Will did from the start, and, on a level that she can’t explain, destined to be theirs.