ALSO BY VICTORIA CONNELLY
One Last Summer
The Heart of the Garden
Love in an English Garden
The Rose Girls
The Book Lovers
Rules for a Successful Book Club
Natural Born Readers
Scenes from a Country Bookshop
The Secret of You
A Summer to Remember
Wish You Were Here
The Runaway Actress
A Weekend with Mr Darcy
The Perfect Hero
Mr Darcy Forever
Molly’s Millions
Flights of Angels
Irresistible You
Three Graces
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 Victoria Connelly
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542008167
ISBN-10: 1542008166
Cover design by The Brewster Project
To Fiona and Richard with love
CONTENTS
In the beginning . . .
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
The Next Summer
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In the beginning . . .
‘Of course, it needs a bit of work,’ the estate agent said.
The woman looked around the room, noticing the crumbling plaster, the damp stone and the rotting timbers.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’
‘And that has been reflected in the price.’
She nodded, knowing that she was lucky to be even considering buying a place like this.
‘Would you mind if I walked around on my own for a while?’ she asked.
‘Of course not. I’ll wait for you outside.’
She watched as he left her, listening to the sound his neat shoes made on the old flagstone floor. It was a good floor, she noticed. Perhaps it was one of the few things in the place that didn’t need fixing. She looked up at the ceiling high above her and gasped. There was so much space here. Not that she needed a lot of space, being on her own, but she appreciated having it around her because it meant that other people wouldn’t occupy it. It would be all hers and that was important.
So there was a bit of work to do, but there wasn’t anything insurmountable, was there? Not after what she’d been through. A little painting here, a little carpeting there. Okay, maybe some new timbers, plastering and stonework. She’d look into that at some point. And some window shutters to block out that appalling draught coming straight off the North Sea. But – oh – how lovely the building was. She adored the way the honeyed light streamed in through the arched windows, and how the old stone walls were pitted and mellowed by the centuries, and the steps worn away by generations of feet. It would be a privilege to own something so old and beautiful, so ancient and age worn.
Maybe it was a little extravagant to buy something so big and so ridiculously fairy tale but, she thought as she walked down a corridor lined with arrow-slit windows, what better place was there to hide from the world than in a castle?
Chapter 1
Helen Hansard was a dreamer, but the nine-to-five usually got in the way. Not that it stopped her completely. She always made sure that there were little pockets of time to daydream, no matter how busy she was. She’d never make management – she knew that – mostly because a good portion of the time she sat in meetings was spent staring out of the window, watching the way the wind moved through the one beautiful tree that grew in the central London street, or the way sunlight flirted with the office windows opposite. It had been the same at school. Helen’s teachers had been constantly shouting at her for staring out of windows. But it couldn’t be helped. Helen had that rare quality of being able to see beauty wherever she went and, luckily for her, it made her rather mundane job bearable.
She’d spent the last ten years working for a small advertising company, Fiennes and Fairchild, taking a graduate placement straight out of university. She hadn’t meant it to last so long, only life seemed to have settled in this particular rut and the dreams she’d had of doing something better, more interesting, more creative, were always on hold while matters like paying bills took precedence.
But, oh, how she lived for the little moments in-between her job. It was as if she became a different person as soon as she left the office, shaking off the shackles of her administrative role and entering her other self – the truer version of the person she knew she was: the version she put out onto her favourite social media site, Galleria.
Helen had discovered Galleria during an aimless ramble around the internet and had soon been swept up by its magic and the photographs of beautiful gardens, of footpaths through woods, and smallholdings where people were growing their own food and delighting in every minute of it. Here, she’d thought, was a little corner of the web that wasn’t concerned with politics, that never discussed the horrors of war and that didn’t encourage debates you couldn’t win with strangers who didn’t really care anyway. Galleria felt like a safe haven where people shared their happiest pictures, beautifully framed, with gentle words to accompany them.
Helen adored those little square boxes of joy and would happily scroll through them several times a day to keep up to date with the people she was following. Some of them, she knew, were making a living from their art. They’d gathered thousands of followers and were now being courted and
