The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

Description

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, “A captivating mystery: beautifully written, with a rich sense of place, a cast of memorable characters, and lots of deep, dark secrets.”—Kate Morton, New York Times bestselling author of The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Extraordinary…Absolutely her best yet.”—Lisa Jewell, New York Times bestselling author of The Family Upstairs

Three generations. Three daughters. One house of secrets.
 

 
The truth can shatter everything . . .

  When the Harrington family discovers an abandoned baby deep in the woods, they decide to keep her a secret and raise her as their own.
 
But within days a body is found in the grounds of their house and their perfect new family implodes.
 
Years later, Sylvie, seeking answers to nagging questions about her life, is drawn into the wild beautiful woods where nothing is quite what it seems.
 
Will she unearth the truth?
 
And dare she reveal it?

(Published in the UK as The Glass House) 
 
“The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is not really about a murder, or a creepy house, but about families – the ones we’re born into, the ones we make and especially the ones we flee.”—The New York Times

One of the New York Times “Novels of Suspense and Isolation”
One of The Washington Posts’ Best New Audiobooks
One of Bustle’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer
One of PopSugar‘s Best Books of July
One of New York Posts Best Books of the Week
 “Chase parcels out her clues slowly, without a hint of showiness. In the end, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is not really about a murder, or a creepy house, but about families—the ones we’re born into, the ones we make and especially the ones we flee.” —The New York Times

“Like Lisa Jewell’s The Family Upstairs and Ruth Ware‘s The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Chase takes a haunted house and exposes its ghosts, all those things that were hoped to stay hidden in the walls…A compelling story about how the secrets we hide from one another in order to protect actually can cause more harm than good, but thankfully, fate always has a way of interceding.” —Paperback Paris

“A captivating mystery: beautifully written, with a rich sense of place, a cast of memorable characters, and lots of deep, dark secrets.”
—Kate Morton, author of The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Eve Chase is an extraordinary writer and The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is absolutely her best yet. No one creates families as complex, loveable and utterly believable as Chase and she is the master of the dual time frame narrative.”
—Lisa Jewell, author of The Family Upstairs

“Eve Chase is right up there with Tana French and Sarah Waters as an author who writes page-turning masterpieces that meld a vibrant sense of place with a heartbreaking cast of characters. I devoured her latest, and will be recommending it to everyone I know. Her plot twists floored me, and this haunting story will stay with me for a very long time.”
—Fiona Davis, author of The Chelsea Girls

“I adored this beautifully-written, riveting mystery. Chase is peerless in her ability to stitch together dark secrets and tantalizing twists with unforgettable characters and enthralling imagery. I am a die-hard fan!” 
—Rosie Walsh, author of Ghosted

“Gothic mystery The Daughters of Foxcote Manor by Eve Chase alternates between the past and the present to tell a story of mothers and daughters that’s as chilling as it is moving.” —PopSugar

“[An] atmospheric mystery…Ample foreboding and evocative prose propel things to a gratifying close. Gothic suspense fans will be delighted.” —Publishers Weekly

“Chase deftly constructs a shadowy puzzle…A delicious mystery full of dark labyrinthine curves.” —Kirkus Reviews 

“Exploring family dynamics by using alternating timelines, Chase captivates readers, especially fans of Kate Morton, with eloquent prose and sympathetic characters.” —Booklist

“Set in mysterious and witchy woods, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is the perfect read for mystery lovers who prefer thrills without gore and violence.” —BookPage

“Eve Chase’s novels are about glamorous families with tragic pasts, set in wonderful locations. Her writing is rich and her stories full of dreamy mystery…This gorgeous meditation on motherhood is one of my favourite reads so far this year.” —Daily Mail

“This wonderfully evocative mystery chronicles the relationships among three mothers and their daughters and the secrets they’ve buried.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In The Daughters of Foxcote Manor, Eve Chase brings readers a richly crafted set of characters, and then places them in a delightfully decrepit house sitting in an eerie forest with a dark atmosphere…Told in chapters then and now, the past slowly creeps into the future, and the lives of the characters intertwine intricately, leaving readers with a sense of awe. This book is a pleasure and a thrill. The marvelous discoveries unfold right up to the last page, where the perfect ending resides.” —BookReporter.com

“Chase’s mastery of language is impressive, and her concrete images pack a considerable punch with their freshness and emotional resonance…A web of intricate threads links characters in both timelines, leading to a satisfying ending. Sure to please fans of Kate Morton and Diane Setterfield.” —Historical Novels Review

“Devilishly atmospheric…Chase builds a narrative laden with twists rendered so cleverly that readers likely will not foresee them. She does so with deeply formed characters, a setting guaranteed to evoke unease and prose that amplifies the ominous events. But Chase does not stop with an engaging tale. Her portrait of mothers and daughters…delves intensely into connections that can be as fraught as those between fathers and sons. With profound but restrained passion typical of Britons, Chase creates a rewarding, disturbing tale of transgressions of commission and omission, with a measure of redemption born of her innate decency and empathy.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Utterly captivating, this is a glorious dream of a novel – an irresistible story of family secrets, beautifully written.”
—Emma Rous, author of The Au Pair

“Bewitching and beguiling. . . . As suspenseful as the mistress of psychological drama, Daphne Du Maurier. Chase is simply brilliant.” —Veronica Henry, author of How to Find Love in a Bookshop

“I adored The Daughters of Foxcote Manor by Eve Chase. Sublime writing, secrets, lovable characters I didn’t want to leave, and a ripping twisting plot that kept me guessing. An absolute jewel of a book.” —Dinah Jefferies, author of The Sapphire Widow

“If you like your mysteries atmospheric then I highly recommend The Daughters of Foxcote Manor…Beautiful, transportive writing.” —Erin Kelly, author of We Know You Know and He Said She Said 

“I just love Eve Chase’s lyrical writing and evocative sense of place. The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is her best yet…A treat.” —Louise Candlish, bestselling author of Our House 

“So beautifully and insightfully written, with characters I grew to love populating a compelling, moving story that kept me turning the pages right to the very last. Chase handles the various unexpected ways our earliest experiences shape and define us with huge empathy and sensitivity. It’s an evocative and engrossing read.” —Katherine Webb, author of The Legacy

“Evocative and beautifully written The Daughters of Foxcote Manor sucked me into a mystery as atmospheric and densely packed with secrets as the forest in which it’s set.” —Rachel Rhys, author of Fatal Inheritance

“Rich, gripping, intriguing, beautifully written, diving deep into emotional truths, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is an assured and lovely novel” —Elizabeth Buchan, author of Revenge of the Middle-Aged WomanEve Chase is the author of Black Rabbit Hall, The Wildling Sisters, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor, and The Birdcage. She lives in Oxford, England with her husband and three children.

1

 

Rita, Forest of Dean, 4 August 1971

 

The forest looks like it’ll eat them alive, thinks Rita. The light’s gone a weird green and branches are thrashing against the car’s windows. She tightens her grip on the steering wheel. The lane narrows further. Wondering if she’s missed the turning to the house or if it’s around the next corner, she takes a bend too fast, then slams her foot on the brake.

 

Rita sucks in her breath, her eyes widening behind the Morris Minor’s insect-spattered windscreen. She’s not sure what she was expecting. Something smarter. More Harrington. Not this.

 

Behind a tall, rusting gate, Foxcote Manor erupts from the undergrowth, as if a geological heave has lifted it from the woodland floor. The mullioned windows on the old house, a wrecked beauty, blink drunkenly in the stippled evening sunlight. Colossal trees overhang a sweep of red-tiled roof that sags in the middle, like a snapped spine, so the chimneys tilt at odd angles. Ivy suckers up the timber-and-brick gabled faade, dense, bristling, alive with dozens of tiny darting birds, a billowing veil of bees. It’s as far from the Harringtons’ elegant London townhouse as Rita could possibly imagine.

 

For a moment no one in the car speaks. Unseen, in the trees, a woodpecker drums its territorial tattoo. Sweat trickles down the back of Rita’s left knee. Only now does she register her hands are shaking.

 

Although she’s done her best to disguise it from Jeannie and the children, she’s been panicky ever since they turned onto the forest road, almost five hours after leaving London. It’s not just the worry she’ll kill her precious passengers. Every so often her vision has actually shuddered, disoriented by all the soaring trees, the lack of sky, and the knowledge of quite how hard a tree trunk is when hit at fifty miles an hour. Now they’ve survived the journey, she covers her mouth with her hand. Everything’s still going too fast. How on earth has she ended up here? A forest. Of all places. She hates forests.

 

It was meant to be a London nannying job.

 

Fourteen months ago, Rita had never been to London. But she’d dreamed of it longingly, the Rita she might be there, far away from Torquay, everything that had happened. And the metropolitan family-just like the Darlings in Peter Pan-who’d embrace her as their own. They’d live in a tall warm house that didn’t have a coin-gobbling electricity meter, like Nan’s bungalow did. She’d get a bedroom of her own, with a desk and a shelf, perhaps a view of the churning, thrilling city. And the mother she worked for would be . . . well, perfect. Someone delicate and kind and soft. Cultured. With tiny earlobes and fluttery birdlike hands. Like her own mother, whom Rita hazily remembered. Everything she’d lost in the accident. And that a bit of her kept searching for.

 

On the morning of the interview, she’d gazed up at the Primrose Hill house’s sugar-white stucco and cascading wisteria, and immediately known this was it. Her new home. Her new family. She could feel a tingling sensation, like the first fizz of pins and needles, as she’d knocked on the smart front door, her heart scudding beneath her best blouse that didn’t look best in London. Now it’s her second-best blouse, packed in the boot along with any other clothes-practical, plain, rarely long enough in the arm or leg-she could salvage after the fire that tore through that London house last weekend. Even after the long cycle at the launderette, her clothes still whiff of smoke.

 

Rita glances across at Jeannie in the passenger seat. Wearing a new haul from Harrods, she is defiantly dressed for London, clutching a black patent leather handbag as if for dear life. She looks fragile, upset. Her recent weight loss is painfully obvious in that cream crepe skirt, tightly belted, another hole in, a powder-blue cashmere twinset, and a white silk scarf, wound like a bandage around her stemlike neck. And she’s wearing those sunglasses again, the tortoiseshell ones, with lenses big as Hartley’s jam-jar lids, she always puts on after a night of crying.

 

Jeannie hadn’t wanted to leave Claridge’s. (Rita neither: she’d never stayed anywhere she hadn’t had to make her own bed before. The maid wouldn’t even let her help with the tricky mattress corners.) Jeannie certainly hadn’t wanted to come here: “Monstrous place. Walter’s way of isolating me,” she’d whispered last night, out of the children’s earshot. Peering up at Foxcote Manor now, Rita can’t help but wonder if Jeannie was right.

 

When she’d started the job, everything was different. She remembers Jeannie reading her reference out loud on the day of the interview, her slowly spreading smile, her hands stroking the sun of her heavily pregnant belly. “‘Loyal, kind, and adored by my four children. Brilliant with the baby. Not so good on laundry or cooking. Very nervous driver. Would hire again in a heartbeat.'”

 

Walter hadn’t been particularly interested. A reserved man with a carefully curated mustache, sinewy in a slim-cut brown suit, he’d been friendly but businesslike. After briskly shaking her hand, he excused himself, blew some kisses in the direction of the kids, and rushed out to work, trailing the faint soapy scent of shaving foam. Back then, Walter was happy to leave all of the domestic decisions to his wife. He ran the Harrington Glass headquarters in Mayfair, not the family house. And he seemed perfectly nice. If there had been warning signs, Rita didn’t spot them.

 

She’d never wanted a job so much. Carefully lowering herself to the sofa, she’d laced her hands together tightly, so they couldn’t fidget, and crossed her untidy legs at the ankle, tucking them in, as Nan had instructed (“It’ll make you look smaller, love. More feminine”). She tried very hard not to smile too much, to appear a serious professional, older than her twenty years. Worthy of such a plum post.

 

Jeannie had called the then-five-year-old Teddy into the drawing room. “He’s delicious,” she said. And he was. Rita had to fight the urge to ruffle his curls. Then-twelve-year-old Hera appeared, less obviously delicious and, as if to compensate for this, offering a slice of cake-Jeannie called it p‰tisserie-on a bone-china plate with a minuscule silver fork. As Hera shyly explained how to pronounce her posh name-“Here-rah”-Rita took the plate. It tipped and the cake, in horrifying slow motion, slid off and landed in the deep-pile carpet next to the potted aspidistra. Hera giggled. Rita caught her eye, then disastrously giggled too, and tried to disguise it as a coughing fit. Obviously she’d blown it spectacularly and would be sent packing back to Nan’s bungalow, cloying small-town life-and her own ugly secret. But that giggle, Jeannie told her afterward, had won her the job. She wanted the baby to have a fun young nanny, not some cross old boot.

 

But the baby never heard Rita’s giggle. Or anyone else’s. She’s a tiny ghost doll, stiff, white, frozen in time, a presence constantly felt but never, God forbid, mentioned. And Rita . . . well, what is she now? Not just the fun young nanny. And she’s got more than what they’ll eat for tea weighing on her mind.

 

Even the trees seem to peer down at her accusingly, shaking their leafy heads. “Our little arrangement,” Walter calls it. When he suggested it two days ago, Rita didn’t want any part. She felt such disquiet about his motives. “You want to think about it?” He’d snorted. “This is a job, not a dessert menu, Rita.” The choice was stark: agree or leave (“immediately, without a reference”), and he’d hire someone more compliant.

 

“I have to remain in London, what with the business, so you must make notes on my wife’s state of mind.” Walter smoothed his rapidly retreating hair. “Keep me informed of her moods. Appetite. Quality of mothering. I’ll expect your absolute discretion, of course. My wife mustn’t find out.”

 

Rita’s mind had raced. First, if she left, where would she go? How would she live? Nan had died a few months earlier-not a bad case of indigestion, after all-and the council had reclaimed her bungalow. She had been determined to give Nan a proper send-off and a gravestone. The cost had wiped out her savings.

 

And she couldn’t bear the thought of walking away from Jeannie, Hera, and Teddy when they needed her most. It’d be like giving up on them. Or saying, “I can’t help you anymore,” even though she’s sure she can-she knows about grief, the way it scars you, not on the skin but on the soft suede of the soul inside. (And how it is to grow up different, like Hera, the one who doesn’t fit.) So yes, surely better she “report” on Jeannie this summer, fudging whenever necessary, than some strict new hire, she reasoned. Even this morning it felt like the right decision. But now that they’re here, enclosed by these somber, looming trees, in a spot so remote it feels like they’re the last survivors on the planet, she’s no longer sure. Her mouth is dry and metallic. It tastes of betrayal.

 

“Rita?” Jeannie touches her lightly on the arm, interrupting her spiraling thoughts. Jeannie’s voice is thick with the morning’s medication, the reason Rita is driving. (“Funny, I see halos,” Jeannie observed over Claridge’s flawless poached eggs at breakfast.) “Are you ready?”

 

“Oh, yes! Sorry.” Rita’s cheeks blaze. Her conscience lies too close to the surface.

 

“Well, let’s get this bloody awful thing over with, shall we?” Jeannie whispers grimly. Rita nods and grapples with the gearshift. Forcing a smile for the children, Jeannie says in a loud, bright voice, “Well, hello, Foxcote! This is exciting. Come on, Big Rita. Drive in.”

 

2

 

Sylvie, Kensal Town, London, Now

 

I heave the last cardboard box from the house to the car, hands on the bulging base so bits of me don’t fall out into the street and cause a scene. I glance back at the house, my eyes stinging. Is this it? My family home, like the marriage I’ve stuck with for so long, finally excavated of me?

 

My married life has been bookended by moving boxes. Arrivals and exits. Whoops and sobs. When we first moved in, nineteen years ago, I was five months pregnant, a busy makeup artist with a carry-on case always packed, ready to easyJet off for a shoot abroad at short notice. I didn’t own a salad spinner. I’d never changed a nappy. My engagement ring-antique gold, pea-green emerald-had belonged to Steve’s great-aunt and made me smile every time I looked at it. The wedding would happen after I’d lost the baby weight (not all of it). I’d wear an ivory lace vintage dress and T-bar shoes, just the right side of Courtney Love. We’d dance to Pulp’s “Common People.” We’d be married forever.

 

I couldn’t have imagined this street changing either.

 

Cheap for Zone 2, it was home to a kebab shop, a resident loon, who shouted abuse at lampposts, and a thriving drug den. The front doors were painted a council rust red. Now those doors are mostly sludgy shades of charcoal gray. The kebab shop is a much-Instagrammed florist, selling dragon-red dahlias. There are five Sophies living on the street. Probably fifty juicers. If we had to buy our house now, we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We? That mental slip again. Keeps happening.

 

I say, “Good-bye,” under my breath. I’ve been moving boxes out of the house into my tiny apartment for the last month, tentatively, while Steve’s at work. Now it’s done, I feel elated. But my heart aches. I can’t shut it as easily as the front door. So many memories remain in that house, stored like sunlight in a jar: Annie’s ascending height marks penciled on the bathroom wall; the baby-pink rose we planted to mark the grave of Lettuce, Annie’s rabbit; folders of tear sheets, editorial magazine work I did when starting out, well over twenty years ago, happy to be cool rather than properly paid. I’ve no storage space now. No garden, either. And way too many bills to settle on my own.

 

A trial separation, Steve still calls it. He didn’t believe me when I first told him six weeks ago. We were eating prawn linguine in silence. I’d been away that week, working on a countrywear catalog shoot in the Highlands, involving lots of corduroy, shivering models, and driving rain. Steve had forgotten the bin day-crime A-so we’d be stuck with the recycling for another two weeks, and the bin was stuffed full already. But really it was about something else-other layers of rubbish built up in our marriage. (Crimes BZ.)

 

I watched Steve decapitate a prawn with his fingers, humming under his breath. His face-the angular dark brows, the childhood BMX scar on his chin-was so familiar it was as if I couldn’t see him. “What have I done now?” he said, not looking up at me.

 

I put down my fork. The words just tumbled out. “Steve, I can’t do this . . . us . . . anymore.” A moment passed. Steve blinked rapidly. He waited for me to apologize or blame my hormones. The music shuffled on to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Normally we’d quip about the irony. We didn’t. It felt like nothing would be funny again.

 

“But I love you,” Steve stuttered, floored. And at that moment-8:11 p.m., 19 June-I knew he meant it, he really did, but also that he couldn’t imagine life without me, which is not quite the same. Then I thought about our eighteen-year-old daughter, Annie, out in Camden celebrating finishing her last A-level exam, sweetly oblivious, and I burst into tears. What was I doing?

 

Love. Stability. An unbroken home. The moment Annie slid into the world, unfathomably precious, I’d promised her all of this. I didn’t mourn my lost freedoms, even though my career soon shrank like cashmere in a hot wash. I could no longer travel or work late into the night. I was exhausted. Even my feet were fat. But there was no getting around it, I was also deeply, shockingly happy, maybe for the first time in my life. My magnetic north had flipped. So yes, I’d get motherhood right. That was all that mattered. I’d give Annie absolutely everything I had.

 

To this end, I’ve done my very best to forget about Lisa from HR-early thirties, balayage blonde, spilled her Negroni on my best Isabel Marant dress at Steve’s office Christmas party-and, I’m 55 percent sure, the woman he plays doubles with at the tennis club-and other encounters I’ve sensed but not been able to prove these last few years.

US