The Sisters of Hope Square

Chapter 1

Thirty-Four Years Ago

It was probably not Blythe’s earliest memory, but it was her most vivid of all from childhood.

It wasn’t even a good memory, not really and perhaps that’s why it stuck with her.

They were in the old tree house at the bottom of Pappy’s garden in Hope Square.

She and Rae; of course, they were always together.

Mrs Macken, the lady novelist who came into the hotel every Thursday afternoon to drink coffee with Pappy, said they were peas in a pod.

Except of course, she was wrong, and Blythe had told her so, too. They were not peas, they were sisters.

‘The sisters of Hope Square,’ the old woman laughed.

‘The Sisters of Hope Square.’ Rae repeated it now when Blythe told her about them both being no better than Pappy’s runner beans.

It was one of those long summer days. Their parents had travelled over to the mainland on some business that meant they had to go alone.

It was no hardship on Blythe to be left at the hotel for the day.

Mrs Daly, the cook, would make them lunch and Blythe had the run of the place, so long as they stayed out of the way of paying guests.

Today, because the weather was fine and Mrs Daly had a funeral lunch, she’d handed them old blankets and a box of chalk and told Blythe, they could make their own fun in the old tree house until she called them for lunch.

It was a novelty for Rae to climb up what felt like a great height to the top of the wooden ladder.

When you were at the top, you were taller than Pappy, not so tall as their father, but still, if you stayed near the back, you were hidden from view.

Blythe was eight years old this summer, she’d been climbing up here since she was Rae’s age.

She’d lost interest in it, for a while, but now her sister was allowed to come up too, it was fun again.

They were prasticing their numbers. Rae was due to start school in September and even though everyone knew Miss Macken was the loveliest teacher in the whole world, Blythe didn’t want the other kids calling out her sister for not knowing her numbers.

They were cuddled up in the blankets when she heard a man’s voice, singing loudly somewhere near Pappy’s borders.

Rae looked at her with wide eyes, there was something unsettling about the voice.

They crept to the edge of the tree house, peered down to where Pappy’s roses were a backdrop of pink and fuchsia and red.

The man was in the middle of them. Pulling out whole bushes with his bare hands and shouting.

Everything about him seemed a bit mad. He moved with a manic looseness, as if someone had slightly loosened the hinges on his arms, waist and neck.

His roars were growing louder with every plant he pulled.

His words, terrible words, cursing Pappy and the hotel and all their family.

Rae, next to her, began to cry. Blythe fearing the man would spot them and come up and pull them from their roots next, dragged her as quickly and quietly as she could to the back of the tree house.

She pulled her close, huddled down into the blankets.

Still, they could hear the howling, becoming louder, filthier.

Blythe tried to hush her sister, but Rae was terrified, shaking and crying and sucking her thumb, a habit she’d promised to give up before she went to school.

‘Hey!’ it was Mrs Daly. She must have heard the racket from the kitchen. ‘What on earth are you doing there, Charlie Carney?’

‘Hah! I’m saying goodbye to this dump and Jack Scott can go do what he likes, but he’s never seeing another penny of my money.’

‘You won’t be much of a loss. I’m sure Mr Scott will get on just fine without you hanging around the bar like a bitter breeze.’

‘What on earth?’ That was her grandfather’s voice.

Next to Blythe, Rae struggled to get out from beneath her hold and the blankets wrapped around them.

‘Off with you, Charlie, you’re not content with wrecking your own home, you think you’ll do the same to everyone else’s.

’ Blythe had followed Rae to the edge of the tree house.

It was like watching a horror movie, or what she imagined it would feel like to watch one, because her heart was racing.

Next to her, she held on to Rae for fear she’d fall off the edge, she was so transfixed by the macabre sight before them.

‘It’s the last time you’ll go and collect my wages before I do…’ the man said, and he pulled one more plant with a flourish. Now, Blythe could see, he was bleeding. All down his arms, probably cut open by the thorns.

‘If you don’t want to pay your debts, keep away from my hotel.’

‘That won’t be a problem anymore. I’m out of here on the next ferry,’ the man said now, and he thumped the air with such ferocity, he almost lost his balance.

‘Well, may the wind be at your back,’ Pappy said then and Blythe wasn’t sure what that meant, but whatever it meant, the man made a grunting noise before looking around the garden and she thought for a moment, he might strike out at the hydrangeas next.

She held her breath, but then he turned and suddenly, it seemed as if he had stiffened up.

It was almost an anticlimax really, when he walked out the back gate.

‘It’s his poor family I feel sorry for, those lovely boys, you couldn’t get a better kid than Kip Carney,’ Mrs Daly said. They had moved down to inspect the damage.

‘Well, the mother is a decent enough sort, I suppose.’

‘Aye, she’s too good, that was half the problem. Those boys will take after her, with a bit of luck.’ Mrs Daly picked up a beautiful rose; it was a miracle it had managed to survive the culling and crushing.

‘Still, the apple never falls far from the tree, I wouldn’t be having too much to do with any of Charlie Carney’s lot.

They’re coming from bad stock, no fault of their own.

But you can’t change what’s in the blood, can you?

’ Her grandfather picked up his precious plants one at a time and laid them on the path, as if they might be about to be put to bed.

‘Will they be alright, Pappy?’ Rae called down to him now.

‘They’ll be fine.’ He smiled up at his two grandchildren.

‘Lucky it wasn’t apples, so…’ Blythe said, thinking of that thing he said that she didn’t understand.

‘I suppose it is,’ her grandfather laughed. ‘Do you girls want to help me save them?’ He didn’t have to ask them twice. They scampered down the ladder and were stuck to him for the afternoon, replanting the roses that stood a chance of survival.

‘Ah, how Gisela loved these flowers.’ Her grandfather spoke softly now.

‘Nature was her refuge when she came to the island first. She lived in Still Water House, you know that? She was so happy here, she set her heart on the place for her grandchildren. That’s why we bought it for your parents. ’ Pappy smiled down at them now.

That day, it seemed to Blythe everywhere fizzed with a brilliance that held the air with a strange mixture of significance and anticipation.

She felt it in the hotel too when they returned to it for lunch, the brasses gleaming, huge bouquets of fresh flowers crushed to attention in vases on every surface.

The windows shone, smelling of fresh lemon and vinegar and glinting in the afternoon sun.

In the reception the long sideboard was heavy with plates of mixed sandwiches and a huge bowl of jelly trifle.

The boiler bubbled up behind the bar, on hand to fill the fat tea pot warming above it.

‘Der Liebling,’ Pappy said softly, as they tucked into lunch.

‘Your old granny would be proud; two lovely Enkelin…’ He still spoke smatterings of his wife’s German when he was emotional.

Blythe looked up to see tears in his eyes and maybe young as she was, she understood the difference between tears that are sad and those that are grateful.

It was important to him; the idea of his legacy being carried on.

He’d told her about how her grandmother came to this place without a relative to call her own, only to find herself blamed for a war she had nothing to do with.

Gisela was one of the lucky ones, sent off to boarding school in Sussex just weeks before her family was blown up in a bombing raid that took out not just their home and factory, but half the village too.

The B?cker family certainly had no appetite for war.

Gisela B?cker had found herself as a young girl, in a country where she wasn’t welcome, without a living relative in the world to call her own.

Her best friend, another outsider, Wendy Johnson, from an Anglo-Irish family insisted that she spend her holidays with her family at Still Water House, on Pin Hill Island.

It was as far away as one could get from a world that seemed to be intent on turning itself inside out.

One fateful summer, the German orphan girl had fallen in love with an islander called Jack Scott and that was that.

Jack Scott, a young ambitious farm boy had little more to recommend him than good looks and a capacity for hard work.

When he had clapped his eyes on Gisela, he knew, immediately, she was the one for him, even if his parents and his friends tried to talk him out of having anything to do with the German girl.

He set his cap at Gisela and within the year, they were married.

There was a trust, money her father had squirrelled away in American bonds. Although it took two years for it to be released, and when it was, it was certainly much shrunken from the vast fortune that her family had built up through their small but lucrative engineering works.

When it came, it took them both by surprise.

They’d been living modestly in a small room above the local haberdashery where Gisela had managed to get a job as a shop assistant.

An inheritance from Germany went a long way on island property prices, as islanders left in droves for jobs and what they believed would be a better life on the mainland.

If Gisela was treated with some suspicion, thanks to her German background, her money was welcomed warily.

Behind closed doors, some of her neighbours harboured jealousy and bitterness against the striking young couple who seemed to be setting out on a path that no one else was brave enough to take nor had the money to join them on.

The idea of a hotel was far beyond what anyone ever expected on a place like Pin Hill Island.

But, the big old Georgian houses on the square were being abandoned one after the other, buying one and then another proved well within their means as prices plummeted and confidence in island living shrank.

Jack and Gisela opened the Hope Square Hotel with a lot more optimism than business savvy, but somehow, they pulled it off.

Blythe begged her grandfather repeatedly to tell her the story of how he’d fallen in love with her grandmother and how the hotel had come about, just one more time.

She was fascinated by the photograph of Gisela, a thin blond woman, with eyes the colour of lilacs – although there was no way of knowing that from the sepia print on her grandfather’s sideboard.

There was something about her, haunting, as if her early experiences of life were never quite forgotten.

Although her smile was wide – there was no missing how she held onto her husband’s arm as if it was the last raft in an angry ocean.

‘Now, there’s tea and biscuits,’ Pappy said, and he ruffled Rae’s dark curls affectionately.

Blythe loved coming to the hotel and not just for the biscuits.

When she was here, Blythe felt as if she had uncles and aunts all through the village.

Every time she went out the door someone stopped her, knew her name, asked after her parents and Pappy.

‘Aye, that’s Muffeen Mòr for you, die Herzhen.’ Her grandfather smiled as if he was as proud of Blythe as he was of the island and this hotel he loved so dearly. And Blythe’s heart was swollen with love for him and for the hotel and for the island, too.