Prologue

      Jessie Cavendish hadn’t been sure about uprooting from their elegant Chelsea mews house and re-locating to the quaint, but quite muddy, little village of Tindledale. Having grown up in a rural, close-knit, welly-wearing community, she knew first hand how incestuous they could be and how isolated they could make one feel. Yet, as she hiked on up to the highest point overlooking the valley, landmarked by the biggest oak tree she had ever seen, pausing to catch her breath as she slipped off her cardy and tied it neatly around her waist, she realised that the more she saw of this idyllic part of the world, the more she rather liked it.

      Tindledale was surrounded by lush, undulating green hills dotted with lambs and an abundance of pretty wild flowers, pink apple orchards and strawberry fields. At its heart lay an adorably cobbled High Street, flanked either side with black timber-framed, white-wattle-walled shops with mullioned windows – it really was a special place. And Jessie wasn’t the naïve person she had been back then, when Sebastian had enticed her away to the bright lights of London, to the city where all the women lived fabulously glamorous lives in their pretty ballerina pumps, or so she had thought. But Jessie had grown to realise over the years that it was often far easier to ‘get onboard’, as Sebastian was fond of saying, whenever one of his big, life-changing plans was mooted. Plus, the children would be so much happier in the village school, with its postage-stamp-sized playground and quaint clock tower on the roof – no more navigating the super-shiny 4x4 (Sebastian had insisted she drive the triplets in the oversized, but extra-safe tank, but she hated it, much preferring her clapped-out, old and very small Mini) through the narrow, congested streets of London on the nursery school run.

      Moving here would mean just a short trundle through the village where the triplets’ new friends were bound to live, and perhaps Jessie would meet and make some friends of her own too! Yes, far nicer than having the children cloistered away inside some archaic boarding school, as Sebastian had been planning for far too soon after their sixth birthdays, having registered the children’s names before they were even born – so at least she had managed to hold out for something in return, this time, for distancing herself from her old life, her family, her friends, her support network … But then Jessie