The Honey Queen
Can she find the strength to help the family she never knew she had?Vibrant and warm, Frankie manages people as a career – so her husband’s silence on redundancy comes as a shock. Suddenly both their dream house project in pretty Redstone and their marriage are under terrible strain.Only twenty-seven, Peggy is opening her own knitting shop in town but her past threatens to unravel any prospect of love and a family of her own.Lillie is the friend they both need. Newly arrived in the small Irish town from Australia, she’s no stranger to secrets and heartache. Wrapped in the warmth of the community, Lillie must help herself and her new friends rediscover the joy in life…
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The Honey Queen
Cathy Kelly
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2013
Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Jacket illustration © Nicholas Hely Hutchinson
Jacket lettering © Stephen Raw
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007373673
Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007510948
Version: 2017-10-28
For my family, John, Murray and Dylan.
For Mum, Lucy, Francis and all my beloved family, and for the dear friends who are always there for me.
Thank you.
Table of Contents
The atmosphere of the bees and the hive is determined entirely by the mood and personality of the queen bee. A calm queen will result in a calm, peaceful and productive hive.
The Gentle Beekeeper, Iseult Cloud
Lillie Maguire kept the letter tucked into the inside zipped compartment of her handbag, a battered beige one Sam had bought her in David Jones one Christmas. The handbag was as soft as butter from years of use, and coins would slip down in the places where the lining had split, but she didn’t care: it was a part of him.
She had so little left of Sam that she treasured what she did have: his pillow, which still had the faintest scent of his hair, the shirt he’d worn that last day going into hospital, the engagement ring with its tiny opal bought forty years before. And the David Jones bag with the ripped lining. These were her treasures.
The letter was almost a part of the bag now: the edges curled up, the folds worn. She’d read it many times since it arrived a fortnight ago and could probably recite it in her sleep. It was from Seth, the half-brother she hadn’t known existed, and the one link to a mother she’d never known.
Please come, I’d love to meet you. We’d love to meet you, Frankie and I. You see, I’ve been an only child for fifty and then some years, and it’s wonderful to hear that I have a sister after all. I never knew you existed, Lillie, and I’m sorry.
I’m sorry too to hear about your husband’s death. You must be heartbroken. Tell me if I’m being forward for proffering such advice, but perhaps this is exactly the right time for you to come? Being somewhere new might help?
The one thing I can say for sure after all these years on the planet is that you never know what’s around the corner. I lost my job three months ago, and that was completely unexpected!
We’d love to have you with us, really love it. Do come. As I said before: I may be speaking out of turn because I’ve never suffered the sort of bereavement you have, Lillie, but it might help?
It was such a warm letter. Lillie wondered if Seth’s wife, Frankie, had a hand in the writing of it because there was such a welcome contained in it, and yet the wise woman in Lillie thought that Seth was probably still reeling at discovering her very existence.
The sudden appearance of a sixty-four-year-old Australian sister could mean many things to an Irishman called Seth Green on the other side of the world, but most shocking might be the knowledge that his mother, now dead, had kept this huge secret from him all his life.
Women were often better at secrets than men, Lillie had always felt. Better at keeping them and better at understanding why people kept them.
They knew how to say ‘don’t mind me, my dear, I’m fine, just a bit distracted’ to an anxious child or a confused husband when they weren’t fine at all, when their minds were in a frenzy of worry. What would the doctor say about the breast lump they’d found?
