The Honey Queen

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

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Three

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Six months later

And now an extract from an interview with Cathy Kelly!

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

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?Could they afford the mortgage?

Would their shy son ever make a friend in school?

No, a wise woman could easily make the decision that certain information would only bring pain to her loved ones, so why not keep all the pain to herself? She could handle it on her own, which meant they didn’t need to.

Men were different. In Lillie’s experience, men liked things out in the open.

So given a bit of time, Seth might feel entirely differently about the whole notion that his mother had borne another child before him when she was very young, and had handed that child to a convent that had in turn handed her to a sister convent in Melbourne. It might just help him, if he were to meet that child.

An open-ended ticket, Lillie decided. That would be the right way to travel to see Seth and Frankie.

Martin, one of Lillie’s two grown-up sons, had set the whole thing in motion.

Soon after Sam’s death, Martin, who was tall, kind and clever, just like his father, had taken up genealogy and started spending many hours on his computer looking for details of his past. As a university history lecturer, he said he couldn’t believe he’d never thought to do this before.

‘It’s the history of our family, I should have taken this on years ago. What was wrong with me?’ he asked, running hands through shaggy dark hair that made Lillie’s fingers itch to get the scissors to it, the way she used to when he was a kid.