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The absolute book by elizabeth knox7/8/2023 ![]() ![]() The library had already gone, broken up before the sale. But the stone walls were dis‑ mantled to make long fields with nothing to impede the big harvesting machines-not walls, or drainage ditches, or the hawthorn hedges the foxes had followed. The new owners left the last of the wetlands intact, and the plantation forest with its kernel, a copse of ancient oaks. A farm conglomerate had taken over the estate. She never went near Princes Gate, because she couldn’t cope with the changes. Taryn would spend some of her holidays with her mother, then stay with friends. Addy Cornick had been struggling with illness and was dispiriting company. Basil Cornick was in New Zealand, playing the bluff fellow in a fantasy epic. It was Grandma Ruth whom Beatrice was visiting when Webber found her.īeatrice and Taryn’s parents were separated. The family had to give up the debt‑encumbered house-though Grandma Ruth stayed on in the gatehouse while she continued at her vet’s practice. Beatrice was seventeen and Taryn thirteen when their grandfather died. The Cornick girls loved libraries, most of all the one at Princes Gate, which belonged to their grandfather, James Northover. ![]() Beatrice enjoyed those books, perhaps because they were often set in libraries. The book in the bag still strapped to Beatrice’s body when Timothy Webber bundled her into the boot of his car was the blockbuster of that year, 2003, a novel about tantalising, epoch‑spanning conspiracies. ![]()
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