Phoebe, Ann and Connor read Hester's journal. The entries show how hard life during the war was. For Hester those years were beyond difficult. Her brothers and her fiancé went to the war as well as William. Death reigned in Beechgrave. Hester's brothers died and so did her father when he learned that his eldest son had been killed. That was such a blow to her mother that she lost her mind. Then Walter also died, and even though she was filled with sadness, she also felt liberated.
William was also fighting and had some leave. It was around this time that Hester wrote that something terrible has happened, something that should never have happened, which confused Phoebe, Ann and Connor.
Violet's father died after contracting pneumonia, and around that time William went missing. Then Violet came to Hester to confess that she was pregnant and her boyfriend, had been killed at the front. Hester was sympathetic and came up with a solution. Violet would be her mother's lady's maid and would live in the room next to her. Violet had her baby girl, Ivy.
Then William is found. The man had amnesia and only remembered the names of plants and how to work on them. Walter's mother, who was working as a nurse in a hospital, wrote to Hester, telling her that they had a patient that had lost his memory but he had a book with sketches which looked very much like Beechgrave. Hester travelled to the hospital and found William, who she took back to Beechgrave and he took his position as head gardener.
In some of the passages from the point of view of the trees, they mention two women burying a baby under the forest. That gets cleared on Phoebe's birthday. The woman does not want to celebrate, but Ann and Connor persuade to have a small dinner with the three of them together. Ann cooks and Connor gives her a special present. He carves Phoebe's face, using the wood of the fallen beech tree. Then she mentions that she would like to have two birthdays. Connor says that Ivy had, his official one and his unofficial one. Apparently, there was the birthday recorded in the bible and the one Hester wrote about. Ivy said that Violet made a mistake, and now Phoebe and Ann think that a mother wouldn't make a mistake. Then Phoebe says that there were two children: Violet's and Hester's. And one of the babies died. And they guess that Willliam could be the father, and the entry about the terrible thing that happened must have been this. They count the weeks between William's leave in 1916 and Ivy's birth, and the dates match.
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