TRISHA ASHLEY

Twelve Days of Christmas

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2010

This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2017

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2010

Cover illustration © Robyn Neild

Cover layout design © Debbie Clements

Trisha Ashley 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: 9781847561152

Ebook Edition © October 2010 ISBN: 9780007412297

Version: 2017-10-26

Dedication

For my good friends and fellow 500 Club members,

Leah Fleming and Elizabeth Gill, with love.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue - The Ghost of Christmas Past

Chapter 1 - Pregnant Pause

Chapter 2 - Little Mumming

Chapter 3 - Weasel Pot

Chapter 4 - Rose of Sharon

Chapter 5 - Hot Mash

Chapter 6 - Horse Sense

Chapter 7 - The Whole Hog

Chapter 8 - Deep Freeze

Chapter 9 - Daggers

Chapter 10 - Wrung

Chapter 11 - Slightly Tarnished

Chapter 12 - Deeply Fruited

Chapter 13 - Christmas Spirits

Chapter 14 - Toast and Treacle

Chapter 15 - Advent

Chapter 16 - Comfort

Chapter 17 - Rapping

Chapter 18 - Ice Maiden

Chapter 19 - I Should Coco

Chapter 20 - Flickering

Chapter 21 - Loathe at First Sight

Chapter 22 - Outcomes

Chapter 23 - Pieced Together

Chapter 24 - Birkin Mad

Chapter 25 - Christmas Carol

Chapter 26 - Socked

Chapter 27 - Knitting

Chapter 28 - Christmas Present

Chapter 29 - Abominable

Chapter 30 - A Bit of a Poser

Chapter 31 - Fool’s Gold

Chapter 32 - Puzzle Pieces

Chapter 33 - Turning Turkey

Chapter 34 - Slightly Thawed

Chapter 35 - Acted Out

Chapter 36 - Piked

Chapter 37 - Bumps

Chapter 38 - Photo-Finish

Chapter 39 - Signs and Portents

Chapter 40 - Twelfth Night

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Even though it was barely December, the hospital ward had been decked out with a tiny tree and moulded plastic wall decorations depicting a fat Santa, with bunchy bright scarlet cheeks and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He was offering what looked like a stick of dynamite to Rudolf the very red-nosed reindeer, but I expect you need explosive power to deliver all those presents in one single night.

My defence strategy for the last few years has been to ignore Christmas, shutting the door on memories too painful to deal with; but now, sitting day after day by the bed in which Gran dwindled like snow in summer, there seemed to be no escape.

Gran, who brought me up, would not have approved of all these festive trappings. Not only was she born a Strange Baptist, but had also married a minister in that particularly austere (and now almost extinct) offshoot of the faith. They didn’t do Christmas in the way everyone else did – with gifts, gluttony and excess, so as a child, I was always secretly envious of my schoolfriends.

But then I got married and went overboard on the whole idea. Alan egged me on – he never lost touch with his inner child, which is probably why he was such a brilliant primary school teacher. Anyway, he loved the whole thing, excess, gluttony and all.

So I baked and iced spiced gingerbread stars to hang on the tree, which was always the biggest one we could drag home from the garden centre, together with gay red and white striped candy canes, tiny foil crackers and twinkling fairy lights. Together we constructed miles of paper chains to festoon the ceilings, hung mistletoe (though we never needed an excuse to kiss) and made each other stockings full of odd surprises.

After the first year we decided to forgo a full traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings in favour of roast duck with home-made bottled Morello cherry sauce, which was to become my signature dish. (I was sous-chef in a local restaurant at the time.) We made our own traditions, blending the old with the new, as I suppose most families do …

And we were so nearly a family: about to move to a tiny hamlet just outside Merchester, a perfect country setting for the two children (or maybe three, if Alan got his way) that would arrive at neatly-spaced intervals …

At this juncture in my thoughts, a trolley rattled sharply somewhere behind the flowered curtains that enclosed the bed, jerking me back to the here and now: I could even hear a faint, tinny rendering of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ seeming to seep like a seasonal miasma from the walls.

Perhaps Gran could too, for suddenly her clear, light grey eyes, so like my own, opened wide with an expression of delighted surprise that had nothing to do with either my presence or the home-made pot custard I’d brought to tempt her appetite, the nutmeg-sprinkled top browned just the way she liked it.

‘Ned? Ned Martland?’ she whispered, staring at someone only she could see.

I’d never seen her look so lit-up and alive as she did at that moment, which was ironic considering those were her last words – and the words themselves were a bit of a puzzle, since my grandfather’s name had been Joseph Bowman!

So who the hell was Ned Martland? If it had been Martland, of course, and not Cartland, Hartland, or something similar. But no, I was pretty sure it was Martland – and he’d obviously meant a lot to her at some time. This was fairly amazing: had my grave and deeply reserved grandmother, who had been not so much buttoned up as zipped tightly shut and with a padlock thrust through the fastener for good measure, been keeping a romantic secret all these years? Had she lived her life without the man she truly loved by her side, just as I was living mine?

Perhaps there’s a family curse, which would account for why, after Alan’s death, she kept going on about the sins of the fathers being visited on the next generations – though actually, as I pointed out to her, that would have meant me rather than my husband. But if there is a family curse it looks set to end with me, because I’m the end of the line, the wrong side of thirty-five, and with my fruit in imminent danger of withering on the vine.

I’ve had too much time to think about that lately, too.

I’ve no idea what Alan’s last words were, if any, because I was still asleep when he went for his early morning jog round the local park before work. When I woke up and went downstairs there was no sign of him and it was all worryingly Marie Celeste. The radio was spilling out some inane Christmas pop song to the empty kitchen and his bag, with its burden of marked exercise books, was on the floor by the door. A used mug and plate and a Tupperware box of sandwiches lay on the table and the kettle was barely warm.

As I stood there, puzzled and feeling the first stirring of unease, the police arrived to break the news that there had been an accident and Alan would never be coming home.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I heard my voice telling them crisply, ‘I’m doing duck with some of my bottled Morello cherry sauce for Christmas dinner – it’s his favourite.’

Then, for the first and only time in my life, I fainted.

* * *

Alan had been trying to rescue a dog that had fallen through the ice on the boating lake. How stupid was that? I mean, if a dog fell through, then even a slightly built man like Alan would, too. The dog was evidently not a retriever, for it swam through the broken ice created by Alan’s fall, scrambled out and ran off.

I was so furious with Alan that at the funeral I positively hurled the single red rose someone had handed me into the grave, screaming, ‘What were you thinking of, dimwit?’

And then I slipped on the snowy brink and nearly followed it in, though that was entirely due to the large shot of brandy my friend Laura, who was also Alan’s sister, insisted we both drink before we set out. Luckily her husband, Dan, was on my other side and yanked me back at the last minute and then Gran walked around the grave from where she had been standing among a small cluster of elderly Strange Baptist friends and took a firm grip of my other arm, like a wardress.

But by then I was a spent force: grief, fury and guilt (the guilt because I had refused to take up jogging with him) seemed to blend so seamlessly that I didn’t know where one ended and another began.

He’d left me on my own, closing the door on the future we had all planned out. How could he? I always thought we were yin and yang, two halves of the same person, soulmates destined to stay together forever throughout eternity – if so, I’d have a few choice things to say when I finally caught up with him.

My coping strategy had been to close the door on Alan in return, only allowing my grief full rein on the anniversary of his death in late December and shutting myself away from all reminders of the joyous seasonal festivities he had taught me to love during the all-too-brief years of our marriage.

There’s even less reason to celebrate Christmas now …

Christmas? Bah, humbug!

Chapter 1

Pregnant Pause

Since Gran had been slipping quietly away from me for years, her death wasn’t that much of a shock, to be honest. That was just as well, because I had to dash straight off to one of my house-sitting jobs right after her austere Strange Baptist funeral, though finding her journals in the small tin trunk in which she kept her treasures just before I left was a very poignant moment …

When I’d locked up her little sliver of a terraced house in Merchester (not that there was anything in it worth stealing) I’d taken the trunk home with me: the key was on her keyring with the rest. I already had some idea of what was in it from glimpses caught over the years – postcards of Blackpool, where my grandparents spent their Wakes Week holiday every year, my annual school photographs, certificates and that kind of thing – layers going back in time.

I’d only opened it meaning to add her narrow gold wedding band, but then had lifted up a few of the layers to see what was underneath – and right at the bottom was a thin bundle of small, cheap, school exercise books marked ‘Esther Rowan’, bound together with withered elastic bands. Opening the first, I found a kind of spasmodic journal about her nursing experiences starting towards the end of the war, since the first entry was dated October 1944, though it began by looking back at earlier experiences:

I’d started working as a nursing auxiliary at fifteen, which meant that when war broke out at least I wasn’t sent to do hard, dirty work in the munitions factory, like many Merchester girls.

I thought how young they started work back then – and, reading the following entry, how stoical she was:

Tom, my childhood sweetheart, enlisted in the navy straight away, though I begged him to wait until he was called up. Sure enough, he was killed almost immediately, to the great grief of myself and his poor, widowed father. After this, I resolved to put all girlish thoughts of love and marriage behind me and threw myself into my nursing duties …

That last line struck me as being much like the way I’d moved house and thrown myself into a new job right after Alan died: only somehow in my case it didn’t seem stoical, more a denial of those wonderful years we had together.

I knew Gran had eventually gone on to marry the father of her childhood sweetheart – she had said to me once that they had felt they could be a comfort and support to one another – so where this Ned Martland came in was anyone’s guess! I was starting to think I must have imagined the whole thing …

Gran seemed to have filled the ensuing pages with a moralising mini-sermon on the evils of war, so I put the journals back in the trunk again, to read on my return.

I spent a week in Devon, looking after a cottage for one of my regular clients, along with two budgerigars called Marilyn and Monroe, Yoda the Yorkshire terrier and six nameless hens.

It was very soothing and allowed me the space to get a lot of things straight in my mind – and also to make one large and potentially life-changing decision – before coming back home braced and ready to sort out Gran’s house, which belonged to a church charity. They were pressing me to clear it out and hand back the keys, so I expect they had a huge waiting list of homeless and desperate clergy widows.

I had a week before my next Homebodies assignment, which I was sure would be more than adequate. And I was quite right, because I’d almost finished and was starting to look forward to escaping to the remote Highland house-sit which would safely take me over Christmas and into New Year, when it was suddenly cancelled.

Ellen, the old schoolfriend (or so she calls herself – Laura and I remember things a little differently) who runs the Homebodies agency, tried to persuade me to cook for a Christmas house-party instead, but she did it with little hope.

‘I don’t know why she even bothered asking,’ I said to Laura, who had popped in to help me sort out the last of Gran’s belongings. Well, I say help, but since she was heavily pregnant with her fourth baby she was mostly making tea and talking a lot. She’s blonde, pretty and petite (my exact opposite), and carried the baby in a small, neat bump under a long, clingy tunic top the same shade of blue as her eyes.

‘She asked because you’re a brilliant cook and it pays so much better than the house-sitting,’ she replied, putting two fresh mugs of tea down on the coffee table. ‘Plus, she has all the tact of a bulldozer.’

‘But she knows I need a rest from the cooking in winter and I don’t do Christmas. I like to get away somewhere remote where no-one knows me and pretend it isn’t happening.’

Laura sank down next to me on Gran’s hideously uncomfortable cottage sofa. ‘She probably hoped you’d got over it a bit and changed your mind – you’ve been widowed as long as you were married, now. We all still miss Alan dreadfully, especially at this time of year,’ she added gently. ‘He was the best brother anyone could ever have. But he wouldn’t want us to grieve forever, Holly.’

‘I know, and you can’t say I haven’t picked up the pieces and got on with my life,’ I said, though I didn’t add that even after eight years the grief was still mixed fairly equally with anger. ‘But Christmas and the anniversary of the accident always bring things back and I’d much rather spend it quietly on my own.’

‘I expect Ellen’s forgotten that you weren’t brought up to celebrate Christmas in the same way as everyone else, too.’

Laura and I go way back to infant school, so she understands my slightly strange upbringing, but Ellen only came on the scene later, at the comprehensive (and though she denies it now, she tagged on to the group of girls who bullied me because of my height).

‘No, the Strange Baptists think the trappings of the season are all pagan manifestations of man’s fall from spiritual grace – though Gran could play a mean Christmas hymn on the harmonium.’

Laura looked at the space opposite, where the instrument had always stood against the magnolia blown-vinyl wallpaper. ‘I don’t know how you managed to fit that harmonium into your tiny cottage, I bet it weighed a ton even though it wasn’t very big.’

‘It did, but I was determined to have it because it was Gran’s pride and joy – the only time she seemed happy was when she was playing it. It just fitted into the space under the stairs.’

I hadn’t kept a lot, otherwise: the pink satin eiderdown that had covered my narrow bed as a child and two austere cross- stitch samplers sewn by my great-grandmother. One said, ‘Strange are the ways of the Lord’ and the other, ‘That He may do His work, His strange work’. That was about it.

What was left was a motley collection of cheap utility furniture, battered enamel and aluminium saucepans and the like, which were being collected by a house clearance firm.

The house had been immaculate, apart from a little dust, and Gran had never been a hoarder, so there hadn’t been that much to sort out. Her clothes had already been packed and collected by a local charity and all that was left now to put in my car was a cardboard box of neatly filed household papers.

‘I think I’m just about finished here,’ I said, taking a biscuit from the packet Laura had brought, though Garibaldi are not actually my favourite – a bit too crushed-fly looking. ‘So, are you going to call this baby Garibaldi, then?’

Now, this was not such a daft question as you might suppose, since during her last pregnancy Laura had been addicted to Mars bars and she had called her baby boy Mars. He should thank his lucky stars it hadn’t been Twix or Flake.

She giggled. ‘No way! But if it’s a girl we might call it Holly after you, even though it will be a very early spring, rather than a Christmas, baby.’

I hated my name (my late mother’s choice), but I was quite touched. ‘I suppose it would be better than Garibaldi,’ I conceded, ‘especially for a girl.’

I took a sip of the pale, fragrant tea, which was the Earl Grey that Laura had brought with her, rather than the Yorkshire tea that Gran had always made strong enough to stand a spoon in. ‘The van will be here any minute, so we’ve just got the box of papers to stick in my car and we’re done. The meter reader came while you were in the kitchen, so I expect the electricity will be turned off any minute now, too.’

As if on cue, the dim bulb in its mottled glass shade went out and left us in the gathering shadows of a December afternoon.

‘“Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,”’ I sang sepulchrally.

‘You know a hymn for every occasion.’

‘So would you, if you’d been brought up by a Strange Baptist.’

‘Still, it’s just as well you’d finished sorting out,’ Laura said. ‘She wasn’t a great hoarder, your gran, was she?’

‘No, apart from the few mementoes in that tin trunk I took home – and I’ve been reading a bit more in that sort of diary I told you I’d found. Some of it is fascinating, but you have to wade through lots of Victorian-sounding moralising in between.’

‘You could skip those bits?’ she suggested.

‘I thought about it, then decided I wanted to read it all, because I never felt I really knew her and it might give me some insight into what made her tick.’

‘She was certainly very reserved and austere,’ Laura agreed, looking round the sparsely furnished room, ‘and frugal: but that was probably her upbringing.’

‘Yes, if ever I wanted to buy her a present, she always said she had everything she needed. She could never resist Yardley’s lavender soap, though, but that was about as tempted by the lures of the flesh as she ever got.’

‘She was very proud of you, having your own house and career.’

‘I suppose she was, though she would have preferred me to train to be a teacher, like you and Alan – she didn’t consider cooking much above skivvying. And when I left the restaurant and signed up to Homebodies instead, she thought cooking for large house-parties in the summer and looking after people’s properties and pets in the winter was just like going into service.’

‘It’s worked very well though, hasn’t it? You get paid so much for the summer jobs that you can take the poorly paid home-sitting ones in the winter.’

‘They’re more for a change of scene and a rest, so staying rent free in someone else’s house suits me fine: I get to see a different bit of the country and they get their house and pets taken care of, so they can enjoy their hols without any worries.’

‘But now your next home-sitting job has fallen through, you could spend Christmas Day with us, couldn’t you?’ she suggested. ‘We’re going over to Mum and Dad’s for dinner and Mum is always saying she hardly sees you any more.’

‘Oh no, I couldn’t!’ I said with more haste than tact.

‘It would be better than staying home alone – and I’ve just invited my cousin Sam to stay. His divorce has been finalised and he’s at a loose end. You got on so well when you met in the summer and went on that date.’

‘Laura, that wasn’t a date, we just both wanted to see the same film. And he’s at least a foot shorter than me.’

‘That’s a gross exaggeration – a couple of inches, at most! Anyway, he said he liked a woman who knew her own mind and the way you wore your hair made him think of Nefertiti.’

‘Did he?’ I said doubtfully. My hair is black, thick and straight and I keep it in a sort of long, smooth bob that curves forwards at the sides like wings. ‘I expect he was just being kind. Not many men want to go out with someone taller than themselves.’

‘They might if you ever gave them the chance, Holly!’

‘There’s no point: I met my Mr Right and I don’t believe in second-best.’ Alan had found me beautiful, too, though I had found it hard to believe him at first after all that school bullying about my height and my very untrendy clothes …

‘It doesn’t have to be second-best – I know you and Alan loved each other, but no-one would blame you, least of all me, if you fell in love with someone else now. Alan would be the last man to want you to mourn him forever.’

‘I’m not still mourning, I’ve moved on. It’s just …’ I paused, trying to sum up how I felt. ‘It’s just that what we had was so perfect that I know I’m not going to find that again.’

‘But was it so perfect? Is any marriage ever that?’ she asked. ‘And have you ever thought that you weren’t actually married for long enough for the gilt to wear off the gingerbread?’

I looked at her, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you were very happy, but even the best relationships change over time: their little ways start to irritate you and you have to learn a bit of give and take. Alan wasn’t perfect and neither are you: none of us are. Look at me and Dan, for instance. He can’t understand why I need forty-six pairs of shoes and I hate coming second in his life to rugby – but we still love each other.’

‘Apart from our work, the only thing Alan and I didn’t do together was the running – we shared everything else.’

‘But one or both of you might have felt that was a bit claustrophobic eventually. Alan was a dreamer too – and he dreamed of writing. You couldn’t do that together.’

‘Well, I didn’t stop him,’ I said defensively. ‘In fact, I encouraged him, though the teaching took up a lot of his time and energy. And I was going to write a house-party cookbook, so we did share that interest too, in a way.’

‘Oh yes – I’d forgotten about the cookbook. You haven’t mentioned it for ages.’

‘It’s nearly finished, just one more section to go.’

That was the one dealing with catering for a Christmas house-party, which I had been putting off.

‘I do realise the dynamics of the relationship would have changed when we had children, Laura, but we had it all planned. I wish now we hadn’t waited so long, though.’

‘There you are, then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘if you find someone else, it’s not too late to start a family – look at me!’

‘Funnily enough I was thinking about that in Devon, and I decided that although I don’t want another man, I do want a baby before it’s too late. So I thought I’d try artificial insemination. What do you think?’

She stared at me from startled, long-lashed blue eyes. ‘Really? Well, I suppose you could,’ she conceded reluctantly after a minute. ‘But wouldn’t you prefer to try the natural way first?’

‘No,’ I said simply. ‘I want the baby to be just mine.’

‘How would you manage financially? Have you thought it through?’

‘I own the cottage,’ I pointed out, because I’d paid off the mortgage on our terraced house with the insurance money after Alan died, then moved out to an even smaller cottage in the countryside between Ormskirk and Merchester. ‘And I thought I could finish off the cookery book and maybe start doing party catering from home.’

‘I’m not sure you’ve seen all the pitfalls of going it alone with a small child, but I know what you’re like when you’ve made your mind up,’ she said resignedly. Then she brightened and added, ‘But I could help you and it would be lovely to be able to see more of you.’

‘Yes, that would be great and I’ll be counting on you for advice if I get pregnant.’

‘I must say, you’ve really surprised me, though.’

‘I surprised myself, but something Gran said right at the end made me realise I ought to go out there and get what I want, before it’s too late.’

‘You mean when she said some man’s name you’d never heard of?’

I nodded. ‘It was the way she said it – and she could see him, too. I’d never seen her smile like that, so she must have loved and lost him, whoever he was – and perhaps her journal will tell me that eventually. Her face went all soft, and I could see how beautiful she must have been when she was young.’

‘Just like you, with the same black hair and light grey eyes.’

‘Laura, you can’t say I’m beautiful! I mean, apart from being the size of a maypole, I’ve got a big, beaky nose.’

‘You’re striking, and your nose isn’t beaky, it’s only got the tiniest hint of a curve in it,’ she said loyally. ‘Sam’s right, you do look like that bust of Nefertiti you see in photographs … though your hair is a bit more Cleopatra.’

I was flattered but unconvinced. Gran’s skin had been peaches and cream and mine was heading towards a warm olive so that I look Mediterranean apart from my light eyes. Gran’s mother’s family came from Liverpool originally, so I daresay I have some foreign sailor in my ancestry to thank for my colouring – and maybe my height, which has been the bane of my existence.

‘I quite liked Sam, because at least he didn’t talk to my boobs, like a lot of men do,’ I conceded and then immediately regretted it, because she said eagerly, ‘So you will come to us, if only for Christmas dinner? I promise not to push you together, but it would give you a chance to get to know him a bit and—’

My phone emitted a strangled snatch of Mozart and I grabbed it. Saved by the muzak.

Chapter 2

Little Mumming

At my last hospital I was frequently left in sole command of a children’s ward in a separate building, night after night. When the air raid sirens went I took all the children down to a dark and damp cellar, where I had to beat hundreds of cockroaches off the cots and beds before they could be used. Finally, earlier this year, weakened by too many night shifts, lack of sleep (for I found it impossible to sleep during the day), too much responsibility and poor food, my health broke down and I was sent home to recover.

October 1944

I hoped the call wasn’t the man from Chris’s Clearance saying he’d decided against collecting Gran’s fairly worthless sticks of furniture and bric-a-brac, but no, it was Ellen from the Homebodies agency.

‘Holly, you know I said there was nothing else on the books over Christmas?’ she said in her slightly harsh voice, without any preamble. Ellen doesn’t do polite, except to the customers. ‘Well, now something’s come up and I’m going to ask you to do it for me as a big, big favour!’

‘A favour?’ My spirits lifted. ‘You mean a house-sitting big favour?’

Laura caught my eye and grimaced, shaking her head and mouthing, ‘Don’t you dare!’

‘Yes, a major crisis has just blown up,’ Ellen explained. ‘You remember Mo and Jim Chirk?’

‘You’ve mentioned them several times, but I haven’t met them. They’re one of your longest-serving and most dependable house-sitting couples, aren’t they?’

‘They were,’ she said darkly. ‘And they were supposed to be house-sitting up on the East Lancashire moors over Christmas – they’d been two or three times and the owner asked for them again – but no sooner had they got there than their daughter had her baby prematurely and they’re flying out to Dubai to be with her.’

‘You mean, they’ve already gone?’

‘They’re on their way home to repack and get their passports, then they’re booked onto the first flight out. They phoned me just before they left – and so they should, too, because they’ve dropped me right in it!’

‘It doesn’t sound as if they could help it, Ellen – it’s just one of those things. I hope the baby is all right.’

‘Which baby?’

‘Their daughter’s baby.’

‘I have no idea,’ she said dismissively, which wasn’t any surprise, since where business is concerned she’s totally single-minded.

‘Look, could you help me out by taking the job on? It should be two people really, because it’s a large manor house in its own grounds, and a bit remote and there are a couple of pets to look after, too. Only there’s no-one else free on the books apart from you. Could you possibly go? Tomorrow? I’ll make sure you get double pay,’ she wheedled.

‘If there are pets, who’s looking after them at the moment?’

‘The owner’s elderly aunt and uncle live in the lodge and say they will keep an eye on things until you get there, but I don’t think they can really be up to it, or presumably Mr Martland wouldn’t have needed Homebodies in the first place.’

‘Martland?’ I interrupted.

‘Yes, Jude Martland. Have you heard of him? He’s quite a well-known sculptor – he did the Iron Horse next to the motorway near Manchester, all welded strips of metal – very modern.’

‘Oh yes, I think I have. But actually, I heard that surname recently in another context and it’s unusual, that’s why I was surprised.’

‘Just a coincidence, then – truth is stranger than fiction,’ she said, disinterestedly rustling some papers.

‘That’s true,’ I agreed, and of course these Martlands could have no relationship to the Ned Martland Gran had mentioned (assuming I’d even heard the name right): she was a working-class girl and wouldn’t have mixed in the same circles as minor gentry from moorland manor houses.

‘Anyway, he inherited the pile, which is called Old Place, about a year ago and he’s abroad somewhere, but so far we haven’t managed to get hold of him to tell him what’s happening. He isn’t coming back until Twelfth Night.’

I’d turned away from Laura’s disappointed face, though I could feel her eyes boring accusingly into my back. I was starting to suspect she’d hastily invited her cousin Sam for Christmas as soon as I’d told her my Christmas job had fallen through – the idea had probably never crossed her mind until then.

‘It doesn’t sound too arduous,’ I said to Ellen. ‘I’ve looked after quite big houses before single-handedly. What are the pets you mentioned?’

‘One dog and … a horse.’

‘A horse? You call a horse a pet? Ellen, I don’t do horses!’

‘It’s very elderly and you do know a bit about horses, because you went to that riding school with Laura, remember.’

‘I only watched her, that hardly qualifies me to look after someone’s horse, does it?’

‘I expect you picked up more information than you think you did. Mo said she was very easy to look after and all the instructions were written down.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I expect the elderly couple in the lodge can advise you if there’s any difficulty. And there’s a cleaner and a small village nearby with a shop, so it isn’t totally isolated. What do you say?’

‘Well … I suppose I could. But I’m a bit worried about the horse. I—’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ she broke in quickly. ‘I’m sure the horse won’t be a problem, it’s probably in a field and you only have to look at it once a day, or something. And the good news is, Mo and Jim felt so awful at landing the job on someone else at such short notice that they left all their supplies for Christmas behind for whoever took it on. Though actually, I suppose they could hardly take a turkey and all the trimmings out to Dubai with them!’

‘No, but it was a kind thought. Where exactly is this place, did you say?’

‘I didn’t, but I’ll email you directions and all the details now. It’s a bit off the beaten track, but you usually like that.’

‘Yes, especially over Christmas. That aspect of it is perfect.’

‘I don’t know what you’ll do up there, because apparently the TV reception is lousy and there’s no broadband.’

‘I’ll be fine – I’ll take my radio and lots of books.’

Clicking off the connection, I turned to find Laura looking at me reproachfully. ‘Oh, Holly, it would have been such fun to have you here for Christmas!’

‘Believe me, it wouldn’t: it would have been like having the Grinch. And I’ll enjoy myself in my own way. There are only two animals to look after, so I’ll have lots of time to experiment with recipes and write that last section of the book. If I’m going to go ahead with the baby idea, I need to get it finished and find a publisher!’

Laura sighed and cast her eyes up in mock resignation, but she knew me too well to try and persuade me out of it.

‘Now, what can you remember about horse management?’ I asked hopefully.

I printed out Ellen’s instructions as soon as I got home and she was right – it was in a remote, upland spot, near a small village I’d never even heard of.

Getting ready that night was all a bit of a scramble, though I couldn’t resist continuing my nightly reading of a page or two of Gran’s journal, which was getting more interesting again now she wasn’t talking about the past, but engrossed by the present. By November of 1944, she was evidently well enough to go back to work:

Now I have recovered I have been sent to Ormskirk hospital, which pleases me because it is nearer home and also Tom’s widowed father, a sweet, kindly man, is the minister at the Strange Baptist chapel here. But my lodgings are very poor, in a nearby house run by a dour, disagreeable woman. The food is scanty and bad and we sleep dormitory-style, so there is little privacy. The treat of a fresh egg, which was a parting gift from my mother, I gave to my landlady to boil for my breakfast – but it never appeared and my enquiries about it met only with surly grunts.

I read on a little further as she made new friends and settled in, but really I was way too tired to keep my eyes open and there would be lots of time to read the journals over Christmas – in fact, I would take the whole trunk of papers with me to sort out.

Early next morning I loaded the tin trunk into my car along with everything else I usually take with me on assignments – boxes of herbs, spices and other basic ingredients, general food supplies, a cool box of perishable stuff, vital utensils, cookery books, laptop, house-party recipe book notes and my portable radio … It was pretty full even before I added a suitcase, holdall and my wellies.

Laura, resigned now to my decision, had driven over to give me my Christmas present (she’s the only person who ever gives me one). In return I gave her a bag of little gifts for the family, some of them home-made and edible.

She also gave me strict instructions to call her daily, too. ‘Tell me all about it. Old Place sounds terribly posh, somehow, and I’ve never even heard of the village – what did you call it again?’

‘Little Mumming. It’s near Great Mumming, apparently. I’d never heard of it either, but I’ve found it on the map.’

‘It’s all been such a rush – are you sure you’ve got everything you need?’

‘Yes, I think so – most of it was still packed up ready to go. And I’ve put in my wellies, jeans, dog-walking anorak …’

‘A smart dress, in case the local squire’s lady leaves calling cards and you have to return the visit?’

‘You need to stop reading Jane Austen,’ I said severely. ‘And I think this Mr Martland might be the Little Mumming equivalent of the local squire, in which case, if there is a lady, he will have taken her away with him, won’t he?’

‘Unless she’s upstairs in Bluebeard’s chamber?’

‘Thank you for sharing that unnerving thought.’

‘You’re welcome. But the house can’t be that big, can it? Otherwise there would be some live-in help.’

‘Not necessarily, these days,’ I said, drawing on my long experience of house-party cooking, where sometimes the only live-in staff had been myself and the family nanny. ‘Ellen mentioned a daily cleaner. It’s big enough to have a lodge though, because the owner’s elderly uncle and his wife live there and I’m to call in for the keys on my way up to the house.’

‘I can see you’re dying to go, but I still don’t like to think of you marooned in a remote house all on your own over Christmas,’ Laura said. ‘Have you got your phone and charger, and enough food and drink in case you’re miles from the nearest shop? I mean, the weather report said we were in for a cold snap next week and the odds on a white Christmas are shortening.’

‘Oh, come on, Laura, when do they ever get the long-term forecasts right? And come to that, how often does it snow here, especially at Christmas?’

‘But it’s probably different in East Lancashire, up on the moors.’

‘It might be a bit bleaker, but I’ll believe in this snow when I see it. And Ellen said Jim and Mo have left me all their food, since they won’t need it – they were only stopping at home long enough to fling some clothes in a suitcase and get their passports before they flew out to Dubai. I’m hardly likely to eat my way through a whole turkey and all the trimmings over Christmas, even if I do get snowed in.’

I gave her a hug – but cautiously, because of the very prominent bump. ‘I’ll be fine, you know me. Give my love to your parents and have a great time and I’ll see you on Twelfth Night!’

I climbed into the heavily-laden car and drove off, Laura’s small figure waving at me in the rear-view mirror until I turned the corner, realising just how fond of my best friend I was.

Now Gran had gone, was there anyone else in the whole world who really cared about me? Or who I really cared about? I couldn’t think of anyone … and it suddenly seemed so terribly sad. I’d had other friends, but mostly they’d been Alan’s too, and I’d pushed them out of my life after the accident.

But soon, if my plans for a baby came to fruition, I would have someone else to love, who would love me in return …

My spirits lifted as I drove further away from home, just as they always did, for the joy of each assignment was that no-one knew me or my past, or was interested enough to find out: I was just brisk, capable Holly Brown from Homebodies, there to do a job: the Mary Poppins of Merchester.

Chapter 3

Weasel Pot

I have made friends with Hilda and Pearl, who have the beds either side of me at the lodging house, and they are showing me the ropes at the new hospital. Like many of the other nurses their chief desire seems to be to marry, preferably to one of the young doctors, and they teased me until I explained that I had lost my sweetheart in the first months of war, so that I now saw nursing as my life’s work.

November, 1944

Little Mumming lay in a small valley below one of the beacon hills that run down East Lancashire, where a long chain of fires was once lit as a sort of ancient early warning system.

On the map it hadn’t looked far from the motorway, but the poor excuse for a B road endlessly wound up and down, offering me the occasional distant, tantalising glimpse of Snowehill, topped with a squat tower, but never seeming to get any closer.

Finally I arrived at a T-junction that pointed me to Little Mumming and Great Mumming up a precipitous, single-track lane – though rather confusingly, it also pointed to Great Mumming straight ahead, too. All roads must lead to Great Mumming.

I took the sharp left uphill turn, sincerely hoping that I wouldn’t meet anything coming in the opposite direction, because although there were occasional passing places, there were also high dry-stone walls on either side, so I wouldn’t be able to see them coming round the series of hairpin bends.

I passed a boulder painted with the words ‘Weasel Pot Farm’ next to a rutted track and shifted down a gear. Was there ever going to be any sign of a village?

Then I crossed an old stone humpbacked bridge, turned a last bend past a pair of wrought-iron gates and came to a stop – for ahead of me the road levelled and opened out, revealing Little Mumming in all its wintry glory.

It was a huddled hamlet of grey stone cottages, a pub, and a small church set around an open green on which sheep were wrenching at the grass as if their lives depended on it. Perhaps they did. Winters were presumably a lot bleaker up here.

High above on the hillside a Celtic-looking figure of a horse had been carved out from the dull red earth or sandstone, using just a few flowing lines. It could be an ancient hill marking, or maybe some more recent addition to the landscape.

After a minute I carried on and pulled in by the green, turning off the engine. I needed a moment to unclench my hands from the steering wheel after that ascent.

The village looked as if it had grown organically from the earth, the walls and roofs all lichen-spotted and mossy. There was a raw wind blowing and it was midmorning, so I suppose it wasn’t surprising that it was deserted, though I did have the sensation that I was being watched from behind the Nottingham lace curtains …

But the only movement was the sign swinging in the wind outside the pub, the Auld Christmas, which depicted a bearded old man in a blue robe, holding a small fir tree and wearing a wreath of greenery round his head. Very odd. The pub advertised morning coffee and ploughman’s lunches, which would have been tempting had the journey not taken so much longer than I expected.

The shop Ellen had mentioned was nearby, fronted by sacks of potatoes and boxes of vegetables, with the Merry Kettle Tearoom next to it, though that looked as if it had closed for the winter. It was probably just seasonal, for walkers.

I consulted my map, started the engine, then continued on past a terraced trio of tiny Gothic cottages and over a second, smaller bridge to yet another signpost pointing to Great Mumming up an improbably steep and narrow strip of tarmac.

No wonder all the vehicles parked outside the pub were four-wheel-drive!

After half a mile I turned off through a pair of large stone pillars and came to rest on a stretch of gravel next to a lodge house that had been extended at the back into a sizeable bungalow.

It was very quiet apart from the rushing of water somewhere nearby and the rooks cawing in a stand of tall pine trees that must hide the house itself, for I couldn’t see even a chimney stack.

As I got out a little stiffly (I hadn’t realised quite how tense that drive up had made me), the lodge door opened a few inches and a tall, stooping, elderly man beckoned me in.

‘There you are! Come in quickly, before all the warm air gets out,’ he commanded urgently, as if I was a wayward family pet.

I sidled carefully past a large and spiky holly wreath into a long hallway. Once the door was safely shut behind me he turned and came towards me with an odd, slightly crablike gait, holding out his hand.

‘Noël Martland. And you must be Holly Brown – lovely name, by the way, very suitable.’

‘Oh? For what?’

‘Christmas,’ he replied, looking vaguely surprised that I needed to be told. He wore a drooping, ex-Air Force style moustache, partially covering the extensive, puckered shiny scars of an old burn.

He caught my eye: ‘Plane shot down in the war. Got a bit singed, landed badly.’

‘Right,’ I said, admiring the economy of description of a scene that would have occupied half a film and had you biting your knuckles on the edge of your cinema seat.

‘Best to say straight off: people always wonder, but they don’t like to ask.’

He took my coat and hung it carefully on a mahogany stand, then ushered me into a small, square, chintzy sitting room that would have been very pleasant had it not been rendered into a hideous Christmas grotto. Festoons of paper chains and Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling, swags of fake greenery lined the mantelpiece and the tops of all the pictures, and there were snowglobes and porcelain-faced Santas on every flat surface.

In the bow window, fairy lights twinkled among so many baubles on the small fake fir tree that the balding branches drooped wearily under the strain.

Observing my stunned expression with some satisfaction he said, ‘Jolly good, isn’t it? We like to do things properly in Little Mumming.’ Then he suddenly bellowed, ‘Tilda! She’s here!’

‘Coming!’ answered a high, brittle voice and with a loud rattling noise a tiny woman pushed a large hostess trolley through a swinging door from what was presumably the kitchen.

‘My wife, Tilda,’ Noël Martland said. ‘This is Holly Brown, m’dear.’

‘So I should suppose, unless you’ve taken to entertaining strange young women,’ she said tartly, eyeing me from faded but still sharp blue eyes. Though age had withered her, it had not prevented her from applying a bold coating of turquoise eye shadow to her lids and a generous slick of foundation, powder and glossy scarlet lipstick. Under the white frilly apron she was wearing a peach satin blouse with huge dolman sleeves that finished in tight cuffs at the wrists, and a matching Crimplene pinafore dress. Her matchstick-thin legs in filmy loose stockings ended in pointed shoes with very high stiletto heels. I felt glad she had the trolley to hang onto.

‘The agency said you were coming on your own, though really a couple would have been better. But I suppose we’re lucky to get anyone at such short notice, over Christmas,’ she said, eyeing me critically.

‘I am sure you will cope splendidly!’ declared her husband.

‘That remains to be seen, Noël,’ she snapped back. ‘Miss or Mrs?’ she suddenly demanded, with a glance at my naked left hand.

‘Mrs,’ I said, ‘I’m a widow. I do a lot of cooking, so I’ve never been much of a one for rings.’

‘A widow? Tough luck,’ she said, taking the covers off a couple of dishes to reveal plates of pinwheel sandwiches and butterfly sponge cakes.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ I protested. ‘I really wasn’t expecting to be fed, just to pick up the keys!’

‘I didn’t – we always have an early lunch anyway, so I made extra. My housekeeper has gone home for Christmas as usual, but I do most of the cooking in any case – it’s nothing to me. I was a TV chef, you know, in the early days. If I’d known the exact time of your arrival, I could have whipped up a soufflé.’

‘This looks lovely,’ I said, taking a sandwich. ‘Were you a TV cook like Fanny Craddock, then?’

Her face darkened alarmingly and it didn’t need Noël’s appalled expression and shake of the head to inform me that I had made a faux pas.

‘Don’t mention That Woman to me,’ she snapped. ‘She was nothing but a brass-faced amateur!’

‘Sorry,’ I said quickly.

‘I was Tilda Thompson in those days – and much more photogenic than she ever was, all slap and false eyelashes.’

This seemed to me to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I made a vague noise of agreement.

‘Coffee?’ Noël chipped in brightly, pouring me a cup with a slightly trembling hand.

‘Thank you.’ Having tasted the sandwich I was eager to accept anything that might wash the flavour away … whatever it was.

‘Did you call Jessica?’ Tilda Martland asked her husband.

‘On my way to the door, m’dear. But perhaps I had better call again.’

Upstairs a door slammed and footsteps thundered down the stairs like a herd of inebriated rhinos.

‘No need,’ she said dryly.

Jess was a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl of about twelve or thirteen (not quite as tall as I had been at that age, but even skinnier), dressed entirely in black, from glasses frame to shoes. Anyone less like a Jessica I never saw. She certainly stood out against the chintzy, ornament-laden and over-bedecked sitting room.

‘This is our granddaughter, Jessica,’ Noël Martland said.

‘Jess, Grandpa,’ she corrected, in a long-suffering way.

He smiled at her affectionately. ‘Jess, this is Mrs Brown who is going to look after Old Place until your Uncle Jude gets back.’

‘Please do all call me Holly,’ I suggested.

‘Then you must call us Tilda and Noël.’

Jess eyed me curiously, in that slightly-shifty adolescent way that generally denotes nothing much except acute self-consciousness. ‘I’m only here on my own because my parents are in Antarctica. But now my great-uncle’s dead and Jude’s gone off somewhere, we can’t stay at Old Place over Christmas and New Year like we usually do. It’s a drag.’

‘Jess’s parents are studying pelicans,’ Tilda said, unveiling another plate of tiny sandwiches, this time cut into teddy bear shapes.

‘Penguins,’ corrected Jess. ‘Emperor penguins. And how old do you think I am, Granny?’

‘Going by your manners, six.’

‘Ha, ha,’ said Jess, but she took a teddy bear sandwich and, after lifting up the top to examine the innocuous-looking ham filling, ate it.

‘It’s such a pity that Mo and Jim had to go off suddenly like that, isn’t it?’ Noël said. ‘But it couldn’t be helped. I only hope you don’t find it too lonely up there – there is a cleaner twice a week, but the couple who used to look after my brother, the Jacksons, retired and my nephew looks after himself when he’s home.’

‘That cleaning girl is a slut: I don’t think she ever does more than whisk a duster about for half an hour and then drink tea and read magazines,’ Tilda said. ‘But I expect you will soon have everything shipshape again, Holly.’

‘I’ll certainly make sure the areas of the house I use are kept neat and tidy, ’ I said pointedly, because it was a common misconception that home-sitters would also spring-clean and do all kinds of other little jobs around the house and garden and I often found it as well to make the real position clear from the outset. ‘I’m here simply to make sure the house is safe and to look after the animals. I believe there are a dog and a horse?’

‘Lady – she was my great-aunt’s horse, so she’s ancient,’ Jess said. ‘Me and Grandpa went up in the golf buggy yesterday afternoon and again this morning and I filled her water bucket and haynet, but I couldn’t get too close because I’m allergic to horses. I sneeze.’

‘That’s a pity,’ I said sincerely, because I could have done with a knowledgeable, horse-mad child.

‘Yes, but I’m all right with dogs as long as I don’t brush them, so I took Merlin out for a run.’

‘That’s something,’ I agreed, assuming Merlin to be the dog I’d been told about.

‘We left Lady in for the day, with the top of the stable door open, in case you were late arriving – it goes dark so early at this time of year,’ Noël said, ‘and you wouldn’t want to be bringing her in from the paddock in the dark, before you’ve got your bearings.’

‘No indeed,’ I said gratefully.

‘Jude sets great store by her, because she was his mother’s horse,’ Noël said, eating one of the strange pinwheel sandwiches with apparent relish. I had tried to swallow the rest of mine without chewing.

‘He was happy enough to leave her in the Chirks’ care again, but I’m not sure what he will think about someone he has never met taking over,’ Tilda said.

‘Ellen, who runs Homebodies, has been trying to contact Mr Martland to inform him of what has been happening. Will you please explain, if he calls you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Noël, ‘and he is bound to, in the next day or two. He may then call you up, too.’

‘I admit, I’ll feel happier when he knows there has been a change of house-sitter.’

‘Well, it’s his own fault for staying away so long,’ Tilda said. ‘We didn’t think he meant it when he suddenly said he didn’t intend coming back from his trip to America until after Christmas, did we, Noël?’

‘No, m’dear, because normally, as Jess said, we move into Old Place for Christmas and New Year. My sister Becca also stays from Christmas Eve until Boxing Day, too – you probably passed her house on the way here, New Place? Big wrought-iron gates, just the other end of the village.’

‘Of course she passed the damned house,’ snapped Tilda, ‘did you think she was parachuted in?’

‘Turn of speech,’ he said apologetically, but twinkled at me.

I suddenly wondered if Alan and I would have ended up like this, with me bossing him about and him good-naturedly suffering it? There was no denying that I was bossy and organising. But then, he had had a stubborn streak, too …

‘Still, it would have been a bit difficult this year, what with my poor brother passing away last January and then Jude falling out with Guy,’ Noël sighed.

‘It wasn’t Guy’s fault, really,’ Tilda said dispassionately, ‘that girl just got her hooks into him.’

I didn’t ask who Guy was because, to be honest, I wasn’t terribly interested in people I was never going to meet. I finished my coffee and put down my cup and plate. ‘Well, that was unexpected but delicious: thank you so much! And now I’d better get up to the house and settle in.’

‘Sharon, the cleaner, should still be there, so get her to show you round before she goes. It might be the most useful thing she’s done all year,’ Tilda suggested.

‘I expect she does her best: it is a large house for one person to clean,’ Noël said mildly. ‘Not that Jude can make much of a mess, because when he is home he seems to spend most of his time down at the mill, working on his sculptures, or in his little study next to the library.’

‘Oh yes, I heard he was a sculptor.’

‘He’s very famous,’ Jess said, ‘and very bad tempered. He only cancelled Christmas because he saw that engagement announcement and I think he’s mean. I bet he didn’t even remember that Mum and Dad wouldn’t be able to be here this year and I’d be coming on my own.’

‘Jess, that will do!’ commanded Tilda, and she lapsed into sulky silence.

I got up. ‘Well, I think I’d better go up to the house while it’s still light and settle in.’

Noël also got up and found me a vast bunch of keys, pointing out the largest. ‘That’s the front door. I expect you will work the rest out for yourself.’

‘I could come and show you,’ Jess offered quickly.

‘Now, Jess, you know you’ve promised Old Nan you will visit her this afternoon: you’d better go and get ready, you can’t disappoint her,’ Tilda said. ‘She’ll have made you a special tea.’

‘More nursery food!’ Jess said disgustedly.

‘And change into something that isn’t black.’

Jess groaned and stomped off upstairs.

‘She’s so disappointed not to have Christmas atOld Place,’ confided Noël in a whisper, as though he thought we could be overheard from above, ‘and whatever she says, she adores Jude. It will be very quiet here for her, I’m afraid. Mo and Jim kindly invited us to share their Christmas dinner and that would have been something.’ He sighed again. ‘I am an expert on Christmas, you know – I’ve written a book on its history and traditions, so I do like to celebrate properly.’

‘And so we will! I have a plump little chicken that will do very well for the three of us,’ Tilda said stoically.

I suddenly wondered if they were expecting me to offer to cook Christmas dinner instead of the Chirks, even though I hadn’t even arrived at Old Place yet, so I said quickly, ‘I don’t celebrate Christmas.’

‘Not celebrate Christmas?’ Noël looked as stunned as if I had admitted to some abhorrent crime.

‘No, I was brought up as a Strange Baptist.’

‘Oh – right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I think I’ve heard of those … And the lady who runs the Homebodies agency – Ellen, is it? – mentioned that you have not long since lost your grandmother, so I don’t expect you feel particularly festive this year?’

‘No, not at all … or any year, in fact.’

‘My dear, I am so sorry,’ Tilda said and added, graciously, ‘We quite understand – and if you feel at all in need of company at any time, you are always welcome to call on us.’

‘But surely – with a name like Holly – you must have a birthday to celebrate during Christmas?’ Noël asked suddenly.

‘It’s Christmas Day, actually, but I don’t celebrate that, either.’

‘So is mine and I feel just the same,’ he said understandingly. ‘It would simply be too presumptuous to share the Lord’s birthday, wouldn’t it?’

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