Читать книгу A Winter’s Tale: A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance - Trisha Ashley - Страница 11

Today to my great grief and sorrow came the news of my mother’s death and the babe with her. But I already knew the very moment of her passing: it was as if all my mother’s arts flew to mee on the moment of her quitting this earth and my eyes were opened to a terrible pre-knowledge of destiny that moved like dark shadows around mee, step for step.

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

Slightly shaken, I restarted the engine and crawled up the lane between grassy banks and sad, autumnal brown hedges, feeling that this first encounter did not bode well. I only hoped he wasn’t tying knots anywhere close by…

And then it occurred to me that since he looked a bit son-of-the-soil, he could even be one of my inherited three gardeners, though maybe not. Greeting his future employer like that was hardly the way to achieving lasting job security.

A wide, gated and padlocked opening on the left declared itself to be Winter’s End visitors’ car park, well and truly shut for the winter. Opposite was a matched pair of sandstone lodges linked by an arched chamber set with a weathered shield, carved with a crest that looked exactly like a whippet with a black pudding in its mouth. An immaculate half-moon of turf in front of each had been bordered with box hedging torturously clipped to form the words ‘WINTER’S’ on one side, and ‘END’ on the other—a strangely municipal and time-consuming labour of love that contrasted strangely with the once-splendid iron gates. For goodness’ sake! Had they never heard of wire wool and Cure-rust?

The gates were open, but, in their present state, looked more like the jaws of a trap than a welcome. I turned cautiously between them onto a drive that ran through a dark tunnel of trees, slowing to wait for my eyes to adjust after the bright autumnal sunshine.

This was a lucky move, as it turned out, because a large grey horse was advancing to meet me—if you can call it an advance when it was going backwards rather fast. I stamped on the brakes for the second time in five minutes, and the creature briefly slammed its fat rump into the front of my van before whirling round, snorting down two red, foam-flecked nostrils, its eyes wildly rolling. The rider, almost unseated, was clinging on like a monkey.

Two thoughts about the matter crossed my punch-drunk mind from opposite directions and collided in the middle. One was that the woman seemed to have no control over her mount whatsoever; and the second (rather regretfully), was that I would never look so good in riding clothes: too big, too curvy, too bouncy.

Imagine Helen of Troy in tight cream breeches and a velvet hat.

She spared me a fleeting glance from curiously light brown eyes and called, ‘Sorry about that!’ very casually, considering there was probably a horse’s-bottom-shaped dent in the front of the VW. Then, with some inelegant flapping of the reins, she urged her mount off down the road at a clattering trot.

‘Idiotic creatures, horses,’ said a voice in my ear, and I jumped again. ‘Saw me dressed in white and ran off—though it’s a holy colour, I always wear it to go to church and I’m off to do the flowers later. But she was a Christopher before she married, and none of them ride well. I suppose she thought Jack was here—though you never know, because she’s never been what you might call fussy where men are concerned.’

I might have tried to explore this interesting statement further had I not had other things on my mind, for I would have known my great-aunt Hebe instantly anywhere: tall, bony, aquiline of nose like a slightly fuzzy Edith Sitwell, with her shock of fine hair, now white rather than red-gold, partially secured into a high knot with a chiffon scrunchie.

If I hadn’t recognised her I would probably have been running after the horse, due to the polar-bear-crossed-with-Miss-Havisham style of her apparel. A floating, ivory-coloured, crystal-and sequin-dotted chiffon dress, layered for warmth with a yellowing fake-fur coat and fluffy scarves, and worn over white wellington boots of the sort only usually seen in hospitals and clinics, made for a striking ensemble.

There was a lump in my throat. ‘Hello, Aunt Hebe,’ I said, slightly unsteadily.

She regarded me severely, then leaned in through the still-open window and kissed me, though the silver pentacle and golden cross that hung around her neck on separate chains swung forward and bashed me on the nose first. Evidently Aunt Hebe still liked to hedge her bets, a family tradition.

‘You’re late! We expected you over an hour ago, so I thought I would walk down and see if there was any sign of you. I’d better get in.’ She opened the passenger door and, clambering up with some difficulty, arranged her skirts. The familiar scent of crushed rose petals came in with her, and I felt eight again…

‘Off you go,’ she said briskly, and I realised I’d been staring at her, waiting for some sign that my return held real meaning for her. Maybe I hadn’t quite expected bunting, banners and a fatted calf, but a little more than a peck on the cheek and a ticking off—but then, there had never been much in the way of maternal softness about Aunt Hebe.

Obediently I moved off again up the dark driveway—and then nearly went off the road as something beat a sudden tattoo on the roof. It was definitely one surprise too many in a very eventful day.

‘Nuts,’ said Aunt Hebe, unfazed.

‘Right…’ I said uncertainly, my heart still racing away at twice the normal speed. ‘There certainly are!’

She gave me a sharp, sideways look and I managed to get a grip on myself. ‘I didn’t know I was expected any particular time, Aunt Hebe. In fact, I nearly stopped to get something for lunch in the village. I’ve been thinking about Pimblett’s hot pies all the way down here—didn’t Mum sometimes buy me one on the way home from school?’

‘I dare say, but lunch is being prepared for you up at the manor,’ she said reprovingly, ‘and I believe it is hotpot pies. Everyone is waiting to meet you first, though.’

‘Everyone?’ I echoed, then added, perhaps too eagerly, ‘Is Jack here already?’

She gave me another sidelong glance. ‘Jack sent his apologies, but business matters prevent him from welcoming you home until the weekend. He’s probably putting it off, for he’ll find it difficult, seeing someone else in his place—but there, what’s done is done, and the obvious solution is in his own hands.’

I supposed she knew all about his offer to buy Winter’s End and there was no question about where Aunt Hebe’s loyalties lay.

‘You’ve turned out not too badly, considering,’ she added, turning her beaky head to study me.

‘Thanks.’

‘Though you appear to have no dress sense. Jeans are so unflattering on women of a certain age.’

‘I don’t know, they hold me in where I need holding in, like a twenty-first-century corset. Exactly who did you say was waiting to meet me?’

‘Everyone,’ she repeated as we came out of the darkness under the trees. ‘Everyone that matters, anyway.’

And there was the house sitting in a puddle of autumn sunshine, the light dully glittering off the mullioned windows, a shabbily organic hotchpotch of black and white Tudor and local red sandstone, with the finger of an ancient tower poking triumphantly upwards above the rest.

It looked as if it had grown there, like some exotic fungus—but a ripe fungus on the point of decaying back into the earth it had sprung from. Before the porch a distant double row of miscellaneous figures waited, like the guard of honour at a low-budget wedding and, as if on cue, a small, fluffy pewter cloud let loose a confetti of snowflakes.

‘Oh, yes—I see them now,’ I croaked nervously, crunching slowly up the gravel. To my left stretched the curving, billowing shapes of yew that formed the maze, the gilded roof of the little pagoda in the centre visible in the distance. My feet would know the way to it blindfold…

‘The maze has been extended at huge expense back to the dimensions of the old plan, and the pagoda regilded, since your time,’ Aunt Hebe informed me, so maybe I wouldn’t find my way into it so easily—and I suspect a lot of the bank loan went on restoring it.

‘Most of the rest of the garden has been extensively restored, too, since you were last here. It became quite a mania with William.’

Everything in the garden looked pleached, parterred, bosketted and pruned to within an inch of its life. A mere glance showed me that there were still abundant examples of all four garden features here, but the immaculately manicured grounds only served to make the house look the more neglected, like a dull, dirty jewel in an ornate and polished setting.

I circled my incongruous vehicle left around a convoluted pattern of box hedges and little trees clipped into spirals, and the fountain at its heart sprinkled me with silver drops like a benediction as I came to a halt.

We climbed out to a thin scatter of applause and a voice quavering out: ‘Hurrah!’

Hebe rearranged her collection of white angora scarves around her neck and, taking me by the elbow, drew me forward and began making introductions.

‘You remember Mrs Lark, our cook—Beulah Johnson as was? And her husband, Jonah?’

‘Welcome back, love,’ Mrs Lark said, her twinkling eyes set in a broad, good-humoured face so stippled with brown freckles she looked like a deeply wrinkled Russet apple. ‘Me and Jonah are glad to see you home again.’

‘That’s right,’ Jonah agreed, baring his three remaining teeth in a wide grin. He had mutton-chop whiskers and looked like a friendly water vole.

‘I certainly do remember you, Mrs Lark!’ I said, basking in the genuine warmth of their welcome. ‘You used to make me gingerbread men with currant eyes.’

‘Fancy remembering that, after all this time! Well, I’ll make some for your tea this very day—and some sticky ginger parkin too, that you used to love.’

Hebe urged me onwards by means of a small push between the shoulder blades. ‘This is Grace from the village, our daily cleaner.’

‘But no heavy stuff, me knees won’t take it no more,’ piped Grace reedily, who indeed looked even more steeped in the depths of antiquity than Mrs Lark, and was about the size of the average elf.

‘And Derek, the under-gardener, and Bob and Hal…’ Aunt Hebe said more briskly, towing me onwards before I could register any more than that Derek was a morose-looking man whose ears stuck out like old-fashioned car indicators, Bob was the one wearing a battered felt hat with a pink plastic daisy in the band, and Hal’s large front teeth had a gap between them you could drive a bus through.

Aunt Hebe made a tut-tutting noise. ‘No sign of Seth. I expect he forgot all about it.’

‘Who’s Seth?’ I said, irrationally feeling faintly aggrieved that one unknown man was missing from my royal reception committee.

‘Seth Greenwood, the…well, I suppose he’s the head gardener. But he’s a bit of a law unto himself.’

‘Oh, right!’ I said, comprehending, because head gardeners could be tricky. They often seemed to think they owned the garden and did it their way regardless of what the owners wanted. Though according to Mr Hobbs, in this case he and my grandfather had been two minds with but one single thought.

‘My sister, Ottilie, married the last head gardener,’ Hebe started, in a tone that made it clear that she had committed a major faux pas, ‘and so Seth—’ She broke off and added curtly, ‘Here is Ottie.’

A tall figure in jeans and a chambray shirt over a polo-necked jumper strode round the corner of the house, smoking a long, thin cheroot. This she flicked into a bed of late-flowering pansies and then embraced me vigorously, thumping me on the back. ‘Glad to have you back, Sophy: you should have come sooner.’

‘Thank you, Aunt Ottie,’ I said, coughing slightly. Even now, in her eighties, Ottie seemed to be twice as alive as her twin; she crackled with energy.

‘Just call me Ottie, everyone does. Clear off, you lot,’ she said to the staff. ‘You’ve only come out of curiosity and you’ve all got jobs to get to.’

‘That’s a fine way to talk,’ Mrs Lark said good-humouredly, ‘but I do need to see to my split pea and ham soup for tonight’s dinner. There’ll be lunch in the breakfast room in fifteen minutes.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ Ottie said, ‘settle in. Tell that vacant sister of mine to show you your room. You don’t want to be hanging about out here in the cold.’

‘Perhaps you would like to follow me?’ Hebe said without looking at her, and it became obvious that my aunts were not speaking to each other. ‘I expect my sister wants to get back to making mud pies in the coach house.’

‘I’m just finishing the last figure in a major sculptural commission,’ Ottie said pointedly. ‘You must come and see it before it goes to be cast, Sophy.’

Then her eyes caught sight of something behind me and opened wide in surprise. ‘Look, it’s Charlie!’

Turning, I found the final resident of Winter’s End on the top step, staring at me with slightly bulging eyes set in a pansy-shaped face—one of those tiny, black and white spaniels that you see so often in old paintings.

‘Oh, of course, Grandfather always had several King Charles spaniels, didn’t he? Though this can’t be one of the ones I remember.’

‘No, this is the last one my brother had. He’s only five, and— Good heavens!’ Aunt Hebe exclaimed, as Charlie descended the steps slightly shakily and bustled up to me in the manner of all small spaniels, tail rotating like a propeller.

He skirmished around me, whining, until I sank down and stroked him. Then he attempted to climb into my lap and I fell over backwards onto the gravel, laughing, while he tried to lick my face. Finally I got up with him in my arms.

‘Well!’ Hebe said, sounding surprisingly disapproving. ‘He’s been pining after William for weeks, but he certainly seems to have taken to you!’

‘Poor old Charlie,’ I said, holding him close. He felt like little more than skin and bone, and smelled like a dirty old carpet. I didn’t think anyone could have brushed him since my grandfather died and, like the house, he was in serious need of some TLC.

‘My sister is a sentimentalist and would probably have preferred him to howl on the grave permanently, like Greyfriars Bobby,’ Ottie said with a grin, then walked off, her shirttails flapping and the black bootlace that held back her long grey hair starting to slide off.

‘Perhaps you would like to go to your room before lunch?’ Hebe suggested.

Everyone else had vanished. Still carrying Charlie, I lugged my carpetbag out of the van with one hand, then followed Hebe through the door from the porch and round a huge, heavy carved screen into a cavernous hall paved with worn stone.

She crossed it without pause and began slowly to ascend the curved staircase towards the balustraded gallery—but I had come to a stop in the middle of the floor under a sky of intricate plasterwork, overwhelmed by a flood of emotion. Suddenly I was fused to the house, wired in: I was Sophy at eight and at the same time Sophy at considerably more than thirty-eight…But I was back where I belonged and the house was happy about it, for there was a space in the pattern of Winter’s End that only I could fill.

It was an acutely Tara moment: the years when I had been away were gone with the wind. This was my house, my place on God’s good earth, and nothing would ever tear me from it again. I knew I would do anything—anything—to keep it.

I had thought I was a piece of insignificant flotsam swept along on the tide of life, but now suddenly I saw that everything I had learned, every single experience that had gone into moulding me, had been leading up to my return.

I was transfixed, translated, transformed…trans-anything except, ever again, transient.

Tomorrow might be another day, but it certainly wouldn’t be the one that saw me signing away my inheritance.

Jack was out of luck.