A Winter’s Tale (2 page)

Dead and gone.

It was still dark and I reached for the bedside lamp, only to find that it wasn’t there. Then, with a sickening jolt under the ribcage, I remembered that it was already packed away—and why.

I had to pad across the cold, bare floorboards to switch on the ceiling light before climbing back into bed. The white candlewick coverlet, with its raised diamond pattern and central flower motifs, suddenly reminded me of the intricately moulded plaster ceilings of Winter’s End. Strange that I hadn’t thought of that before, but perhaps, subconsciously, that had been why I bought it.

Yet I barely ever allowed myself to think of Winter’s End—not with my conscious mind, anyway—for that was the past, with the door forever shut, and the present had to be dealt with.

And what a present! That day I would be moving out of the tied cottage where Lucy and I had lived for over twenty years, because my elderly employer recently suffered a bad fall and the consequence was that my job had come to an abrupt end.

At first I thought everything would work out fine, especially when Lady Betty’s nephew arrived to look after things until she recovered enough to come home. Conor was a chubby, balding man who always reminded me of an
amiable frog, though unfortunately he turned out to be a complete toad.

On previous visits to Blackwalls he had seemed fond of Lady Betty and otherwise entirely harmless (apart from a slight tendency to invade my personal space and squeeze my arm with his plump white fingers, while telling me how grateful he was to me for looking after his aunt). That opinion lasted right up to the point where he got power of attorney and had poor Lady Betty, confused but weakly protesting, whipped straight from the hospital to an expensive retirement home. Personally, I don’t see that keeping fourteen cats, and telling visitors to your stately ruin that you are the reincarnation of Ramses the First, is anything
like
enough reason to be declared incompetent to manage your affairs. She’d managed them perfectly well for years, with a little assistance from her faithful staff, and she
never
wore the headdress and robe in public.

I think Conor’s betrayal was a much greater shock to her than the fall, which I told him straight the day I found out about it—and then he had the gall to come round to the cottage that very evening, well tanked up, to try to exercise some kind of medieval droit de seigneur, insinuating that keeping my home and my job depended entirely on how ‘friendly’ I was.

I had an instinctive knee-jerk reaction and droited his seigneur until his eyes watered. Pity Lady Betty hadn’t been able to do the same, once he had charmed and weaselled the ‘temporary’ power of attorney out of her and showed his true colours.

The upshot was that Conor gave me immediate notice and put my cottage and other assets up for sale—and of course without a job I couldn’t get a mortgage to buy it myself. In any case, I couldn’t match the price the people
buying it as a weekend cottage were prepared to pay. Let’s face it, I couldn’t even raise the deposit.

When my husband, Rory, did his vanishing trick and left me holding the baby over twenty years ago, I took the job of Lady Betty’s general factotum and moved to a remote little Northumbrian village with Lucy, mainly because it offered a cottage as well as a small salary. There weren’t many applicants, or I don’t suppose I would have got the job at my age and with a small child, despite having had lots of relevant experience working for the mistress of a small Scottish castle ever since I left school.

But the minute we arrived at the village I knew it was
meant
to be, because I recognised the place. My mad mother and I (and her man of the moment) had once set up home in our vans in a lay-by just outside it, and for several days no one had tried to move us on. That was exceptional, since normally we seemed to be as welcome as a bad smell.

So you see, serendipity brought us here, and Lady Betty loved children and was quite happy for me to fit my work around Lucy’s needs. But my pay wasn’t huge, so I’d staggered from one financial crisis to another over the years, with never quite enough money to make ends meet, juggling bills and later helping Lucy out at university when her student loan and part-time job weren’t quite enough.

If only the interest wasn’t so high on that small loan I took out…and if only I hadn’t had to increase it further still to cover nearly two thousand pounds of vet’s bills for poor Daisy! And all in vain, though of course I had had to
try
because she was Lucy’s dog too, and we both loved her. And if only I hadn’t economised the month before she got ill by letting her pet insurance lapse, it would have been perfectly all right.

If only…

Why did everything have to go pear-shaped at once? My
life was like a volcano: it lay dormant for long enough to let me think it was acquiescent, and then suddenly tossed out hot rocks.

My mother would have said, ‘Accept your karma and go with the flow, darling,’ but just look where doing that got her. She flowed over the Atlantic, over California and down a rather steep canyon. And then, since she still had her old passport, they returned her to Winter’s End for burial: a toss of the dice and right down the snake to where you started out, though perhaps not in quite the same pristine condition.

But it was not in my nature to be miserable for long, and soon fingers of silvery sunlight began to gleam around the edges of the black cloud of despondency. I knew something good was coming, even if not precisely what, because I have a touch of the second sight from my witch ancestor, Alys Blezzard.

And after all, there were hours yet before I had to hand over the keys of Spiggs Cottage to strangers and always,
always
in the past something had happened to avert calamity at the last minute…though perhaps calamity had never been on such a grand, overwhelming scale before. I mean, I’d put down roots here at last, shallow and tentative though they might be, and it was the only home Lucy had ever known. I’d been so determined that Lucy would have the secure and settled upbringing I hadn’t had myself once Mum had torn me away from Winter’s End.

I sat up, hugging my knees. It wasn’t too late to save the cottage—the contract wouldn’t be exchanged until later that morning. There was still time for the cavalry to come riding over the hill to rescue me, bugles blowing and flags flying, just as they always had.

I was filled with a sudden glow of unfounded optimism. Getting up, I sprayed on a liberal, fortifying blast of
Penhaligon’s Elisabethan Rose perfume (the only extravagance in my life, unless you counted Lucy), pulled on a red jumper and jeans that clung to my abundant curves, and ruthlessly dragged a hairbrush through wildly curling dark hair.

Then I went to make coffee and await the arrival of the postman. The last post…

No, I wouldn’t think like that! The postman would bring
good
news—a reprieve. Maybe I’d won the lottery (despite never buying a ticket) or the Pools. Or perhaps Conor had metamorphosed overnight from a cockroach into a human being and, repentant, he would refuse to sell the cottage and instead beg me to stay there rent free for ever (no droit de seigneur included).

My best friend, Anya, who believes our guardian angels watch over us twenty-four seven, would say that she heard the hushing whisper of mine’s wings as she (or should that be
it
?) rushed to the rescue.

I only hoped my very own Personal Celestial Being wouldn’t collide on the doorstep with the cavalry or there would be feathers everywhere.

Chapter Two: Distant Connections

I applied all the cures and simples my mother taught mee so well, and young Thomas Wynter’s suffering is much alleviated, though it is clear to mee that he will not make old bones.

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

I’d been so
positive
I could hear those hoofbeats and the
swoosh!
of angel’s wings coming to the rescue—but either I was mistaken or they took a wrong turn, for Spiggs Cottage was lost to me.

I couldn’t understand it…and even several days later, I still couldn’t quite believe it. My life had gone full circle so that I’d have to start all over again, twenty years older but still with no money, qualifications or assets other than a vintage Volkswagen camper van with about twice the world’s circumference on the clock, inherited, by rather permanent default, from my mother.

Lucy and I had always used it to travel about with friends in the holidays, but it began to look as though I would have to live in it again permanently, until someone in the village came to the rescue with the offer of a big static caravan for the winter.

Though grateful for any temporary roof over my head, there was nothing quite so freezing as a caravan out of
season. The cold pierced from all directions, like living in an ice cube. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a shivering polar bear at the door asking to be let out.

But at least it was a roof over my head until the site reopened in March, and it was far larger than either the van or the cottage. This was just as well, since the materials for the little round silk and satin crazy-patchwork cushions I made and sold mail order took up quite a bit of space.

My cushions, each feather-stitched patch embroidered and embellished, were
very
upmarket. Luckily the buyers couldn’t see the raggle-taggle gypsy making them, or the charity shops and jumble sales where I bought the old clothes to cut up for pieces!

I blew on my frozen fingers and read over the letter I had written, breaking the news that we were homeless to Lucy, so very far away teaching English in Japan.

Darling Lucy,

My job at Blackwalls has finished rather suddenly. Poor Lady Betty was making a good recovery from her fall, but her nephew got power of attorney and took charge of things, with disastrous results. Do you remember Conor? You said when you met him once that he was a slimy little creep, and you were quite right—he has put Lady Betty into a home and now seems to be selling up the whole estate.

In fact, he’s sold our cottage already, but though it was sad to leave it I am ready to have a change of scene and a new job. Meanwhile, Dana—you remember her from the Pleasurefields camping site?—is letting me live in one of her static caravans rent free, which is very kind of her. I’m making a special cushion as a thank-you.

Don’t worry, I packed up everything in your room very carefully, and the contents of the cottage are stored in the next-door caravan. I can stay until they open up again in March, but I don’t suppose I will be here very long. There are one or two nice-looking jobs advertised in
The Lady
magazine, with accommodation included, so I’ve written off with my totally impressive CV. You can’t say I haven’t had a lifetime’s experience of looking after ancestral piles, even if I’ve only ever really been a glorified cleaner-cum-tour guide.

I’ll let you know when I hear anything and hope to have a lovely new home for you to come back to when you return.

Love, Mum xxx

Who was I fooling? Lucy would be on the phone to me two minutes after she got the letter…which was why, I suppose, I was taking the cowardly way out and posting her the news.

I hoped, by the time she got hold of me, to have a new job and a new life lined up somewhere else. The applications lay on the table, ready to post except for stamps—and then I suddenly remembered it was the post office’s half-day and the clock was hurtling towards twelve.

Leaping up, I dragged on my jacket and flung open the door—then teetered perilously on the brink, gazing down into a pair of eyes of a truly celestial blue, but even colder than the caravan. Missing my footing entirely, I fell down the two metal steps into the surprised arms of an angry angel.

Maybe Anya was right after all, I thought, as he fielded me neatly—except that angels are presumably asexual, while this one was undoubtedly male, even if his short, ruffled hair was of corniest gold. He smelled heavenly too,
and
expensive. I think it was the same aftershave that Conor used, at about a million pounds a molecule, but it smelled
so
much better on my visitor.

He set me back on my feet, stared down at me in a puzzled sort of way, then said, ‘I’m looking for Sophy Winter—I was told she was staying here.’

‘She is—you’ve found her.’

‘
You’re
Sophy Winter?’

‘Well, I was last time I checked in the mirror,’ I said tartly.

‘But you can’t be! You don’t look like—’ he began, then broke off to give me a comprehensive once-over, checking off my minus points on some mental list: dark hair—check; hazel eyes—check; unfashionably generous hourglass figure—check; supermarket jeans and jumble-sale jumper—check. Number of Winter attributes scored: nil.

‘Right…’ he said doubtfully, ‘then you must have been expecting me. I’m your cousin, Jack—Jack Lewis.’

‘But I haven’t got any cousins,’ I protested. I certainly didn’t recall any…and surely even my mother would have mentioned them if I had.