A Winter’s Tale (34 page)

Climbing the steps back up to the gallery, I wondered what Seth had come to find me for, but I didn’t see him again for the rest of that afternoon to ask him—I was just grateful he had been there at the right time.

I polished like a Fury, though. Every surface in the gallery was like glass by the time I’d finished with it.

Then afterwards, feeling strangely unsettled and needing to be alone, I took Charlie and drove to the sea near Southport in the Volkswagen and we had a walk along a cold, blowy beach, followed by a brew-up on the stove—and except for Lucy not being there, it was just like old times.

Chapter Twenty-three: Lost Treasures

I was seen, returning to the house—or at any rate, the cloaked figure of a woman—and they suspect us of aiding a priest to escape so come to question us tomorrow…I have made such preparations as I can, if it go ill with mee, charging Joan with the care of my child, that she may know my secrets when she is old enough.

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1582

Aunt Hebe told me over dinner that the bare-root roses we had ordered had arrived. She’d seen Derek unloading them while Seth checked them over, so it seemed that he hadn’t spent the entire afternoon helping Mel with her bedding, after all.

Not that it was any of my business anyway, unless it affected his work—but I couldn’t imagine any woman ever becoming more important than the garden, even one as beautiful as Mel.

By a strange coincidence, that evening Jonah had removed the flotilla of paper-napkin swans and replaced them with red ones folded into roses. He’d laid a separate one, with a stem of green florist’s wire, by my plate.

‘Thanks, Jonah,’ I said. ‘The roses are really pretty—you are clever!’

‘Seth won’t mind about that one, and no earwigs neither,’
Jonah said, grinning. ‘The kitten ate one that dropped on the floor and it went through the poor little thing like a dose of salts. If I hadn’t caught him with the last bit of red paper, I’d have been that worried, because the litter tray—’

‘Jonah,’ Aunt Hebe interrupted firmly, ‘I can see lamb chops, but are we to have no mint sauce?’

Later, as I sat sewing in the parlour, I reflected that roses seemed to be a recurring theme at Winter’s End for, once I started to notice them, I discovered they were everywhere. Briar roses were carved on pillars and panelling, and the ancient rose of Lancaster cut into stone corbels. They appeared in tapestries and embroideries, formed the design of the knot garden on the middle terrace and even featured (along with the family whippet-and-black-pudding crest) in the stained-glass quarries set among the plain diamonds of the Long Room windows.

According to Mr Yatton, the crest is a hound holding a black gauntlet, rather than a black pudding, though I am not convinced. But it’s quite jolly, so I intend having it printed on lots of things for the gift shop, from pencils to tote bags. There will be two or three different ranges of items, something to suit all tastes, I hope, from roses and Shakespeare to witchcraft. I just keep jotting ideas down as they come to me.

Jack said (and keeps saying in his phone calls,
ad nauseam
) that he hates the idea of Winter’s End being ‘commercialised’ and I should forget about opening the house and just concentrate on getting it back in order again. But if sharing such a beautiful place with other people generates enough income to keep it running, why not? Luckily Seth seems to feel the same way about the gardens as I do, and actually
wants
lots of people to see them, because we don’t want a glowering gardener among the vegetation.

But above all, I was quite sure that Alys approved of all the changes I was making. In fact, that evening she felt especially close, so I actually
asked
her if she would mind if I copied out one or two charms from her household book and had them printed on postcards to make money for Winter’s End? Call me mad, but I got the distinct impression that she didn’t in the least. She might not have lived here long, but I knew she loved it as much as I did.

Still does, come to that.

Tonight Hebe was occupied with her furtive customers in the stillroom and anyway, rarely came into the parlour, which she didn’t seem to like. It was too late for Seth to call (not that I ever
expected
him, because he was probably frequently otherwise engaged), and the Larks were settled in for the evening upstairs in their quarters, with Gingernut the kitten and the telly, until it was time for Jonah to do his last rounds of the house.

So I fetched Alys’s book from its hiding place and, using a pair of clean white cotton gloves, even though centuries of sweaty Winter fingers had turned the pages already, mine included, I opened it at the front, where there were inscriptions in two different hands—for, of course, this had originally been her mother’s book, passed on to Alys at her death.

Alys’s writing was still clearly legible, firm and bold, if a little over embellished with loops and curls for current tastes, and hard to decipher:

Herein are many household receipts and hints, which I had from my mother, for the use of simples to cure divers ailments, some that the superstitious would call witchcraft in these sorry times. I have continued to add to the book, as I hope my daughter, Anne, will do after mee, and onward down the generations in the female line for we women know better how to value such things and keep them safe. The treasures within are both my mother’s legacy and my own, and the rose lies at their heart. I charge you to use them well.

Alys Blezzard, 1582

Well, that was clear enough—the treasures were the recipes in the book, especially the rose-based ones. I don’t think even the Famous Five could conjure a mystery out of that, so Lucy would be disappointed.

And perhaps my mother thought she should have been the keeper of the secret, rather than Ottie, and took the book away with her so she could pass it on to me, her only legacy—apart from the camper van, of course.

But it should never have left Winter’s End—even my dotty, spaced-out mother must have known that!

I copied out a couple of recipes that I thought would be suitable for postcards without poisoning anyone who tried them, one for rose tea and another for a sort of universal salve. Aunt Hebe was probably already using them, and Mrs Lark seemed to think she hadn’t managed to dose anyone to death yet.

I flicked through the rest of the book, thinking that despite Alys’s defence, some of her mother’s potions sounded very Dark Arts to me. And so did some of Alys’s own additions at the end of the book, interspersed among innocent instructions about which herbs to use to sweeten wooden floors, and how to make sops-in-wine.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any recipes for discouraging a persistent lover, and Jack continued his schmoozy evening phone calls to ask how my day had gone, and whether I missed him—which, though fond of him, I hadn’t really. It was hard to pinpoint the moment when I had passed from a state of dazzled infatuation to a sisterly—if slightly
exasperated—affection, but it wasn’t his fault that I’d recovered from the fever so quickly.

He apologised for not being able to get to Winter’s End more often. ‘I’ll make up for it at Christmas, and I’ll try to get down for lunch one day soon—I’ll let you know when. Just concentrate on getting the house looking wonderful. We’ll work out our future plans at Christmas, darling.’

‘I’ve already worked mine out. You should have listened to
all
my speech to the staff,’ I said drily, and though he laughed, I thought I had started to detect a note of impatience in his voice.

Perhaps it was at last dawning on him that I hadn’t so much got a toehold on Winter’s End, as captured the castle.

I finally received an answer to the letter I wrote ages ago to Mrs Dukes, the Blackwalls cook, asking if she knew how Lady Betty was.

It had taken some time for my letter to be passed on because she resigned after she, too, was denied permission to visit her mistress in the nursing home. She said she thought Conor had treated his aunt disgracefully, especially in isolating her from her friends and staff.

I had no other way of finding out what was happening, but by a strange coincidence I received an official missive from a solicitor only a day or two later, giving me the sad but not unexpected news that Lady Betty had died.

Conor hadn’t thought fit to inform me of it, but I would have travelled up for the funeral, had I known.

Mind you, I didn’t leave him a forwarding address, though Tanya at the caravan site was kindly sending on my mail, which is how I got the solicitor’s letter. But Conor did have my mobile phone number, from when I worked there.

I admit that I had a little weep for Lady Betty, so it was a few minutes before I read on and discovered that under
the terms of her will, all the permanent household staff would receive a keepsake, which she had personally chosen. Picking them out must have given her hours of pleasure!

Mine was an Egyptian artefact, and the author of the letter enquired if I would I like the solicitor to arrange to have it packed and delivered to me. I wondered which item, from Lady Betty’s mainly bogus Egyptian collection, she had left to me. I only hoped it was not the stone sarcophagus, though when I told Seth while I was helping him plant the new rose bushes, he said that it would make quite a good display, planted up—so long as the mummy wasn’t still in it.

I knew him well enough now to recognise when he was joking, even though he kept his face straight. It was a good sign, because he’d been a bit gloomy and preoccupied since the day Mel found us in that unfortunately compromising-looking clinch in the Great Hall. And though he still dropped into the parlour sometimes in the evening, his heart didn’t always seem to be in our arguments any more.

I didn’t think Mel was good news as far as Seth was concerned. Can you have your heart broken twice by the same person? He could be infuriating, but I found I didn’t want him to be deeply unhappy, which I suspected was because I was starting to think of him as family, too.

Mr Yatton was to write to the solicitor to arrange delivery of my Mystery Parcel from Lady Betty. I’d treasure it, whatever it was. Lucy said she hoped it was a mummified cat, a ghoulishly strange desire that would gain no endorsement from Mrs Lark, that’s for sure, and Gingernut, who seemed to have no respect for other people’s property, let alone his own ancient ancestors, would probably eat it.

I wouldn’t like to see the mess
that
would make in his litter tray.

*  *  *

Apart from the sad but not entirely unexpected news of my former employer, there were no flies in my balm of bliss until the end of the week.

Then the local rag came out again—and to my horror there I was, after all this time, headlined in the
Sticklepond and District Gazette
.

‘WINTER’S END FOR MRS MOP!’ it said in huge capitals, followed in slightly smaller type by ‘MYSTERY HEIRESS FOUND’.

The meagre and unexciting facts of my inheritance had been used to support a huge edifice of speculation and possibility…a bit like what I was doing with the guidebook and display boards, come to think of it. Maybe I should have been a journalist.

It was all very sensational, and accompanied by the photo of Seth and me that had been taken in the new rose garden. I looked startled and fat, as did Charlie—but then, he usually does. Underneath it they’d put, ‘To the manor born—the new Lady Winter with one of her gardeners at Winter’s End,’ and then quoted Seth as saying, ‘The new mistress doesn’t know her a** from her antirrhinum,’ which I imagine he might well have done in the first flush of fury after I arrived, though he says not. (And I’m
not
Lady Winter. Unless I married Jack, I would never be Lady
anything
.)

Seth was furious, but I think it was mostly wounded male vanity, because he said the article and picture made him sound and look like a bucolic half-wit. Mind you, it was true that I didn’t know what an antirrhinum was, so I asked him and he said it was like a snapdragon.

That should be his middle name—Seth Snapdragon Greenwood.

The day after the horrible article appeared, Jack called in for lunch on his way somewhere. Though he’d let us know
he was coming, he arrived much earlier than I expected, so that I was down on the lower terrace getting some air after a morning spent cleaning the furniture in the Chinese bedroom.

Also, the footings for the retaining wall were in, and a couple of plain courses laid, and Seth insisted I put the first of the engraved stones into place.

The stone was a lot heavier than it looked so he had to help, standing right behind me with my hands over his as he carefully manoeuvred ‘I like of each thing that in season grows’ into place.

I turned in his encircling arms and smiled up at him as the other three gardeners clapped, probably more to restore some circulation to their cold hands than for any other reason, but his answering smile was surprisingly short-lived—then he moved away as if I was suddenly contagious.

A familiar voice hailed me peremptorily from above. ‘Sophy!’