A Yorkshire Christmas
A Christmas Around the World Novella
Kate Hewitt
A Yorkshire Christmas
Copyright © 2014 Kate Hewitt
EPUB Edition
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-942240-14-3
Christmas Around the World Series
‡
H
ow To Have
A Perfect Christmas
. Claire Lindell’s mouth twisted cynically as she read the headline of the article in the airline magazine. According to the featured website
BrambleCottage.com
, there were no less than twenty-five tips to having a magical holiday. She skimmed the article, her mouth turning down as she read about how scented candles created a mood, and she should buy wrapping paper during the sales after the holidays and save it for the next year. How to make sauce from fresh cranberries, and how mashed potatoes with skimmed milk and olive oil spread were delicious
and
low calorie. A well-decorated table, using fresh evergreen and holly, could, apparently, make
all
the difference.
Claire didn’t read past the first ten tips to a perfect Christmas. She’d read enough, and in any case, she’d been part of enough so-called perfect Christmases to last a lifetime.
She crammed the magazine back into the pouch in front of her and stared out the window at the endless black night. The plane was soaring at an altitude of thirty-four thousand feet, had been in the air for three and a half hours, and most of the other passengers on their way to Manchester, England from New York were asleep or trying to be.
All except Claire.
Insomnia had been her unwelcome friend for four and a half weeks, since Thanksgiving, to be precise. Since she’d gone way too far down a road she’d never thought she would have travelled.
But at least you turned back.
Sighing, she shifted restlessly in her seat. Her eyes felt gritty and hot, and her muscles ached with fatigue. She glanced down at her carry-on canvas bag, filled with final exams she needed to mark before she returned to her position as history teacher at Stirling Academy for Girls on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. She couldn’t face the exams yet and so she looked away, stabbing the button to power up the little screen installed in the back of the seat in front of her. Endless entertainment was what she needed. It might, at least, provide a distraction from the circling of her thoughts.
She scrolled through the offerings of films: gritty thriller, weepy drama, lighthearted rom com. No, no, no. She finally settled on a documentary about Bengali tigers and after ten minutes she closed her eyes, content to let the words just drift over her.
In just under three hours she would land in Manchester, hire a rental car to drive the hour and a half to Ledstow, a small village, thirty miles outside of York where her godmother had a cottage. Her godmother Ruth Carrington was spending Christmas in London, and when Claire had seen Ruth’s status update on Facebook, she had, in a moment of desperation borne of urgency, asked her if she could stay in Ledstow while she was away.
Ruth had said yes, as Claire had known she would. She only saw her godmother every few years, but Ruth was always effusive in her welcome and warmth, and Claire had had a standing invitation to visit England since she was eight years old.
She couldn’t bear another one of her mother’s perfect Christmases. The perfect tree, decorated with color-coordinated ornaments, with a different theme every year. The perfect Christmas dinner, brought in discreetly by high-end caterers. The perfect everything, and all of it completely fake, the trappings of happy family life draped over an empty husk.
Melanie Lindell had been icily disappointed that Claire, for the first time in her twenty-nine years, would not be joining the family festivities at their six-thousand-square-foot home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Claire’s sister Abby would be going, of course, with her perfect husband Andrew and her two perfect children, four-year-old Andrew Junior, nicknamed Drew Drew, and six-year-old Skylar. Claire could picture them now; Drew Drew in his Rachel Riley polo shirt and crisp khakis, Skylar in Lily Pulitzer. The beautiful, perfect family, poster children for prosperity and happiness.
Claire didn’t want to be around all the glossy perfection, not when she fell so short of the mark. So, she’d hole up in Ledstow, in Yorkshire, reading books and marking essays, enjoying the luxuries of solitude and quiet, a bottle of wine, and a roaring fire.
It sounded like bliss. It also sounded like hell. Claire had been alone with her thoughts for too long already, and that had been while working a full-time teaching job, preparing kids for finals and college applications, helping with the Winter Concert, doing the obligatory round of social events even though she’d felt as if she were sleepwalking through life. And that was on a good day.
Okay, enough with the self-pity. This is your downtime, and when you get back to New York, you’ll have put all this heartache behind you. You’ll be upbeat and purposeful and you won’t think about how close you came to the edge again.
Yes. That was what she would do. That was the plan. And her plan would work, because Claire wanted and needed it to, and she’d worked hard for everything in her life and so she’d work hard for this, too.
Four hours later, the plane had touched down in Manchester amidst snow flurries, and Claire had trudged with a million other hollow-eyed passengers through Customs and Immigration, hauled her suitcase off the baggage carousel, and trudged some more to the rental car agency, where she’d filled seemingly endless paperwork despite all the forms she’d already filled out online, and was now in proud possession of the keys to a Honda Civic.
It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the sky outside was as gray as pewter, with mean little flakes of snow, not the fluffy, festive kind, drifting down on a muted grey landscape of concrete and leafless trees.
Claire dumped her bag in the trunk—or the boot, she supposed, someone in England would call it. Claire had always loved her godmother Ruth’s English accent, and when she was a kid she’d quizzed Ruth on all the different British words. Pavement for sidewalk. Jumper for sweater. Rubber for eraser. The last one, of course, had caused eleven-year-old Claire to burst into muffled giggles of embarrassment and mirth. Ruth had just smiled, her eyes twinkling, sharing the admittedly immature joke.
Slowly, very conscious she was driving on the other side of the road, Claire pulled onto the road, and then followed signs for the M62 and York.
An hour and a half later, those mean little flakes of snow had turned thick and fluffy and white. They were beautiful, but her little car was not handling the snowy roads all that well. Growing up in Connecticut, Claire was used to snow. She’d driven through plenty of snowstorms and blizzards, but her car had been equipped with four-wheel drive and snow tires. In comparison the Civic felt like a toy car with tin wheels. Still she judged, hopefully with accuracy, that as long as the weather didn’t get any worse, she’d make it to Ledstow.
It got worse.
The wipers were barely clearing the windshield of the heavy, wet flakes and the highway already had a blanket of several inches carpeting it. Outside the window, Claire glimpsed a blurry montage of rolling white fields bordered by drystone walls, she suspected would be beautiful if she could stop and actually look at them. If she wasn’t consumed with not crashing the car or getting stuck in God Knows Where, England, with no working phone, no sleep, and very little suitable clothing.
It wasn’t supposed to snow in England, but Claire acknowledged that she had not checked the weather in Yorkshire before she’d left. But still, wasn’t England supposed to be mild and rainy?
The wheels of the Civic slid across the snow, and only by pumping the brake and gripping the wheel tightly was Claire able to keep from fishtailing across the highway.
This was not good. She was still about ten miles from Ledstow.
With sweat beading her forehead and her knuckles white on the steering wheel, Claire hunched forward, her gaze on the road. Each mile inched past; she wasn’t even going twenty. Finally, after half an hour, she saw, through the now near-blizzard, a sign for Ledstow, and gratefully turned off the highway.
Onto a road that resembled a snow bank.
The road to Ledstow was narrow, with high hedges on both sides and barely enough room for another car to pass. No one had plowed it, and the Civic skidded once again. The car spun slowly, as graceful as a ballet dancer, and ended up facing the wrong direction, the hood buried under a mini-avalanche of snow that had fallen from on top of the hedge, landing with a kind of gentle apology on the car, covering the windshield in whiteness.
Claire’s breath came out in a rush and she leaned back against the seat, her heart pounding from the whole, surreal episode. She hadn’t actually felt in danger, with all the softness surrounding her, but she had no idea what to do now. Her car was well and truly stuck, and there wasn’t a person or building in sight.
After a moment, when her heart had stopped racing, she turned the car off and sat for a moment, the world silent around her, except for the gentle
thwack
of the snowflakes hitting the windows.
She was still two miles from Ledstow. Two miles, she decided, she could walk. She pulled the hood up on her coat, dug out her gloves and scarf from her bag, and squaring her shoulders, opened the door and stepped out into the storm.
*