A Winter’s Tale: A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance

‘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.

Chapter Six: Unravelled (#ulink_474999dc-9d2f-5d5f-83f3-0bb592213d01)

Father still hath not sent for mee, nor any word, so I asked leave to return home. But Thomas Wynter hath suddenly set his heart on marrying mee, despite his family’s opposition—and mine, for I feel for him as though he were a brother, no more than that. They do not like the match, yet he is Sir Ralph’s onlie child and he will denie him nothing…

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

I did a slow turn, arms spread wide to embrace the house, letting my long-suppressed memories of Winter’s End rise to the surface at last like slow, iridescent bubbles.