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

The Great Hall and the cross passage, which was partly hidden by the enormous carved wooden screen, separated the family part of the house from the service wing, the area I seemed to recall best. Over there was the door to the kitchen with its huge black Aga, Mrs Lark’s domain and the source of comfort, warmth and treats. Then came the stillroom, where Aunt Hebe held sway, brewing up potions and lotions, and receiving mysterious late visitors to the side door for whispered, urgent consultations. Beyond that again, a maze of stone-flagged, utilitarian rooms and the cellar steps.

Here in the hall there was no longer a fire in the cavernous hearth, only cold grey embers, but ancient cast-iron radiators were dotted about as though dropped randomly into place and a hollow, metallic clunking indicated that they were working, a fact that wasn’t immediately obvious from the chill air. A powerful energy ran up from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, filling me to the brim with a life force compounded of the vital essence of Winter’s End and of my ancestors who had loved it before me—the alleged witch, Alys Blezzard, among them.

From the dark shadows behind me I heard the once-familiar echo of her light, serious young voice whispering, ‘Welcome—welcome home, at last!’

‘There you are,’ I murmured.

‘Of course—I never left.’

‘I missed you, Alys.’

Aunt Hebe’s face, an elderly Juliet, appeared like a waning moon over the balustrade high above and she called, slightly querulously, ‘Aren’t you coming, Sophy?’

‘Yes, of course!’ I came back to earth with a start, and ran up the stairs to the gallery with Charlie, who had been sitting watching me, at my heels.

She looked at him with disfavour. ‘The dogs have never been allowed upstairs.’

‘But he’s so sad and lonely at the moment, Aunt Hebe. I’d really like to keep him with me.’

‘You can do as you wish, of course—for the present. Fill the house with dogs if you want to, though I expect Grace will complain about the hairs.’

‘I think one dog will do to be going on with, and he won’t shed so much hair once I have given him a good brushing.’ That was an experience neither of us was going to enjoy, because currently he was just one big tangled knot and a pair of bright eyes.

Following her through a door at the back of the gallery I found myself in the Long Room, which was exactly what it said on the packet—a narrow, wooden-floored chamber running from one wing to the other, jutting out at the back of the house above the terraced gardens.

The wooden shutters were all partly closed over diamond-paned windows yellowed with grime, so that we walked in a soupy half-light past paintings so dirty it was hard to tell the subject matter. Even so, I noticed that nothing above shoulder height had been cleaned within living memory, and cobwebs formed tattered silk drapery across the ceiling. Some of them brushed Aunt Hebe’s head, but she seemed oblivious.

Lower down everything had been given a rough once-over, the legs of the furniture showing evidence of repeated violent batterings with a Hoover nozzle.

‘Grace surely can’t be the only cleaner?’ I said, itching to get my hands on a duster. ‘It must be too much for one person to cope with, especially since she’s getting on a bit.’

‘She does what she can, and my brother occasionally got a team in from an agency to give the place a good spring clean until a couple of years ago, when he said it had got too expensive. The Friends of Winter’s dust the Great Hall and the minstrels’ gallery when we open to the public. Those are the only parts of the house the visitors are allowed into, you know. It’s mainly the gardens they come to see.’

Clearly she’d never considered lifting a duster herself, and the house was desperate for some TLC. Poor tiny, ancient Grace could never hope to manage it all herself, for while the house was not some enormous mansion, it was low and rambling, with lots of panelling and wooden floors and ups and downs.

I was yearning to make a start on it…but maybe five minutes after I arrived wouldn’t be tactful. With an effort I managed to restrain myself, thinking it was ironic that I had spent all my life learning the art of cleaning other people’s stately piles, not knowing those skills would one day be necessary to transform my own. Again, I had that strange sense of fitting into some preordained pattern, the vital bit of missing jigsaw.

They say everyone has some skill or talent and mine just happens to be cleaning. Not romantic or exciting, perhaps, but there it is—and exactly what was needed here. Now a missionary fervour was invading my heart, filling me with the longing to convert the dirt.

As we walked along I noticed lighter patches on the walls where pictures had been removed—perhaps when Grandfather was searching for something to pay death duties with. How odd to think of him here, planning the implications of his impending death on the Inland Revenue, making sure everything was settled before I was even told he had gone.

‘Are the missing paintings still away being cleaned and valued?’ I asked.

‘No, they have been returned. They’re stacked in the Blue Bedroom waiting to be rehung.’

At the end we turned left past a suit of armour made for a short, fat gentleman and went through a door into the West Wing, down two steps, round a corner, and up one step to a passage.

‘This is the Blue Bedroom,’ Hebe said, indicating a door, ‘then my room and a bathroom. The Red Bedroom will be Jack’s when he arrives. Of course, he should have had my brother’s room, only,’ she added resentfully, walking on and throwing open another door, ‘Ottie insisted that you should have it.’

‘But really, I don’t mind at all if Jack has Grandfather’s room,’ I protested. (Especially if Grandfather actually died there!) ‘I thought perhaps my old room on the nursery floor…’

My voice petered out: someone had lit an incongruous little gas heater in the magnificent fireplace and the red glow reflected off a great mahogany bed covered with the kind of jewel-coloured crazy patchwork that I make myself. The curtains were of the same soft, faded gold velvet as the bed hangings and, like the Long Room, the oriole windows jutted out over the terraces at the rear of the house, with a distant glimpse of the river at the bottom and the wood across the valley.

‘What a lovely room! You know, I don’t think I ever came in here when I was a child,’ I said, pulling back the drapes. Below were laid out the intricate, lacy shapes of terraced knot gardens, though the lowest level looked to be still very much a work in progress.

‘I’m so happy to be back, Aunt Hebe!’ I said spontaneously, turning to smile at her. ‘I haven’t forgotten how kind you always were to me, telling me bedtime bible stories and giving me rose fondants when I hurt myself.’

She softened slightly. ‘Couldn’t have you growing up a complete heathen. We missed you when Susan took you away, but we thought she’d be back again eventually, when the money ran out. And of course you were only a girl. It would have been different if you had been a boy.’

‘Sorry about that,’ I said drily, though her casual dismissal hurt.

‘My brother hoped that Susan would come to her senses and get married, and there would be more children—a son,’ she added, rubbing it in. But I’d already got the message: to Aunt Hebe, girls didn’t count, and illegitimate girls counted even less.

‘But then my cousin Louisa died and eventually Jack was sent back to school in England, and spent all his holidays here.’

‘Well, I’m sure that made everything right as rain, then,’ I said sourly. I mean, I liked Jack, but much more of this kind of thing and I would start to go off him rapidly.

‘It should have done, but I’m afraid Jack was a disappointment to my brother. Their characters were just too dissimilar, though Jack did try, by taking an interest in the architecture of the house and the family history. Then William somehow got the idea that Jack was thinking of marrying Melinda Seldon—or Christopher, as she has been calling herself again since her husband died. But if he had been, which I personally very much doubt, he gave it up once William made it clear he disapproved of the match. He never liked her, though of course she’s very wealthy now and, goodness knows, Winter’s End could do with a rich heiress marrying into the family.’

‘Was she the blonde woman on the grey horse that ran into my car?’ I asked, thinking rather despondently that the equestrian Helen of Troy and Jack would have made a wonderful couple—but also that Jack hadn’t seemed the kind of man who would meekly give up the woman he loved just to please his grandfather.

‘Yes, that was Melinda. She was widowed last year and moved back here to live with her mother, who is one of my oldest friends. Naturally, she and Jack saw a lot of each other. For one thing, they have lots of friends in common, but also he had entered into a business arrangement with her to develop the property she inherited from her late husband.’

‘She is very beautiful,’ I said wistfully.

‘She is, but also a great flirt—as a girl she played all the local boys off against each other quite shamelessly—but if Jack was tempted after she was widowed, then I expect he thought better of it, even before William mentioned the matter. He had already made one misalliance, you see, soon after he left university—a short-lived affair.’

‘So was mine, though in my case it was my husband’s family who thought he’d made a misalliance.’

‘Oh no, dear, nobody marrying a Winter could possibly think that,’ Aunt Hebe assured me—but then, she had never met the Mistress.

‘Things did seem to improve between Jack and William until they had that last ghastly argument…’ She shuddered.

‘Oh? What was that about, Aunt Hebe?’

‘Jack had long wanted William to transfer ownership of Winter’s End to him, to try and avoid death duties, but he wouldn’t hear of it. This time Jack told his uncle that if he didn’t divert some of his income into keeping the house standing, he would have nothing but a garden to inherit anyway.’

‘Well, goodness knows, he was right about the house. Another couple of years of neglect and possibly it would have passed the point of no return.’

‘Yes, but my brother took it badly and told Jack he shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatched. And then, to top it all, he’d heard about one of Jack’s business deals—such a clever boy—and accused him of only wanting to get his hands on Winter’s End so he could turn it into an apartment block. I told him he was being absurd, because Jack wouldn’t dream of doing anything of the kind to his ancestral home.’

‘No, I’m sure he wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

She smiled approvingly. ‘I’m sure my brother would have seen sense if he hadn’t suddenly discovered where you were and made that disastrous will. I can’t think what got into him.’

‘Sickening for you and Jack,’ I agreed, fascinated despite myself by this one-viewpoint argument, because it had obviously never occurred to either of them that I had any kind of right to inherit Winter’s End.

‘Yes—you do understand, don’t you? William didn’t even tell us he had found you, so the will came as a complete shock. And although Mr Hobbs says he was in his right mind and the will can’t be challenged, he can’t have been, really.’