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

‘Will it? Won’t the necks be difficult?’

‘Thank you, Jonah,’ Aunt Hebe said again with slightly more emphasis, before he could reply, and he ambled off, grinning. Charlie hauled himself up and followed him, and I hoped Mrs Lark would give him something to eat. I was so starving I’d rather not share my hotpot pie, and I didn’t think he would fancy mushy peas or pickled cabbage.

Mind you, my last dog ate orange peel, so you just never know.

‘We generally find our own lunch and tea in the kitchen, but Mrs Lark wanted to give you something hot today. Though there is usually soup—’ she looked around as if surprised at its absence—‘and we just have fruit for dessert. But today there’s semolina, which is apparently your favourite pudding.’

‘It might have been once…I can’t remember.’ I hoped Mrs Lark wasn’t going to feed me exclusively on the type of nursery diet I ate as a child. My tastes have changed a little over the years.

Mind you, when I stirred a generous dollop of home-made blackcurrant jam into my semolina and it went a strange purple-grey colour, it did all sort of come back to me why I had liked it—stodgy puds are nearly as comforting as chocolate.

When we had finished, and Jonah had brought coffee in mismatched cups and saucers, Aunt Hebe said that she would give me a brief tour of the house. ‘Just enough to remind you of the layout, for I am sure you will want a more detailed survey as soon as you have time,’ she said shrewdly.

She was quite right, I was already mentally compiling a mammoth shopping list of cleaning materials, some of them only obtainable from specialist suppliers. It was lucky I already knew a good one, called Stately Solutions, wasn’t it? Serendipity again, you see.

‘After that, I am afraid I must go out, she said, glancing down at the watch pinned to her cardigan. ‘I am closely involved in the work of the Church, and it is my turn to do the flowers.’

She fingered the heavy chased gold cross that swung against her bony chest—and I remembered I had seen the small silver pentacle on its chain around her neck earlier that day, the two symbols in incongruous proximity. Perhaps they summed up the conflicting sides of her heritage—the old religion hidden against her skin, the new for outward show?

With the brisk, detached air of a tour guide running late (which of course I recognised, having been one), she took me round the major rooms of the house. ‘Dining room, drawing room, morning room, library, cloakroom…Mr Yatton’s office is here, in the solar tower, and of course at Winter’s End he is always called the steward, rather than estate manager.’

‘Like on a cruise ship?’

‘I know nothing of cruise ships: the appellation is a tradition here,’ she said dampeningly.

This part of the house was only vaguely familiar, for my allotted domain as a child had been the nursery, kitchen wing and garden. Stumbling after her through such a warren of dark passages that I half-expected a giant rabbit to bound around the corner at any minute, I thought that each room seemed dingier and more neglected than the last. But I suppose once the sun vanished and the day started to fade it was bound to look worse, especially since the lights weren’t switched on.

‘This is Lady Anne’s parlour.’ She cracked open a door a few measly inches, then prepared to shut it again.

‘Lady Anne? You don’t mean Alys Blezzard’s daughter, do you?’ I asked, sticking my head under her arm and peering round the door into a small chamber, whose furnishings and decoration, like that of the rest of the house, were an eclectic mix of several centuries.

‘Yes, did Susan tell you about her? This was her favourite room and, so it is said, her mother’s before her. She was the heiress, of course, and married a cousin, so she remained Anne Winter and stayed on at Winter’s End. Over there in the alcove is the wooden coffer that Alys Blezzard’s household book was always kept in. We discovered both the book and key had vanished soon after your mother left, and so drew the obvious conclusion…but then, being the elder of us, Ottie had charge of the key after your grandmother died, and she is so careless, even with important things.’

The box was about two feet long and perhaps thirteen or fourteen inches high, with two narrow bands of carved flowers and foliage to the front. The sturdy strap-work hinges and lock plate were of decorative pierced metal.

‘It’s quite plain, isn’t it?’ I said, feeling slightly disappointed. ‘Somehow I expected it to be more ornate—and bigger.’

‘This one is a very unusual design for the late sixteenth century,’ she corrected me, with a look of severe disapproval. ‘Not only is the inside heavily carved instead of the outside, it also has a drop front and is fitted out with compartments. Family legend has it that Alys Blezzard’s husband, Thomas, gave it to her as a bridal gift, since he was afraid that she might be suspected of witchcraft if she left her book and some of the ingredients she used to make her various charms and potions lying around.’

‘So she really was a witch?’

‘Only a white witch—little more than what we today would call a herbalist,’ Aunt Hebe said defensively, and her long bony fingers curled around her gold cross.

I turned back to the box. ‘So, how did you know the book was missing, if you hadn’t got the key, Aunt Hebe?’

‘The box was lighter, and nothing moved inside it when it was tilted.’

‘Of course—though if it had been one of those huge heavy affairs with a complicated locking mechanism, which I thought it would be, I don’t suppose you would have known it had gone.’

‘Actually, there is one of those in the estate office, full of old family papers, which I expect Mr Yatton will show you, if you are interested. That’s where my brother discovered the original plans for both the terrace gardens and the maze, rolled up in a bundle of later documents. Smaller boxes like this one were probably intended to keep precious things like spices under lock and key originally, but Alys locked away her mother’s household book instead.’

‘Which became known as Alys Blezzard’s book—even though she was really Alys Winter after she married Thomas?’

‘Yes. When she received the book after her mother’s death, she continued to add to it, as women did then, often passing them on for several generations. But at the front she still signed herself as Alys Blezzard, so I don’t think she ever really considered herself to be a Winter. She was the last of that particular branch of the Blezzards too; her father married three times, but had no more children.’

Like a curse, I thought, shivering. I noticed that Charlie was looking fixedly at a point behind me, his tail wagging, but when I turned there was nobody there—or nobody visible.

‘I keep having the feeling that there’s someone standing right behind me, Aunt Hebe. Is the house haunted? I mean, apart from Alys.’

‘Oh, yes. When you were a little girl you called your imaginary friend Alys—I had forgotten. And you were quite convinced that she talked to you! But of course she does haunt the house, because of her tragically early death, and there are several other ghosts including the robed figure of a man from about the same time. They say the family was hiding a Catholic priest who was taking gold back to the Continent, to further the work of the Church, but he was betrayed and is still searching for his treasure.’

‘You’d think if he hid it he would know where it was, wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so, though each generation has made major alterations to Winter’s End so he might be a trifle confused. There are several other legends too, for of course there had been a dwelling on this site for many centuries before Winter’s End was built. If you are interested in such things, there is a book in the library called Hidden Hoards of the North-West…unless Jack still has it. He’s been fascinated by the idea of hidden treasure since he was a little boy,’ she added indulgently, ‘and I had to read to him from that book at bedtime every night.’

That caused me another unworthy pang of jealousy. ‘You used to read to me from a scary Victorian book of bible stories, Aunt Hebe!’

‘But you were an ungodly child,’ she said severely, ‘born of sin.’

I didn’t think I had been particularly wayward, just mischievous, but I let it go. ‘Have you seen any of the ghosts?’

‘I thought I saw a Saxon in the garden once, at dusk, looking for the hoard he had hidden before a battle. But it was probably just one of the gardeners.’

The windows of Lady Anne’s parlour looked out over the terraces at the back of the house and were curtained in a predominantly coral-coloured William Morris fabric. The walls above the inevitable dark wainscoting had been painted the same shade, and coral tones softly echoed in the faded, but still beautiful, carpet.

I felt as though the room was casting an aura of welcome around me and I could see myself sitting there in the evening, piecing together my crazy cushions. ‘Aunt Hebe, would you mind if I used this room? It’s lovely, and I’ll need somewhere to make my patchwork.’

‘I can’t say I ever much cared for sitting in here,’ she said, looking slightly surprised, ‘and though Mother was a skilled needlewoman and used to embroider beautifully, she did it in the drawing room after dinner. The firescreen in the study is her work.’

‘I’ll look out for it. Where do you like to sit in the evening, Aunt Hebe?’

‘Sometimes one place, sometimes another…’ she said vaguely, like an elderly Titania—which indeed, she resembled. ‘Though I often work in the stillroom until late, or go out—I am on several village committees. There is a TV in the library, but I also have one in my room, for William and I tended to live very separate lives.’

‘We didn’t have a TV in the commune and I’ve never really felt the need for one since, but we always had a radio when I worked at Lady Betty’s. I like to listen to Radio 4 when I’m sewing. You can’t really watch something and sew properly, can you?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’ She looked at her watch and then shooed me out along a tapestry-hung passage and up some spiral stairs. The door at the top opened between my bedroom and the arch leading to the upper level of the tower, which was a complete surprise—I’d noticed it, but thought it was another cupboard.

‘I don’t remember these stairs at all!’

‘That is because you were not allowed to use them. William insisted you were confined to the nursery and the kitchens, though we were forever finding you sliding down the Great Hall banisters. There are the stairs to the attic nursery floor over there, which you will recall, so we won’t bother going up—the rest of the roof space is now entirely given up to storage. I keep the door to that side locked, otherwise Grace sneaks off up there and smokes.’

She turned on her white, wellington-booted heel and sped off, appearing to be losing interest in the tour fast. ‘You know this bedroom floor already,’ she tossed over her shoulder. ‘There are six bedrooms—eight if you include the nursery suite—but the Rose Room is never used.’

I fell down some ill-lit steps and bumped into her round the corner as she came to an abrupt stop.

‘Turn left and you enter the Long Room again, at the end of which is the door to the East Wing where there are further bedchambers, the Larks’ living quarters, and the backstairs to the kitchens. This one takes us onto the landing, of course, commonly called the minstrels’ gallery, and, since it projects over the hall, I expect they did sometimes have musicians there when they were entertaining. When Ottie and I were girls we had parties with dancing in the Great Hall, and the band sat up here and played.’

That must have been quite a sight—the tall, slim, blue-eyed Miss Winters, their red-gold hair floating as they danced the night away with their dinner-jacketed partners…