Twelve Days of Christmas: A bestselling Christmas read to devour in one sitting!

Chapter 20 - Flickering

Chapter 21 - Loathe at First Sight

Chapter 22 - Outcomes

Chapter 23 - Pieced Together

Chapter 24 - Birkin Mad

Chapter 25 - Christmas Carol

Chapter 26 - Socked

Chapter 27 - Knitting

Chapter 28 - Christmas Present

Chapter 29 - Abominable

Chapter 30 - A Bit of a Poser

Chapter 31 - Fool’s Gold

Chapter 32 - Puzzle Pieces

Chapter 33 - Turning Turkey

Chapter 34 - Slightly Thawed

Chapter 35 - Acted Out

Chapter 36 - Piked

Chapter 37 - Bumps

Chapter 38 - Photo-Finish

Chapter 39 - Signs and Portents

Chapter 40 - Twelfth Night

Acknowledgments

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Prologue

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Even though it was barely December, the hospital ward had been decked out with a tiny tree and moulded plastic wall decorations depicting a fat Santa, with bunchy bright scarlet cheeks and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He was offering what looked like a stick of dynamite to Rudolf the very red-nosed reindeer, but I expect you need explosive power to deliver all those presents in one single night.

My defence strategy for the last few years has been to ignore Christmas, shutting the door on memories too painful to deal with; but now, sitting day after day by the bed in which Gran dwindled like snow in summer, there seemed to be no escape.

Gran, who brought me up, would not have approved of all these festive trappings. Not only was she born a Strange Baptist, but had also married a minister in that particularly austere (and now almost extinct) offshoot of the faith. They didn’t do Christmas in the way everyone else did – with gifts, gluttony and excess, so as a child, I was always secretly envious of my schoolfriends.

But then I got married and went overboard on the whole idea. Alan egged me on – he never lost touch with his inner child, which is probably why he was such a brilliant primary school teacher. Anyway, he loved the whole thing, excess, gluttony and all.

So I baked and iced spiced gingerbread stars to hang on the tree, which was always the biggest one we could drag home from the garden centre, together with gay red and white striped candy canes, tiny foil crackers and twinkling fairy lights. Together we constructed miles of paper chains to festoon the ceilings, hung mistletoe (though we never needed an excuse to kiss) and made each other stockings full of odd surprises.

After the first year we decided to forgo a full traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings in favour of roast duck with home-made bottled Morello cherry sauce, which was to become my signature dish. (I was sous-chef in a local restaurant at the time.) We made our own traditions, blending the old with the new, as I suppose most families do …

And we were so nearly a family: about to move to a tiny hamlet just outside Merchester, a perfect country setting for the two children (or maybe three, if Alan got his way) that would arrive at neatly-spaced intervals …

At this juncture in my thoughts, a trolley rattled sharply somewhere behind the flowered curtains that enclosed the bed, jerking me back to the here and now: I could even hear a faint, tinny rendering of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ seeming to seep like a seasonal miasma from the walls.

Perhaps Gran could too, for suddenly her clear, light grey eyes, so like my own, opened wide with an expression of delighted surprise that had nothing to do with either my presence or the home-made pot custard I’d brought to tempt her appetite, the nutmeg-sprinkled top browned just the way she liked it.

‘Ned? Ned Martland?’ she whispered, staring at someone only she could see.

I’d never seen her look so lit-up and alive as she did at that moment, which was ironic considering those were her last words – and the words themselves were a bit of a puzzle, since my grandfather’s name had been Joseph Bowman!

So who the hell was Ned Martland? If it had been Martland, of course, and not Cartland, Hartland, or something similar. But no, I was pretty sure it was Martland – and he’d obviously meant a lot to her at some time. This was fairly amazing: had my grave and deeply reserved grandmother, who had been not so much buttoned up as zipped tightly shut and with a padlock thrust through the fastener for good measure, been keeping a romantic secret all these years? Had she lived her life without the man she truly loved by her side, just as I was living mine?

Perhaps there’s a family curse, which would account for why, after Alan’s death, she kept going on about the sins of the fathers being visited on the next generations – though actually, as I pointed out to her, that would have meant me rather than my husband. But if there is a family curse it looks set to end with me, because I’m the end of the line, the wrong side of thirty-five, and with my fruit in imminent danger of withering on the vine.

I’ve had too much time to think about that lately, too.

I’ve no idea what Alan’s last words were, if any, because I was still asleep when he went for his early morning jog round the local park before work. When I woke up and went downstairs there was no sign of him and it was all worryingly Marie Celeste. The radio was spilling out some inane Christmas pop song to the empty kitchen and his bag, with its burden of marked exercise books, was on the floor by the door. A used mug and plate and a Tupperware box of sandwiches lay on the table and the kettle was barely warm.

As I stood there, puzzled and feeling the first stirring of unease, the police arrived to break the news that there had been an accident and Alan would never be coming home.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I heard my voice telling them crisply, ‘I’m doing duck with some of my bottled Morello cherry sauce for Christmas dinner – it’s his favourite.’

Then, for the first and only time in my life, I fainted.

* * *

Alan had been trying to rescue a dog that had fallen through the ice on the boating lake. How stupid was that? I mean, if a dog fell through, then even a slightly built man like Alan would, too. The dog was evidently not a retriever, for it swam through the broken ice created by Alan’s fall, scrambled out and ran off.

I was so furious with Alan that at the funeral I positively hurled the single red rose someone had handed me into the grave, screaming, ‘What were you thinking of, dimwit?’

And then I slipped on the snowy brink and nearly followed it in, though that was entirely due to the large shot of brandy my friend Laura, who was also Alan’s sister, insisted we both drink before we set out. Luckily her husband, Dan, was on my other side and yanked me back at the last minute and then Gran walked around the grave from where she had been standing among a small cluster of elderly Strange Baptist friends and took a firm grip of my other arm, like a wardress.