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

‘A widow? Tough luck,’ she said, taking the covers off a couple of dishes to reveal plates of pinwheel sandwiches and butterfly sponge cakes.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ I protested. ‘I really wasn’t expecting to be fed, just to pick up the keys!’

‘I didn’t – we always have an early lunch anyway, so I made extra. My housekeeper has gone home for Christmas as usual, but I do most of the cooking in any case – it’s nothing to me. I was a TV chef, you know, in the early days. If I’d known the exact time of your arrival, I could have whipped up a soufflé.’

‘This looks lovely,’ I said, taking a sandwich. ‘Were you a TV cook like Fanny Craddock, then?’

Her face darkened alarmingly and it didn’t need Noël’s appalled expression and shake of the head to inform me that I had made a faux pas.

‘Don’t mention That Woman to me,’ she snapped. ‘She was nothing but a brass-faced amateur!’

‘Sorry,’ I said quickly.

‘I was Tilda Thompson in those days – and much more photogenic than she ever was, all slap and false eyelashes.’

This seemed to me to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I made a vague noise of agreement.

‘Coffee?’ Noël chipped in brightly, pouring me a cup with a slightly trembling hand.

‘Thank you.’ Having tasted the sandwich I was eager to accept anything that might wash the flavour away … whatever it was.

‘Did you call Jessica?’ Tilda Martland asked her husband.

‘On my way to the door, m’dear. But perhaps I had better call again.’

Upstairs a door slammed and footsteps thundered down the stairs like a herd of inebriated rhinos.

‘No need,’ she said dryly.

Jess was a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl of about twelve or thirteen (not quite as tall as I had been at that age, but even skinnier), dressed entirely in black, from glasses frame to shoes. Anyone less like a Jessica I never saw. She certainly stood out against the chintzy, ornament-laden and over-bedecked sitting room.

‘This is our granddaughter, Jessica,’ Noël Martland said.

‘Jess, Grandpa,’ she corrected, in a long-suffering way.

He smiled at her affectionately. ‘Jess, this is Mrs Brown who is going to look after Old Place until your Uncle Jude gets back.’

‘Please do all call me Holly,’ I suggested.

‘Then you must call us Tilda and Noël.’

Jess eyed me curiously, in that slightly-shifty adolescent way that generally denotes nothing much except acute self-consciousness. ‘I’m only here on my own because my parents are in Antarctica. But now my great-uncle’s dead and Jude’s gone off somewhere, we can’t stay at Old Place over Christmas and New Year like we usually do. It’s a drag.’

‘Jess’s parents are studying pelicans,’ Tilda said, unveiling another plate of tiny sandwiches, this time cut into teddy bear shapes.

‘Penguins,’ corrected Jess. ‘Emperor penguins. And how old do you think I am, Granny?’

‘Going by your manners, six.’

‘Ha, ha,’ said Jess, but she took a teddy bear sandwich and, after lifting up the top to examine the innocuous-looking ham filling, ate it.

‘It’s such a pity that Mo and Jim had to go off suddenly like that, isn’t it?’ Noël said. ‘But it couldn’t be helped. I only hope you don’t find it too lonely up there – there is a cleaner twice a week, but the couple who used to look after my brother, the Jacksons, retired and my nephew looks after himself when he’s home.’

‘That cleaning girl is a slut: I don’t think she ever does more than whisk a duster about for half an hour and then drink tea and read magazines,’ Tilda said. ‘But I expect you will soon have everything shipshape again, Holly.’

‘I’ll certainly make sure the areas of the house I use are kept neat and tidy, ’ I said pointedly, because it was a common misconception that home-sitters would also spring-clean and do all kinds of other little jobs around the house and garden and I often found it as well to make the real position clear from the outset. ‘I’m here simply to make sure the house is safe and to look after the animals. I believe there are a dog and a horse?’

‘Lady – she was my great-aunt’s horse, so she’s ancient,’ Jess said. ‘Me and Grandpa went up in the golf buggy yesterday afternoon and again this morning and I filled her water bucket and haynet, but I couldn’t get too close because I’m allergic to horses. I sneeze.’

‘That’s a pity,’ I said sincerely, because I could have done with a knowledgeable, horse-mad child.

‘Yes, but I’m all right with dogs as long as I don’t brush them, so I took Merlin out for a run.’

‘That’s something,’ I agreed, assuming Merlin to be the dog I’d been told about.

‘We left Lady in for the day, with the top of the stable door open, in case you were late arriving – it goes dark so early at this time of year,’ Noël said, ‘and you wouldn’t want to be bringing her in from the paddock in the dark, before you’ve got your bearings.’

‘No indeed,’ I said gratefully.

‘Jude sets great store by her, because she was his mother’s horse,’ Noël said, eating one of the strange pinwheel sandwiches with apparent relish. I had tried to swallow the rest of mine without chewing.

‘He was happy enough to leave her in the Chirks’ care again, but I’m not sure what he will think about someone he has never met taking over,’ Tilda said.

‘Ellen, who runs Homebodies, has been trying to contact Mr Martland to inform him of what has been happening. Will you please explain, if he calls you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Noël, ‘and he is bound to, in the next day or two. He may then call you up, too.’

‘I admit, I’ll feel happier when he knows there has been a change of house-sitter.’

‘Well, it’s his own fault for staying away so long,’ Tilda said. ‘We didn’t think he meant it when he suddenly said he didn’t intend coming back from his trip to America until after Christmas, did we, Noël?’

‘No, m’dear, because normally, as Jess said, we move into Old Place for Christmas and New Year. My sister Becca also stays from Christmas Eve until Boxing Day, too – you probably passed her house on the way here, New Place? Big wrought-iron gates, just the other end of the village.’

‘Of course she passed the damned house,’ snapped Tilda, ‘did you think she was parachuted in?’

‘Turn of speech,’ he said apologetically, but twinkled at me.

I suddenly wondered if Alan and I would have ended up like this, with me bossing him about and him good-naturedly suffering it? There was no denying that I was bossy and organising. But then, he had had a stubborn streak, too …

‘Still, it would have been a bit difficult this year, what with my poor brother passing away last January and then Jude falling out with Guy,’ Noël sighed.

‘It wasn’t Guy’s fault, really,’ Tilda said dispassionately, ‘that girl just got her hooks into him.’

I didn’t ask who Guy was because, to be honest, I wasn’t terribly interested in people I was never going to meet. I finished my coffee and put down my cup and plate. ‘Well, that was unexpected but delicious: thank you so much! And now I’d better get up to the house and settle in.’

‘Sharon, the cleaner, should still be there, so get her to show you round before she goes. It might be the most useful thing she’s done all year,’ Tilda suggested.

‘I expect she does her best: it is a large house for one person to clean,’ Noël said mildly. ‘Not that Jude can make much of a mess, because when he is home he seems to spend most of his time down at the mill, working on his sculptures, or in his little study next to the library.’