Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

Noël had gone to bed and Jess was in the morning room watching something fuzzy and probably highly unsuitable on the TV, half-glazed with sleep. I sent her upstairs, but she made me promise to come and put her light out on my way up in a few minutes. The child in her was only just beneath the surface: I ended up reading her a bit of The Water Babies from a book we found on one of the shelves, before tucking her up with her teddy bear and saying good night.

* * *

Tonight I could only focus on the journal entries for long enough to discover that Gran’s first meeting outside the hospital with N seemed set to become the first of many.

Then my eyes started to close as if weighted with lead and I switched out the light and sank back on the pillows — only to start awake again a moment later, my heart racing, filled with shocked guilt because for the first time in eight years, I had forgotten the anniversary of Alan’s death!

I climbed out of bed and fetched his photograph in its travelling frame from the top of the washstand: and that’s how I fell asleep, holding onto my lost love, my face wet with tears.

I was up much earlier than everyone else, seeing to Merlin and double-rugging Lady, as Becca had suggested doing if it got really cold, before letting her and Billy out into the snowy paddock.

It was bitterly icy out there and the wind felt as if it was coming straight off the tundra so, after hanging the haynet on the fence and breaking the ice in the water trough, I was glad to go back in and thaw out. Mucking out would have to wait for later.

By now I’d found a note about the care of Billy, which had come adrift from its place in the file and been pushed into the pocket at the back. However, apart from feeding him some of the goat biscuit things every day, which I had been doing anyway, he seemed to eat much the same as Lady. At the bottom of the typed page, Jude had written: If Billy gets ill and goes off his food, tempt him with toast and treacle.

Was he serious?

I got the defrosted ham out of the larder and boiled it, pouring away the water. Then I smeared it with honey and mustard, stuck it with cloves, and put it in to bake.

By the time I’d followed this up by making a blancmange and a quick chocolate cake from a favourite recipe, Noël and Jess had appeared. Tilda was, as I expected, still shaken, bruised and stiff, though she’d apparently announced her intention of coming down later.

When I asked them what they would like for breakfast, Jess said, ‘A bacon and egg McMuffin, if you really want to know.’

‘There are muffins in the freezer, you could have a Holly Muffin instead, if that would do?’

In fact, we all had bacon and egg-filled muffins, including Tilda, though Jess took hers up on a tray along with toast, marmalade, butter and a little fat pot of tea.

Apparently she usually eats a hearty breakfast, though if she got through that lot, then she must eat her own body weight every day, since she’s the size of a sparrow!

Fortified by that, Noël and Jess were all set for an expedition to the attic to fetch down the Christmas decorations.

‘There are only two days to go before Christmas, so there’s no time to waste,’ Noël said. They wanted me to go with them, which in my new spirit of drifting with the seasonal flow I agreed to do, just as soon as I’d cleared the breakfast things.

Jess was dispatched to collect her granny’s breakfast tray and tell her where we were going to be, in case she thought we’d deserted her. I was just checking the ham when there was a hammering at the back door.

George must have snowploughed up the drive again, for the tractor with the heavy blade on the front was on the other side of the gate and, to judge from the footsteps across the snowy cobbles, he’d already made a couple of trips to and fro. There was a large holdall and a suitcase at his feet, and he was holding an assortment of other stuff, including a lot of greenery.

He gave me his attractive grin over the top of it, his healthy pink face glowing under its shock of white-gold hair and his sky-blue eyes bright.

‘Morning! Met the postie in the village and thought I’d save him the trouble of bringing your mail up, seeing I was coming anyway. I’ve brought the old folks’, too, though theirs mostly looks like Christmas cards.’

‘That’s kind of you.’

‘If you take that?’ he suggested and I relieved him of a large bundle held together with red elastic bands, two parcels, a hyacinth in a pot and the bunch of holly and mistletoe.

‘Henry sent you the hyacinth, and the holly and bit of mistletoe are from me. I’ll cut some more and drop it off in the porch later.’

‘Oh — how kind of you both,’ I said, gingerly holding the prickly bouquet and trying not to drop anything. ‘And the bags. .?’

He picked them up and heaved them over the threshold.

‘Becca’s. I cleared as far as New Place and she called to me and asked if I’d drop them off.’

‘She did?’

I supposed it made sense, when I came to think about it, since if it carried on snowing she might have to walk up through the snow on Christmas Day. She did seem to need an awful lot of stuff for one night, though!

‘We’ve just finished breakfast — why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?’

‘Nay, I haven’t time, but I’ll carry Becca’s bags through for you if you like, one of them’s heavy.’ He stamped the snow off his boots and came in, shutting the door behind him.

‘Is that George?’ called Noël from the kitchen. ‘Tell him to come through!’

‘I can’t stop,’ George called back, but walked up the passage anyway, while I lingered to put the holly and mistletoe in the utility room together with the hyacinth, until I could find it a saucer to stand on.

Despite what he’d said, he was sitting at the kitchen table when I went in and Noël was pouring him a mug of slightly stewed tea.

I put a plate of mince pies in front of him and, sniffing the air as appreciatively as a truffle hound, he said, ‘Something smells good in here!’

‘That’s the ham cooking. . and maybe the cake I made earlier.’

While he consumed a succession of mince pies he told us what the lane down to the main road was like, which was pretty bad for anything except four-wheel-drive vehicles, especially the last steep, bendy stretch from Weasel Pot Farm.

‘Their lad Ben’s doing a roaring trade, pulling the SatNav people out of the ditch on the first corner. They get partway up it, then slide down again.’

‘You’d think they would take one look and realise the SatNav was wrong,’ Noël said.

‘More money than sense, buying those things in the first place,’ George said.

‘But the postman got up it all right?’ I asked.

‘He’s got a Post Office Land Rover and he’s used to it,’ he explained. ‘Did you make these mince pies yourself, flower?’

They were quite small, but even so, I’d never seen anyone put a whole one in their mouth before. I nodded, fascinated.

‘They’re champion — you’re a grand cook as well as a strapping lass,’ he said with approval.

Jess giggled and he grinned at her. ‘And you’ll be another strapping lass too, when you’ve finished growing.’

Jess blushed, but actually I think she was quite pleased.

‘The forecast says more snow is likely on higher ground,’ Noël said, ‘so I suppose we might get cut off.’

‘Maybe, though we usually manage to keep the lane to the village open, don’t we? But you couldn’t get even the tractor over the Snowehill road to Great Mumming, now.’ George consumed the last mince pie on the plate as though he was popping Smarties, then got up. ‘Well, I’ll be going: the dog’s on the tractor and it’s bitter out there. I’ll drop you more greenery off later, Holly, you’ll want it for the decorations — this first lot’s more of a token gesture. And maybe you’ll have hung the mistletoe up in the porch when I come back,’ he added with unmistakable intent, and it was my turn to blush.

‘Oh yes, we must hang up the mistletoe later,’ Noël agreed, ‘and have lots of green stuff in the sitting room. We were just about to go up into the attic and bring down the decorations when you arrived.’

‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’

Noël showed him out, while Jess got the giggles. ‘George fancies you!’

I carried on sedately stacking the mince pie plate and the mugs in the dishwasher. ‘He fancies my cooking, Jess, that’s all.’

‘Do you think he’s nice-looking?’

‘Yes, he’s very handsome, in a rugged, outdoor kind of way.’

Noël came back in. ‘It’s bitter out there, isn’t it? And what are these two bags he’s brought?’

‘They’re your sister’s — I suppose she thought she might as well send her overnight things up with George while she had the chance, in case the weather worsens. Jess, you could help me carry them up to her room while we’re going in that direction. Take the overnight bag and I’ll have the case.’

‘I’ll look through our mail later,’ Noël said.

‘There’s already a whole stack for Jude. It’s piled on that table in the front hallway,’ I told him.

‘I’ll bring it all in later and sort it out,’ he promised. ‘A lot of it is probably junk.’

We dumped the bags in the room that had been assigned to Becca and then Noël checked again on Tilda, who was fast asleep, before we carried on up past the nursery.

Jess gave the attic door a good shove and it opened reluctantly with a protesting screech.

‘Jude ought to get that fixed, it’s always sticking,’ Noël said, pressing down a light switch and illuminating a large space, well filled with the abandoned clutter and tat of centuries.

‘There’s another, smaller attic over the kitchen wing, but there’s nothing much in it, as I recall. In the days when there were several servants, I think some of them slept there.’

‘I hadn’t even noticed a way into it,’ I confessed.

‘It’s in a dark corner of the landing and looks like a cupboard door.’

‘That would account for it’.

Noël led the way to a dust-sheeted pile between a large trunk and a miscellany of broken chairs. ‘Here we are,’ he announced and Jess tore off the sheet eagerly.

‘We need all these boxes marked with a large C, and that red metal stand for the Christmas tree,’ he began, then noticed he’d lost my attention. ‘I see you are admiring the Spanish chest, m’dear?’

‘Yes, it looks ancient?’

‘Parts of the house are extremely old and the chest has always been here. We think it might be Elizabethan and came into the family when an ancestor married a Spanish bride, or perhaps a few years later. Did I mention that family legend has it that Shakespeare once visited Old Place, too?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘though it doesn’t surprise me, since they found those Shakespeare documents over at Sticklepond recently. He seems to have got about a bit, doesn’t he? You’d probably be hard-pressed to find any large house in West Lancashire that he wasn’t alleged to have visited!’

‘Very true!’ he acknowledged. ‘You know, until recently we used to act out Twelfth Night on New Year’s Eve: “If music be the food of love, play on. .”’ He sighed wistfully. ‘Oh well. .’

‘I’m not allowed to go in that chest for dressing-up things,’ Jess said.

‘No, the mumming costumes for the Revels are in it, though the heads are stored in the hayloft behind the Auld Christmas.’

‘The heads?’ I repeated.

‘The Dragon and Red Hoss and the Man-Woman’s hat and mask,’ he explained, though that didn’t make things much clearer: the opposite, if anything.

‘You know,’ he added, looking at me with a puzzled air, ‘you already feel so much like one of the family that I keep forgetting that you are not, and don’t know all our little ways and customs. But I have mentioned the Revels on Twelfth Night, haven’t I?’

I was glad to be thought of as one of the family, even though I was doubling as cook and general factotum, because I was in a strange position: it’s easier when I’m on cooking assignments, because then I’m definitely staff.