May, 1945

Waking early as usual on Boxing Day, I reread the entry in Gran’s journal and cried over it, despite knowing that she really wouldn’t drown herself like the heroine of a Victorian melodrama, but in the end marry and keep the child — my mother.

Poor Gran sounded so racked with guilt and desperation!

I still can’t help but feel fond of Noël, Tilda and Becca, but their acceptance of Noël’s casual dismissal of Gran as ‘a little mill girl in trouble’ does not reflect well on them. Evidently none of them ever wondered what had happened to her after Ned abandoned her!

But I’ll have to accept that I’m part of this family, whether I want to be or not, though at least now there’s a rational explanation for the pull of attraction to both the people (or some of them) and Old Place that I’ve felt since I arrived here.

The house was still totally silent when I got up and let Merlin out into the darkness of the courtyard, then cleaned out the grate in the sitting room and scattered the ashes outside the back door as usual — in fact, by now I had gritted quite a decent path halfway to the stables!

Merlin followed me back in, shaking off flecks of snow from his wiry dark grey coat, and ate his arthritis-pill-laced breakfast with gusto, while I slipped back out to Lady’s stall with a morning gift of Henry’s home-grown carrots for her, Nutkin and Billy.

I clipped back the top of the stable door to the courtyard and I was in the stall, standing with one arm across Lady’s warm back while she nuzzled carrot chunks from my hand, when Jude looked in. I knew who it was, because his enormous frame eclipsed all the light from the courtyard, until he shifted slightly to one side.

‘Hello — did you forget that I said I’d come down early and do the horses instead of Becca and Jess this morning?’

‘No, but I only came out to give Lady a bit of carrot, that’s all. I haven’t got time to see to her and everything else!’ I snapped. It might be totally irrational, but I felt angry with him because it was his uncle who had put poor Gran in such a harrowing plight!

‘That’s okay, I’ll do it,’ he said, sounding mildly surprised — but then, we had seemed to have come to a better understanding of each other yesterday so I don’t suppose he expected to have his head bitten off.

‘And I was going to clean out the fireplace in the sitting room, too. Just leave all that for me, now I’m back.’

‘I like to get things sorted early — but someone should run the vacuum cleaner over the sitting-room floor later, if you really want to be helpful,’ I said and he gave me a puzzled look from his deep-set dark eyes.

Lady, having eaten her carrot, turned her head and vigorously rubbed her nose up and down my arm, the muscles of her neck rippling and Jude suddenly said urgently, ‘Stay exactly like that!’

I had no time to wonder if the command was meant for me or Lady before he’d whipped out a small camera and flashed it right in my eyes.

‘What on earth. .?’ I began indignantly, but he ignored me and kept snapping away. Lady seemed quite blasé about it: if anything, she held the pose better than I did.

Nutkin, who had closed his eyes and dozed off after his share of the carrot, opened them and stared at us with mild astonishment through the barred partition dividing the boxes.

‘Right, now stay like that while I fetch a sketch pad,’ Jude said, putting the camera back in his pocket.

‘I can’t, I’ve things to do in the kitchen. And why do you need me? I thought you were only interested in horses.’

‘They are my main subject, but I sculpt all kinds of other things and I often include a human form with my animal sculptures. The way you were standing with one arm across Lady’s back while she turned her head towards you was full of lovely, flowing lines,’ he said regretfully, as I gave Lady a last pat and unbolted the door to come out past him. ‘Oh, well, I suppose it doesn’t matter — I have the pictures on film and in my head,’ he said, though he still seemed a bit reluctant to move out of my way right until the last minute, looking down at me with those deep-set eyes like dark, peaty, dangerous pools. .

But right then, that just reminded me of poor Gran again.

Back in the warmth of the kitchen I said to Merlin, ‘Your boss is a great, big, surly, autocratic bear!’ Though in fact I’d been the surly one this time: he had just been bossy. Merlin wagged his tail politely.

I prepped everything ready for lunch, which was actually going to be another early cooked dinner, but dead easy: the whole salmon I’d taken from the freezer the previous morning, Duchesse potatoes, petits pois and a piquant sauce.

Jude stayed outside so long I’d forgotten about him. By the time he came back in, Michael had also come downstairs and we were laughing together over something silly as I cooked bacon for breakfast and he laid the table.

Jude, who I could now see in the clearer light of the kitchen, was sporting so much black stubble along his formidable jawline that he looked like an overgrown Mexican bandit, glowered darkly at us and went on through without a word. Perhaps he’s not really a morning person? Or any time of day person?

He did reappear later, washed, shaved and smelling faintly of the wholesomely attractive aftershave that was presumably designed for rugged men, and put away an impressive amount of breakfast. But he didn’t really join in the conversation with the others, though he probably wouldn’t have got much out of Coco, anyway. She drifted silently in, wearing her diaphanous pink negligee, like some species of attenuated jellyfish, and then communed silently with a cup of black coffee until I cut the yolk out of a fried egg and plonked the remains down in front of her. She shuddered.

‘Eat it!’ I ordered and she gave me a slightly alarmed look and picked up her knife and fork.

Jude seemed increasingly abstracted and soon disappeared into his little study/studio next to the library. Perhaps a lot of his taciturnity is actually artistic temperament and he simply vanishes into a new idea? I get a bit withdrawn when I’m working out a new recipe, only without the rattiness, of course. . or usually without the rattiness. I did feel I had been a bit mean to him earlier, taking something out on him that wasn’t his fault.

Everyone else (except Coco) had talked around him as they ate, as though he were the elephant — or Yeti — in the room that all saw but no-one mentioned, so presumably they are quite used to his moods.

Jess made me promise I’d go out as soon as I’d finished clearing up in the kitchen and join her in sledging down the sloping paddock with Guy and Michael — and even Coco ventured out eventually, in borrowed wellingtons and her grubby once-white quilted coat.

I’d been sledging before of course, though using a flattened cardboard carton to sit on, but I’d never made snow angels until Jess and Guy showed me how, by falling backwards into the virgin whiteness and waving my arms up and down to make wing shapes. The horses and Billy were astonished.

It was great fun and so was the snowballing. . until I got one down the back of my neck. I wasn’t so keen on the icy trickle down the spine as it melted.

We were all freezing and wet by the time we went in to dry off and change, but healthily glowing too. And everyone glowed even more when Guy concocted mulled wine in a jam pan on the small electric stove, demanding cinnamon sticks and other ingredients while I was busy putting the salmon in the larger Aga oven, wrapped in a loose parcel of foil with butter and bay leaves.

He left the pan and all the mess for me to clear, of course — but then, that’s typical of most men when they cook anything, isn’t it?

I didn’t drink the small glass of wine he gave me, beyond a token sip to see what it tasted like (surprisingly nice).

Michael came back long after everyone else, because he’d trudged up the hill in the snow to phone his little girl, but this time his ex-wife wouldn’t let him speak to her.

‘Debbie said it would just upset her, because since my last call she keeps asking for Da-da and she’s been unsettled.’

He was so upset that I gave him a comforting hug — and just at that moment Jude wandered in, cast us a look that was hard to read, silently poured himself some coffee from the freshly-made pot, and went out again.

He does choose his moments to appear! And I expect he’s drawn entirely the wrong conclusions — if he noticed at all, that is, because he did look very abstracted.

I gave Michael the remains of my mulled wine: that seemed to cheer him up a bit.

We had a starter of little savoury tomato and cheese tartlets I’d made and frozen a couple of days ago. Becca took a plate of the tartlets to Jude in his study and said he was working, but he still hadn’t emerged by the time we were in the dining room, sitting down to the perfectly-cooked salmon (adorned with the very last bit of cucumber, sliced to transparency), so I went to call him.

He was leaning back in his chair, his long legs in old denim jeans stretched out, and the crumb-strewn plate by his elbow. The desk and the corkboard behind it were covered with line drawings and photographs of me and Lady, so he must have one of those instant digital printer things and possibly an instant digital memory, too.

‘Dinner — it’s on the table,’ I announced loudly, but when he finally looked up at me it took his eyes a couple of minutes to focus. Then he smiled seemingly involuntarily — and with such unexpected charm and sweetness that I found myself responding. Then the smile vanished as suddenly as if it had never been, leaving only the memory of it hanging in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.

‘Dinner?’ I repeated, and finally he got up and followed me obediently to the dining room, though he didn’t seem to notice what he was eating, even when Tilda pointed out that the capers in the piquant sauce had been her idea. It was sheer luck he didn’t choke on a salmon bone, really. (But I can do the Heimlich manoeuvre, I would have saved him.)

Before dessert, which was a choice between the very last scrapings of the trifle and Christmas cake, he abruptly got up, declaring that he was going down to work in the mill studio for a couple of hours.

‘Can I go with you again, Uncle Jude?’ asked Jess eagerly. ‘You promised to show me how to weld.’

‘Not today — another time,’ he told her and her face fell. ‘Holly — you come down to the studio in about half an hour or so, I want you to pose for me.’

‘Me? Not nude?’ I blurted, horrified, then felt myself go pink as they all looked at me.

‘Not if you don’t want to, though I’ll have had the big Calor heaters on for a bit by then, so the place will have warmed up,’ he said, his mouth quirking slightly at one side. I thought he was joking, but I wasn’t quite sure.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said firmly. ‘I’ve got some black velvet leggings and a fairly clinging tunic jumper I can change into, if you like, but that’s as figure-revealing as I’m prepared to go.’

‘I’ll settle for that,’ he said gravely.

‘I certainly like the sound of it! Can I come and watch?’ asked Guy cheekily.

‘Or maybe I should go, as chaperone?’ Michael suggested, twinkling at me.

Jude scowled at them both, his sudden burst of good humour vanishing. ‘Unnecessary!’ he snapped and went out. We heard the front door slam a few minutes later.

‘The dear boy does spend most days down at the studio when he is at home,’ Noël said. ‘He works very hard.’

‘Edwina usually takes him a flask of coffee and sandwiches for lunch,’ Tilda said, ‘she dotes on him and I am sure he would starve if she didn’t, because he forgets the time when he is down there.’

‘Does jolly good sculptures, especially the horses,’ Becca said. ‘Look like mangled metal up close, then step away — and there they are! Seems like you’re going to be in one, Holly.’

‘I don’t know why he wants you as a model when he could have had me,’ Coco said, inclined to be even sulkier than Jess.

‘Oh, but anyone can have you,’ Guy said ambiguously, though luckily Coco didn’t seem to have caught the double meaning.

‘It’s because you’d be two-dimensional, Horlicks,’ Jess said.

‘That was quite good, Jess,’ Tilda said impartially, ‘if a trifle rude.’

‘It was only that he saw me with Lady this morning and liked the way I was standing with my arm across her,’ I explained. ‘I expect if it had been Becca he’d seen, he’d have asked her instead.’