Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

‘There’s never been anything of value to lock away in Old Place anyway,’ Sharon was saying scathingly, though I noticed a wistful look on her face like a child at a sweetshop window. ‘Though Jude’s that famous now, they’re saying that even his little drawings of horses for those weird sculptures of his can fetch hundreds of pounds.’ She nodded through the glass door. ‘And he just crumples them up and tosses them in that waste-paper basket!’

‘Well, that’s up to him, isn’t it? Presumably he wasn’t happy with them.’

‘You’d think he’d leave the basket for me to empty, but no, he takes them outside and puts them in the garden incinerator!’ She obviously bitterly regretted this potential source of income going up in flames.

‘That does seem a little excessive,’ I agreed, amused.

Apart from a couple of china and linen cupboards, the only other door from the passage was to a little garden hall with French doors leading outside. The trug of garden tools on the bench looked as if they hadn’t been touched for half a century and were waiting for Sleeping Beauty to wake up, don the worn leather gauntlets, and start briskly hacking back the brambles.

‘Is that a walled garden out there?’ I asked, peering through the gathering gloom.

‘Yes, though no-one bothers with most of it since Mrs Martland died. .’ She screwed up her face in recollection. ‘That would be ten years ago now, thereabouts.’

‘Is there a gardener?’

‘An old bloke called Henry comes and grows vegetables in part of it, though he’s supposed to have retired. He lives down in Little Mumming, in the almshouses — those three funny little cottages near the bridge.’

‘Oh yes, I noticed those. Victorian Gothic.’

‘I wouldn’t know, I hate old houses,’ she said, which I could tell by the state of this one.

There was a little cloakroom off the hall, with a splendid Victorian blue and white porcelain toilet depicting Windsor Castle inside the bowl, and I was just thinking that peeing on one of the Queen’s residences must always have seemed a little lese-majesty when Sharon said impatiently, ‘Come on: I need to get off home,’ and gave me a dig in the back.

We went upstairs by a grander flight of stairs than that in the sitting room, with a stairlift folded back against the wall.

‘That was put in for Jude’s dad,’ she said, hurrying me past a lot of not very good family portraits of fair, soulful women and dark, watchful men, when I would have lingered. ‘Six bedrooms if you count the old nursery and the little room off it, plus there’s two more in the staff wing.’

She opened and closed doors, allowing me tantalising glimpses of faded grandeur, including one four-poster bed. The nursery, up a further stair, was lovely, with a white-painted wooden bed with a heart cut out in the headboard, a scrap-screen and a big rocking horse.

‘There are more rooms on this floor, but they’re shut up and not used any more. The heating doesn’t go up that far.’

‘Oh yes, I noticed there were radiators — all mod cons! I’m impressed.’

‘I wouldn’t get excited, it never gets hot enough to do more than keep the chill off the place.’ She clattered back down the stairs and hared off along the landing. ‘Two bathrooms, though Jude’s had an en suite shower put into his bedroom since he inherited.’

‘That isn’t bad for a house of this size,’ I said. ‘There’s the downstairs cloakroom, too.’

‘And a little bathroom in the staff wing, where you’re sleeping. This is the family wing, of course — your room’s in the other, where the old couple who used to look after the place lived.’

Evidently house-sitters ranked with servants in Jude Martland’s eyes — but so long as I was warm and comfortable, I didn’t mind where my room was.

The bedrooms either opened off the corridor, or the oakfloored balcony, where I stopped to gaze down at the huge sitting room, which looked like a stage set awaiting the entrance of the actors for an Agatha Christie dénouement, until Sharon began to rattle her turquoise nails against the banister in an impatient tattoo.

Once through the door into the other wing the décor turned utilitarian and the bathroom was very basic and ancient, though with an electric shower above the clawfooted bath. The bedroom that was to be mine was plain, comfortable — and clean. I expect Mo and Jim did that as soon as they arrived.

As if she could read my thoughts, Sharon said, ‘Mo and Jim changed the bed ready for you, but they hadn’t time to wash the sheets, so you’ll find them in the utility room, I expect. I don’t do washing.’

I was tempted to ask her exactly what she did do, but managed to repress it: it was none of my business.

We went down the backstairs to the kitchen, a very large room with an electric cooker as well as a huge Aga, a big scrubbed pine table in the middle, a couple of easy chairs and a wicker dog basket. This looked like the place where the owner did most of his living — it was certainly warmer than the rest of the house.

‘The Aga’s oil-fired — the tank’s in one of the outhouses — and it runs the central heating, but you don’t have to cook with it because there’s a perfectly good stove over there.’

‘Oh, I like using an Aga,’ I said, and she gave me another of her ‘you’re barking mad’ looks, then glanced at her watch.

‘Come on. Through here there’s the utility, larder, cloakroom, scullery, cellar. .’

She flung open a door to reveal two enormous white chest freezers. ‘The nearest one’s full of Mo and Jim’s food and so are the cupboards, fridge and larder.’

‘Yes, they said they were leaving it for me, which was kind of them.’

She closed it again and led me on. ‘That’s the cellar door and there’s firewood down there as well as the boiler. This by the back door is sort of a tackroom, it’s got feed and harness and stuff in it for the horse.’

Something had been puzzling me. ‘Right — but where’s the dog?’

‘In the yard, I don’t want him under my feet when I’m cleaning, do I?’

‘Isn’t it a bit cold out there?’ I asked and she gave me a look before wrenching the back door open. A large and venerable grey lurcher, who had been huddled on the step, got up and walked in stiffly, sniffed at me politely, and then plodded past in the direction of the kitchen.

‘That’s Merlin. He’s past it, should be put down.’

I said nothing and she added, leading the way across to a small barn on the other side of the cobbled yard, ‘Like the horse — it was Jude’s mother’s and it’s way past its three score years and ten, if you ask me. But he won’t hear of it.’

There was something familiar but very spiteful about her tone when she mentioned Jude Martland’s name that made me suspect a touch of the woman scorned. Maybe she had taken the job hoping for a bit more from him than a weekly pay-packet?

Now she looked at me sideways, slyly. ‘You single?’

‘Well, yes — widowed.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up, then — he goes for skinny blondes, does our Jude — though his brother stole his last one.’

‘I’m not remotely interested in what he goes for and anyway, I won’t meet him: he’ll return after I’ve left, on Twelfth Night.’

‘Oh — Twelfth Night! You want to watch yourself in Little Mumming if you’re still here on Twelfth Night! Did you ever see that old film, The Wicker Man?’ And she laughed unpleasantly.

‘Well, I’ll just have to take my chance, won’t I?’ I said cheerfully, since she was obviously trying to put the wind up me. Sure enough, she was talking about ghosts and haunting a minute later as she slid back the bolt and opened a barn door.

I’ve cooked in some of the most haunted houses in the country and all I can say is, the kitchen and the servants’ bedrooms are not where they generally hang out.

Failing to get a rise out of me, she said, ‘Your instructions for looking after the horse are on the kitchen table in that big folder thing. He’s a great one for instructions, is Jude Martland.’ She gestured inside the barn. ‘The horse is down the other end.’

I could see a couple of looseboxes and a pale equine shape in one of them, but I didn’t disturb it: time enough when I had read the instructions!

‘Well, that’s it then,’ Sharon said, bolting the door again and leading the way back into the kitchen, where she pulled on a red coat that clashed with the magenta streaks in her hair and picked up her bag. ‘I’m off. I expect the old people at the lodge will tell you anything I’ve forgot and you won’t starve, at any rate, because there was enough food here to withstand a siege even before Mo and Jim brought all their stuff.’

When she drove off I was more than glad to see the last of her. I think the old dog was, too, because when I went back into the kitchen carrying the first load of stuff from my car, he wagged his tail and grinned in that engaging way that lurchers have, with a very knowing look in his amber eyes.

‘Well, Merlin, it’s just you and me, kid,’ I told him, in my best Humphrey Bogart voice.

By the time I had brought all my stuff in, put the perishable food in the fridge and taken my bags up to the bedroom allocated to me, I was more than ready to sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the Homebodies file, which Ellen gives to all the clients to fill in with essential information and emergency phone numbers. Jude Martland’s was crammed with printed pages, mostly relating to the care of the dog and horse.

First I read the note that Mo and Jim had left tucked inside it, for a bit of inside information, and learned that the owner was more than happy for the house-sitters to help themselves to any of the food in the house, including the fish and game in the larger of the two freezers. ‘But not the alcohol, since the wine cellar is locked’ had been added, which was okay by me, because I wasn’t much of a drinker. Other than that, the TV reception was lousy and mobile phones worked best if you stood in the ear of the horse on the hill, or ten paces down the lane from the lodge and two steps right. (I expect finding that out kept Jim occupied for hours.)

I glanced at the generator instructions and discovered it was in an outbuilding and was automatic, so should in theory look after itself, and then made sure I knew where the main water stopcock was and the fuse box. The latter I found in the tack-room, with a working torch next to it on a shelf, together with a couple of candle lanterns and a wind-up storm lamp.

I was starting to form a picture of Jude Martland, who was clearly quite practical and obviously cared about the animals. . And yet, he paid his cleaner a pittance and neglected his lovely house, so he was either broke or mean — maybe both. Or perhaps those with an artistic temperament simply don’t notice muck?

I went back in the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, and checked out the animal care instructions. Merlin, who was now leaning heavily against my leg with his head on my knee, was easy: two meals a day, with a pill for his arthritis crushed into the breakfast one, and he needed daily walks to help prevent him stiffening up.

Well, didn’t we all?

I’d already spotted his brush, food, biscuits and a supply of rawhide chews in a cupboard in the scullery, next to a hook with a dog lead and a large brown pawprint-patterned towel helpfully marked ‘DOG’, in case I had found it a struggle to make the connection.

The horse was an Arab mare called Lady, which I would have thought a delicate breed for an exposed, upland place like this. She was twenty-five years old and that sounded quite an age for a horse too. But then, what do I know?

She had a paddock with a field shelter behind the house, where she spent the day unless the weather was extremely bad, though he had omitted to define what ‘really bad’ entailed. I should ensure the water in the trough was not frozen over and that a filled haynet was hung on the paddock fence. Billy would go out with her.

Who, I wondered, was Billy? I puzzled over that for a moment and then read on.