‘I’ve sprung it on you and you haven’t had enough time to think about it,’ I said ruefully. ‘I should have discussed it with you before – but you did say when we got engaged you were ready to settle down and wanted a family.’
‘Yes, but not instantly, and certainly not in the middle of nowhere, miles from all my friends!’
‘But one of your friends married a footballer and lives in Knutsford, doesn’t she? That’s only a short drive away from Godsend.’
The thought didn’t seem to mollify her, but I was convinced that once she saw Mote Farm she’d love it as much as I did.
‘Wait till you visit, you’ll be surprised,’ I said. ‘And you’ll understand what I mean about the mill development, too. You could even relocate your mail-order business there,’ I told her, though what Mercy would say to that idea when she found out what my fiancée was selling was a moot point. Still, Quakers did tend to be very tolerant and all-embracing …
‘I’ve got everything running fine from my warehouse in Hammersmith – a good manager, the right staff and everything,’ she said.
‘Once you’ve seen the scale of the redevelopment project up in Godsend, I thought you might even want to work together with me on that, instead,’ I said wistfully. ‘It’s a really exciting challenge and I think we’d make a great team.’
‘What, give up my own business? Never,’ she said positively. ‘And I’m not giving up my flat, either. Mummy and Daddy bought it for me for my twenty-first birthday.’
‘I’ll sell mine, but of course we could still have a London pied-à-terre, if you wanted to.’
‘I’ve already got one,’ she snapped, frowning again. ‘You said this Mote Farm wasn’t really a farm at all, but a decent-sized house? How many bedrooms does it have?’
‘Bedrooms? I don’t know, I’ve never counted them.’ I tried to reckon up. ‘Maybe around ten … and then there’s the nursery and some other rooms on the upper floor that were once for servants.’
She looked slightly impressed. ‘And it’s got a moat and everything?’
‘I don’t know about everything,’ I said, smiling down at her, glad she was taking an interest, ‘but it’s certainly got a moat with ducks on it, and a terrace and knot garden behind the house. The interior has a lot of dark wood panelling, Tudor plaster ceilings and a thirteenth-century oak front door. It’s a complete mishmash, like a lot of big old houses.’
But Lacey, her lovely face suddenly more animated than it had been so far that evening, was waving at a noisy, boisterous group of her friends who had come in and was no longer listening.
Chapter 18: Potent
Q:Why don’t penguins fly?
A:Because they’re not tall enough to be pilots!
Before going to bed that night, I’d soaked my sore ankle in an old white china footbath that had been unearthed by Mercy from one of the storerooms off the kitchen passage. She’d filled it, and then cast a handful of something I think she said were Epsom salts into the steaming water. Whatever it was, by morning things were much improved and I could hardly see any swelling, just a bit of a bruise coming out.
I was dressed and wondering whether to put the elastic bandage back on or not, when there was a knock on the sitting-room door. When I opened it, Job bowed and presented me with a tarnished silver tray, on which reposed a small plastic whisky bottle of the kind you get on planes, full of a greenish solution.
‘Miss Becca rode down early and left this for you,’ he said with deep gloom, then retreated to the kitchen, now holding the tray as if he was about to hit a tennis ball with it.
He was a little strange in his ways, quite the opposite of his wife, whom I’d already got to know quite well, since she was constantly popping in and out of the house, preparing food for Mercy to cook for dinner, collecting shopping lists, taking in the upmarket frozen ready meals that Silas so loved and stowing them in one of the two large freezers, letting in the cleaning service and the laundry … her list of duties was impressively long.
Becca had stuck a handwritten label on the bottle that said: ‘Horse liniment, rub in three times daily’. It smelled vile, but since she’d gone to all that trouble, I rubbed some in anyway and then replaced the bandage.
My foot barely twinged when I walked after that, but maybe I’d find my ankle had turned into a hairy fetlock later?
Trot on, Tabitha …
Pye kept wrinkling his nose whenever I was near him and saying ‘Pfft!’ in disgusted tones, but I expected the smell would keep the flies off. And maybe vampires … and if Guy Martland came back, I could try it on him.
My sore ankle didn’t stop me gathering everything I’d need to clean and catalogue the stockrooms after breakfast and making a start – in fact, I was dying to get in there and see what there was – and I did little else for the next few days, unless called on by Mercy or Arlene for an opinion about something, or, at Joy’s insistence, try my hand at making another misshapen cracker.
‘Practice makes perfect,’ she kept saying, but so far her theory wasn’t working.
Arlene was already putting in extra hours sourcing new materials and sending for samples, especially for the revamped traditional crackers, which we hoped would soon be taking the place of the current ones, but we had lots of ideas for other kinds, too.
Mercy, meanwhile, had extracted the revised mill plans from the unfortunate architect and had also submitted a set to the planning department. She didn’t hang about.
But the pull of the stockrooms always lured me back, and as soon as I set foot over the threshold I tended to lose track of time, it was so interesting.
I’d started in the first room, which would remain a stockroom, since it had the loading bay at the back so the cartons of crackers could be trundled through. Going by the amount of dust on everything in there, apart from the large fire-proof storage bin in which the cracker snaps were stored, they hadn’t been using it for anything else for years. Phil said they packed the boxes of crackers into cardboard cartons at the back of the workshop.
My plan was to clear, clean and catalogue what was worth keeping on the shelves in the first room. This should create a lot of space to temporarily store items as I cleared the other two, which were much more tightly packed.
I had so far found boxes of mottoes and jokes, a bag of small plastic cowboy and Indian figures, a dozen penny whistles fixed to a display card with elastic, and about a mile of faded and filthy festive ribbon. It was all so fascinating I’d probably have forgotten to eat and drink, had Mercy not put sandwiches and flasks of soup under my nose from time to time.
The cracker workers brought me strong tea and biscuits when they were having a break, too. Despite his reserve and general melancholy, Bradley proved to be the most thoughtful in remembering I was there, even offering his assistance to move heavy items when I came to them, like the small press in the second storeroom that had once been used to emboss seasonal designs onto circular foil cracker embellishments. That one would probably be included in the museum.
Each evening I’d return to the house tired but happy, though black as a sweep from dust and grime, which I showered off with deliciously scented French soap, before giving Mercy a hand with dinner. She didn’t really need any help, but she was expanding my cooking repertoire and, anyway, I enjoyed it.
Then I retired to bed totally exhausted each night – but looking forward to the next morning, like a child on Christmas Eve … and strangely, though in the prison I’d dreamed of being at home with Mum at Christmastime, now I often woke hearing the echoes of my fellow prisoners belting out ‘Jingle Bells’ and other seasonal favourites …
On the evening before her nephew was to visit, I found that Mercy had already baked his favourite chocolate cake and made mountains of cheese scones, to which he was also apparently partial. Since she’d been whirling in and out of the mill all day, trainer heels flashing, like a small, self-illuminating dervish, I don’t know when she’d had the time to fit it in, but she se
emed to produce food effortlessly.
When I said so, she replied, ‘I’ve always enjoyed cooking – it’s something I share with my friend Tilda, who is married to Noël Martland and lives at the Old Place lodge.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember you mentioning them and I passed the lodge when I walked up to Snowehill.’
‘Tilda was one of the very first TV cooks, you know. But unfortunately, she was ousted by Fanny Cradock and found the disappointment very hard to bear. But she still had great success with her cookery books, right up until the eighties. Pretty Party Titbits was a bestseller of its day.’ She smiled. ‘One magazine called her “The Queen of Canapés” and she loved that. She’s older than me and very frail now, but they still sometimes come here for dinner.’
‘I’ll have to look up her books online.’
‘You’ll find several of them on the cookery-book shelf,’ Mercy said, indicating the tomes ranged in an impressive row above a large spice rack. ‘She’s given me signed copies, so do borrow them if you want to.’
She finished preparing pork tenderloin and popped it into the hot oven. ‘There, I’ll make a little apple sauce now, because Silas is very partial to it, and then there are just the vegetables to put on later, which Freda has prepared.’
I volunteered to peel and core the cooking apples and then we decided to have baked apples stuffed with dried fruit and sugar for dessert, so I did three more.
‘Soon Liz will be coming home for Easter, Tabby,’ Mercy told me as she stirred the apple sauce. ‘She’ll most likely stay for a day or two with her best friend first, whose family live nearer to the school. I must remember to get her an Easter egg and make a Simnel cake – she does love all the British traditions.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Simnel cake, let alone made one,’ I confessed.
‘I’ll show you; they’re very easy. I do a lot of traditional baking at Christmas too – puddings, the cake and mince pies, turkey and all the trimmings … A lot of Friends don’t celebrate Christmas at all, they simply gather together to reflect on the true meaning of the occasion. But the Marwoods were big Christmas celebrators and it was my husband’s favourite time of the year.’
For a moment, her round face under its pudding-bowl circle of silvery hair was sad, and I thought she must miss him very much, even after all these years.
‘I always loved Christmas with Mum,’ I said. ‘We never had much money, but we always managed a few treats and often her old friends from the theatre days would pop in with gifts of food or drink.’
‘You don’t need money for happiness, just warm, loving hearts,’ Mercy agreed.
‘Jeremy, my ex-fiancé, didn’t really celebrate the same way, which was a bit disappointing. In fact, he liked to go out for a meal with friends on Christmas Day, which wasn’t at all the same. And then, of course, last Christmas I was in prison … though I think I was still in a state of shock, because I don’t actually remember what the Christmas dinner was like.’
‘Well, now we must look to the future and hope that our new scheme for the cracker factory will be a huge success, so that we’ve something extra to celebrate by next Christmas.’
I wondered if this unknown nephew would have moved in and be ruling the roost by then. And if so, whether I would still be here.
So much depended on what he was like … and I’d find out the next day, when he arrived.
He might be just like Mercy’d described him – her dear boy – but given what I’d already learned about him and her propensity to view everyone through rose-tinted spectacles, I wasn’t holding my breath.
Chapter 19: Brief Encounters
Q:What’s black, white and red all over?
A:A newspaper!
Mercy stayed at the house next morning to await Randal’s arrival, for he’d been intending to set out at the crack of dawn, so as to be well on his way before the morning rush hour started.
She suggested I wait with her, but I said I’d rather get on with my work and set off for the mill, because not only was I thoroughly enjoying myself sorting out the old stockrooms, but I thought it would be a good idea if Mercy first showed Randal her revised plans on her own. While I’d made lots of suggestions, I was just another employee, after all, so he might not take well to my being present at the discussion.
I’d finished clearing the shelves on the left-hand side of the room, with what was retained occupying a fraction of the space, and began slowly working my way back down the other side – and back in time, it seemed, from what I was finding.
By now I’d developed a method, tackling one section of shelf at a time, starting with the top of the stack. First I took everything off and put it on the floor, before cleaning the shelf and the festoons of cobwebs behind it. Sometimes this disturbed large spiders, so I was always glad when Pye or the two resident cats were there to pounce on these unexpected and juicy snacks.
Then I cleaned the grime of years from what had been on it, revealing all kinds of treasures. I was starting to find complete boxes of discontinued lines of crackers, but also the empty display boxes, some with interesting graphics, and box after box of old-fashioned plastic moulded charms, metal puzzles, spinning tops, pencil sharpeners, rings, hats, scraps, mottoes, embossed foil stickers … and lots and lots of rubbish, like filthy rolls of crepe paper and ribbon. Several things had been wrapped in yellowed and crumbling newspaper, which gave me some idea of when they had been stored.
After my first day’s work in there, I’d asked Mercy if I could have some cardboard filing boxes to sort things into and she’d dispatched Job in the car to buy a supply, along with rolls of white adhesive address labels and big black marker pens. Once things were sorted into the fresh new boxes and labelled with the contents, the rows I’d already finished looked neat and workmanlike. It would make it easier to decide on and find what we wanted to display in the museum, too, when we got to that stage.
I’d also learned by experience that enveloping myself in an old, faded, flowered cotton overall, loaned to me by Freda, and completely covering my hair with a scarf, saved me an awful lot of time in the shower.
I was writing down everything I found on a clipboard as I went, and the paper was so grubby, I had to type it up on the computer each evening.
On the morning of Randal’s arrival, I’d worked away methodically for a couple of hours, before giving in to the temptation to treat myself to a quick dip into the contents of the second room, where presumably even older things were stored …
Taking my stepladder, I chose at random a top shelf in the middle row and saw that it wasn’t so much a layer of dust up there, as it was furred with the stuff. I brushed it in the direction away from myself with the feather duster, to prevent a choking fit, then peeked inside a pasteboard box to find it crammed full of wonderful old Christmas scraps. The next one contained a tangle of tarnished tinsel.
Then I spotted something tightly rolled up right behind it, at the back of the shelf … The rickety steps teetered as I shifted and reached out for it, then heavy footsteps crossed the wooden floorboards and the ladder was quickly steadied by a large and firm pair of hands.
‘Thanks, Bradley,’ I said. ‘I thought I was going to end up clinging to the shelf and have to climb down like a monkey.’
‘It’s not Bradley,’ rasped an unfamiliar, deep voice. Startled, I stepped backwards into thin air, so that he had to let go of the ladder, which fell over with a clatter, in order to grab me.
His hands inadvertently rested in places they shouldn’t be and he dropped me on the floor like a hot potato, snatching them away as if they’d been burned.
‘Thank you – I think,’ I said, feeling my face go hot as I turned round to see my rescuer. ‘Though I wouldn’t have fallen off if you hadn’t startled me like that.’
‘You need a better stepladder than that old thing,’ he snapped, frowning down at me, and I found myself staring at him in surprise. Assuming this was Randal, he wasn’t remotely the way I’d
imagined him!
In fact, apart from being dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, he looked like a Victorian factory owner in a TV melodrama. He was tall and well built, with honey-blond hair that wanted to curl but was cut too short, and a pair of surprisingly dark hazel eyes, set in a lean, craggy – but not unattractive – trouble-at-t’mill face.
You could picture him dressed in riding boots and breeches, leaning against the mantel at Mote Farm, kicking logs back into place and frowning … much like he was still doing at me.
‘I’m Randal,’ he said. ‘Mercy sent me down with some sandwiches, because she said you’d forgotten lunch – but since she’s spent the entire morning going on and on about all your brilliant ideas, I thought I’d come and see what you were like and—’
He broke off as I pulled the scarf from my hair and used it to wipe off some of the dust on my face – or, more probably, just smear it about a bit. My fringe, which still needed cutting, immediately fell into my eyes.
‘I’ve met you before,’ he said slowly, examining me with those sharp, hazel eyes with their fascinating green flecks.
‘No, you haven’t,’ I said positively, sure the only reason he looked vaguely familiar was because I’d seen his type on TV or the cover of romantic saga novels. My dark brown hair, quickly unravelling from its loose plait, swung back around my face like half-drawn curtains.
He gave an exclamation. ‘Got it! You’re the artist – she was called Tabitha something and Mercy kept referring to you as Tabby.’
‘I’m Tabitha Coombs,’ I admitted, ‘but I’m still sure we haven’t—’
‘I went to your exhibition in Liverpool last year with a friend. We didn’t speak, but I remember you.’
And then it all came back to me in an unwelcome rush, for his friend was the reporter who’d ruthlessly used me to get access to Champers&Chocs and I’d seen him talking with this man at the gallery. It didn’t exactly endear him to me. In fact, I glared at him.
A Christmas Cracker Page 13
