A Winter’s Tale

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘That’s right,’ Jonah agreed, baring his three remaining teeth in a wide grin. He had mutton-chop whiskers and looked like a friendly water vole.

  ‘I certainly do remember you, Mrs Lark!’ I said, basking in the genuine warmth of their welcome. ‘You used to make me gingerbread men with currant eyes.’

  ‘Fancy remembering that, after all this time! Well, I’ll make some for your tea this very day—and some sticky ginger parkin too, that you used to love.’

  Hebe urged me onwards by means of a small push between the shoulder blades. ‘This is Grace from the village, our daily cleaner.’

  ‘But no heavy stuff, me knees won’t take it no more,’ piped Grace reedily, who indeed looked even more steeped in the depths of antiquity than Mrs Lark, and was about the size of the average elf.

  ‘And Derek, the under-gardener, and Bob and Hal…’ Aunt Hebe said more briskly, towing me onwards before I could register any more than that Derek was a morose-looking man whose ears stuck out like old-fashioned car indicators, Bob was the one wearing a battered felt hat with a pink plastic daisy in the band, and Hal’s large front teeth had a gap between them you could drive a bus through.

  Aunt Hebe made a tut-tutting noise. ‘No sign of Seth. I expect he forgot all about it.’

  ‘Who’s Seth?’ I said, irrationally feeling faintly aggrieved that one unknown man was missing from my royal reception committee.

  ‘Seth Greenwood, the…well, I suppose he’s the head gardener. But he’s a bit of a law unto himself.’

  ‘Oh, right!’ I said, comprehending, because head gardeners could be tricky. They often seemed to think they owned the garden and did it their way regardless of what the owners wanted. Though according to Mr Hobbs, in this case he and my grandfather had been two minds with but one single thought.

  ‘My sister, Ottilie, married the last head gardener,’ Hebe started, in a tone that made it clear that she had committed a major faux pas, ‘and so Seth—’ She broke off and added curtly, ‘Here is Ottie.’

  A tall figure in jeans and a chambray shirt over a polo-necked jumper strode round the corner of the house, smoking a long, thin cheroot. This she flicked into a bed of late-flowering pansies and then embraced me vigorously, thumping me on the back. ‘Glad to have you back, Sophy: you should have come sooner.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Ottie,’ I said, coughing slightly. Even now, in her eighties, Ottie seemed to be twice as alive as her twin; she crackled with energy.

  ‘Just call me Ottie, everyone does. Clear off, you lot,’ she said to the staff. ‘You’ve only come out of curiosity and you’ve all got jobs to get to.’

  ‘That’s a fine way to talk,’ Mrs Lark said good-humouredly, ‘but I do need to see to my split pea and ham soup for tonight’s dinner. There’ll be lunch in the breakfast room in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ Ottie said, ‘settle in. Tell that vacant sister of mine to show you your room. You don’t want to be hanging about out here in the cold.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to follow me?’ Hebe said without looking at her, and it became obvious that my aunts were not speaking to each other. ‘I expect my sister wants to get back to making mud pies in the coach house.’

  ‘I’m just finishing the last figure in a major sculptural commission,’ Ottie said pointedly. ‘You must come and see it before it goes to be cast, Sophy.’

  Then her eyes caught sight of something behind me and opened wide in surprise. ‘Look, it’s Charlie!’

  Turning, I found the final resident of Winter’s End on the top step, staring at me with slightly bulging eyes set in a pansy-shaped face—one of those tiny, black and white spaniels that you see so often in old paintings.

  ‘Oh, of course, Grandfather always had several King Charles spaniels, didn’t he? Though this can’t be one of the ones I remember.’

  ‘No, this is the last one my brother had. He’s only five, and— Good heavens!’ Aunt Hebe exclaimed, as Charlie descended the steps slightly shakily and bustled up to me in the manner of all small spaniels, tail rotating like a propeller.

  He skirmished around me, whining, until I sank down and stroked him. Then he attempted to climb into my lap and I fell over backwards onto the gravel, laughing, while he tried to lick my face. Finally I got up with him in my arms.

  ‘Well!’ Hebe said, sounding surprisingly disapproving. ‘He’s been pining after William for weeks, but he certainly seems to have taken to you!’

  ‘Poor old Charlie,’ I said, holding him close. He felt like little more than skin and bone, and smelled like a dirty old carpet. I didn’t think anyone could have brushed him since my grandfather died and, like the house, he was in serious need of some TLC.

  ‘My sister is a sentimentalist and would probably have preferred him to howl on the grave permanently, like Greyfriars Bobby,’ Ottie said with a grin, then walked off, her shirttails flapping and the black bootlace that held back her long grey hair starting to slide off.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to go to your room before lunch?’ Hebe suggested.

  Everyone else had vanished. Still carrying Charlie, I lugged my carpetbag out of the van with one hand, then followed Hebe through the door from the porch and round a huge, heavy carved screen into a cavernous hall paved with worn stone.

  She crossed it without pause and began slowly to ascend the curved staircase towards the balustraded gallery—but I had come to a stop in the middle of the floor under a sky of intricate plasterwork, overwhelmed by a flood of emotion. Suddenly I was fused to the house, wired in: I was Sophy at eight and at the same time Sophy at considerably more than thirty-eight…But I was back where I belonged and the house was happy about it, for there was a space in the pattern of Winter’s End that only I could fill.

  It was an acutely Tara moment: the years when I had been away were gone with the wind. This was my house, my place on God’s good earth, and nothing would ever tear me from it again. I knew I would do anything—anything—to keep it.

  I had thought I was a piece of insignificant flotsam swept along on the tide of life, but now suddenly I saw that everything I had learned, every single experience that had gone into moulding me, had been leading up to my return.

  I was transfixed, translated, transformed…trans-anything except, ever again, transient.

  Tomorrow might be another day, but it certainly wouldn’t be the one that saw me signing away my inheritance.

  Jack was out of luck.

  Chapter Six: Unravelled

  Father still hath not sent for mee, nor any word, so I asked leave to return home. But Thomas Wynter hath suddenly set his heart on marrying mee, despite his family’s opposition—and mine, for I feel for him as though he were a brother, no more than that. They do not like the match, yet he is Sir Ralph’s onlie child and he will denie him nothing…

  From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

  I did a slow turn, arms spread wide to embrace the house, letting my long-suppressed memories of Winter’s End rise to the surface at last like slow, iridescent bubbles.

  The Great Hall and the cross passage, which was partly hidden by the enormous carved wooden screen, separated the family part of the house from the service wing, the area I seemed to recall best. Over there was the door to the kitchen with its huge black Aga, Mrs Lark’s domain and the source of comfort, warmth and treats. Then came the stillroom, where Aunt Hebe held sway, brewing up potions and lotions, and receiving mysterious late visitors to the side door for whispered, urgent consultations. Beyond that again, a maze of stone-flagged, utilitarian rooms and the cellar steps.

  Here in the hall there was no longer a fire in the cavernous hearth, only cold grey embers, but ancient cast-iron radiators were dotted about as though dropped randomly into place and a hollow, metallic clunking indicated that they were working, a fact that wasn’t immediately obvious from the chill air. A powerful energy ran up from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, filling me to the brim with a life force compound
ed of the vital essence of Winter’s End and of my ancestors who had loved it before me—the alleged witch, Alys Blezzard, among them.

  From the dark shadows behind me I heard the once-familiar echo of her light, serious young voice whispering, ‘Welcome—welcome home, at last!’

  ‘There you are,’ I murmured.

  ‘Of course—I never left.’

  ‘I missed you, Alys.’

  Aunt Hebe’s face, an elderly Juliet, appeared like a waning moon over the balustrade high above and she called, slightly querulously, ‘Aren’t you coming, Sophy?’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ I came back to earth with a start, and ran up the stairs to the gallery with Charlie, who had been sitting watching me, at my heels.

  She looked at him with disfavour. ‘The dogs have never been allowed upstairs.’

  ‘But he’s so sad and lonely at the moment, Aunt Hebe. I’d really like to keep him with me.’

  ‘You can do as you wish, of course—for the present. Fill the house with dogs if you want to, though I expect Grace will complain about the hairs.’

  ‘I think one dog will do to be going on with, and he won’t shed so much hair once I have given him a good brushing.’ That was an experience neither of us was going to enjoy, because currently he was just one big tangled knot and a pair of bright eyes.

  Following her through a door at the back of the gallery I found myself in the Long Room, which was exactly what it said on the packet—a narrow, wooden-floored chamber running from one wing to the other, jutting out at the back of the house above the terraced gardens.

  The wooden shutters were all partly closed over diamond-paned windows yellowed with grime, so that we walked in a soupy half-light past paintings so dirty it was hard to tell the subject matter. Even so, I noticed that nothing above shoulder height had been cleaned within living memory, and cobwebs formed tattered silk drapery across the ceiling. Some of them brushed Aunt Hebe’s head, but she seemed oblivious.

  Lower down everything had been given a rough once-over, the legs of the furniture showing evidence of repeated violent batterings with a Hoover nozzle.

  ‘Grace surely can’t be the only cleaner?’ I said, itching to get my hands on a duster. ‘It must be too much for one person to cope with, especially since she’s getting on a bit.’

  ‘She does what she can, and my brother occasionally got a team in from an agency to give the place a good spring clean until a couple of years ago, when he said it had got too expensive. The Friends of Winter’s dust the Great Hall and the minstrels’ gallery when we open to the public. Those are the only parts of the house the visitors are allowed into, you know. It’s mainly the gardens they come to see.’

  Clearly she’d never considered lifting a duster herself, and the house was desperate for some TLC. Poor tiny, ancient Grace could never hope to manage it all herself, for while the house was not some enormous mansion, it was low and rambling, with lots of panelling and wooden floors and ups and downs.

  I was yearning to make a start on it…but maybe five minutes after I arrived wouldn’t be tactful. With an effort I managed to restrain myself, thinking it was ironic that I had spent all my life learning the art of cleaning other people’s stately piles, not knowing those skills would one day be necessary to transform my own. Again, I had that strange sense of fitting into some preordained pattern, the vital bit of missing jigsaw.

  They say everyone has some skill or talent and mine just happens to be cleaning. Not romantic or exciting, perhaps, but there it is—and exactly what was needed here. Now a missionary fervour was invading my heart, filling me with the longing to convert the dirt.

  As we walked along I noticed lighter patches on the walls where pictures had been removed—perhaps when Grandfather was searching for something to pay death duties with. How odd to think of him here, planning the implications of his impending death on the Inland Revenue, making sure everything was settled before I was even told he had gone.

  ‘Are the missing paintings still away being cleaned and valued?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they have been returned. They’re stacked in the Blue Bedroom waiting to be rehung.’

  At the end we turned left past a suit of armour made for a short, fat gentleman and went through a door into the West Wing, down two steps, round a corner, and up one step to a passage.

  ‘This is the Blue Bedroom,’ Hebe said, indicating a door, ‘then my room and a bathroom. The Red Bedroom will be Jack’s when he arrives. Of course, he should have had my brother’s room, only,’ she added resentfully, walking on and throwing open another door, ‘Ottie insisted that you should have it.’

  ‘But really, I don’t mind at all if Jack has Grandfather’s room,’ I protested. (Especially if Grandfather actually died there!) ‘I thought perhaps my old room on the nursery floor…’

  My voice petered out: someone had lit an incongruous little gas heater in the magnificent fireplace and the red glow reflected off a great mahogany bed covered with the kind of jewel-coloured crazy patchwork that I make myself. The curtains were of the same soft, faded gold velvet as the bed hangings and, like the Long Room, the oriole windows jutted out over the terraces at the rear of the house, with a distant glimpse of the river at the bottom and the wood across the valley.

  ‘What a lovely room! You know, I don’t think I ever came in here when I was a child,’ I said, pulling back the drapes. Below were laid out the intricate, lacy shapes of terraced knot gardens, though the lowest level looked to be still very much a work in progress.

  ‘I’m so happy to be back, Aunt Hebe!’ I said spontaneously, turning to smile at her. ‘I haven’t forgotten how kind you always were to me, telling me bedtime bible stories and giving me rose fondants when I hurt myself.’

  She softened slightly. ‘Couldn’t have you growing up a complete heathen. We missed you when Susan took you away, but we thought she’d be back again eventually, when the money ran out. And of course you were only a girl. It would have been different if you had been a boy.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said drily, though her casual dismissal hurt.

  ‘My brother hoped that Susan would come to her senses and get married, and there would be more children—a son,’ she added, rubbing it in. But I’d already got the message: to Aunt Hebe, girls didn’t count, and illegitimate girls counted even less.

  ‘But then my cousin Louisa died and eventually Jack was sent back to school in England, and spent all his holidays here.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that made everything right as rain, then,’ I said sourly. I mean, I liked Jack, but much more of this kind of thing and I would start to go off him rapidly.

  ‘It should have done, but I’m afraid Jack was a disappointment to my brother. Their characters were just too dissimilar, though Jack did try, by taking an interest in the architecture of the house and the family history. Then William somehow got the idea that Jack was thinking of marrying Melinda Seldon—or Christopher, as she has been calling herself again since her husband died. But if he had been, which I personally very much doubt, he gave it up once William made it clear he disapproved of the match. He never liked her, though of course she’s very wealthy now and, goodness knows, Winter’s End could do with a rich heiress marrying into the family.’

  ‘Was she the blonde woman on the grey horse that ran into my car?’ I asked, thinking rather despondently that the equestrian Helen of Troy and Jack would have made a wonderful couple—but also that Jack hadn’t seemed the kind of man who would meekly give up the woman he loved just to please his grandfather.

  ‘Yes, that was Melinda. She was widowed last year and moved back here to live with her mother, who is one of my oldest friends. Naturally, she and Jack saw a lot of each other. For one thing, they have lots of friends in common, but also he had entered into a business arrangement with her to develop the property she inherited from her late husband.’

  ‘She is very beautiful,’ I said wistfully.

  ‘She is, but also a great flirt—as a
girl she played all the local boys off against each other quite shamelessly—but if Jack was tempted after she was widowed, then I expect he thought better of it, even before William mentioned the matter. He had already made one misalliance, you see, soon after he left university—a short-lived affair.’

  ‘So was mine, though in my case it was my husband’s family who thought he’d made a misalliance.’

  ‘Oh no, dear, nobody marrying a Winter could possibly think that,’ Aunt Hebe assured me—but then, she had never met the Mistress.

  ‘Things did seem to improve between Jack and William until they had that last ghastly argument…’ She shuddered.

  ‘Oh? What was that about, Aunt Hebe?’

  ‘Jack had long wanted William to transfer ownership of Winter’s End to him, to try and avoid death duties, but he wouldn’t hear of it. This time Jack told his uncle that if he didn’t divert some of his income into keeping the house standing, he would have nothing but a garden to inherit anyway.’

  ‘Well, goodness knows, he was right about the house. Another couple of years of neglect and possibly it would have passed the point of no return.’

  ‘Yes, but my brother took it badly and told Jack he shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatched. And then, to top it all, he’d heard about one of Jack’s business deals—such a clever boy—and accused him of only wanting to get his hands on Winter’s End so he could turn it into an apartment block. I told him he was being absurd, because Jack wouldn’t dream of doing anything of the kind to his ancestral home.’

  ‘No, I’m sure he wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  She smiled approvingly. ‘I’m sure my brother would have seen sense if he hadn’t suddenly discovered where you were and made that disastrous will. I can’t think what got into him.’

  ‘Sickening for you and Jack,’ I agreed, fascinated despite myself by this one-viewpoint argument, because it had obviously never occurred to either of them that I had any kind of right to inherit Winter’s End.