A Winter’s Tale

by Trisha Ashley

  From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1582

  The local newspaper came out again, thankfully without any mention of me in it, so I decided I could stop worrying. Even in Sticklepond and the surrounding villages, there had to be a lot more exciting stories than ‘Mrs Mop inherits manor house’.

  Life was fast becoming a near rural idyll—that is, if I managed not to think about running costs, income tax demands, the costs of accountancy firms, solicitors, public liability insurance and the like, fortunately all the things that Lucy and Mr Yatton seemed to find both comprehensible and exciting.

  My financial troubles might now be on a truly magnificent scale, but they didn’t seem to feel as insurmountable, probably because I was not struggling alone any more. And with my best friend now making her leisurely way down from Scotland in her converted ambulance, I just needed to gather Lucy back into the fold to feel totally happy. All I ever really wanted from life was a settled home and a family around me—could that really now be within my grasp?

  Slowly I settled into a pleasant routine, the whole house starting to glow and come alive as the reek of dust, damp and neglect was replaced by the mingled scents of beeswax, lavender, rose potpourri and love. Aunt Hebe had taken to saying approvingly that one day I would make Winter’s End an excellent mistress, so I didn’t know what she thought I was doing now—playing house?

  In the early afternoons I generally took a break and walked with Charlie down the terraces and over the little bridge, climbing up through the woods on the other side of the valley to the summerhouse perched among the trees, which gave me a whole new perspective on Winter’s End.

  It was weathered and half-rotted, as Seth had pointed out to me when I started using it, but the wooden pillars holding up the lintel and roof seemed firm enough and the bench seat inside was dry. From there, I could see the gardeners all toiling away on the lower terrace, with Seth easy to spot, since he was much taller than the rest. The wall was coming along in leaps and bounds, since, as Seth pointed out, I wasn’t hijacking his workforce quite so much, even if they were all tired out from doing other jobs around the house in their free time.

  Seth was a hard taskmaster. If they were not working on the terrace or in the woodland, then they were kept busy elsewhere in the garden and greenhouses.

  He’d taken to dropping into the parlour most evenings, though, via the terrace, so we could discuss progress—or rather, if I were honest, bicker in comfort. We seemed perfectly capable of arguing over anything, fighting our way to each truce.

  Currently, he was reluctantly incorporating some sensational material I had written into the Winter’s End guidebook, but in return I was letting him design a separate garden guide, though I did stipulate that he should include a Shakespeare Trail.

  The lower terrace wouldn’t be finished until the guidebook went to print but at least Seth seemed perfectly happy about the design now. I was sure that, with typical male forgetfulness, he had entirely forgotten that the best suggestions were mine.

  Seth and I also managed to disagree over what was to go on the revamped display boards in the Great Hall, whether the ‘William Shakeshafte’ mentioned in local documents was actually William Shakespeare, practically all my ideas for Winter’s End merchandise—and anything and everything else. In fact, a few times we argued our way down to the Green Man, all through a game of darts and a couple of drinks (with Hal and Bob grinning behind their beer mugs, and Mike the policeman cheerfully refereeing), and back again.

  I never saw Jack’s friends there, so I concluded they only came to meet up with him…and maybe Mel did too, for there was no sign of her either. When I asked Val, she said she rarely came in, so if she and Seth were having an affair (and how could he resist her?), then they met up elsewhere.

  I wouldn’t know—he never mentioned her at all.

  One morning after breakfast, when I was up in the minstrels’ gallery polishing the wooden balustrade, something came over me—second childhood, unfortunately.

  Putting down my soft cloth and jar of beeswax polish, I swung myself astride the wooden banister, my fingers automatically slipping into the groove that ran down beneath, as if carved for the purpose. I hesitated for barely one second, looking over my shoulder down into the depths of the hall, then let go.

  It was fast—far faster than I remembered—scarily fast. My fingers, slippery with polish, were not slowing me down and I realised my back was going to hit the carved post at the bottom with a thump likely to break one or both of us…

  They say your life passes before your eyes at moments like this, but all that passed before mine was a brief recollection of the last time I’d slid down the rails like this…when, as now, two large, strong hands stopped my progress just in the nick of time.

  Eyes still tight shut with terror, I was hauled off and held upright on trembling legs that wouldn’t take my weight. For a moment I was eight again and, when I opened my eyes and looked upward with fearful reluctance, I half-expected to see my grandfather’s angry face.

  Instead, it was Seth, who held me in a grip of iron, white-faced and furious.

  ‘What on earth were you doing?’ he demanded, giving me a shake. ‘You could have seriously injured yourself if you’d slammed into the post!’

  My knees gave and the room whirled dizzyingly around but his arms closed around me, holding me upright. It felt wonderfully comforting.

  ‘Oh, Seth!’ I whispered, clinging to him like a drowning woman to a rock, and we stared into each other’s eyes from a couple of inches away, united in the horror of what might have happened, had he not been there. His eyes were like a green sea you could drown in…

  Then the stag’s head fell with a clatter onto the stone flags and broke the spell. Déjà vu. I took a deep breath. ‘Th-thanks for catching me! I used to slide down the banisters all the time when I was a child, but this time it seemed so much faster. I had beeswax on my hands so perhaps I just didn’t have the same grip.’

  ‘It certainly wouldn’t help,’ he agreed, but at least he wasn’t looking angry any more. In any case, I’d quickly realised that the anger had been because I might have hurt myself…and looking back, I’m sure that was why Grandfather had been so furious with me too.

  ‘Last time I did it, Grandfather caught me just like you did,’ I told him. ‘In fact, that’s the last time I saw him, and for ages I thought it was all my fault we had to go away, because I’d been naughty.’

  ‘You were only eight, weren’t you? So nothing was your fault, Sophy. And your colour’s coming back—you looked white as a ghost,’ he added with relief.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I assured him, though my hands were still clutching the outer layers of his ratty wool jumpers—and come to that, his arms were still around me. I felt safe like that…

  ‘Good, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, Sophy,’ he said seriously.

  ‘Only because you know that Jack inheriting the place would be even worse. He’d be digging treasure-hunting pits all over the garden, for a start,’ I said, rallying, and he grinned.

  ‘No, because your daughter would inherit, and she sounds like hell on wheels.’

  I began to say indignantly, ‘Lucy is not—’ when a cool voice broke in.

  ‘Am I interrupting something, Sophy? Only the front door was unlocked, so I just walked in—but I’ll go away again if you want to get all hands-on with the help. I suppose like calls to like.’

  Mel was standing by the carved screen, immaculate in a quilted jacket and tight cream jodhpurs, her light brown eyes cold and furious.

  I loosed my grip on Seth’s jumper and his arms slowly released me, his face going all shuttered.

  ‘I fell off the—the chair,’ I explained quickly, not wanting to mention that I was doing something as childish as sliding down the banisters. ‘Luckily, Seth caught me.’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked at the nearest chair, which was a knobbly triangular neo-Gothic affair some feet away, and raised a thin brow. ‘J
ack suggested I should call in and see if I could give you any advice—new kid on the block and all that—but it doesn’t look to me as if you need it. I’d certainly recommend Seth for emergencies, though—and if you can get him away from his knots, he’s brilliant at all kinds of bedding too, aren’t you, Seth?’

  She took out a packet of cigarettes and started to root about in her pockets, presumably for a lighter.

  ‘Thanks for the recommendation,’ Seth said evenly, though he was white-lipped and clearly furious, ‘but I agree that no advice you could give her would do Sophy any good.’

  Her manner changed in an instant and she smiled at him, a full beam job a bit like Jack’s best efforts, exerting a force field of personal attraction. ‘I was going to come and look for you afterwards, Seth,’ she said caressingly. She spared me a casual, dismissive glance. ‘If you’ve quite finished with him, you don’t mind if I borrow him for an hour or so, do you? There’s a little something he can help me with.’

  I thought the old-fashioned seduction technique was dated, but I didn’t bother looking at Seth to see how it was going down: I could guess. ‘His time is his own,’ I said shortly. ‘And by the way, you can’t smoke in my house.’

  She’d found her lighter and stuck the cigarette in her mouth, but now paused. ‘Oh, well, we’ll go out then. Coming, Seth?’

  But Seth’s gaze had gone to the window and hardened into a lethal glare. ‘Only to see you off the premises. You’ve tied your bloody horse to one of the topiary trees, and it’s practically got it up by the roots!’

  I watched from the porch while Mel ran to retrieve her horse. It was tossing its head and jerking at the tree, which was trimmed into three balls of box in decreasing size. Before she could grab the reins her velvet hat, which was perched on the topmost one, was suddenly catapulted off and landed in the basin of the fountain, where it floated upside down.

  Seth stamped the tree back down into the ground, then retrieved her hat, shaking the water off it. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see Mel was trying to get round him, with one hand laid on his sleeve, smiling that surely irresistible smile up at him—but she was impeded by her horse, who had had enough of standing about in the cold.

  It seemed to like going backwards and after a moment Seth took the reins from her and turned and walked off down the drive and, after looking briefly over her shoulder in my direction in what was surely triumph, Mel hurried to catch up.

  That was a very neat demonstration of ‘this is my property, so hands off’—so it must be Seth she was really interested in, not Jack. Presumably that night at the pub she just automatically swung into her usual routine to show me that she could also have Jack—or any other man—any time she wanted to. At least, for Seth’s sake, if he was keen on the woman, I hoped so.

  Climbing the steps back up to the gallery, I wondered what Seth had come to find me for, but I didn’t see him again for the rest of that afternoon to ask him—I was just grateful he had been there at the right time.

  I polished like a Fury, though. Every surface in the gallery was like glass by the time I’d finished with it.

  Then afterwards, feeling strangely unsettled and needing to be alone, I took Charlie and drove to the sea near Southport in the Volkswagen and we had a walk along a cold, blowy beach, followed by a brew-up on the stove—and except for Lucy not being there, it was just like old times.

  Chapter Twenty-three: Lost Treasures

  I was seen, returning to the house—or at any rate, the cloaked figure of a woman—and they suspect us of aiding a priest to escape so come to question us tomorrow…I have made such preparations as I can, if it go ill with mee, charging Joan with the care of my child, that she may know my secrets when she is old enough.

  From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1582

  Aunt Hebe told me over dinner that the bare-root roses we had ordered had arrived. She’d seen Derek unloading them while Seth checked them over, so it seemed that he hadn’t spent the entire afternoon helping Mel with her bedding, after all.

  Not that it was any of my business anyway, unless it affected his work—but I couldn’t imagine any woman ever becoming more important than the garden, even one as beautiful as Mel.

  By a strange coincidence, that evening Jonah had removed the flotilla of paper-napkin swans and replaced them with red ones folded into roses. He’d laid a separate one, with a stem of green florist’s wire, by my plate.

  ‘Thanks, Jonah,’ I said. ‘The roses are really pretty—you are clever!’

  ‘Seth won’t mind about that one, and no earwigs neither,’ Jonah said, grinning. ‘The kitten ate one that dropped on the floor and it went through the poor little thing like a dose of salts. If I hadn’t caught him with the last bit of red paper, I’d have been that worried, because the litter tray—’

  ‘Jonah,’ Aunt Hebe interrupted firmly, ‘I can see lamb chops, but are we to have no mint sauce?’

  Later, as I sat sewing in the parlour, I reflected that roses seemed to be a recurring theme at Winter’s End for, once I started to notice them, I discovered they were everywhere. Briar roses were carved on pillars and panelling, and the ancient rose of Lancaster cut into stone corbels. They appeared in tapestries and embroideries, formed the design of the knot garden on the middle terrace and even featured (along with the family whippet-and-black-pudding crest) in the stained-glass quarries set among the plain diamonds of the Long Room windows.

  According to Mr Yatton, the crest is a hound holding a black gauntlet, rather than a black pudding, though I am not convinced. But it’s quite jolly, so I intend having it printed on lots of things for the gift shop, from pencils to tote bags. There will be two or three different ranges of items, something to suit all tastes, I hope, from roses and Shakespeare to witchcraft. I just keep jotting ideas down as they come to me.

  Jack said (and keeps saying in his phone calls, ad nauseam) that he hates the idea of Winter’s End being ‘commercialised’ and I should forget about opening the house and just concentrate on getting it back in order again. But if sharing such a beautiful place with other people generates enough income to keep it running, why not? Luckily Seth seems to feel the same way about the gardens as I do, and actually wants lots of people to see them, because we don’t want a glowering gardener among the vegetation.

  But above all, I was quite sure that Alys approved of all the changes I was making. In fact, that evening she felt especially close, so I actually asked her if she would mind if I copied out one or two charms from her household book and had them printed on postcards to make money for Winter’s End? Call me mad, but I got the distinct impression that she didn’t in the least. She might not have lived here long, but I knew she loved it as much as I did.

  Still does, come to that.

  Tonight Hebe was occupied with her furtive customers in the stillroom and anyway, rarely came into the parlour, which she didn’t seem to like. It was too late for Seth to call (not that I ever expected him, because he was probably frequently otherwise engaged), and the Larks were settled in for the evening upstairs in their quarters, with Gingernut the kitten and the telly, until it was time for Jonah to do his last rounds of the house.

  So I fetched Alys’s book from its hiding place and, using a pair of clean white cotton gloves, even though centuries of sweaty Winter fingers had turned the pages already, mine included, I opened it at the front, where there were inscriptions in two different hands—for, of course, this had originally been her mother’s book, passed on to Alys at her death.

  Alys’s writing was still clearly legible, firm and bold, if a little over embellished with loops and curls for current tastes, and hard to decipher:

  Herein are many household receipts and hints, which I had from my mother, for the use of simples to cure divers ailments, some that the superstitious would call witchcraft in these sorry times. I have continued to add to the book, as I hope my daughter, Anne, will do after mee, and onward down the generations in the female line
for we women know better how to value such things and keep them safe. The treasures within are both my mother’s legacy and my own, and the rose lies at their heart. I charge you to use them well.

  Alys Blezzard, 1582

  Well, that was clear enough—the treasures were the recipes in the book, especially the rose-based ones. I don’t think even the Famous Five could conjure a mystery out of that, so Lucy would be disappointed.

  And perhaps my mother thought she should have been the keeper of the secret, rather than Ottie, and took the book away with her so she could pass it on to me, her only legacy—apart from the camper van, of course.

  But it should never have left Winter’s End—even my dotty, spaced-out mother must have known that!

  I copied out a couple of recipes that I thought would be suitable for postcards without poisoning anyone who tried them, one for rose tea and another for a sort of universal salve. Aunt Hebe was probably already using them, and Mrs Lark seemed to think she hadn’t managed to dose anyone to death yet.

  I flicked through the rest of the book, thinking that despite Alys’s defence, some of her mother’s potions sounded very Dark Arts to me. And so did some of Alys’s own additions at the end of the book, interspersed among innocent instructions about which herbs to use to sweeten wooden floors, and how to make sops-in-wine.

  Unfortunately, there weren’t any recipes for discouraging a persistent lover, and Jack continued his schmoozy evening phone calls to ask how my day had gone, and whether I missed him—which, though fond of him, I hadn’t really. It was hard to pinpoint the moment when I had passed from a state of dazzled infatuation to a sisterly—if slightly exasperated—affection, but it wasn’t his fault that I’d recovered from the fever so quickly.