A Winter’s Tale

by Trisha Ashley

  It occurred to me suddenly, right out of the blue, that I’d had more fun since I got to Winter’s End than I had done in the last twenty years, precious moments with Lucy excepted.

  We were late getting back to Winter’s End. The fire in the Great Hall was banked down, with the guard in front of it, Charlie was snoozing in his basket in the kitchen and Aunt Hebe and the Larks long gone to bed.

  I’d left my phone behind again and missed three calls from Jack. I hoped he’d given up for the evening, but no, he called again just as I was climbing into bed, which was really annoying because I’d plugged the mobile into the charger on the other side of the room.

  ‘Sophy? Where’ve you been?’ he demanded.

  ‘Out celebrating Bonfire Night. My friend Anya’s staying here for a couple of days and we drove over to Middlemoss with Seth and Mike—do you know Mike? He’s the local bobby.’

  ‘No,’ he said shortly.

  ‘We had a great time. But funnily enough, it seemed to kick-start my memory, and I remembered something I’d noticed, just before my accident in the summerhouse.’

  ‘Oh? Well, it wasn’t me lurking about in the undergrowth, darling.’

  ‘I know that, it was nothing to do with you—unless you’ve started wearing Arpège perfume, that is?’

  He sighed. ‘Mel? Actually, I suspected as much, though I’m sure she didn’t mean you any real harm.’

  ‘But why would she want to hurt me at all?’ I asked, trying to imagine the elegant Mel being that vindictive…which actually wasn’t hard.

  ‘Because she’s jealous of you, of course.’

  ‘Jealous of me?’

  ‘Yes, because of Seth. She’s crazy about him, and not only did she find him in a clinch with you in the Great Hall that time, he also seems to be spending more and more time with you. Like tonight, for instance,’ he added smoothly.

  ‘Me and two other people! And Seth’s not interested in me that way, so she has no reason to feel jealous.’

  ‘Perhaps if you weren’t seen out and about with him so much…?’ he suggested.

  ‘He’s my head gardener—of course I’m going to be seen with him! And he’s family. But the point is, she could have killed me, and she might have hurt Charlie too. It was sheer luck he was OK!’

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean anything except to give you a warning scare,’ he said easily. ‘She thinks you’re invading her territory.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And this would be the woman I saw snogging you in the shrubbery when you came here for lunch recently?’

  There was a small pause. ‘Oh, come on, darling, that was nothing! Mel still likes to think she could get me back if she wanted to, though I’ve made it clear that I’m only interested in you. That’s annoyed her, but not half as much as thinking you’re moving in on Seth too.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ I said shortly.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ he said softly. ‘It seems ages since I saw you, but I’ll be down for Christmas, of course, and I’m looking forward to spending lots of time with you then—and afterwards, because I have an invitation to pass on to you.’

  ‘An invitation? For me?’

  ‘Yes, I always go out to Barbados to stay with friends the day after Boxing Day, and when I told them about you, they said they would love to have you too.’

  ‘What, me? The Caribbean?’ I exclaimed, all tiredness suddenly dispelled by thoughts of coral beaches and palm trees.

  ‘Yes, you!’ He sounded amused. ‘I assume you’ve got a passport?’

  ‘Well, yes, I won a weekend in Paris a few years ago. But—’

  ‘We’ll have a great time, Sophy, and really have a chance to get to know one another—three weeks in paradise. They have a lovely house with a pool, and we’ll go snorkelling and water ski. And they throw wonderful parties—everyone comes, you’ll love it. It’ll be romantic, too…imagine you and me in the evenings, walking along a coral beach.’

  ‘But, Jack, I can’t possibly go away after Christmas,’ I said blankly, ‘there’s too much to do organising everything in time for the Valentine’s Day opening, for a start!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sophy, it’ll be much more fun than playing Lady of the Manor! It’s time you scrapped these mad ideas and let me take care of all your worries. I promise you, you’ll feel totally differently by the time we get back from Barbados.’

  ‘I’m not the one with mad ideas, you are!’ I snapped, now wide-awake but exhausted enough after an eventful day to be ratty. ‘I won’t feel differently because I’m not going to Barbados—I’m enjoying planning everything here at Winter’s End and there’s loads to do.’

  ‘Check your passport is still current, darling,’ he said, blithely ignoring most of what I’d just said, ‘because I’m very sure I can change your mind over Christmas!’

  I said something so rude that Aunt Hebe would have been scrubbing my mouth out with disinfectant, but it was too late—he’d gone. I had to content myself with waking Anya up and pouring what he’d said, word for word, into her reluctant ears.

  I was so going to miss her when she left next day—and I was already missing Alys, who hadn’t seemed to have been around lately. Perhaps she’d return when I was alone?

  Heading back down the dimly lit corridor to my bedroom, I whispered experimentally: ‘And where was my guardian angel when the summerhouse fell on me, Alys?’ but there was no reply, not even a chill breeze round the extremities.

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Vixens

  Sir Ralph came to mee and said his conscience was sore troubled, as well it might be, but begged mee not to tell the truth in the matter of his hiding the priest, since it would bring disaster upon the house. I told him I would not, for my child’s sake, but nor would I admit to practising the dark arts for the same reason. Then I began to cough and could not stop, to his alarm, for I have the same malady that affected my husband and the days of my life would soon run through my fingers like sand even were I not imprisoned here.

  From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1582

  I awoke one morning to find a fluffy white blanket over the landscape, and after breakfast I went out to the top terrace to admire my very own winter wonderland.

  Below, with his broad back to me, stood Seth, brooding over the fact that he would get no work on the terrace done that day.

  It was just too much to resist…

  My first snowball landed with a flump! right between his shoulder blades and the second skimmed the top of his dark head. Then I dodged down behind the balustrade, but too late—he’d seen me.

  ‘Come out, Sophy! I know it’s you,’ he called up.

  I should have had better sense than to stand up, because I was instantly almost knocked off my feet by his return shot. Snow got in my hood and melted, trickling icily down my back.

  He was grinned triumphantly.

  ‘I’ll get you for that, Seth Greenwood!’ I yelled, and for the next few minutes we pelted each other, though since I was higher up I think I had the advantage…though maybe he was the better shot.

  Anyway, honours were about even by the time Aunt Hebe popped her head out of the door and demanded to know what on earth I was doing.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied innocently, just as a parting shot from below almost propelled me into her arms.

  I just hoped Seth was as cold and wet as I was.

  ‘Your voice sounds odd,’ Anya said, ringing me from somewhere near Coventry, where she was doing a Christmas craft fair. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I was inside a packing crate,’ I said, picking bits of straw and polystyrene beads out of my hair. ‘Lady Betty’s legacy has arrived, and it’s rather large, to say the least.’

  ‘What’s she left you?’

  ‘It looks like a stone statue of a hippopotamus.’ I glanced at the head, which was the only bit unwrapped, and it looked back in a fairly amiable way. ‘There were at least two Egyptian gods who sometimes appeared in that form, but if it looks pregnant when I’ve unpacked it, t
hen it’s Tawaret. I don’t know if it’s really old or not. It looks pretty authentic, but a lot of her collection was fake. She had no eye for antiquities at all.’

  ‘Have you decided where you’re going to put it?’

  ‘Yes, there’s an empty alcove in the Long Room and I’ve already moved two ushabti from the parlour up there, so I can have an Egyptian antiquities corner. It’s so big that it’s going to take all the gardeners, including Seth, to carry it upstairs. But it shouldn’t take long, so I don’t think he’ll mind very much.’

  ‘Oh, the Gorgeous Gardener might protest a lot, but I suspect he’s really putty in your hands, Sophy.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, amazed. ‘I have to fight him over every little thing. He might be putty in someone’s hands, but they’re certainly not mine. Are you doing well at the craft fairs?’

  ‘Fine. I’m hoping to be sold out by Christmas. How are things your end?’

  ‘We’ve had a cold snap and it snowed. The garden looks so magical that Mr Yatton’s taken lots of photographs and we’re going to use one or two for postcards. He and Lucy are currently sourcing stock for the shop on the internet—you know, the sort of place who will print what we want on everything. When I told Lucy you and Guy were going to be here for Christmas I could tell she was dying to come home—but no, she has to be Little Miss Honourable and stick it out to the end of her contract.’

  ‘That’s Lucy for you,’ Anya commiserated, ‘though it would have been lovely to see her again, of course. Have you had time to do any more to the shop and tearoom?’

  ‘Yes, Grace helped me to clean the place out and I’ve bought the material for the curtains and chair cushions—bright red gingham in a big check—which someone in the village is going to make up. Mr Yatton found me a supplier of a matching PVC table covering by the metre on the internet, but we can cut that to fit the tables ourselves. I’ll get the electrician in to install a couple more electric sockets and better lighting later, when the Herring painting is sold and I’ve got a bit of money. I simply daren’t do anything expensive at the moment.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start,’ she agreed. ‘You’ve been pretty busy!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to do much more to it before the New Year, except hijack Bob and Hal to paint the rooms when Seth isn’t looking—not that there’s a huge amount to do in a garden at this time of year anyway. But I need to keep him sweet because he’s designing the new garden guide and helping me put the last touches to the guidebook. They’re almost ready to go to press.’

  ‘He’s worth his weight in visitor tickets, that man. You need to hang on to him,’ Anya said. ‘And you’re not even paying him anything!’

  ‘Actually, I’d arrived at much the same conclusion myself,’ I confessed, ‘though if he comes with Mel permanently attached, the price of having him around might be too high.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s got over her now, like a fever?’ she suggested optimistically. ‘I mean, you said you’d never seen them out together?’

  ‘No, but I see her car, or her horse, near the lodge and in the grounds often enough. She haunts the place when he’s here.’

  ‘Maybe, but could you see her living in the lodge, a gardener’s wife?’

  ‘No…actually, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Or Seth wanting to live anywhere except Winter’s End?’

  ‘Not really, but it would depend how mad about her he was, wouldn’t it? He might be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, but we will just have to wait and see.’

  ‘Mike’s been keeping in touch,’ Anya said casually. ‘He phones me for a chat every now and then. His parents originally came from Antigua in the Caribbean and he’s hoping to go there on holiday next year. It sounds like paradise!’

  Although she deserved to be teased after her comments about Seth, I nobly restrained myself. Mike is very nice, and if something comes of their obvious attraction to each other, it will be another anchor to keep her living near me, which would be lovely.

  In fact, everything seemed to be coming together in a very fortuitous way, like a preordained pattern, even if Jack did so far seem incapable of understanding that I was no longer even remotely romantically interested in him.

  It’s a pity I was all over him like a rash that time he kissed me, or he might have been easier to convince.

  But luckily he was still too preoccupied with business to do more than drop by occasionally, and even his late-night phone calls had a rushed air, as if he was always about to dash off and clinch another deal.

  Perhaps, if he ever was really attracted to me, I was losing my charm.

  It took all four gardeners to get the heavy statue upstairs, with Jonah supervising the operation, though luckily that didn’t impede them much.

  ‘What did you say it was?’ Seth asked, panting, when it was finally manoeuvred into place.

  ‘It’s an Egyptian goddess, Tawaret—she’s often depicted as a pregnant hippo standing upright. But maybe it’s just fat, in which case it could be you.’

  ‘Me?’ He looked at me as if I had run mad. ‘You think I look like a hippo? And I’m not fat,’ he added with wounded male pride, casting a glance down at his torso, as if he feared his six-pack had suddenly turned into a beer barrel.

  ‘I never said you were, and you don’t look anything like a hippo. But the evil brother of Osiris was called Seth or Set, so this could have been your namesake.’

  He patted Tawaret on the head. ‘I think this one is female, all right.’

  ‘Careful—she’s a bit of a fertility symbol,’ I warned.

  ‘I think I’m unlikely to get pregnant, Sophy,’ he said mildly.

  Bob and Hal were grinning and nudging each other until he said, ‘Come on, we’ve wasted enough time—back to work. There’s plenty to do.’

  ‘Mrs Lark’s been making Chelsea buns this morning; they should be out of the oven by now,’ Jonah hinted.

  ‘Go out by way of the kitchen and ask for some to take with you,’ I said hastily, seeing Seth’s face darkening.

  In his own way, he is as driven as Jack. Or me, come to that. I’m pretty single-minded in my determination to make the house beautiful again and paying its way.

  Ottie returned from Cornwall via London, where according to Seth she was arranging for a major retrospective exhibition next year and catching up with her friends.

  She was preceded a couple of days earlier by a van bearing the unfinished model for The Spirit of the Garden sculpture she is making for Winter’s End, wrapped in damp sacking.

  It was good to have her back again, though once she had admired the changes I had made to the house and seen the progress of the Shakespeare garden, she retired to her studio to work on the sculpture. I could see her at all hours of the day and night when I was passing through the courtyard, working away in one of her oversized, checked lumberjack shirts.

  I think I am starting to feel much as Grandfather did about having all the family around me, and though some of them are more annoying than others, I have grown to love them anyway.

  Another strand in the fabric of Winter’s End was strengthened when the cleaned painting of Alys came back, too. It wasn’t a good painting—in fact, it was a very bad one—but without the dark coating of dirt and old varnish I could see that the artist had managed to catch something sad and secretive about her eyes—though I would love to know what Alys thought of the pursed rosebud lips, which she had never possessed, and the simper. But apart from that bit of artistic licence, it was a fairly faithful, if uninspired, catalogue of her features. Dark curls lay on the young girl’s long white neck, and her neat nose had the hint of a tilt at the end, just like mine. For the first time I could see that I looked very like her—or how she would have looked, had she lived to my age. After being for so long the atypical dark Winter, I suddenly felt a renewed sense of belonging. Alys’s blood ran in my veins and the two opposing strains of Blezzard and Winter were forever united there.

  Maybe I should w
ear a pentacle and a cross, like Aunt Hebe, to symbolise this strange union?

  One afternoon in December I was sitting contentedly on the bottom step of the flight of stairs down to the lower terrace, watching Derek and Hal lay a herringbone path in Tudor bricks along the new border in front of the rebuilt wall. The weather had taken a slightly milder turn, but it was still chilly. The freshly dug beds were dotted with pots of shrubs ready to plant out and larger, container-grown trees stood about as if simply dropped from the skies. But I knew there was method in this seeming randomness, because I’d seen Seth’s planting scheme.

  He’d already marked out the central knot before I got there and was now measuring and laying out the designs for two smaller ones at either end, using some kind of red spray. From where I was sitting it looked a bit like a stencilled, boxy Christmas cracker.

  When he’d finished Seth came and sat on the step next to me. ‘You’ll get piles, sitting on cold stone,’ he said mildly.

  ‘That’s an old wives’ tale, like the one that says eating too much sugar gives you worms. Yuk! Anyway, you’re doing it too.’

  We sat there in amicable silence for a moment or two, contemplating the terrace. ‘It’s odd how suddenly it’s all starting to come together,’ I mused. ‘Now I can imagine what it will be like once it has all settled and grown a bit—but I suppose you could see that in your head right from the start?’

  ‘Yes, though it’s changed a bit as we go along. Using that pile of weathered old bricks from behind the pigsties for the path will give it a settled look instantly and then when we put the gravel down, the pattern of the knots will be more defined until the edging shrubs grow together.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me they used several different colours of gravel in the late sixteenth century?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m sticking to one throughout here, because we’ve already got the contrast between the bricks and the wall, and it all has to blend together. We’ll plant up the compartments inside the knots later with flowering plants popular at the time.’