A Leap of Faith

by Trisha Ashley

  Other favourites of Granny’s included The Water Babies and Alice in Wonderland – the latter a favourite of mine, too, since the heroine had the same name. I begged for her lovely old copies after she died and Dad made sure I got them, even though Nessa was hell bent on having a clearance firm empty the whole house. She was a minimalist sort of person . . . except when it came to her own clothes, jewellery and shoes.

  Our house was a tale of two parts, with most of the creatively chaotic clutter in dad’s studio, which might have been stables once upon a time – until he married a wicked witch disguised as a flamboyantly beautiful ex-opera singer and she banished him there.

  Anyway, you can see why I have a tendency to turn everything that happens in my life into a dark-edged fairytale – I can’t help it!

  ‘They threw stinky rotten eggs at the wicked fairy, too,’ I’d once added firmly to the familiar story.

  ‘Well, perhaps, but only until she said she was sorry and then they let her out,’ Dad had amended, kind-hearted as always.

  Over the years we embroidered the story with increasingly ridiculous flourishes at every retelling, but it had served its purpose, for I grew up knowing that I’d been abandoned in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire and adopted, and the reason for the filament-fine silvery scar that was all that remained to show I’d been born with a harelip.

  Of course, later I realized Dad had no way of knowing whether my birth mother was young or not and also, once I became quite obsessed with the Brontë family and Haworth, I knew that it was extremely unlikely that she’d tiptoed up to the steps of the Parsonage in the middle of the night and laid me there, in the expectation that he and Nessa would shortly swing by and scoop me up. I mean, it was a museum by then, so it would have been closed and also, adoption didn’t quite work like that. (I’m still surprised they let Nessa on to the register – I can only think that her opera training kicked in and she hadn’t been able to resist throwing herself into the role of eager prospective mother.)

  But while Nessa might only make extravagant expressions of affection towards me when her London friends were visiting (one of whom once cattily let fall the information that she hadn’t had that brilliant a voice even before the operation on her vocal cords that ended her career), I’d known real love from Granny and Dad.

  And I also had Lola, my best friend and her lovely parents, who owned a nearby smallholding. There we helped look after the hens and goats, ran wild in the fields and learned to bake in the long, cool, quarry-tiled kitchen. All my life, baking – even the scent of cinnamon and dried fruit – would have the power to immediately transport me back to those happy days and transfuse me with warmth and comfort.

  So it was an idyllic childhood on the whole, though once the rebellious teenage hormones kicked in I began to clash more and more with Nessa.

  Still, the finer details of my distant past didn’t seem to matter . . . until Dad suddenly died from a massive heart attack when I was nearly eighteen and my safe, secure world collapsed around me like a house of cards.

  In any ordinary family, his loss might have pulled Nessa and me together, but she was not so much grief-stricken as filled with a volcanic rage, mainly directed at me. And she became so obsessed with money that immediately after the funeral she sold the entire contents of Dad’s studio (he was quite a well-known artist) to an American collector without a word to me beforehand, locking the door so I couldn’t even go in there to find solace among the comforting, familiar smells of oil paint and turpentine.

  That was bad enough. But then, with even more indecent haste, she moved a new man into the house – and a horrible one, at that, who was scarily over-friendly in an old-letch kind of way whenever she was out of earshot – and I came to realize that now I was just an encumbrance and she couldn’t wait for me to go off to university the following year.

  The pain of Dad’s loss was still raw and I couldn’t bear to see another man in his place, so I had the row to end all rows with Nessa, culminating in my saying that I hated her and I was going to go and find my real mother.

  ‘She has to be an improvement on you!’ I finished.

  ‘You’re a foundling, darling, so there’s no way you can find her,’ she snapped cuttingly. ‘And bearing in mind that she dumped you out on the moors on a freezing cold night, she’d be unlikely to welcome you with open arms even if you did.’

  Stunned into silence, I stared at her while I took in the implications of what she’d just told me. ‘She . . . didn’t leave me in Haworth village, but up on the moors, where she didn’t think I’d be found?’ I asked eventually.

  Nessa looked at me, the fury dying down slightly into a sort of malicious, slightly shame-faced pleasure that shook me: I knew she’d never really loved me, but until recently I’d thought she was as fond of me as her self-absorbed nature would allow.

  ‘Your father never wanted me to tell you the truth, but I think that was a mistake. And maybe she was batty and thought someone would come across you,’ she suggested, possibly divining from my expression that she’d gone too far.

  ‘No, if she left me at night out on the moors, then clearly she hoped I’d die and never be found,’ I said numbly, for the spell of Dad’s fairytale was now well and truly shattered and there was no way it could be glued together again. I felt empty, alone and lost . . . and unwanted, totally unwanted by anyone.

  ‘I hate you!’ I cried with sudden violence as hot tears rushed to my eyes. ‘I wish you’d died instead of Dad – though you couldn’t have had a heart attack, because you haven’t got one. You’ve never loved me, like Lola’s mum loves her.’

  She shrugged. ‘I expect Dolly actually wanted children, which I never did, even if I could have had them. Your father finally wore me down into agreeing to adoption and he was over the moon when we were offered a baby. But you’d only just had the surgery on your face and what with that and the carroty hair, you weren’t exactly prepossessing, darling.’

  Now the floodgates of frankness were open, there seemed to be no stopping the hurtful revelations, so I added one of my own: I told her that the day before, when she was out, her creepy new lover had tried to kiss me and made suggestive remarks.

  ‘You lying snake in the bosom!’ she hissed furiously, clutching those generous appendages as though she’d just been bitten there by an asp.

  And though of course she didn’t believe me (which was why I hadn’t already told her), there was no going back after that.

  Dawn found me on a coach heading to Cornwall, with the loan of Lola’s birthday money in my bag, to tide me over. I only took one case with me, leaving with her for safe-keeping my most precious possessions, including Granny’s books and a small portrait of me in oils, painted by Dad.

  Of course Lola had wanted to tell her mum what had happened, but I’d sworn her to secrecy until I’d found a job and somewhere to live.

  ‘I’ll stay in a bed and breakfast at first and there are lots of hotels and cafes there where I can get some casual work until I find my feet,’ I assured her.

  Inspired by some of Dad’s old stories of the Newlyn artists and our holidays in Cornwall, I had romantic ideas about joining an artists’ colony, where my aspirations to become a writer and painter could be nurtured, though later I realized this was not only unrealistic, but several decades too late.

  The stark reality was that my arrival, late in the evening and off-season, when many places were shut up for the winter and no one was hiring, left me without any option other than spending the first night huddled in a shelter on the seafront . . . And all too soon my overactive imagination was peopling the darkest corners with evil muttering goblins and foully hellish Hieronymus Bosch creatures.

  When the cold breeze blew a discarded cardboard cup across the prom I thought it was the clatter of running footsteps and even the soft, constant susurration of the sea sounded like an unkind conversation about me.

  I’d begun to write my own contemporary mash-ups of fairytales, fables and
folklore, spiced with an edge of horror, but when it came to the crunch, this princess was no kick-ass kind of girl able to rescue herself, but a frightened waif in urgent need of a handsome prince . . . or even a kind, ugly one.

  Hell, I’d have settled for a reasonably friendly frog.

  Tears trickled down my face and I shivered as the cold wind picked up and wound its way around my legs.

  Then, all at once, I heard the staccato tap of high heels and the excited yapping of a small dog. Before I could attempt to shrink even further into my dark corner, it dashed in and discovered me.

  A torch snapped on and I screwed up my eyes against the dazzling beam, though not before I’d glimpsed the small and unthreatening shape behind it, so that my heart rate steadied.

  ‘Well, what have we here, Ginny?’ said a surprised female voice with the hint of a highland lilt. ‘A wee lassie?’

  Available in hardback and ebook from Spring 2017

  About the Author

  Trisha Ashley was born in St Helens, West Lancashire, and believes that her typically dark Lancashire sense of humour in adversity, crossed with a good dose of Celtic creativity from her Welsh grandmother, have made her what she is today … whatever that is. Nowadays she lives in North Wales, together with the neurotic Border Collie foisted on to her by her son, and a very chancy Muse.

  A Christmas Cracker was her eighth consecutive Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller. Her novels have twice been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Romantic Comedy and Every Woman for Herself was nominated by readers as one of the top three romantic novels of the last fifty years.

  For more information about Trisha please visit her Facebook fan page (Trisha Ashley books) or follow her on Twitter @trishaashley.

  Also by Trisha Ashley

  Sowing Secrets

  A Winter’s Tale

  Wedding Tiers

  Chocolate Wishes

  Twelve Days of Christmas

  The Magic of Christmas

  Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

  Good Husband Material

  Wish Upon a Star

  Finding Mr Rochester

  Every Woman for Herself

  Creature Comforts

  A Christmas Cracker

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 as The Urge to Jump

  by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd

  Published as A Leap of Faith in 2016 by Black Swan

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2001

  Extract from The Little Teashop of Lost and Found © Trisha Ashley 2016

  Cover illustration © Robyn Neild

  Cover design © Becky Glibbery/TW

  Trisha Ashley has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473526105

  ISBN 9781784160869

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2