Twelve Days of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  And then I was crying in earnest and Jude put down the mug and came and pulled me up into a warm, comforting, enveloping embrace against his broad chest, patting my back with a large and surprisingly gentle hand as I cried.

  ‘He couldn’t help it!’ I sobbed into his shoulder, in a wimpy way I would normally deplore. ‘He couldn’t help it!’

  ‘No, he’d have had an adrenaline rush and his impulses would have taken over on the spur of the moment, just as yours did — and thank goodness you were there, because I might not have heard Jess and I don’t think she could have got out alone — she’d have died. And you risked your own life to save her, so I could have lost you both.’

  I could have pointed out that he’d never had me in the first place, but I was feeling too limply acquiescent and in need of comfort. I fished out my handkerchief, mopped my eyes and blew my nose.

  ‘Feeling better now?’ he asked, then as I looked up to reply, that wonderful fleeting smile of his suddenly appeared. .

  And then, I’m not sure how, my arms were around him, too, and we were kissing as if we would never stop. . Until he suddenly wrenched his mouth from mine and held me at arm’s length.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Holly! I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you, when you were so shocked. . but that took me by surprise too — I really didn’t intend to kiss you.’

  ‘It’s all right, it doesn’t matter — forget it,’ I said shakily, recalling all the reasons why that very passionate kiss shouldn’t have happened between us. ‘I think it must have been the whisky — I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Was it just the whisky, though? I got the feeling you wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss you,’ he said and our eyes, inches apart, met and held for a long moment.

  I looked away first. ‘Perhaps. . but it was just a physical thing.’

  ‘Was it, Holly?’ he said quietly. ‘I think we need to talk when you’re feeling better. . but first, there’s something I really need to ask you right now—’ he began.

  But whatever it was, it would have to wait, because just at that moment Becca popped her head through the door to tell us that Jess seemed to be no worse for her icy plunge and was tucked up under a blanket in front of the sitting-room fire with Tilda, reading a book.

  ‘Feeling okay now?’ Becca asked me kindly. ‘Jude looking after you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thank you,’ I said, though I knew my eyes must be red, a dead giveaway. ‘I’d better do something about lunch, because it’s practically dinner time and everyone must be starving.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Jude said.

  ‘No, I can manage.’

  ‘Then manage me: you sit next to the Aga and boss me about — you’re good at that.’

  ‘It takes one to know one,’ I snapped back and he grinned.

  ‘There you are, you’re feeling better already!’

  I gave in and sat down — by now the whisky seemed to have gone to my legs anyway. ‘It was only going to be Gentleman’s Relish sandwiches and cups of soup, followed by mincemeat flapjacks or the last of the mince pies — I took those out of the freezer earlier.’

  ‘I think even I can manage that. And actually, I’m not a totally hopeless cook, whatever you might think.’

  ‘Don’t forget that I’ve seen the extent of your ready meal supplies in the freezer.’

  We were surprisingly amicable in our bickering, now that the awkwardness of an embrace which had taken both of us by surprise had worn off. But though we might have acknowledged a mutual physical attraction, I expect he was now remembering all the reasons why taking it any further would be a really bad idea, just as I was.

  I wondered what on earth he had been going to ask me when Becca came in: maybe if I was a secret pretender to the throne of Old Place?

  I felt absolutely fine later and insisted on cooking dinner myself, though I ended up with Michael and Jude, in slightly wary alliance, as assistants. Tilda and Jess made another potato-hedgehog starter with cheese and small pickled onions on cocktail sticks.

  But at least Jess and I were excused the final play rehearsal and could loll about watching the others, until ordered off early to bed with hot water bottles by Jude. When I protested that I had things to do in the kitchen first, he said there was nothing that couldn’t keep until the morning and also that he was perfectly capable of locking up and all the rest of it himself, pointing out that he had managed to survive perfectly well before my arrival, so I gave in.

  He’d been giving me very searching looks all evening, but since they weren’t dissimilar to the ones he sent my way when he was drawing me, he was probably just sizing me up for another sculpture: given my watery performance, a Little Mermaid, perhaps?

  I was quite happy to go off to bed, really, because I was starting to feel exhausted and strangely light-headed, though calm in an odd sort of way: I suppose the whole experience on the ice had been a very cathartic one, when I came to think about it.

  Now I’d accepted that Alan couldn’t help the actions that had led to his death, I could finally forgive him, letting go of the anger that had burdened me for the last eight years and enabling me to remember him, quite simply, with love.

  And Gran? According to her journal, she seemed to have determined to do much the same:

  Yesterday I packed my bags and departed from my lodgings without fuss, and was married that afternoon by special licence, a friend of my husband’s in a nearby town officiating. It all seemed like a strange dream, but I now mean to put out of my head all memories of what went before, and make Joseph the best possible wife, even though our relationship will always be only that of loving friends.

  June, 1945

  Chapter 35

  Acted Out

  Joseph put a newspaper into my hand this morning, pointing to the report of the death of my lover in a motorbike accident. Then he left me. Later, we prayed together for N. I am so sorry for his family and for his fiancée, if she truly loved him. That chapter of my life is now closed. . apart from the child I carry.

  June, 1945

  Jude was downstairs early and back to being quietly helpful, though there was still some awkwardness between us — in my case largely because that passionate kiss had featured largely and rather feverishly in my dreams last night. I knew he was thinking about it too — our eyes kept meeting and then we’d both immediately look away.

  I felt absolutely fine, with no ill after-effects, as I assured him when he asked, accompanying the question with one of those searching stares from his deep-set dark eyes.

  I was glad that we seemed to be friends again and he seemed cheerful enough (probably, in the light of day, deeply relieved that I hadn’t taken the kiss seriously!).

  He even fell in with Coco’s suggestion that we have a quick run-through of our play scenes after breakfast, before he went to the studio, since it was New Year’s Eve (which, what with everything else happening, I had managed to forget!) and the final performance was to be later today, in front of an invited audience of Old Nan and Richard.

  We played our Twelfth Night roles straight and serious, no hamming this time, and then off Jude went, commanding me to bring his lunch to the studio later, so we were back to normal again — or what passed for it.

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed, ‘but I won’t be able to stay long because I’ve got way too much to do. I want to turn the ham bone into pea and ham soup for tomorrow, for a start, and then I thought I might make some soda bread.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. ‘By the way, Guy, one of us will need to drive down and pick up Old Nan and Richard this afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll do that if you like, then,’ he offered and then gave me a glinting, flirtatious smile. ‘Holly can come with me.’

  ‘Holly will be too busy cooking dinner for eleven people,’ I replied pointedly.

  ‘We’ve discussed the menu: it’s all very straightforward,’ Tilda said. ‘Smoked mackerel mousse on toast triangles — my very own recipe — roast lamb with
rosemary and then treacle tart and custard.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Becca said. ‘I’m not going to want to go home when the roads have thawed. Maybe I could ask Richard to pray for more snow?’

  Merlin had stayed with me this morning, but accompanied me down to the studio when I took Jude’s lunch.

  He was welding, totally absorbed in his work, so I put on the spare visor and sat in my usual place on the dais to watch him until he finally switched off the torch.

  ‘It’s coming along, don’t you think?’ he asked, examining his handiwork critically. Already, what had started out looking like a few linked metal leaves had begun to elongate and swirl into the interlinked forms of horse and woman. It was turning out a bit like one of the maquettes he’d made, so I could see roughly where it was heading.

  ‘Yes, and I believe you now when you say you get paid good money for your sculptures,’ I teased him and he grinned.

  ‘You’re very good at dampening my pretensions, but my work is much in demand, I’ll have you know! “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.”’

  ‘Is that from the play? I don’t remember that bit.’

  ‘It’s in one of the scenes we’re not doing,’ he said, sitting down next to me. Merlin came out from under the dais and nudged his way between us, leaning his weight affectionately against Jude’s shoulder; though that might have been just a keen interest in the sandwiches.

  Jude was silent while he ate, his mind clearly on his work rather than anything else, but when he’d finished and I was packing the remains back into the basket, he suddenly said, ‘Holly, we need to talk about yesterday, when I—’

  ‘Oh, let’s forget all that,’ I said brightly. ‘We’d both had a shock and it makes you do the strangest things. I feel much better now.’

  ‘Yes, but Holly, you—’

  I picked up the basket and headed for the door. ‘I must go — see you later. I’ll be so glad to get this wretched play over with!’

  The New Year’s Eve audience, well primed by a good roast lamb dinner and a drop or two of sherry, were prepared to watch three rank amateurs and one professional actor massacre scenes from the Bard with equanimity.

  In fact, I wished I could have watched it instead of acted in it, because it must have been hilariously funny, what with me spending most of the time looking like a waif in Jude’s enormous greatcoat, Coco a skeletal Bride of Frankenstein and Jude, resigned but unable to resist slightly hamming it up, in his blue velvet cloak and imaginary moustache.

  Michael played it straight, but gave a muted performance, probably to stop the rest of us looking quite so awful: but if so, it didn’t really work, especially in the parts that hinged on Sebastian and Viola looking identical: ‘An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures: which is Sebastian?’

  You couldn’t have found two people more unlike than Michael and me if you tried, so I couldn’t blame the snort of laughter that came from Guy’s corner of the room at that point.

  However, the rest of the audience applauded each scene enthusiastically, though that might have had something to do with the sherry.

  Michael spoke his final lines very well, considering he had the distraction of Coco draped adoringly around him by this point, and then it was Jude’s turn to declare his love for me — such as it was:

  ‘Cesario, come — for so you shall be, while you are a man; but, when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.’

  To my mind, that line’s about as romantic as Prince Charles saying, when asked if he was in love with Diana, ‘Yes — whatever love means,’ even if Jude did accompany the words with a look of smouldering promise. I think I may have underestimated his acting abilities as well as his artistic ones.

  There was another round of applause and Old Nan dabbed her eyes with a pink tissue and said sentimentally that it was terribly moving and she loved a happy ending. ‘And I’ll knit you and Jude a nice Afghan for your wedding present,’ she declared, beaming at us.

  ‘We’re not really getting married, it was just in the play, Nan,’ I explained.

  ‘I don’t hold with all this living together out of wedlock,’ she said severely. ‘Don’t think you’re getting my Afghan until you tie the knot with this poor lass, Jude Martland!’

  ‘All right, Nan,’ he said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘Interesting play, isn’t it?’ the vicar said, allowing Guy to refill his sherry glass. ‘Nothing is what it seems right until the end and it must have been even more confusing in Shakespeare’s day, when the female parts were played by boys.’

  ‘Yes, so a boy was playing a girl, pretending to be a boy!’

  ‘That’s right. It all harks back to mumming and ancient pagan cross-dressing fertility rituals, like the Man-Woman character at the Revels, as you will see.’

  ‘If I’m still here,’ I said. ‘It does seem to be slowly thawing, so I might have left.’

  ‘Of course you’ll be here,’ Old Nan snapped tetchily, waking suddenly from a half-doze in time to catch this. ‘Where else would you be?’

  Quite possibly in a smart house in London cooking falafels, if Ellen got her way, I thought!

  Guy ran Old Nan and Richard home again soon after that. To my surprise, no-one seemed interested in staying up until midnight to see the New Year in since, as Noël explained when I asked, Twelfth Night had always been Little Mumming’s night of transition from the old year to the new, and that was not likely ever to change.

  Everyone went to bed except Jude, who followed me into the kitchen where I was about to wash the sherry glasses.

  I thought he was going to let Merlin out and take a last look at the horses, but instead he came and turned me round by the shoulders, staring down at me as if my face was a slightly untrust-worthy map he was trying to read, to find a destination he was not sure he wanted to reach.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked uneasily.

  ‘It’s what Richard was saying: because you’re not really who you say you are either, are you, Holly?’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course I’m Holly Brown!’ I hedged.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that’s your name, but I’ve suspected practically from the first moment I set eyes on you that you were related to us, probably on the wrong side of the blanket. Given Ned’s nature and the way you seemed to steer the conversation onto him at every opportunity, he seemed the likeliest candidate. Then when I saw that photograph of him on your bedside table, it all clicked into place and I realised that your grandmother must have been the—’

  ‘“Little mill girl” Noël told us about, that Ned got into trouble?’ I finished bitterly. ‘Yes, she was, but she wasn’t a mill girl, she was a nurse.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he apologised, though it was hardly his fault. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘It’s all in her diaries, the ones I’ve been reading since I got here — how he seduced her and then, when she got pregnant, dumped her and ran off home. She found out he’d been engaged to someone else all the time,’ I told him, ‘and then her parents disowned her too, and she was so desperate she even thought about taking her own life.’

  ‘Oh, God, that’s terrible!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but then the local Strange Baptist minister came to her rescue and married her — my grandfather.’

  He ran a distracted hand through his dark hair, so that it stood on end. ‘I had no idea! It doesn’t reflect very well on my Uncle Ned — or my family — does it?’

  ‘No, nobody seemed to care what happened to her.’

  ‘Did she ever know he’d been killed?’

  ‘Yes, but only because she saw it in the local newspaper. It must have been a horrible way to find out.’

  ‘The family really forgot about her and the baby, they never offered her any money for support? I find that so hard to believe!’

  ‘So far as I’ve got in the journal, she’d heard nothing from them — an
d anyway, she wouldn’t have wanted their money even if she hadn’t married my grandfather. And if you think I came here hoping to ingratiate myself with the family to get some kind of financial gain out of the connection, then you’re quite wrong!’ I added indignantly.

  ‘The thought did cross my mind at first,’ he admitted, ‘but not for long. I mean, half the time you didn’t even seem to like us, especially Guy — which was when I twigged that he was supposed to be just like Ned and started to put two and two together.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I had no idea I was related to you, until I started to read Gran’s diaries.’

  ‘You mean, you’d never even heard of the Martlands before?’

  ‘Not until a couple of weeks before I came here.’ I described Gran’s last words. ‘Then Ellen told me the name of the family she wanted me to house-sit for and I thought it was just one of those strange coincidences: there seemed little chance your Martlands could have any connection to my gran. In fact, I was more than half-expecting the lost love of her life to have been one of the doctors at the hospital!’

  ‘I can see why you feel bitter about what happened, but Ned always sounded weak rather than bad, so perhaps if he hadn’t been killed, he would have supported her?’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so and nor did Gran, or she wouldn’t have felt so abandoned that she thought of killing herself.’

  ‘Well, thank God she didn’t,’ he said and then added, frowning, ‘and I suppose this makes us cousins of a kind, though not first cousins, which is probably just as well. .’

  His hands on my shoulders tightened their grip and, seeing his intent, I said hastily, ‘Too close for kissing.’

  ‘Have you never heard of kissing cousins?’ he said, raising one eyebrow and giving me that brief, intimate and spine-sapping smile.