by Emma Jackson
A MISTLETOE MIRACLE
Emma Jackson
Contents
Title page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
For Dan
Your support makes the journey so much easier.
Chapter One
Little did I know, when the Christmas tree in the lobby of my mother’s hotel attacked me, that it was a metaphor for how the next week of my life was going to unravel.
There I was, minding my own business, heading for the door, when a jingling swarm of itchy green branches descended upon me. Throwing my hands up as shiny white baubles and silver bells showered down, I still wasn’t quick enough to stop the ceramic angel landing with a decisive thunk on my head and bouncing off.
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ my mother called out, her strawberry-blond hair just visible through the foliage. I searched for the metal trunk of the artificial tree and gave it a good shove towards being upright again while my mum came around the side to help. ‘Oh, thank God for that, it’s just you.’ Her panic-stricken expression cleared when she realised it was her one and only child and not a guest preparing a case to sue her.
‘Yeah, I’m fine thanks, Mum.’ I rubbed at the tender spot on my forehead where the angel had head-butted me.
She tilted her head to the side examining me, tiptoed up and pressed a quick kiss to my forehead.
‘You’ll survive.’ She patted my shoulder, and then picked up the angel from the parquet flooring and pouted: its cherubic cheeks and nose were caved in, wings hanging off. ‘More than I can say for her. Are you going down into the village?’
‘That was the plan.’
‘Could you pop into Lydia’s for a replacement, please? She had some nice angels on the counter the other week.’
‘Well…’ I pretended to think about it ‘…I suppose I could squeeze that into my busy schedule…’ I swiped at the glitter now dusted all over my jeans and jacket ‘…but only on the condition that you stop fiddling with the decorations after that. They look fine. They’ve looked fine for over a month.’ When I arrived at the beginning of November, with my hastily packed holdall – after the argument that finally ended mine and Peter’s four-year relationship – my old bedroom had been floor to ceiling with boxes of decorations, labelled and numbered ready to dress the hotel for Christmas as soon as the last sparkler on bonfire night went out. She didn’t like to waste a moment of the festive period.
‘Thank you.’ She scooped up a couple of the escaped baubles and started examining them for defects too. ‘But I just want to make sure everything is right before the last guest arrives tomorrow.’
‘Are we fully booked now?’
‘Yep, last-minute booking.’
‘Did you warn them the high street will be blocked off from mid-morning because of the Christmas fayre?’
She nodded, her focus back on the tree as she searched for the perfect spot to place a bauble that had escaped damage. I started for the door thinking there was no more to be said now she’d returned to the Christmas-tree-zone.
‘Could you be back by two o’clock, Beth?’ she called after me, proving that – as always – Rosie Keenan was paying more attention than she appeared to be. ‘I need you on reception this afternoon.’
‘Sure, see you in a bit.’
I stepped outside, pulling up the hood on my jacket and zipping it right to the top, burrowing my chin inside the collar. There were fairy lights wrapped all around the pillars of the porch to the hotel and lining the long gravel driveway, dripping from tree to tree in delicate arcs. They glowed valiantly through the drizzly rain, despite it being early afternoon. As far as I knew, the only time the Christmas lights were turned off in December was between two and five o’clock in the morning. If you stood still for too long near my mum at this time of year, there was a high likelihood she would wrap you in tinsel and pop a star on your head.
I checked the time on my phone as I walked through the grounds: just gone one o’clock. I had no real errands of my own to run in the village, although I probably should’ve been trying to buy Christmas presents but, with the exception of the bookshop, there was very little in the village that a person with my meagre budget could afford to get friends and family for Christmas. Loganbury was very pretty, all ramshackle Tudor buildings leering like drunks over pavement barely wide enough to fit one very small person and their handbag, which was great for tourists – and therefore my mum’s hotel – but it was genuinely like living in a time warp. In addition to the bookshop, there was an art gallery and an antique shop aimed at the more affluent visitors, one of the oldest pubs in Britain, a tea room, a greengrocer and Lydia’s florist shop. You know, all the essentials.
Before I put my phone away, I decided to risk a look at my notifications. Two of my best friends from London had been tagged in a new photo. In contrast to the soggy grey landscape surrounding me, Geri and Lisa were on a white, sandy beach, with an eye-achingly blue sea behind them. Geri was down on one knee…
I almost tripped over my own feet.
She’d finally done it!
I’d gone with Geri to find the ring months ago, scouring boutique jewellers for something that Lisa would like. We finally found a slim silver band with an enamel heart, a swirl of pretty colours that encapsulated Lisa’s optimistic personality. Geri bought it and then promptly chickened out of asking.
To begin with I’d tried to give her encouragement to go ahead and propose – I knew there was no way Lisa would turn her down. But my own issues with my (then) fiancé Peter distracted me. Over the last eighteen months of our relationship small problems – things that had been niggling at me but which he assured me weren’t issues – became big problems. And those rapidly morphed into illusion-shattering revelations.
I doubt I will ever forget that moment, standing at the head of a table full of perfect strangers, when he’d called me stupid and told me that I couldn’t be trusted with anything, all because I’d served a dinner to his client that had given him an allergic reaction. I’d already felt awful – even though I hadn’t been told the man had allergies – and Peter, who was supposed to love me, hadn’t thought twice about humiliating me in front of everyone.
I’d heard that word ‘stupid’ like an echo of all the times he’d insulted me like that before. As soon as the guests had left (they’d hot-footed it out the door pretty quickly after that scene), we’d erupted into an argument of EastEnders-level proportions and every ugly truth of our relationship had been aired. It’s funny how the phrase ‘cheated on’ refers only to a significant other having sex with someone else…because there are a lot of ways people can cheat on you.
I wish I could say that I still felt excited for Geri and Lisa, as a good friend should have done, but that afternoon I just felt numb and it was nothing to do with the icy rain.
Still, one beautiful thing about social media is that I was able to hit the heart button and type ‘congratulations’ wit
hout the sentiment being ruined by the existential crisis written all over my face.
When I got to Lydia’s I stood on the doormat inside, shaking off all the drips and wiping my face. The intense perfume from all the different flower displays infiltrated my lungs and made me feel like I was breathing in my childhood. After getting off the bus from school, I would often come straight in here to wheedle hot chocolate and a biscuit before I walked back up the hill to the hotel.
A radio played softly out the back and not a soul manned the shop but they didn’t really need to. Loganbury wasn’t exactly rife with master criminals planning to make off with bouquets of carnations. A bunch of decorations were set out on a round table near the counter but there was only one angel left. I picked her up and was surprised by how heavy she was. She was wearing an off-white crochet smock, like a repurposed doily, and she had a round white face with very red cheeks and an old-fashioned butterfly kiss of a mouth, giving her a rather shocked expression. I guess I’d look shocked too if my purpose in life was to spend the majority of December with a Christmas tree shoved up my dress. She was a misfit angel, last to be picked for a festive team, and I kind of liked her all the more for it. Mum would think she was hideous.
I leaned across the counter to call out before I walked straight through. My mum and Lydia had been best friends for over a decade and I knew I was welcome to make myself at home, but after the incident when I was fifteen where I caught Lydia in a clinch with one of her delivery drivers, I always made sure I announced my presence in advance.
‘Lydia?’
There was a pause and the music on the radio lowered. A middle-aged woman with an iron-grey topknot and a bright yellow apron poked her head around the door behind the counter.
‘Beth, honey. Come on through.’ She disappeared, and the volume of the music rose again. I stepped into the back room just in time to see Lydia put her hand on her hip and execute a single-girl shimmy over to the big wooden table where she was making up a flower arrangement. I snorted and joined her at the table, setting the angel down next to a bunch of long-stemmed red roses. She nudged me and tutted. ‘Go on then, if you can do any better, why don’t you show me how?’
‘I don’t need to show you anything, Lyd, you know you’ve got all the best moves. And I’m in retirement from dancing at the moment.’
She fixed me with a disapproving sideways look, then pointed her shears at the angel. ‘What are you doing with that? You can’t want her? I’ve been thinking of taking her out of the shop. I reckon she’s been putting off the customers.’
‘Mum needs an angel for the tree. Can you put it on the account for the hotel, please?’
‘How can she need another one? Do we need to hold an intervention for her decorating addiction?’ Lydia snipped at the end of a spray of tiny white buds, then laid it down to the left of the arrangement of red and white flowers she was working on.
‘Says the woman selling Christmas decorations…’
‘Which was your mother’s idea. Use the opportunity for extra sales, she said. And the idea of some extra money in my holiday fund did appeal. I just didn’t realise she’d be the one buying most of the stock from me.’
‘Mercenaries, the pair of you.’
‘I think the word you’re looking for is “businesswomen”.’ She unspooled a length of satin ribbon with her permanently tanned hands and wrapped it around the bunch of flowers. ‘Finger.’ I pressed my finger on the knot while she finished tying off the bow and all the disparate stems and lonely petals drew together to make a bouquet in the shape of a heart.
‘Wedding?’ I asked, unable to hide the note of grim inevitability creeping into my voice.
She nodded and twisted at one of the stems at the bottom. ‘Tomorrow. Won’t it be romantic for them if that snow we’re forecast comes early?’
‘It’ll be cold. And half their guests will probably get stranded.’
‘Oh, Beth darling. You’re far too young to sound so bitter.’
‘I beg to differ.’ I crossed my arms over my chest. ‘I think twenty-six is the perfect age to start sounding bitter. I’ve been sarcastic since I was a kid. Now I actually have some life experience, bitterness is the next logical step.’
‘And what comes after bitterness?’
‘Crabbiness. Then meanness. I’m looking forward to that one. When kids kick their ball into my garden, I’ll puncture it. Then I’ll go inside and feed all thirty-two of my cats.’
Her mouth quirked at the corner, but she didn’t laugh.
‘That’s not going to happen to you.’ She picked up the bouquet with two hands, like it was a sleeping newborn, to place it in a small polystyrene crate.
‘You’re crushing my dreams, Lyd.’
‘This is a just a hiccup.’ She patted my cheek as she walked past towards the kitchenette area behind her, skirting a stack of holly wreaths, which must’ve been for all the houses with doors opening out onto the high street. She donated them every year for the Dickensian festival, Loganbury’s annual Christmas fayre, along with a bunch of mistletoe, which the villagers liked to hang in the prettiest spots that most lent themselves to a romantic moment. ‘Men fall over themselves to get a date with a pretty girl like you.’
‘Men with a basic lack of co-ordination you’re saying? Seems about right.’
‘Oh, you’re hopeless.’
I laughed even though the word snuck between my ribs and needled at me.
I knew she didn’t mean it. That she was just exasperated with my defensiveness when all she wanted was to boost me up and send me out to meet my Prince Charming. But still. ‘Hopeless’. If the boot fits.
‘Are you staying for a cuppa?’ She picked up the kettle and waved it at me.
I flicked a glance at the clock on the wall behind the table, even though I had no intention of staying. Tea with Lydia would only mean more well-meaning but soul-destroying pep talks.
‘No, I better get going. I want to pop to the bookshop before my lunch break’s over.’
I gave her a hug before picking up my misfit angel. On my way back out through the shop I rummaged under the counter for a bag to put her in, but all I could find was enormous cellophane sheets and paper bags. I wedged her in my pocket instead and tucked her shocked face under my elbow to protect her from the rain as I left.
The bookshop was right at the opposite end of the high street. I liked it because – obviously – it was full of books but also, vitally, it was run by a man who’d only moved to the village a couple of years ago and therefore did not know me or feel the need to console/advise me about my life.
Of course, between the florist and the bookshop was a landmine territory of people who did know me. Despite the rain, there were plenty of villagers making last-minute preparations for the fayre: fixing up strings of coloured lights and Santa signs pointing out the direction of the grotto, or marking out the spaces for the stalls and the stage. I suddenly wondered why I’d thought it was a good idea to come down to the village in the first place – although I knew the answer to that: I’d wanted to get out of the hotel before I went stir-crazy.
Living and working in the same place had never been a problem when I’d been a music tutor from Peter’s flat in North London. But then I had only dealt with one pupil at a time, according to my own schedule. Not a horde of guests, changing every three to seven days – that took some getting used to again. I couldn’t argue with one of Peter’s parting shots: I’d had it easy with him supporting me financially. Tutors don’t earn a lot – not if they want to keep their rates competitive – and boy, did he never miss an opportunity to point that out to me towards the end. I’d given up my music tutoring the last year we were together, because I was so tired of his jibes, and I’d taken a job as a sales assistant in a music store instead, to ensure a steady income.
It’d been such a relief not to go back to that store though. It was uninspiring to say the least. I was going to have to think hard about what kind of reliable job with
a secure income I could deal with, when I started looking after Christmas.
I stayed on Lydia’s doorstep for a moment as the single-decker community bus swung by me, close enough that I could’ve reached a hand out to write a rude word on its window. Not that I would do that sort of thing. It was the village’s only method of public transport. It stopped at a small island in the centre of the ‘high street’, which was furnished with a memorial cross, a bench, two bricked-in flowers beds and the sorriest-looking Christmas tree I’d ever seen. Its branches were slicked down and it was almost bent in half from the gusts of wind and the rain. Something told me it wasn’t going to make it to the fayre tomorrow night without some reconstructive surgery from the event planners.
With that in mind, I decided to risk walking down the longer stretch of shops on the left side of the road, skirting around the memorial island. I didn’t fancy another altercation with a precarious Christmas tree.
I managed to make it past Victor’s pub and the gallery and was starting to think I might arrive at my destination un-accosted, when two of my oldest friends, Rachel and Ben, stepped out of the tea room on the corner. He fussed over her, untucking her hair from her collar, as she smiled dotingly up at him. I stopped and spun towards the building beside me, hoping to feign interest in a shop window and instead finding a brick wall.
A sneaky glance out the corner of my eye revealed Ben steering Rachel by the shoulders in my direction, her huge belly out before her, like a cannon being lined up on me.
I’d gone to secondary school with Rachel and Ben – they were nice people – but even back then the level of their kissy-wissy-touchy-feely love had the unfortunate side effect of making you feel like the most single person on the planet – even when you were in a relationship. On top of the engagement announcement from Lisa and Geri, I wasn’t sure I could face the reminder of my relatively new relationship status.
I grabbed one of the fliers about the festival that was pinned to the nearest telephone pole and held it up over my face as I marched forwards and ducked down the alleyway between the grocer’s and the tea room they were outside of.
