'Good, I hate them.'

Jess's main contribution to the cleaning after that was to entertain me while I worked by telling me the details of the plot of her vampire novel, until finally I straightened my aching back and declared, 'Lunch time, I think.'

'You look very hot and grubby!'

'That's because your uncle has let his house get filthy he should be ashamed of himself.'

'I don't suppose he even noticed,' Jess said. 'When he's working he doesn't, and he's working most of the time. Even when he isn't you can tell he's still thinking about it. What are you having for lunch?'

'Nothing exciting an omelette probably. What are you having?'

'G.o.d knows,' she said gloomily. 'Probably tinned soup and I'll be the one in charge of heating that up, because Granny's tired today and Grandpa is hopeless.'

She got up. 'I suppose I'd better come back tomorrow and help you make beds. That's why Granny sent me, really, to tell you to make sure the bedrooms are aired.'

'Beds?'

'Granny said it would be much more convenient if we all stayed on Christmas night.'

'Convenient for who?' I said, startled. I was sure they'd only been coming for lunch when Mo and Jim were doing the catering and I don't remember any previous mention of staying over . . .

'For you, of course, so you won't have to drive us back to the lodge. And they've told Auntie Becca that Christmas lunch was on again, so she's coming too.'

'What to stay?'

'Yes.' She counted up on her fingers. 'So that's three bedrooms, isn't it?'

'I suppose it is,' I said faintly. 'Oh, joy! And yes, you'd better come back tomorrow and help, because I expect I'll now have to clean the bedrooms before I can make the beds up.'

I'd have to revise my menu plan, too, if I was catering for rather more than just Christmas lunch! It was just as well the warmth from the big log fire in the hall was permeating all the rooms upstairs and airing them except for the owner's Bluebeard's chamber, of course. If that was damp and dank and chilly when he got back, that would be his own fault.

'Your Uncle Jude called last night, so I a.s.sume the phone is working again.'

'Did he? I think he must like you!'

'No, I think it's the opposite, actually.'

'Auntie Becca called back later to say that since Christmas was on as usual, she'd popped down to the village to tell Old Nan and Richard.'

'Oh my G.o.d!'

'Is that a problem?'

'Oh no,' I said faintly, 'I mean, after looking forward to a quiet and restful few weeks on my own, I should be delighted that I'm now going to be cook, cleaner and general factotum for a large house-party, where everyone bar you is so elderly they're obviously not going to be a lot of help, shouldn't I? Whatever gave you that idea?'

She grinned. 'I know you're joking and it's going to be much more fun than last year, when Great Uncle Alex was so ill and Guy and Jude fell out over Guy and Coco flirting, though Guy flirts with everyone. Aunt Becca said she was surprised when she saw the announcement of his engagement to Coco, because although he always wanted whatever Jude had, he lost interest once he'd got it.'

That seemed very acute of Becca. 'A bit of a Cain and Abel syndrome?' I asked, interested, but she looked blank.

'I hate Guy, he's always winding me up and he never buys me a present either, just gives me money.'

'That is a present, it just means he has no idea what you want.'

'Jude usually gives me a present even if sometimes it's a bit weird. But I don't suppose he even thought of it this time, dropping everything and rushing off like that.'

'He said he sent hampers to Old Nan and Richard, so I'm sure he will have remembered.'

'You know,' she said with an air of one making a major discovery, 'I like Jude much better than Guy, even if he is grumpier! If he says he'll do something, he does. And when he's home, he lets me go and mess about in the studio with modelling clay sometimes and he's going to teach me to weld, too.'

'Well, that's certainly a life skill that not a lot of girls your age have.'

She jumped up. 'Look at the time! I'd better go, or Granny will be trying to open that tin herself.'

'I'll bring you some homemade soup down tomorrow,' I promised. 'I usually have a big pot of it permanently on the go and top it up every day, but I just don't seem to have had a minute since I arrived, so there isn't enough at the moment.'

Making more soup and having a good turn-out of the kitchen cupboards occupied most of the rest of the day, and no call from Jude Martland marred my peace . . . until he rang really late, just as I was thinking about bed.

'I emailed your boss at Homebodies and asked her how much you charged for your cooking,' he said without any preamble. 'My G.o.d, I don't know who can afford those wages!'

'I expect she gave you the weekly rate, but I told you I was expensive.' Trust Ellen to try and get more money out of a client without even consulting me, too!

'If you add that on top of double house-sitting rates, it's extortionate,' he said. 'And you won't be doing anything millions of women won't be doing for their families for nothing over Christmas.'

'They will be doing it for love and it makes you think, doesn't it? Christmas is always hard work for women.'

'That's not what I meant . . . though I suppose you have a point,' he agreed grudgingly.

I was about to tell him that I had no intention of charging him for anything other than the house-sitting, and would have a word with Ellen about it, but something seemed to hold me back. He probably wouldn't have believed me anyway.

'Did you want anything else, or did you just ring me to complain about the Homebodies charges?'

'I phoned for the sheer pleasure of hearing your voice,' he said sarcastically and then I was listening to the empty air: he'd gone.

I fell into bed, exhausted and irritated in equal measures and wasn't much soothed by the next few pages of Gran's journal, since I could see ominous signs of where things were heading: Sister caught me laughing with N this morning and hauled me over the coals for it. I was very upset by this, and was lucky not to be moved from that ward. N was sweet and said he would make it up to me once he is well again, though he didn't say how . . .

Still, at least I might get the chance to find out more about Ned Martland from Noel over Christmas, so every cloud has a silver lining, even if it is slightly tarnished.

Chapter 12.

Deeply Fruited.

N was discharged from hospital today and sent home to convalesce, but before he left he caught my hand and pleaded with me to meet him on my next half-day. Against my better judgement I eventually agreed, though I stipulated that it must be somewhere out of the way, since I do not wish to be the target of idle gossip among the other nurses.

February, 1945.

Yesterday's snow had half-melted by evening, but it froze overnight and then a fresh covering over the top made things pretty treacherous outside. I was worried about Lady on the cobbles and rang Becca to ask if I should still let her out.

'Of course,' she said, and she was quite right, because Lady walked across to the paddock with small, cautious steps as if she'd been doing it all her life which actually, I expect she had.

Becca had also said she was looking forward to Christmas Day. I seemed to be the only one who wasn't. I'd caught her on the way to church, because apparently the vicar comes over from Great Mumming once a fortnight to hold a service here and today was the day: in fact, I could hear the distant peal of the bell as she rang off.

The brandy-soaked fruit for the Christmas cake smelt intoxicatingly delicious when I fetched the bowl into the kitchen and then began a.s.sembling and weighing the rest of the ingredients, which is the most time-consuming bit, along with greasing and lining a cake tin. Luckily there was a good selection of those in all shapes and sizes and I had found a suitably large one in the cupboard yesterday.

Once the cake was safely baking, as well as some mince pies to offer what I now foresaw would be a permanent flow of famished visitors, I had a sit-down with a cup of coffee to brace myself for another bout of the hated cleaning, this time of the bedrooms.

I was getting heartily sick of it not to mention of Jude Martland, the cause of all this extra work! So when Jess turned up again, this time I was much more remorseless in making her help me.

She told me which rooms her grandparents and Becca usually had and said she herself always slept in the old nursery. The rooms didn't seem to have been used since the previous Christmas, so that apart from a coating of dust and needing the beds made up with lavender-scented linen from the big cupboard at the end of the pa.s.sage by the stairs, they didn't actually take a huge amount of time to do much less than I expected.

Jess showed me the cupboard full of old toys in the nursery, though some of them were more recent, mainly miniature instruments of ma.s.s destruction that had probably belonged to Guy and Jude. The room was at the back of the house and, like mine and Jude's, afforded an excellent view of the horse figure on the side of the folly-topped Snowehill, which was certainly living up to its name today. The red horse was now white and practically indistinguishable, much like Lady in the paddock below, though Billy was a small dark blob.

By the time we'd finished upstairs, the scent of fruit cake from the slow oven had wafted gently through the house to tantalise our nostrils and I took the cake out and tested it with a skewer while Jess wolfed down the first batch of mince pies I'd made earlier.

She watched me curiously. 'Why are you poking holes in it?'

'One hole, just to see if it's done. If it isn't, the cake mix will stick to the skewer.'

'Oh, right. These mince pies are much nicer than shop ones,' Jess added, with an air of discovery.

'I've made them the way I like them best, with lots of filling and thin pastry, but the shop ones tend to go the other way. There's a box of them in the larder that the Chirks left, but I don't like the look of them.'

'I could take them back with me,' offered Jess. 'Grandpa would probably be glad of them, because they have to be better than anything Granny whips up, even though he always says he enjoys everything she cooks.'

'How is she today?'

'Quite lively she said she was going to make a batch of rock cakes, though I don't suppose they'll be any nicer than the cheese straws.'

'I'll give you some soup to take back for lunch, I've made a lot more.'

I'd found one of those giant Thermos flasks earlier with a wide mouth for soups and stews, so I scalded it out and ladled the soup into that.

'There, thick enough to stand a spoon in, as my Gran would have said.'

'It smells lovely. I'd better take it back now, because they've probably decided to have rock cakes for lunch and that's not enough to keep them going. Meals at the lodge are getting weirder and weirder by the minute.'

When she'd gone I had a bowl of the soup myself, with a warm, b.u.t.tered roll (luckily there was a good supply of bread in the freezer too, and also several of those long-life part-baked baguettes in the larder), then I covered the end of the kitchen table with newspaper and sat there with a pot of tea to hand, polishing up the tarnished silver from the dining room.

When I was coming back from replacing them on the sideboard, I glanced out of the sitting-room window and spotted a tractor coming up the drive with a snowplough contraption on the front. It swept gratingly around the turning circle in front of the house, narrowly missing my car, then vanished up the side, but not before I'd caught sight of Henry in the pa.s.senger seat next to the fair-haired driver.

I presumed he was being dropped off at the back gate and, sure enough, by the time I got to the kitchen he was stumping across the courtyard to the door and I could hear the roar of the tractor departing again.

'Hi, Henry,' I said, 'was that George Froggat, the farmer from up the lane?'

'That's right, Hill Farm. Gave me a lift, he did.'

'That was kind.'

'Nay, he was coming up anyway, seeing the council pays him and his son to plough the lane to the village, and Jude pays him to do this drive and Becca's. He makes a good thing out of it.'

'Oh yes, I think Tilda and Noel mentioned something about that.'

'Saw you at the window, did George. Said you looked a likely la.s.s. I said you were none too bad,' he conceded grudgingly.

'Well . . . thank you,' I said, digesting this unlikely pair of compliments.

'I told him you were a widow, too. He's a widower himself.'

I glanced at him sharply, wondering if he was about to try a spot of rural matchmaking and saw that he looked frozen, despite wearing numerous woolly layers under a tweed jacket obviously built for someone of twice his girth.

'Look, come in and get warm,' I ordered and, despite his protests, I thawed him out in the kitchen with tea and warm mince pies. The first batch had almost gone already, so it was just as well I had loads more baking, which I intended to put in the freezer.

'The weather's turning worse and I might not get back up over Christmas, so I've come to show you where the potatoes are stored, and the beetroot clamp and suchlike, in case you need to fetch any more in,' he said, when he'd drunk his tea and regained a less deathly complexion.

I was touched by this kind thought and we went out to the walled garden, once I'd donned my down-filled parka and gloves.

I returned half an hour later with a basket of potatoes and carrots and a string of onions, leaving Henry to retire to his little den in the greenhouse, though I told him to tell me later when he was leaving. His daughter couldn't fetch him today, so he'd intended walking home, but I would insist on driving him back, however icy the road down was.

The drive was slippery, but someone (presumably George) had sprinkled grit over the steepest bit of the lane below the lodge, so we got down that all right.

Going by the leaden sky I thought we might be in for another snow fall, and it was a pity the shop was closed because I would have bought yet more emergency supplies while I had the car with me, especially now I was having lots more visitors!

I pulled up outside the almshouses and Henry clambered out, clutching his usual bulging sack of booty.

'Her at the end's wanting you,' he said with a jerk of his thumb and I saw Old Nan was waving at me from her window with surprising enthusiasm. But this was soon explained when Jess shot out of her cottage, still fastening her coat, and climbed into the pa.s.senger seat next to me.

'Great, I thought I was going to have to walk back,' she said, turning round to pat Merlin, who was on the back seat.

'We both might, if the car won't go up the lane it's pretty icy. What were you doing down here?'

'Granny made about three million rock cakes and they weren't very nice, so I volunteered to bring some for Old Nan and Richard, just to try and get rid of them quicker. Your soup was good, though.'

I got back up the hill by the skin of my teeth and dropped her at the lodge, but I didn't go in because it was quickly getting dark and even colder by then, and I wanted to bring Lady and Billy in.

I should have left a light on in the porch: it was slightly eerie and silent when I got out of the car, just the scrunch of my boots on the drive and the sudden high-pitched yelp of a fox not far away, which Merlin took with matter-of-fact disinterestedness.

It's odd, growing up in Merchester, I'd had this idea of the countryside as a quiet place, but in its way it's usually just as noisy as the city: foxes scream, hedgehogs grunt, sheep baa, cows moo, birds sing, rooks caw, tractors roar . . . it's a cacophony! A cacophony interspersed with moments of deep silence. This was one of them.

I was glad to get inside and switch on the lights in the sitting room, where the embers of the fire only needed a log or two to spring back into life.

When I checked the phone, I seemed to have missed a call from Jude. What a pity!