A Winter’s Tale Read online

  TRISHA ASHLEY

  A Winter’s Tale

  For Margaret James, a friend for all seasons.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue-The Dream

  Chapter One-There Must Be an Angel

  Chapter Two-Distant Connections

  Chapter Three-Diamond Cut

  Chapter Four-The Moving Mollusc

  Chapter Five-Pleached Walks

  Chapter Six-Unravelled

  Chapter Seven-Cold Embers

  Chapter Eight-Sovereign Remedies

  Chapter Nine-Lost in Translation

  Chapter Ten-Clipped Edges

  Chapter Eleven-O Mother, Where Art Thou?

  Chapter Twelve-Foxed

  Chapter Thirteen-Grave Affairs

  Chapter Fourteen-Twisted Wires

  Chapter Fifteen-Boxing

  Chapter Sixteen-Polite Expressions

  Chapter Seventeen-Pressed

  Chapter Eighteen-Friendly Relations

  Chapter Nineteen-Suitable for Bedding

  Chapter Twenty-Having Kittens

  Chapter Twenty-one-Ghost Lace

  Chapter Twenty-two-On the Rails

  Chapter Twenty-three-Lost Treasures

  Chapter Twenty-four-Stunned

  Chapter Twenty-five-Follies

  Chapter Twenty-six-First Impressions

  Chapter Twenty-seven-Infernal Knots

  Chapter Twenty-eight-Vixens

  Chapter Twenty-nine-Battle Positions

  Chapter Thirty-Rival Attractions

  Chapter Thirty-one-Lord of Misrule

  Chapter Thirty-two-Touched

  Chapter Thirty-three-Dodgy Dealings

  Chapter Thirty-four-Revelations

  Chapter Thirty-five-Much Ado

  Chapter Thirty-six-Endpapers

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue: The Dream

  Mother, what did you foretell, when you held my hand so tightly and wept, then said that the future could not be altered and I must go to the manor of Wynter’s End in your stead?

  From the journal of Alys Bezzard, 1580

  No house as ancient as Winter’s End was ever entirely silent: even at eight years old, Sophy Winter knew that. Crouched on the floor of the gallery, she felt like Jonah sitting in the belly of the whale, surrounded by creaks and sighing, feeling, rather than hearing, the heavy heartbeat of a distant long-case clock and the sharply flatulent rattling of the water pipes.

  She peered through the wooden banisters, down into the depths of the stone-flagged Great Hall where her grand—father’s King Charles spaniels lay in a tangled, snoring, comatose heap on a rag rug before the log fire.

  Nothing stirred in the darker shadows beyond. Satisfied, she ran to the end of the gallery and climbed onto a curved stair rail that seemed to have been designed for little fingers to grip; then, clinging on for dear life, she slid with an exhilarating, rushing swoosh! of cold air, right to the bottom.

  Slowing down was always tricky. Fetching up with a thump against a newel post bearing a carved cherub’s head, she lost her grip and would have fallen off, had she not been caught and rather roughly set on her feet.

  In the ensuing silence, a moth-eaten stag’s head dropped off the wall and landed with a clatter, glassy eyes vacantly staring at the intricately plastered ceiling.

  Sophy looked up and her impish, round-cheeked face, framed in dark curls, not unlike the carved cherub’s behind her, became instantly serious. Grandfather didn’t like her to use the front stairs, let alone slide down the banisters. In fact, Grandfather didn’t seem to like her at all, and it was somehow Mummy’s fault—and where was Mummy? If Sophy hadn’t been sitting on the gallery floor watching for her for so long, she wouldn’t have been tempted to slide down the banisters in the first place.

  Grandfather stared back at her, ferocious bushy brows drawn together over a formidable nose and an arrested expression in his eyes. ‘A Pharamond, that’s who your father was,’ he said slowly, ‘from over Middlemoss way. Why didn’t I see that before? But which one…?’

  Nervously Sophy began slowly to back away, ready to make a run for the safety of the kitchen wing.

  ‘Hebe!’ he shouted suddenly, making Sophy jump and all the spaniels start awake and rush over, yapping.

  ‘What are you bellowing for? You sound like a cross between the Last Trump and a cow in labour,’ Great-Aunt Hebe snapped, appearing suddenly round the carved screen. Her fine, pale, red-gold hair stood out around her head in a flossy halo and she brandished a large wooden spoon that dripped a glutinous splat onto the flagged floor. One of the spaniels licked it tentatively: you never knew quite what Hebe was cooking up.

  Sophy gave a little nervous giggle—Grandfather was loud enough to wake the dead slumbering in the graveyard, and since that was her least favourite of Aunt Hebe’s biblical bedtime stories she found the idea slightly worrying…

  ‘Aunt Hebe,’ she said urgently, running to her and grabbing a handful of slightly tacky cotton apron, ‘the dead people won’t climb out and walk round the graveyard in their bones, will they?’

  ‘No, they’ll all wait for the end of the world,’ Hebe said. ‘It was just a figure of speech.’

  She looked over her head at her brother. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The child was sliding down the banisters again.’

  ‘Well, she is a child. Yo u did it, I did it, Ottie did it…we all did it! Now, let me get back to my stillroom. Come on, Sophy, you can give me a hand.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Take a look at her and tell me which family round here has black, curly hair? I don’t know why I didn’t realise it before: she’s a Pharamond.’

  ‘What, from the Mosses?’ Hebe held Sophy away and stared at her. ‘What nonsense! There’s been the occasional dark-haired Winters ever since Alys Blezzard married into the family in the sixteenth century—and anyway, all the Pharamonds I’ve ever met have had dark blue eyes, not hazel, and narrow, aquiline noses. If anything, Sophy’s nose turns up.’

  ‘She’s got the look,’ he insisted.

  ‘I don’t think so—and does it matter anyway?’

  ‘Of course it bloody matters! They’re all mad as hatters in Middlemoss!’

  ‘Sophy isn’t mad.’

  ‘Oh, no? What about her imaginary playmate?’

  Aunt Hebe shrugged. ‘Lots of children have invisible friends.’

  ‘ Alys isn’t always invisible,’ Sophy said in a small voice, but Grandfather didn’t seem to hear her.

  ‘I’m sure I’m right,’ he said, ‘and why wouldn’t Susan say who the father was, unless he was a married man? God knows where she’s been the last few days, but if she doesn’t mend her ways, she’ll find herself out on her ear.’

  At this inopportune moment Susan Winter slid in through the great oak door, setting down a colourful carpetbag on the floor; tall, fair, slender and pretty in a long, floaty dress with little bells that chimed softly as she moved, smelling of sandalwood and patchouli. Like a fairy, Sophy always thought, not a dark little hobgoblin like herself.

  ‘So you’re back, then? Where have you been?’ Grandfather demanded, switching that fierce gaze to a new victim. ‘And, more to the point, who have you been with? Another married man?’

  Susan, who had been smiling vaguely at the group, her blue eyes unfocused, flinched and took a step backwards. ‘W-what do you mean? Some friends took me to the Reading Festival to see Genesis, that’s all, Daddy!’

  ‘Friends! I know the riffraff you call friends! Layabouts and hippie scum! I’m telling you, Susan, I won’t tolerate any more of your loose behaviour, so if y
ou want me to house you and your bas—’

  ‘Not in front of the child!’ protested Hebe, and Sophy was suddenly snatched off her feet and carried away through the baize-lined door to the kitchen wing. It slammed behind them, cutting off the escalating sound of shouting and weeping.

  ‘What’s Mummy done now?’ Sophy asked, as she was set back down again. ‘Is it my fault, for making Grandfather angry? Aunt Hebe, what has Mummy—’

  ‘Quickly!’ Aunt Hebe said, flapping her apron and shooing her through the kitchen past Mrs Lark, like a reluctant hen into the coop.

  The cook, who was single-mindedly pounding steaks with a sort of knobbly wooden mallet, looked up long enough to remark, ‘Bile pills, that’s what he’ll be needing, before the night’s out,’ before resuming her assault.

  ‘Deadly nightshade, more like,’ muttered Aunt Hebe. ‘Come on, Sophy, into the stillroom—I’ve got rose conserve on the stove, and I don’t want it spoiled. And you should know by now that your grandfather is all bark and no bite.’

  Although Aunt Hebe was tall and rangy and not at all cosy, she always smelled of roses, which was safe and somehow comforting, unlike Mummy’s patchouli, which made Sophy feel excited but vaguely unsettled, much like Mummy herself did.

  And after Mummy took her away late that night, leaving behind Winter’s End, Aunt Hebe, the little dogs, and everything loved and familiar, she always did find the scent of roses a comfort in an alien world, long after she had forgotten the reason why.

  Chapter One: There Must Be an Angel

  Despite my fears I found Wynter’s End most delightfully situated above a river, with terraces of sweet-scented knots. Sir Ralph was greatly pleased to see mee—but not so the mistress. Mary Wynter is Sir Ralph’s second wife and I perceived from the moment she set eyes on mee that she was mine extreame enemy, though I know not why unless she hateth every woman of less years than herself.

  From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

  No matter how many times I dreamed of the terrible day that culminated in my mother taking me away from Winter’s End for ever, I still woke up with my face wet with tears and a sense of anguish—and guilt.

  Was the final argument that precipitated our flight my fault for provoking Grandfather once too often? I had been a mischievous child, always getting into trouble.

  My mind groped desperately after the disappearing echoes of once-familiar voices, the last lingering fragrance of Gallica roses…but as always they slipped away, leaving me with only the fragmented memories of my early childhood to take out and examine, one by one, like faded treasures.

  Since my grandfather’s brief visit earlier this year everything had been stirred up again and old wounds had reopened. But surely it shouldn’t still hurt so much. It was so long ago, that settled time before my mother and I, cast out of Eden, had moved around the country from squat to travellers’ van to commune. Eventually, like random jetsam, we’d washed up at a remote little Scottish commune, where we’d run out of road. And then later my poor feckless mother had literally run out of road…but as Marlowe said, that was in another country: and besides, the wench is dead.

  Dead and gone.

  It was still dark and I reached for the bedside lamp, only to find that it wasn’t there. Then, with a sickening jolt under the ribcage, I remembered that it was already packed away—and why.

  I had to pad across the cold, bare floorboards to switch on the ceiling light before climbing back into bed. The white candlewick coverlet, with its raised diamond pattern and central flower motifs, suddenly reminded me of the intricately moulded plaster ceilings of Winter’s End. Strange that I hadn’t thought of that before, but perhaps, subconsciously, that had been why I bought it.

  Yet I barely ever allowed myself to think of Winter’s End—not with my conscious mind, anyway—for that was the past, with the door forever shut, and the present had to be dealt with.

  And what a present! That day I would be moving out of the tied cottage where Lucy and I had lived for over twenty years, because my elderly employer recently suffered a bad fall and the consequence was that my job had come to an abrupt end.

  At first I thought everything would work out fine, especially when Lady Betty’s nephew arrived to look after things until she recovered enough to come home. Conor was a chubby, balding man who always reminded me of an amiable frog, though unfortunately he turned out to be a complete toad.

  On previous visits to Blackwalls he had seemed fond of Lady Betty and otherwise entirely harmless (apart from a slight tendency to invade my personal space and squeeze my arm with his plump white fingers, while telling me how grateful he was to me for looking after his aunt). That opinion lasted right up to the point where he got power of attorney and had poor Lady Betty, confused but weakly protesting, whipped straight from the hospital to an expensive retirement home. Personally, I don’t see that keeping fourteen cats, and telling visitors to your stately ruin that you are the reincarnation of Ramses the First, is anything like enough reason to be declared incompetent to manage your affairs. She’d managed them perfectly well for years, with a little assistance from her faithful staff, and she never wore the headdress and robe in public.

  I think Conor’s betrayal was a much greater shock to her than the fall, which I told him straight the day I found out about it—and then he had the gall to come round to the cottage that very evening, well tanked up, to try to exercise some kind of medieval droit de seigneur, insinuating that keeping my home and my job depended entirely on how ‘friendly’ I was.

  I had an instinctive knee-jerk reaction and droited his seigneur until his eyes watered. Pity Lady Betty hadn’t been able to do the same, once he had charmed and weaselled the ‘temporary’ power of attorney out of her and showed his true colours.

  The upshot was that Conor gave me immediate notice and put my cottage and other assets up for sale—and of course without a job I couldn’t get a mortgage to buy it myself. In any case, I couldn’t match the price the people buying it as a weekend cottage were prepared to pay. Let’s face it, I couldn’t even raise the deposit.

  When my husband, Rory, did his vanishing trick and left me holding the baby over twenty years ago, I took the job of Lady Betty’s general factotum and moved to a remote little Northumbrian village with Lucy, mainly because it offered a cottage as well as a small salary. There weren’t many applicants, or I don’t suppose I would have got the job at my age and with a small child, despite having had lots of relevant experience working for the mistress of a small Scottish castle ever since I left school.

  But the minute we arrived at the village I knew it was meant to be, because I recognised the place. My mad mother and I (and her man of the moment) had once set up home in our vans in a lay-by just outside it, and for several days no one had tried to move us on. That was exceptional, since normally we seemed to be as welcome as a bad smell.

  So you see, serendipity brought us here, and Lady Betty loved children and was quite happy for me to fit my work around Lucy’s needs. But my pay wasn’t huge, so I’d staggered from one financial crisis to another over the years, with never quite enough money to make ends meet, juggling bills and later helping Lucy out at university when her student loan and part-time job weren’t quite enough.

  If only the interest wasn’t so high on that small loan I took out…and if only I hadn’t had to increase it further still to cover nearly two thousand pounds of vet’s bills for poor Daisy! And all in vain, though of course I had had to try because she was Lucy’s dog too, and we both loved her. And if only I hadn’t economised the month before she got ill by letting her pet insurance lapse, it would have been perfectly all right.

  If only…

  Why did everything have to go pear-shaped at once? My life was like a volcano: it lay dormant for long enough to let me think it was acquiescent, and then suddenly tossed out hot rocks.

  My mother would have said, ‘Accept your karma and go with the flow, darling,’ but just look where doing that got
her. She flowed over the Atlantic, over California and down a rather steep canyon. And then, since she still had her old passport, they returned her to Winter’s End for burial: a toss of the dice and right down the snake to where you started out, though perhaps not in quite the same pristine condition.

  But it was not in my nature to be miserable for long, and soon fingers of silvery sunlight began to gleam around the edges of the black cloud of despondency. I knew something good was coming, even if not precisely what, because I have a touch of the second sight from my witch ancestor, Alys Blezzard.

  And after all, there were hours yet before I had to hand over the keys of Spiggs Cottage to strangers and always, always in the past something had happened to avert calamity at the last minute…though perhaps calamity had never been on such a grand, overwhelming scale before. I mean, I’d put down roots here at last, shallow and tentative though they might be, and it was the only home Lucy had ever known. I’d been so determined that Lucy would have the secure and settled upbringing I hadn’t had myself once Mum had torn me away from Winter’s End.

  I sat up, hugging my knees. It wasn’t too late to save the cottage—the contract wouldn’t be exchanged until later that morning. There was still time for the cavalry to come riding over the hill to rescue me, bugles blowing and flags flying, just as they always had.

  I was filled with a sudden glow of unfounded optimism. Getting up, I sprayed on a liberal, fortifying blast of Penhaligon’s Elisabethan Rose perfume (the only extravagance in my life, unless you counted Lucy), pulled on a red jumper and jeans that clung to my abundant curves, and ruthlessly dragged a hairbrush through wildly curling dark hair.

  Then I went to make coffee and await the arrival of the postman. The last post…

  No, I wouldn’t think like that! The postman would bring good news—a reprieve. Maybe I’d won the lottery (despite never buying a ticket) or the Pools. Or perhaps Conor had metamorphosed overnight from a cockroach into a human being and, repentant, he would refuse to sell the cottage and instead beg me to stay there rent free for ever (no droit de seigneur included).