The Christmas Invitation Read online

  Trisha Ashley

  * * *

  THE CHRISTMAS INVITATION

  Contents

  Prologue: Incised in Stone

  An Inscribed Life

  1 Going Viral

  2 The Vital Spark

  3 Doomed

  Clara

  4 Poetic Licence

  5 All Enveloping

  6 Verdant

  7 In the Soup

  Clara

  8 Old Shades

  9 Treasured Possessions

  10 Grimlike

  11 A Moveable Feast

  Clara

  12 The Bare Bones

  13 Grinched

  Clara

  14 Brief Encounter

  15 First Flower

  16 Illuminations

  Clara

  17 Eaten Up

  18 Raking the Embers

  19 Snakes and Ladders

  Clara

  20 Resolution

  21 Still Life

  Clara

  22 The Image

  23 Present

  Clara

  24 Piked

  25 Relatively Speaking

  26 Left Luggage

  Clara

  27 Everyman

  28 Headlong

  29 Prickly

  Clara

  30 Advent

  31 Baggage

  32 Star-Crossed Others

  Clara

  33 The Kissing Bough

  34 Well Spiced

  35 Stripped

  36 Tryst Issues

  Clara

  37 Gifted

  38 Entirely Engaged

  39 A Family Affair

  Clara

  40 The Elephant in the Room

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Recipes

  About the Author

  Trisha Ashley’s Sunday Times bestselling novels have twice been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, and Every Woman for Herself was nominated by readers as one of the top three romantic novels of the last fifty years.

  Trisha lives in North Wales. For more information about her please visit www.trishaashley.com, her Facebook page www.facebook.com/TrishaAshleyBooks 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

  A Leap of Faith (previously published as The Urge to Jump)

  The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

  A Good Heart is Hard to Find (previously published as Singled Out)

  The House of Hopes and Dreams

  Written from the Heart (previously published as Happy Endings)

  For more information on Trisha Ashley and her books, please see www.trishaashley.com or visit her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TrishaAshleyBooks) or follow her on Twitter @trishaashley.

  For my son

  Robin Griff Aneurin Ashley

  With love

  Prologue

  Incised in Stone

  5 January 2016

  It was Twelfth Night and an icy wind prowled around the Red House, occasionally causing a soft susurration of snowflakes against the window, or howled menacingly down the chimney.

  ‘You have no teeth to harm me,’ murmured Clara Mayhem Doome. ‘You can huff and you can puff, but you can’t blow my house down.’

  Lass, her husband’s spaniel, who had been temporarily banished to Clara’s study from the hall while the huge Christmas tree was denuded of its baubles and tinsel, politely thumped her undocked tail on the floor.

  ‘Blast,’ added Clara, realizing that her microphone was still on and her words had been added to the end of her current crime novel as a strange postscript to the grand finale.

  She deleted it, then switched off both microphone and computer and lay back in her chair, feeling that fleeting moment of catharsis that all authors experience after writing the final words of their current book … before the urge to start a new one sneaked in to occupy the empty space.

  Professor Clara Mayhem Doome was a large, vigorous woman in her late seventies, with a boldly curved nose, bright dark eyes and a mass of silver-streaked steel-grey curls. She was clad in scarlet corduroy trousers and a rainbow-striped Peruvian jumper, across which marched a procession of llamas. This, together with the big silver sun and moon earrings she wore, had been this year’s Christmas presents from her husband.

  The room was spacious, warm and well lit, the walls lined with bookshelves and illuminated cabinets that contained chunks of stone, clay, wood and other hard substances, incised with the strange shapes of ancient writing. Clara was a world-renowned epigrapher, whose passion for deciphering anything not written on paper had become her career. She liked a little more dimension to her work, and thought that palaeographers, like her friend – or frenemy – Pookie Longridge, had chosen the flat and boring option.

  Clara’s large U-shaped desk was in the centre of the room, facing the long windows on to the garden, and the computers, monitors and laptop it bore reflected the different facets of her nature.

  To the left, with an old-fashioned ball-and-stick microphone before it, was the computer devoted to the writing of her annual crime novel, which was her main hobby. In the centre was a huge monitor on which she could examine in minute detail photographs of bits of pottery, clay tablets or other inscribed surfaces, and which she could also move about like a virtual jigsaw puzzle until they fitted together. She was uncannily expert at spotting a ‘join’, as they were called. The computer to which this was wired was entirely dedicated to her profession, including the writing of her more erudite books, papers and articles. Her most recent book, in which she set out a new timeline for the development of three interlinked early forms of writing, had not so much set the cat among the pigeons in her field, but rather detonated a small explosion, leaving feathers everywhere.

  The laptop on the right-hand wing of the desk was used to email friends and family, surf the internet and store personal photographs. She preferred things to be in compartments and imagined her mind as a richly nectared honeycomb of interconnecting hexagonal cells.

  It was still only eleven in the morning, yet she had already studied the photographs of a few broken fragments of baked clay inscribed with cuneiform, which a colleague in the States had emailed to her, then sent back her opinion, after which she’d dictated the final chapter of her novel.

  There was still a good hour before she could decently eat lunch, though good smells were wafting from the direction of the kitchen.

  Cheese and onion pies, she thought, and perhaps some of Den’s special savoury scones for tea later.

  The sound of Henry’s mellow and resonant voice and the higher treble of her great-nephew, Teddy, moved off towards the front of the house, so they must have finished with the hall tree and were about to start on the smaller, artificial one in the bay window of the drawing room. Henry, who adored Christmas and collected vintage and antique glass baubles, hung some of them each year on this smaller tree, and removing them carefully and restoring them to their storage places in his study would take some time.

  Later in the day, her nephew Lex would help take down the Christmas trees and store the boxes of decorations in one of the attics. This substantial Victorian Gothic house wasn’t short of those.

  It had been another lovely fami
ly Christmas. She and Henry might have no children of their own, but her nephew and niece, Lex and Zelda, more than made up for that. And now, with Zelda’s little boy, Teddy, living with them, there was a child in the house again to make Christmas extra special.

  The room was warm and bright, the clock ticked and time seemed to ripple around her. In moments like this Clara often found herself thinking more and more about the past and how it linked to her present life, a train of thought stirred up by the brief autobiographical introduction she had been asked to write for her last crime novel.

  To her surprise she’d found that she actually had quite a lot to say about her life, not all of it suitable for publication. But it would be enjoyable to write her full and frank memoirs, if only for future generations of the family.

  With Clara, to think was to act. Minutes later she had created a new document and was intoning the foreword to her autobiography into her microphone.

  An Inscribed Life

  The Memoirs of Clara Mayhem Doome

  Foreword

  Late last year I was asked by the publishers of my crime novels to write a brief autobiographical note, to be included at the front of my next offering, Dead Clay.

  They wanted something more personal than the outline of my professional achievements that graces my more erudite works on epigraphy.

  But to me, the interesting parts of my life have mainly been those written in stone … or sometimes baked clay. What insight, I wondered, would it bring to the readers of my novels, to know such trivia as where I was born, that I preferred toast to breakfast cereal and rarely watched the TV from one week to the next?

  But my publishers insisted that indeed they would be fascinated by such details … and I have to admit that despite my initial reservations, the exercise stirred up all kinds of long-dormant memories.

  My husband, the renowned poet Henry Doome, pointed out that he has been examining and chronicling aspects of his life (and, later, by association, mine) through the medium of his work since childhood, but that is hardly the same as setting down the facts.

  Anyway, as you see, I have now fallen prey to the lure of autobiography and so decided to pen a memoir – though for the family, rather than general publication, I think … unless it undergoes a radical editorial pruning at a later date.

  I will start where I was born, in the village that lies in the valley below the house where I now reside, though I reserve the right to wander to and fro among my memories as the fancy takes me. Of course, I will always return here, for as Henry says, we are both firmly rooted in the village of Starstone, even if those roots are now washing about under the still waters of the reservoir.

  Let us ripple the surface and stir up the silt a little …

  Clara Mayhem Doome

  The Red House,

  Starstone Edge,

  January 2016

  1

  Going Viral

  Meg

  November 2016

  I used to think pneumonia was something that only elderly people and those with compromised immune systems got … but not any more. Autumn put off its bronze leaves and turned to stark winter before River finally sprang me from hospital and drove me home to convalesce, though I don’t think they’d have let me go, had they seen the state of his ancient Land Rover. As it was, they looked slightly askance at his long silver hair, plaited beard and the medieval-style quilted tabard, worn over black tunic and trousers, which was revealed when he removed his stained and disreputable waxed drover’s coat.

  Outside, exposed to the chill air of the car park, I felt like a shrivelling hothouse plant, but I assured myself that I’d toughen up again, like I had after my last hospital stay, six years ago, when a car crash had ended the new life inside me that had barely begun. The anguish and mental scars of that loss had taken longer to heal than the physical ones.

  My bags, packed by my best friend, Fliss, were already in the back and, once River had carefully wrapped me in an itchy hand-woven travelling rug, we headed straight out of London.

  It didn’t matter where I was, home would always be River’s Farm up in the Black Mountains of Wales.

  When he had first moved there in search of solitude and a life of self-sufficiency (within reason; there were some little luxuries, like good coffee, that he had no intention of doing without), the place had had a Welsh name that summed up its beautiful remoteness. But with the success of his first publication, A Manual for the Self-Sufficient Vegetarian, it was soon forgotten, and fan mail addressed to ‘River’s Farm’, or even just ‘The Farm, Wales’, found its way there without any difficulty, as did a stream of fans and acolytes.

  Over the ensuing years it had evolved from a simple commune into something far more complex, though at heart it had remained true to its roots and had been a wonderful place to grow up.

  I fell fast asleep despite the Land Rover’s almost non-existent suspension, and was woken only by the rattle as we crossed a cattle grid and bumped up the long track to the Farm. In the thick, woolly gloom of a winter afternoon, the dark conifers of the Forestry Commission woodland pressed up close against the fence to one side, while above us lights shone steadily from the lower windows of the house and the craft workshops in the barns. Between the hedges and trees to our left, lights from the yurts in the lower field flickered like a scattering of glow-worms.

  I wound the window down a fraction and inhaled the heady scent of pine from the forest, mixed with a little wood smoke.

  Soon I would be enclosed in the womb-like warmth and safety of the commune as if I’d never left – and how I longed for that!

  It was the place I came for healing, though in my heart I already knew that with returning health would come the desperate urge to escape again.

  I was quite right, too. By the start of December my flight feathers had grown back and I was more than ready to leave the downy softness of the nest again, where Maj, one of the long-standing members of the commune, almost suffocated me with mother love and tried to fatten me up with an endless succession of my favourite foods.

  Well, apart from the occasional lunch like that of the previous day, when Oshan (River’s son and my sort-of brother – relationships at the Farm are complicated), had insisted on cooking. Unfortunately he had turned vegan while spurning recipe books in favour of ‘intuitive cookery’, whatever that was. The result had both looked and tasted like butterbeans in chilli sauce on chopped grass. It probably was.

  Only a few members of the original commune still lived in the house, like Maj and her husband, Kenny, while most of the rest had either left or moved into the yurt encampment that had sprung up in the lower field. Everyone still wandered in and out at all times of the day and night, so there was a complete lack of privacy. Of course, you could go and stand in one of the fields furthest away from the farmhouse, but even then, you might find Jerry and Luke with the goats, or an inquisitive donkey nudging you in the back and braying loudly, to give your location away.

  In winter, after pneumonia, that option probably wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway, though having survived the journey from London in River’s unheated vehicle, there was clearly hope of a complete recovery.

  I did have a slip of a bedroom to myself, over the front porch of the farmhouse, which was never used for visitors, even in summer, when the place was full with temporary helpers and the bunk rooms in the attic were crammed to bursting.

  It was a privilege Oshan shared, though as River’s son, he had a right to it by heritage, while I was awarded a granddaughter’s rights from love.

  For all official purposes, Maj and Kenny were my parents, Oshan my brother and River my grandfather. It had saved a lot of trouble and explanations over the years.

  I did have a birth mother and so did Oshan, though both were quick enough to deposit their offspring at the Farm and depart, leaving their little cuckoos in the nest.

  On the first Sunday in December, River reluctantly agreed to return me to the shoebox-sized Greenwich flat
I’d shared until recently with Fliss.

  As the miles vanished behind us, I shook off the last of the sadness I felt at leaving the Farm and began to look forward to being back in my own quiet space again … even quieter now Fliss had moved out. I would miss her so much and I also had the added worry about paying the rent on the flat on my own.

  River broke into my reverie by saying, for possibly the third time, ‘You should have stayed till after the Winter Solstice, Meg, if not the Yule Feast. Some of the family are coming home for it and they’d love to see you.’

  By ‘family’, he meant anyone who had ever stayed at the commune over the last forty-odd years since he set it up, no matter for how long or short a time. And people did tend to return like homing pigeons, especially the ones who had grown up there, like me. We might all have felt the need to escape, but the umbilical cord frequently twitched us back.

  ‘I don’t want to leave the flat empty for too long, and anyway, I have commissions to arrange, things to catch up on and a living to earn,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You could take it easy for a while longer, though, Meg. Surely no one will want their portrait painted over Christmas?’

  ‘Probably not, but I do need to add a few finishing touches to my last commission.’ Like signing it, for instance. I was pretty sure I’d forgotten to do that before I was carted off to hospital.

  While I preferred to paint the entire portrait from life, my sitters couldn’t always spare me enough sessions so I took lots of photographs on my iPad. Those, and the sharp memory of the posed sitter in my mind’s eye, meant I could complete the background later, if necessary.

  Fliss had just got married, which was why she’d moved out. The wedding was another thing I’d missed during my stay in hospital, though to be honest, I’d really dreaded putting on that puffy-sleeved teal-blue bridesmaid’s dress with matching capelet edged with fake swansdown and freezing my ass off for the day.