A Winter’s Tale: A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance

Chapter Two: Distant Connections

I applied all the cures and simples my mother taught mee so well, and young Thomas Wynter’s suffering is much alleviated, though it is clear to mee that he will not make old bones.

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1580

I’d been so positive I could hear those hoofbeats and the swoosh! of angel’s wings coming to the rescue—but either I was mistaken or they took a wrong turn, for Spiggs Cottage was lost to me.

I couldn’t understand it…and even several days later, I still couldn’t quite believe it. My life had gone full circle so that I’d have to start all over again, twenty years older but still with no money, qualifications or assets other than a vintage Volkswagen camper van with about twice the world’s circumference on the clock, inherited, by rather permanent default, from my mother.

Lucy and I had always used it to travel about with friends in the holidays, but it began to look as though I would have to live in it again permanently, until someone in the village came to the rescue with the offer of a big static caravan for the winter.

Though grateful for any temporary roof over my head, there was nothing quite so freezing as a caravan out of season. The cold pierced from all directions, like living in an ice cube. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a shivering polar bear at the door asking to be let out.

But at least it was a roof over my head until the site reopened in March, and it was far larger than either the van or the cottage. This was just as well, since the materials for the little round silk and satin crazy-patchwork cushions I made and sold mail order took up quite a bit of space.

My cushions, each feather-stitched patch embroidered and embellished, were very upmarket. Luckily the buyers couldn’t see the raggle-taggle gypsy making them, or the charity shops and jumble sales where I bought the old clothes to cut up for pieces!

I blew on my frozen fingers and read over the letter I had written, breaking the news that we were homeless to Lucy, so very far away teaching English in Japan.

Darling Lucy,

My job at Blackwalls has finished rather suddenly. Poor Lady Betty was making a good recovery from her fall, but her nephew got power of attorney and took charge of things, with disastrous results. Do you remember Conor? You said when you met him once that he was a slimy little creep, and you were quite right—he has put Lady Betty into a home and now seems to be selling up the whole estate.

In fact, he’s sold our cottage already, but though it was sad to leave it I am ready to have a change of scene and a new job. Meanwhile, Dana—you remember her from the Pleasurefields camping site?—is letting me live in one of her static caravans rent free, which is very kind of her. I’m making a special cushion as a thank-you.

Don’t worry, I packed up everything in your room very carefully, and the contents of the cottage are stored in the next-door caravan. I can stay until they open up again in March, but I don’t suppose I will be here very long. There are one or two nice-looking jobs advertised in The Lady magazine, with accommodation included, so I’ve written off with my totally impressive CV. You can’t say I haven’t had a lifetime’s experience of looking after ancestral piles, even if I’ve only ever really been a glorified cleaner-cum-tour guide.

I’ll let you know when I hear anything and hope to have a lovely new home for you to come back to when you return.

Love, Mum xxx

Who was I fooling? Lucy would be on the phone to me two minutes after she got the letter…which was why, I suppose, I was taking the cowardly way out and posting her the news.

I hoped, by the time she got hold of me, to have a new job and a new life lined up somewhere else. The applications lay on the table, ready to post except for stamps—and then I suddenly remembered it was the post office’s half-day and the clock was hurtling towards twelve.

Leaping up, I dragged on my jacket and flung open the door—then teetered perilously on the brink, gazing down into a pair of eyes of a truly celestial blue, but even colder than the caravan. Missing my footing entirely, I fell down the two metal steps into the surprised arms of an angry angel.

Maybe Anya was right after all, I thought, as he fielded me neatly—except that angels are presumably asexual, while this one was undoubtedly male, even if his short, ruffled hair was of corniest gold. He smelled heavenly too, and expensive. I think it was the same aftershave that Conor used, at about a million pounds a molecule, but it smelled so much better on my visitor.

He set me back on my feet, stared down at me in a puzzled sort of way, then said, ‘I’m looking for Sophy Winter—I was told she was staying here.’

‘She is—you’ve found her.’

‘You’re Sophy Winter?’

‘Well, I was last time I checked in the mirror,’ I said tartly.

‘But you can’t be! You don’t look like—’ he began, then broke off to give me a comprehensive once-over, checking off my minus points on some mental list: dark hair—check; hazel eyes—check; unfashionably generous hourglass figure—check; supermarket jeans and jumble-sale jumper—check. Number of Winter attributes scored: nil.

‘Right…’ he said doubtfully, ‘then you must have been expecting me. I’m your cousin, Jack—Jack Lewis.’

‘But I haven’t got any cousins,’ I protested. I certainly didn’t recall any…and surely even my mother would have mentioned them if I had.

‘I’m a very distant cousin and since I didn’t go to live at Winter’s End until shortly after you and your mother had left, you wouldn’t remember me. But I’m sure you’ve heard of me?’

‘No I haven’t,’ I began—and then the full import of what he had just said sank in, shaking me to the core. I exclaimed incredulously, ‘What do you mean, you lived at Winter’s End?’

I’d always imagined Winter’s End and Grandfather and the twin aunts and the little dogs and everything just going on for ever, like a scene securely enclosed in a snowglobe. Even if I could never get back into that closed world again, at least I had been able to take it out and give it a shake occasionally…But now it seemed that this stranger had almost immediately taken my place there!

He misread my amazement as suspicious disbelief and flushed crossly. ‘If you must know, my mother was your grandfather’s cousin and we lived in New Zealand. She died when I was five, and when my father remarried I was sent back home.’

‘Oh,’ I said uncertainly, because despite his hair not having the true red-gold Winter tint he did have a look of my mother, now I came to consider it—or how she would have looked in a rage, if she’d ever had one. While ‘feckless’ and ‘stoned’ would have been the two words that summed my mother up best, she was good-natured to the point where it was a serious handicap in life. ‘But why are you here? And why did you think I would be expecting you?’

I must have sounded as genuinely bewildered as I felt for the anger in his eyes slowly thawed and was replaced by something like speculation. ‘You mean you don’t know anything about me? And you haven’t heard the news yet?’

‘No! And what news?’

‘That William Winter is dead, for a start,’ he said bluntly.

‘Grandfather’s dead?’ Things seemed to blur dizzily around me and I sank down onto the top step of the caravan.

‘Dead for months. And while I, as the last male descendant of the Winters, get the title, I don’t suppose you will be surprised to learn that he left Winter’s End and everything else to you.’

My vision cleared and I looked up to see that he was eyeing me narrowly.

‘W-Winter’s End? Me? You’re mad or…or there’s some mistake!’ I stammered. ‘He’s only seen me once since we left, and he didn’t seem to like me any more then than he did when I was a little girl!’

‘Once?’ It must have been obvious that I was telling the truth, for his expression slowly altered to a rueful smile of singular and quite dazzling charm, exuding such warmth that, despite my state of numb shock, I found myself returning it.

‘Sorry, I seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I’ve made all the wrong assumptions! What on earth must you think of me? Look, let’s start again, shall we?’ He took my hands and pulled me to my feet. ‘Sophy, I’m delighted to meet you at last!’

Then, enfolding me in his arms, he kissed me on each cheek before taking my hands again and stepping back to look at me with what appeared to be genuine admiration.

But do not think I was entirely inactive during this embrace—no, I was actively inert and acquiescent. I hadn’t had my hands on such a gorgeous man within living memory, even one with a dodgy temper who had just told me things I didn’t want to hear—and some I couldn’t believe.

You try dating in a small village, while juggling a low-paid and exhausting job and turning your hobby into a little business on the side, all under the critical and jealous eyes of your daughter. None of my potential suitors had made it past first base. If I actually managed to find a babysitter and got out of the house with a man, you could bet your bottom dollar Lucy would be running a high fever or throwing out interesting symptoms before I reached the end of the street.

And I hadn’t had much more luck since she went off to university. All the men in my age bracket seemed to be looking for skinny young blondes. That, or they had a serious impediment they forgot to mention, like a wife.

So now, enfolded in softest cashmere and anaesthetised by Amouage Gold Pour Homme, if I had any conscious thought at all it was along the lines of, Yes! Bring it on!

Ten minutes later we were sitting in my icebox of a caravan drinking coffee and talking like old friends.

‘So you see,’ Jack was explaining, ‘we didn’t even know old William had found you until the will was read. He’d tried and failed to discover where you and your mother were in the past, of course. Then when your mother…’ he searched for a tactful phrase, ‘when your mother was brought home, he tried again to trace you—but on the wrong side of the Atlantic, since we assumed you would have been in America with her. After that we thought he’d given up, until we discovered he’d secretly left you Winter’s End and,’ he shrugged and smiled charmingly, ‘we thought you must have finally got in touch with him and managed to persuade him into leaving you everything.’

‘No, he traced me through an advert for cushions I put in a magazine, and a few months ago he simply turned up out of the blue. And although it was lovely to know he’d never stopped trying to find me, I don’t know why he bothered, because he spent most of the time lecturing me about where I’d gone wrong in life and which decisions I could have made better. He’d hired a private eye to dig into my past, so he even knew things I’d forgotten. He didn’t look much different from how I remembered him, either…except he seemed frailer and his hair was white, of course.’

I looked back at my early memories of him: a tall figure with the Winter pale red-gold hair, bright blue eyes and the beard of a biblical prophet. (The only one of those attributes I don’t regret not inheriting is the beard.)

‘So that’s the only time you saw him?’ Jack asked, accepting another refill but declining anything to eat. I’d laid out before him everything I had in the way of refreshments—two cherry-topped coconut pyramids and a carob-covered rice cake—but going by his expression, I don’t think he recognised them as food.

I took the rice cake myself, the pyramids, crumbly and sticky, being a bit hard to eat neatly in company. ‘Yes, he just turned up one afternoon on my one day off—but of course the private eye would have told him when I’d be in. Lucy was home and she is so defensive that she and Grandfather spent most of the time trying to score points off each other.’ I shuddered. ‘They actually seemed to enjoy it, but I hate arguments and fights. He didn’t suggest we visit Winter’s End, either—he said it was too late and would just stir things up.’

At the time that had hurt and I had wondered why he had gone to the trouble of finding us at all, but then he had added that he wasn’t in the best of health and had just wanted to assure himself that we were all right.

Which we were, of course—totally penniless, but all right.

‘Who’s Lucy?’ Jack asked.

‘My daughter. She’s twenty-two, and out in Japan teaching English for a year…at least, I hope it’s only a year, because I miss her terribly.’ I cupped my hands around my own mug and stared down into it. ‘But you did say that Grandfather left me Winter’s End, didn’t you? I didn’t imagine that? Only I’m sure you can’t be right because—I mean—why on earth would he? It’s too incredible to be true! And in any case, surely I would have been told about it by now if he had?’

‘You haven’t, because the solicitor had strict instructions from my uncle to wait until the estate was settled before contacting you—or telling the family where you were. He knew there would be a fuss because, you see, I was brought up expecting to take on Winter’s End as the next legitimate heir…even if you turned up again, which of course you didn’t. But it wasn’t entailed on the next male descendant, so he was free to leave the estate to who he liked.’

‘So, why did he do it?’ I asked, ignoring this slur on my birth.

‘My uncle and I didn’t see eye to eye about some things: he just couldn’t understand modern business methods, for a start. And he’d been draining the money that should have gone to keep the house in good repair into his garden restoration schemes instead, but when I remonstrated with him, he flew right off the handle.’

‘So when the will was read you naturally assumed I’d schemed to get him to leave Winter’s End to me?’

‘Yes—sorry about that! But you can understand how I felt, can’t you? The old man must have been senile to do such a thing—I love the place and I’d grown up believing it would one day be mine, that’s what made me so unreasonably angry. As soon as I managed to find out where you lived I thought I’d come up here and make you an offer for Winter’s End, but temper got the better of me!’

‘Make me an offer?’ I’d started to be convinced I was in some strange dream and would wake up again any minute. ‘You mean, you want me to sell Winter’s End to you?’

‘Yes, just that. I could challenge the will because William was clearly unhinged when he wrote it—but this way seems more civilised.’ He leaned forward and took my hand in his, looking down into my eyes in a way that made the caravan seem suddenly very much warmer. ‘Listen, Sophy, it’s the only practical thing you can do, because I’m afraid you’ve inherited a total white elephant and all the liabilities that go with it. Winter’s End is falling down and has been for years, because of all the income being diverted into the garden restoration. He even took out a bank loan against the house to fund the final stages. It’s got wet rot, dry rot, woodworm…you name it, and it’s got it. And there aren’t even any major assets you could sell off. There was one decent painting, a Stubbs, but William arranged for it to go to the nation in lieu of death duties.’

Despite the mesmerising effect his nearness and those devastating blue eyes were having on me, it occurred to me that Grandfather seemed to have had it all worked out—not the actions of a senile man.

‘But you still want Winter’s End?’ I asked him curiously.

‘Yes, it’s my family home, after all, where I was brought up…I love it. And I’m a property developer, a very successful one, so I know what needs to be done and I can afford to do it.’

‘I understand. I was just starting to feel the same way about my cottage, even though it didn’t belong to me.’

He looked seriously at me, his eyes frank and earnest: ‘Please let me buy it back, Sophy! I’ll even pay well over the market value—how about that? It can’t mean anything to you, can it, since you left it when you were a small child? And I don’t suppose you could afford the upkeep, anyway.’

I said slowly, ‘No, I—no, how can it mean anything to me? I was eight when I last saw it.’

‘Liar!’ said a voice in my head—Alys’s voice, tenuous and far away, as if speaking down a very bad telephone line, but instantly familiar to me even after all these years.

Alys, are you back again?

But if she was, she was now silent. Maybe my subconscious had simply ascribed her voice to my innermost thoughts? For of course I did long for Winter’s End—but the Winter’s End of my childhood, before Jack took my place and everything changed—and there was no way back to that.

‘You could come and visit whenever you liked anyway,’ he offered, with another one of those glorious smiles. ‘We’re family, aren’t we? And now I’ve found you, I’ve no intention of letting you get away again!’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘You know, it’s so ironic! I was waiting for an angel to come to the rescue—but now it’s too late. Only a week ago I’d have jumped at the chance without a second thought, because I could have bought my cottage and not had to move out.’

He looked puzzled, so I explained what had happened, and then he suggested I could still make the new owners of the cottage an offer they couldn’t refuse.

‘I could, but they are rich City types who’ve bought it for a holiday home and I don’t think they would be likely to sell it even at more than its value. They’re busy ripping out every original feature and tossing the cottage’s entrails into a skip, so all the things I loved about it have already gone. If there is one thing my early life has taught me, it’s that when everything changes, you move on—and you can never go back and expect things to be the same.’

Not even at Winter’s End, except in my dreams…

‘But you could buy somewhere new?’ he suggested. ‘I expect you’ve got friends here?’

‘Not really. I know a lot of people but I’ve only got one real friend, from way back, and she tends to move around a lot.’

In fact, she moved around permanently; but Anya, with her dreadlocked red hair and her home made from an old ambulance, was probably a world away from the sort of people my cousin Jack knew.

‘Well, now you’ve got me,’ he said, giving my hand another squeeze and then letting it go. ‘Whatever you decide, we’ll always be friends as well as distant cousins, I hope. But I know, when you have thought it over, you’ll realise that the right thing to do is to sell Winter’s End to me, to keep it in the family.’

‘I expect so, but—well, none of this seems real at all yet. I need time to think—and hear the news officially from a solicitor, too, before it sinks in properly and I start to believe it!’

‘You will. Hobbs is the family solicitor, though he is semi-retired, and he said he was going to call in and see you personally on his way up to Scotland. I expect he’s hard on my heels. Oh, by the way,’ he added casually, ‘I promised Aunt Hebe that I’d ask you if you had the book, and if you have, take it back with me.’

‘The…book?’ I stared at him blankly while the clanging of alarm bells sounded in my head. ‘Do you mean that Victorian children’s book of gruesome stories from the Bible that Aunt Hebe used to read to me? I did take that away with me—still got it, in fact, though I didn’t inflict it on Lucy. It used to give me nightmares, but I was horribly fascinated by it!’

‘No, she meant Alys Blezzard’s household book, a little, really ancient notebook of recipes. It’s a priceless bit of family history, and it’s been missing since your mother ran off. They just sort of assumed she took it with her.’

I shook my head. ‘No, sorry. Mum told me all about Alys—she liked the idea that she was descended from a family notorious for witchcraft—but she never mentioned any book.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t among her things?’ he pressed me. ‘It’s quite an heirloom, so Hebe’s always been upset that it’s missing.’

‘She didn’t leave a lot of possessions behind when she went to America, so I’d have noticed something like that.’

‘And she wouldn’t have taken it with her?’

‘No, I’m sure she didn’t. I helped her decide what to take and did the packing. We had to buy a suitcase especially, because we didn’t think her old carpetbag would stand up to aeroplane baggage handlers.’

‘Then Aunt Hebe will be disappointed!’ He stood and pulled out a slim gold case from his pocket. ‘Look, I’ll have to be off now, but here’s my card—ring me when you’ve seen Hobbs and had a think about my offer. Selling Winter’s End is the only sensible option, you know…and remember, whatever anyone says, I love the place and only want the best for it.’

‘OK,’ I said, slightly puzzled, and he put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze. He seemed a very hands-on kind of person, when he wasn’t miffed. But I understood how he felt about Winter’s End because I, too, had loved my little cottage.

‘And at least you have inherited something I, a mere female, can’t—the title,’ I pointed out. ‘Sir Jack!’

‘Very true. And of course there is a long family tradition of intermarriage in the family, especially when a girl is the heiress…much like now, I suppose,’ he said, with a teasing smile. ‘Keeps the title and the property together.’

‘I—yes, I suppose it does,’ I agreed, slightly taken aback.

‘Oh, Sir Jack, this is so sudden!’ he said in a mock-modest falsetto, and I laughed.

‘But seriously, Sophy, I don’t intend letting you go out of my life five minutes after I’ve found you, whatever you decide,’ he said, and kissed me again before he left, this time in a less than cousinly way. But that’s OK—he is something less than a cousin, after all.

After he’d gone everything seemed a bit leached of colour and lifeless, including me. I drank about a gallon of Rescue Remedy, then went out to the VW and fetched a wooden box from the ingenious special hiding place that one of my mother’s friends had made for it (and her stash) long ago.

It was rectangular, quite deep and surprisingly heavy, and when I opened the lid the delicious aroma of ancient books wafted out. I should know that smell, I’ve dusted libraries full of them in my time. Anyway, I adore books. That’s where I acquired most of my education. The scent of old leather bindings promised escape into another, comforting world, much as the scent of roses once reassured me that Winter’s End still existed just as I left it.

Carefully I lifted out A Little Child’s Warning: A Treasury of Bible Stories with its faded gilt edges and the cover depiction of a small child praying, eyes cast up to heaven, but my icy hands fumbled and almost dropped the book.

A positive cascade of pressed roses fell out, with the papery whispering of old ghosts.