Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked uneasily.

‘It’s what Richard was saying: because you’re not really who you say you are either, are you, Holly?’

‘What do you mean? Of course I’m Holly Brown!’ I hedged.

‘Oh, I’m sure that’s your name, but I’ve suspected practically from the first moment I set eyes on you that you were related to us, probably on the wrong side of the blanket. Given Ned’s nature and the way you seemed to steer the conversation onto him at every opportunity, he seemed the likeliest candidate. Then when I saw that photograph of him on your bedside table, it all clicked into place and I realised that your grandmother must have been the—’

‘“Little mill girl” Noël told us about, that Ned got into trouble?’ I finished bitterly. ‘Yes, she was, but she wasn’t a mill girl, she was a nurse.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he apologised, though it was hardly his fault. ‘What happened to her?’

‘It’s all in her diaries, the ones I’ve been reading since I got here — how he seduced her and then, when she got pregnant, dumped her and ran off home. She found out he’d been engaged to someone else all the time,’ I told him, ‘and then her parents disowned her too, and she was so desperate she even thought about taking her own life.’

‘Oh, God, that’s terrible!’ he said.

‘Yes, but then the local Strange Baptist minister came to her rescue and married her — my grandfather.’

He ran a distracted hand through his dark hair, so that it stood on end. ‘I had no idea! It doesn’t reflect very well on my Uncle Ned — or my family — does it?’

‘No, nobody seemed to care what happened to her.’

‘Did she ever know he’d been killed?’

‘Yes, but only because she saw it in the local newspaper. It must have been a horrible way to find out.’

‘The family really forgot about her and the baby, they never offered her any money for support? I find that so hard to believe!’

‘So far as I’ve got in the journal, she’d heard nothing from them — and anyway, she wouldn’t have wanted their money even if she hadn’t married my grandfather. And if you think I came here hoping to ingratiate myself with the family to get some kind of financial gain out of the connection, then you’re quite wrong!’ I added indignantly.

‘The thought did cross my mind at first,’ he admitted, ‘but not for long. I mean, half the time you didn’t even seem to like us, especially Guy — which was when I twigged that he was supposed to be just like Ned and started to put two and two together.’

‘Believe it or not, I had no idea I was related to you, until I started to read Gran’s diaries.’

‘You mean, you’d never even heard of the Martlands before?’

‘Not until a couple of weeks before I came here.’ I described Gran’s last words. ‘Then Ellen told me the name of the family she wanted me to house-sit for and I thought it was just one of those strange coincidences: there seemed little chance your Martlands could have any connection to my gran. In fact, I was more than half-expecting the lost love of her life to have been one of the doctors at the hospital!’

‘I can see why you feel bitter about what happened, but Ned always sounded weak rather than bad, so perhaps if he hadn’t been killed, he would have supported her?’ he suggested.

‘I don’t think so and nor did Gran, or she wouldn’t have felt so abandoned that she thought of killing herself.’

‘Well, thank God she didn’t,’ he said and then added, frowning, ‘and I suppose this makes us cousins of a kind, though not first cousins, which is probably just as well. .’

His hands on my shoulders tightened their grip and, seeing his intent, I said hastily, ‘Too close for kissing.’

‘Have you never heard of kissing cousins?’ he said, raising one eyebrow and giving me that brief, intimate and spine-sapping smile.

‘I don’t think the saying means that kind of kissing,’ I said, resolutely releasing myself and stepping back. ‘We’re still too close for that, even if our connection is illegitimate — and anyway, I’m not going to go the way of my grandmother, falling for a Martland!’

‘But I’m not remotely like my Uncle Ned!’ he said, looking slightly hurt. ‘And I don’t think the relationship is close enough to matter — if we don’t want it to.’

‘Look, Jude, there may be a bit of physical attraction between us, but you’re really not my type, and I’m certainly not yours, so how closely related we are isn’t ever going to be an issue. And no-one else needs to know about this: in a couple of days I’ll be gone as if I was never here.’

‘Yes they do — Noël needs to know,’ he said stubbornly. ‘He’ll be delighted and so will Tilda and Becca, not to mention Jess, because they’re fond of you already. I don’t think you’ll manage to escape us so easily, after that.’

‘You’re not really going to tell him!’

‘Just watch me!’ he said, then looked down at me thoughtfully and asked quietly: ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about, Holly. . in confidence?’

‘No, nothing at all!’ I snapped and he seemed strangely disappointed.

What on earth else can he have expected me to confess to? Being the lost heir of the Romanovs, perhaps?

I escaped to bed after that, where I tried to distract myself from the scene in the kitchen by reading a bit more of the journal, though I wasn’t expecting any more revelations: I knew the outcome.

Granny seemed to have stoically thrown herself into the role of minister’s wife and if there was some talk in the congregation about the sudden wedding and the disparity in their ages, they seemed to have accepted it.

I was just nodding over another long, long passage about Gran’s undeserved good fortune and the mercy of God when I heard a loud yell from Michael’s room next door, followed by a loud crash and a more feminine scream and exclamations.

I leapt out of bed and rushed onto the landing and then paused with my hand on the doorknob to his room, suddenly wondering if I was interrupting something I shouldn’t be!

Jude, who was closest, arrived from the other direction and I could see from his expression he’d got the same idea — and that he thought I was coming out of Michael’s room, not going in!

‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought I heard a scream.’

‘You did, but it wasn’t me.’

Michael’s door swung open and Coco stormed out, the near-transparent folds of her negligee clutched around her.

‘Forget it!’ she said viciously over one shoulder.

‘Coco?’ I heard Michael say, before she slammed the door behind her, cutting him off.

‘What?’ she said, catching sight of us. ‘Look, I was sleepwalking, all right?’ And she brushed past Jude and vanished.

He gave me one of his more unfathomable looks and followed her.

When Jude came down this morning he didn’t mention the Coco episode — and neither did I. I was hoping that, on reflection, he would keep his discovery about who I really was to himself, too.

When he came back in from the stables I was just making a stuffing for the pike, to an old English recipe I’d found in one of my books. I’d never cooked one before, but waste not, want not. I’d run out of sausage meat for the stuffing, but had defrosted some of the last of the excellent pork sausages from the freezer and removed the contents, which would do just as well.

Jude must have been warm from mucking out, because he pulled his jumper off and the T-shirt underneath came with it. . I was still staring at him, slightly mesmerised by the play of muscles across his broad back, when he turned and caught me.

‘The thaw seems to have well and truly set in,’ I said quickly, concentrating my attention back on what I was doing, though when I risked another glance up he was giving me that intent look from his deep-set eyes under a furrowed brow again, the slightly suspicious one that should have been dispelled now he knew about Gran.

‘Holly, I hope you’ll remember what I said last night: if you want to confide in someone, you can trust me.’

‘Mmm. .’ I said, totally puzzled. Confide what, exactly? He already knew all my secrets — even, now, that I fancied him!

‘What on earth is that you’re stuffing?’ he asked in a totally different voice.

‘It’s a pike Becca caught last year and shoved into the bottom of your freezer. I strongly believe that if you kill living creatures, then you should eat them. So we are.’

‘I didn’t even know it was in there!’

‘That’s because you never delve deeper than the surface layer of convenience foods.’

‘True. By the way, I’ll be back for lunch today,’ he said, which was a surprise. Perhaps inspiration had flagged?

After breakfast I went out in the snow again with Guy, Jess and Michael, because as Jess pointed out, it might not be around much longer. She was right, too, because it was now subsiding faster than an exuberant soufflé that had overreached itself.

Coco had come down late and in a mood of silent sulkiness, which I put down to a combination of post-performance boredom and the result of whatever happened — or didn’t happen — between her and Michael last night. She was certainly giving him the cold shoulder.