A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!. Trisha Ashley
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just show Tabitha her rooms and then call you into the kitchen when dinner’s ready to dish out. There’s no point in setting the dining table just for the three of us.’
I picked up my bags again and followed Mercy through another door into a small dining parlour and on into a big kitchen with an outside door equipped with a cat-flap. Pye, who had elected to follow us, was a large cat and looked at it dubiously before sticking his head through to see whether what was on the other side was worth the effort.
‘Should you let him go out right away?’ asked Mercy. ‘Perhaps we should keep him in for a day or two, so that he knows this is his new home? Or put butter on his paws?’
‘Please, don’t even attempt that,’ I begged her. ‘And he won’t go far from me, because we’re sort of joined at the hip, even though he’s mad at me right now because he thinks I abandoned him.’
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she said doubtfully as the rest of Pye squeezed out into the night like black ectoplasm. ‘Come on, let’s just put your bags in your room and then you can unpack and settle in properly later.’
‘Yes, the tagging people could turn up at any minute, too. They said they’d be here between five and seven and it’s well past five now.’
From the back of the kitchen a short passage led past a pantry, scullery and a cloakroom to a tiny, square parlour furnished and decorated in Victorian style, except for a new electric fire in the grate. The boxes containing my worldly belongings – and, I hoped, Pye’s litter tray, bowls and other necessities – were piled against one wall, along with the small yellow velvet nursing chair that was the one piece of furniture I’d not parted with after Mum died.
‘The chair looks very well in here, doesn’t it?’ said Mercy. ‘We managed to squeeze all your belongings into the back of the car quite comfortably. And through here is the bedroom – not palatial, but in the days when the family had a cook-housekeeper, having her own plumbed washbasin was the pinnacle of luxury. I’m told she was the envy even of the housekeepers in the local big houses.’
It was indeed a small room, containing a single brass bedstead covered in a fluffy modern duvet, a chest of drawers with a clouded mirror on top and a narrow wardrobe. The walls had been papered in a leafy William Morris design and an oval braided rag rug sat like a faded Technicolor island on the green lino.
‘All Victorian mod cons, as you see,’ Mercy said, indicating the solid washbasin in the corner. ‘And the cloakroom is just down the passage, too. I hope you’ll be comfortable here – the central heating does run this far, but it’s not terribly efficient,’ she added. Then she opened what I’d thought to be a cupboard door in the passage right outside the parlour, revealing a small spiral stone staircase.
‘This takes you up to the west wing, where the door directly ahead is a bathroom. My room is further along the landing, in the central part of the house, and Silas has a small suite downstairs in the east wing, behind the library, so he doesn’t have to tackle the stairs.’
‘Right,’ I said, wondering if her energy ever flagged, because mine certainly had!
I think she noticed I was tiring, because she said, ‘Not to worry, I’ll give you the guided tour in the morning, when you’re rested – and here comes Pussy again.’
Pye stalked down the passage towards us and then head-butted my legs meaningfully.
‘I think he’s hungry.’
‘Like Silas,’ she said.
‘I hope there are some tins of catfood in one of those boxes along with his dishes and stuff,’ I said.
‘No matter for tonight, for I’m sure I can find a tin of tuna in the cupboard, if he would like that, and I have lots of odd saucers he can use until you find his own crockery.’
She made it sound as if he always travelled with a complete Minton dinner service, but I agreed that he would love tuna.
‘Did you say he was called Pie?’
‘Yes, but spelled P-Y-E, short for Pyewacket. It’s from an old film called Bell, Book and Candle, which my mother loved.’
Too late, I thought that perhaps Quakers might not be that keen on films about witchcraft, but she said cheerfully enough, ‘Oh, I remember that one – hokum, but amusing. I used to be very fond of going to the cinema when I was a young thing. Now, come along with me, Pye, while Tabitha freshens up. Join us in the drawing room when you’re ready, dear. I’ll pop the nice hotpot I made earlier in a slow oven to reheat and we can have dinner as soon as these Tag People have been.’
She made them sound like a tribe.
When I arrived back at the drawing room, it was to find two strangers there and Mercy explaining to Silas what they were going to do.
‘I did tell you earlier, Silas,’ she pointed out. ‘I knew you weren’t listening.’
‘I’d have heard if you’d told me someone was going to come and put a tag on the new girl’s leg, as if she was a pigeon,’ he said testily. ‘Load of nonsense.’
‘It’s so they know if Tabitha has left the house at night,’ Mercy said.
‘Yes, I can’t leave between seven at night and seven in the morning, until the tag is removed in a couple of months – isn’t that right?’ I turned for corroboration from the newcomers, a man and a woman, and they said it was.
The tagging was soon done, but the layout of the house gave them problems, it being very much wider than it was deep. My tag must allow me to walk from one end to the other – but then, it would also allow me to leave the house and walk a short way. But when Mercy pointed out that I still couldn’t get beyond the moat, they thought that would be acceptable.
Mercy invited them to stay to dinner and seemed genuinely disappointed when they said they couldn’t, even waving them off from the front door as if they had been old friends she hadn’t wanted to part with. I deduced that she extended this amicable spirit to most people she met, because although the taggers (whose names I hadn’t managed to catch) were nice, they weren’t that nice. I mean, I’ve never indulged in an ankle bracelet because I think they’re naff, and now I had a super-naff semi-permanent plastic one.
In our absence, Silas had hobbled through to the kitchen and was now seated at one end of the long pine table, with a checked napkin tucked into his blue lambswool jumper. Pye was sitting on a Windsor chair by the big Aga stove, though I noticed there was a utilitarian electric one nearby, too.
It was a strangely homely meal. Mercy dished out bowls of rich brown casserole in which bobbed dumplings and chunks of beef and carrots, served along with a basket of warm and floury soft bread rolls, and we set to. I discovered I was hungry. I’d forgotten what that felt like.
We followed that with cheese and biscuits and the remains of a big sherry trifle, into which I nearly slumped, since by then I was so dazed with food and exhaustion my backbone seemed to be wilting.
‘Here, take the coffee tray through to the drawing room, Tabby, and sit with Silas, while I pop everything in the dishwasher,’ Mercy suggested.
‘I’ll help you first,’ I said.
‘No, no, you’re too tired tonight. Go and pour the coffee and I’ll be with you in a minute. We keep early hours here, so you can get off to bed as soon as we’ve had it.’
‘I’ll be off to my bed straight after the coffee, too,’ Silas agreed.
‘I know you like to watch the news on the TV first,’ Mercy said, then explained to me, ‘I’m afraid Silas has the only TV in the house. I don’t bother, because I like to listen to the radio. But I could get a little one for your room, if you missed it.’
‘No, I don’t mind in the least. I like to read, or work on my papercuts, in the evening.’
Pye came into the drawing room with