Dedication

      For my son, Robin Ashley,

       with love.

      Contents

      Title page

      Dedication

      Prologue: December 2005, Winter of Discontent

      Chapter 1: Old Prune

      Chapter 2: All Fudge

      Chapter 3: Bittersweet

      Chapter 4: Mushrooming

      Chapter 5: Sweet Mysteries

      Chapter 6: Driven Off

      Chapter 7: Loose Nuts

      Chapter 8: Well Braced

      Chapter 9: Soul Food

      Chapter 10: Cornish Mist

      Chapter 11: Popped Corks

      Chapter 12: Just Desserts

      Chapter 13: Raspberries

      Chapter 14: Slightly Curdled

      Chapter 15: Drink Me

      Chapter 16: Unrehearsed Entrances

      Chapter 17: Tart

      Chapter 18: Simmering Gently

      Chapter 19: Stirring

      Chapter 20: Freshly Minted

      Chapter 21: Slightly Stewed

      Chapter 22: Given the Bird

      Chapter 23: Put Out

      Chapter 24: Flambé

      Chapter 25: Crème de Coeur

      Chapter 26: Crackers

      Chapter 27: Charmed

      Chapter 28: Cold Snap

      Chapter 29: Clueless

      Chapter 30: Unscheduled Appearances

      Chapter 31: Middlemoss Marchpane

      Chapter 32: Hoar Frost

      Chapter 33: Well Stirred

      Forget the Jimmy Choos, Chocolate Shoes And Wedding Blues Is the Only Accessory You Need For Spring 2012…

      Twelve Days of Christmas

      About the Author

      Other Books by the Same Author

      Copyright

       About the Publisher

      The Magic of Christmas is loosely based on one of my earlier novels, Sweet Nothings, with the addition of a lot of new material. I felt there was so much more to say about the village of Middlemoss and all the characters who live there, especially Lizzy and her friends in the Christmas Pudding Circle, the annual Boxing Day Mystery Play and the vanishing squirrels!

      Prologue: December 2005, Winter of Discontent

      The venue for the last Middlemoss Christmas Pudding Circle meeting of the year (which was usually more of an excuse for a party) had been switched to Perseverance Cottage because Lizzy’s thirteen-year-old son had come down with what she’d thought was flu and she wanted to keep an eye on him.

      Later, looking back on the events of that day, it seemed to Lizzy that one minute she’d been sitting at the big pine table in her kitchen, wearing a paper hat and happily debating the rival merits of fondant icing over royal with the other four members of the CPC, and the next she was frantically snatching at the card listing the symptoms of meningitis, which she kept pinned to her notice board, and shouting to Annie, her best friend, to ring for an ambulance.

      At the hospital, Jasper changed frighteningly fast from a big, gruff teenager to a pale, sick child, and Lizzy tried urgently to contact her husband, Tom, who was away on one of his alleged business trips. But as usual he didn’t answer his mobile and was nowhere to be found, so all she could do was leave messages in the usual places … and several unusual ones.

      The hospital radio was softly warbling on about decking the halls with boughs of holly, but Lizzy, filled with a volatile mixture of desperate maternal fear and anger, wanted to deck her selfish, unreliable husband.

      It was just as well that Annie was such a tower of strength in an emergency! During that first long day while Lizzy anxiously waited for the antibiotics to kick in, her friend popped in and out between jobs for the pet-sitting agency she ran, visited Perseverance Cottage to feed the poultry and let out Lizzy’s dog, and reassured Tom’s elderly relatives up at the Hall that she would keep them updated with every change in Jasper’s condition.

      Then in the evening she returned to the hospital and she and Lizzy spent the long night watches sitting together while Jasper slept, reminiscing in hushed voices about when they first met and became best friends at boarding school. Lizzy had begun spending the holidays with Annie’s family in the vicarage at Middlemoss, where she was quickly absorbed into the Vane household, much to the relief of the elderly bachelor uncle who was her guardian – and it was also in Middlemoss that she’d met Tom and Nick Pharamond, cousins who were often farmed out with relatives up at the Hall in the school holidays.

      Nick was the eldest: quiet, serious and appearing to prefer the company of the cook at Pharamond Hall to anyone else’s. Tom, who was really only nominally a Pharamond, his mother having married into the family, was the opposite: mercurial, charming and gregarious, though he’d had a quick temper and a sharp tongue, even then …

      Nick was the first to fly the nest. Having inherited the Pharamond cooking gene in spades, it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone except his staid stockbroker father when he took off around the world at eighteen, tastebuds and recipe notebook at the ready. Now he was chief cookery writer for a leading Sunday newspaper and author of numerous books and articles, while Tom, in contrast, had dropped out of university and gravitated down to the part of Cornwall where many of his more useless friends had also ended up.

      When he set eyes on Lizzy again after a long interval, it was across a buffet table at a large party in London, where he was a guest, and where she and Annie, who’d done a French cookery course after school, were helping with the catering. He fell suddenly in love with her, a passion that also embraced her rose-tinted dreams of a self-sufficient existence in the country.

      Somehow she’d forgotten about his dark good looks, his overwhelming charm and his quirky sense of humour … Before she’d had time to think – or to remember his quick temper, occasional sarcasms and how short-lived his enthusiasms had been in the past – he’d swept her off her feet, into a registry office and down to the isolated hovel he was renting in Cornwall.

      ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she said to Annie, as Jasper stirred restlessly in his hospital bed. ‘You tried your best to warn me not to rush into it.’

      ‘You fell in love and so did Tom: there was no stopping you,’ Annie said. ‘Besides, you were addicted to all those books about living in Cornish cottages, with donkeys and daffodils and stuff.’

      ‘True,’ Lizzy agreed wryly, ‘and it was blissful that first summer – until the reality of living in a dank, dilapidated cottage in winter with a newborn baby set in, especially after Tom started vanishing for days on end without telling me when and where he was going.’

      ‘He was worse after Jasper was born, wasn’t he? I think he resented not being the centre of attention,’ Annie said.