The Magic of Christmas. Trisha Ashley

you up on that offer, but very temporarily. I’ll still need to make a home for him to come back to. I’ll have to get a job stacking supermarket shelves, so I can rent somewhere. I’m not really qualified to do anything else.’

      ‘Then what about Posh Pet-sitters? Business is expanding hugely since I added general pet-feeding and care to the dog-walking, and I could do with an assistant.’

      Annie set up Posh Pet-sitters several years ago with a loan from her parents, and business seemed to be building up nicely, due to the patronage of several of the actors from the long-running drama Cotton Common, set in a turn-of-the-century Lancashire factory town, who have suddenly ‘discovered’ the three villages that comprise the Mosses.

      Where they led, other minor celebrities followed, since although off the beaten track, we’re within commuting distance of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and the M6, and in pretty countryside just where the last beacon-topped hills slowly subside into the fertile farmland that runs west to the coast.

      Some of the actors live in the new walled and gated estate of swish detached houses in Mossrow, but others have snapped up whatever has appeared on the market, from flats in the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory, to old cottages and farms.

      ‘Did you go and see Ritch Rainford yesterday?’ I asked, suddenly remembering how excited Annie had been at getting a call from the singer-turned-actor who plays Seth Steele, the ruggedly handsome mill owner in Cotton Common. (All that alliteration must have been too much for the producers of the series to resist!)

      He’s bought the old vicarage where Annie’s family used to live, a large and rambling Victorian building with a brick-walled garden, in severe need of TLC and loads of cash. (The new vicar is now housed in an unpretentious bungalow next to the church.)

      Annie’s pleasantly homely face, framed in a glossy pudding-bowl bob of copper hair, took on an unusually rapt – almost holy – expression and her blue-grey eyes went misty. ‘Oh, yes! He’s …’ She stopped, apparently lost for superlatives.

      ‘Sexy as dark chocolate?’ I suggested. ‘Toothsomely rum truffle?’

      ‘Just – wonderful,’ she said simply. ‘He has such charisma, it was as though a … a golden light was shining all around him.’

      ‘Bloody hell! That sounds more like finding all the silver charms in your slice of Christmas pudding at once!’ I stared at her, but she was lost in a trance.

      ‘Lizzy, he’s so kind, too! When I explained that I used to live at the vicarage, he took me around and showed me all the improvements he’s made, and told me what else he was going to do. Then he just handed me a set of keys to the house so he could call me up any time to go and exercise or feed his dog.’

      ‘Well, if your clients didn’t do that, you wouldn’t be able to get in,’ I said drily. ‘What sort of dog does he have?’

      ‘A white bull terrier bitch called Flo – very good-natured, though I might have to be careful around other dogs.’

      ‘And what’s the new vicar like?’ I asked, but she hadn’t noticed, being full of Ritch Rainford to the point where her bedazzled eyes couldn’t really take in another man. However, a crush on a handsome actor was not likely to get her anywhere.

      Annie was once engaged, but was jilted with her feet practically on the carpeted church aisle. Since then she had safely confined her affections to unsuitable – and unattainable – actors.

      ‘I’ve heard he’s single and has red hair,’ I said encouragingly since, despite her own copper locks, she has a weakness for redheaded men.

      ‘He hasn’t got red hair, he’s blond!’ she protested indignantly, and I saw that she was still thinking of Ritch Rainford. Perhaps I ought to watch Cotton Common to see what all the excitement was about.

      Eventually Annie ran me home, since I wanted to be there when Jasper returned. I was by then attired in one of her voluminous cardigans – a bilious green, with loosely attached knitted pink roses – to hide the dried but dubious-looking stains on my T-shirt.

      She said she was going to come in with me and give Tom a piece of her mind, which would not have gone down well, but luckily Tom, his van and some of his clothes had vanished. He’d also locked me out; but not only did Annie have our key on her ring, I kept one hidden under a flower pot, so that wasn’t a problem.

      ‘Looks like he’s gone away again,’ I said gratefully. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

      Of course he hadn’t thought to feed the hens, who had put themselves to bed in disgust, or the quail, so Annie helped me to shut everything up safely for the night.

      As we walked back to the cottage Uncle Roly Pharamond’s gamekeeper, Caz Naylor, sidled out of a small outbuilding and, with a brief salute, flitted away through the shadows towards the woods behind the cottage.

      He’s a foxy-looking young man, with dark auburn hair, evasive amber eyes and a tendency to address me, on the rare occasions when he speaks, as ‘our Lizzy’, thus acknowledging a distant relationship that all the Naylors in the area seemed to know about from the minute I set foot in the place for the first time at the age of eleven.

      Annie looked startled: ‘Wasn’t that Caz? What’s he doing here?’

      ‘I let him have the use of the old chest freezer in there. Since I cut down on the amount of stuff I grow, I don’t need it,’ I said, for I’d been slowly running things down ready for the moment that I knew was fast approaching, when I must leave Perseverance Cottage. ‘He comes and goes as he pleases.’

      She shook her head. ‘All the Naylors are strange …’

      ‘But some are stranger than others? My mother was a Naylor too, don’t forget! Descendant of some distant ancestor who made good in Liverpool, in the cargo shipping line – which at least explains why I’m such a daughter of the soil and feel so firmly rooted here.’

      She smiled. ‘I expect Roly told him to keep an eye on things after that animal rights group started targeting you.’

      ‘More likely he’s keeping an eye on his freezer,’ I said, though it was true that the only evidence of ARG (as they are known locally) I’d spotted around the place lately were the occasional bits of gaffer tape where a banner had been ripped off my car or the barn. ‘Perhaps they just aren’t bothering with me that much. I mean, I can see why they might target Unks and Caz, especially since no one knows what Caz does with all those grey squirrels he traps, but why me? I’m not battery farming anything.’

      All my fowl lived long, happy and mainly useless lives, except for an excess of male quail and the occasional unwanted cockerel, which Caz dispatched for me with expert efficiency.

      ‘I expect they just include you in with the Pharamond estate, since your cottage is part of it,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not personal.’

      We cleaned up the mess in the kitchen as well as we could and then Annie left, since it was clear enough that Tom wasn’t coming back that night, at least – and I thanked heaven for small mercies.

      ‘What happened to your face, Mum?’ Jasper asked, getting his first good look at me in the light of the kitchen, when a friend dropped him home later. ‘That looks like a bruise coming up. And why are you wearing one of Auntie Annie’s horrible cardigans?’

      ‘Your father dropped a plate and a piece hit me,’ I explained. ‘Annie loaned me the cardigan to cover up the gravy stains on my T-shirt and I forgot to give it back when she went home.’

      He looked at the dent and new marks on the plastered kitchen wall and said, ‘He dropped a plate horizontally?’ in that smart-lipped way teenage boys have.

      ‘Yes, he was practising discus throwing,’ I said, and he gave me a look but let the subject drop.

      He didn’t ask where his father was. But then, at that time, he never did.

      Chapter