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

like that! The postman would bring good news—a reprieve. Maybe I’d won the lottery (despite never buying a ticket) or the Pools. Or perhaps Conor had metamorphosed overnight from a cockroach into a human being and, repentant, he would refuse to sell the cottage and instead beg me to stay there rent free for ever (no droit de seigneur included).

      My best friend, Anya, who believes our guardian angels watch over us twenty-four seven, would say that she heard the hushing whisper of mine’s wings as she (or should that be it?) rushed to the rescue.

      I only hoped my very own Personal Celestial Being wouldn’t collide on the doorstep with the cavalry or there would be feathers everywhere.

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