A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!. Trisha Ashley

lines in a colouring book.

      Joy, who I remembered had passed herself off as a member of the upper classes at hotels and then absconded without paying, was small, quiet, well-spoken and pleasant. The word that best described her was grey: grey hair, grey clothes and grey eyes.

      I wanted to linger over the dusty racks of card and crepe, old-fashioned paper scraps of Santas and cheeky cherubs; the foil stickers, tinsel edging and curling festoons of ribbon.

      It all looked a lot more exciting than the finished boxes, which were, it has to be said, rather cheap and tacky-looking and old-fashioned in a bad, not retro, way.

      ‘There are three large storage rooms here at the back,’ Mercy said, remorselessly detaching me from a box of old scraps I was rummaging in and urging me on. ‘Apart from the first one, which has the doors to the loading area at the back, I can’t say they’re really used any more, and goodness knows what’s in them. They could do with a good clear-out.’

      She switched on a dim light, revealing a trio of adjoining rooms running right across the back of the building, full of racks and shelves jam-packed with shapes so furred with dust it was impossible to see what they were.

      ‘We’ve always kept a few boxes of each kind of cracker we’ve produced – there were lots of varieties at one time. But now we only have two, Happy Family crackers and the Marwood’s Magical ones. The latter have little harmless jokes and tricks in them.’

      ‘Mmm …’ I said non-committally, because the ones I’d seen out in the workshop hadn’t looked terribly exciting.

      ‘So, that’s the extent of the operation now,’ Mercy said finally, taking me out of the further room onto the mill floor again, though this area under the mezzanine level was entirely empty.

      We looked into the extensive attached outbuildings, the rooms bare except from a sifting of soft dust and the occasional packing case, apart from one that was fitted out as a sort of staff room, with a kettle, small fridge and more of the tweedy armchairs like the ones in the reception area. One of the side doors was fitted with a new-looking cat-flap.

      ‘I don’t know where the cats have gone,’ Mercy said, but the two resident moggies silently appeared as we began to retrace our steps into the mill.

      ‘This is Ginger, obviously,’ she said, stooping to stroke them, ‘and here’s Bing. Lillian feeds them, because she’s very fond of cats.’

      The cats, perhaps bored and in need of a diversion, trailed us as we said our goodbyes and headed back towards the house … only to stop dead when we got to the bridge and they spotted the large, dark and menacing form of Pye, still sitting on the far end like a monstrous gargoyle, awaiting our return.

      There was a confrontation of silent stares. With his strange, odd-coloured eyes, Pye did staring very well. It seemed to unnerve the other two, at any rate, but the final straw came when he slowly rose, puffed himself out hugely and began a slow advance.

      They backed away, one paw at a time … then suddenly, their nerve broke and they turned and fled back towards the mill.

      ‘You big bully,’ I chided him, but he just made his strange ‘Pfft!’ noise and stalked regally past me towards home.

      ‘Funny old pussycat,’ Mercy said to him fondly. Then she added, with her usual sunny optimism, ‘I’m sure they will all soon be the best of friends! Come along: I think we’ve earned our lunch.’

      Time had flown by and suddenly I realised what the strange feeling in my stomach was: hunger!

       Chapter 12: Christmas Lists

       Q: What do you get if you eat Christmas decorations?

       A: Tinselitis!

      Mercy had a few calls to make and emails to send and told me to help myself to whatever I fancied for lunch in the kitchen and she would make herself something when she’d finished.

      ‘Breakfast and lunch are always whatever comes to hand, and Silas won’t join us – he has become addicted to meals from a service that brings frozen food and Job will have popped one into the microwave in his kitchenette, though he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself. Truth to be told, I think he prefers his ready meals to my home cooking!’

      ‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ I said.

      ‘No, but a family should eat together at least once a day, that’s so important. Besides, I can’t let him turn into a complete hermit.’

      I made myself a cheese sandwich and followed it with a crunchy apple from the fruit bowl, and Mercy, when she came down again, opened a tin of pea and ham soup.

      ‘Well, we’d better go and look at Randal’s proposals, hadn’t we?’ she said with her inexhaustible energy, once she’d finished chasing the last bit of soup round the bowl with a hunk of bread. ‘Do you feel any ideas of your own are forming yet, now you’ve seen the lay of the land, as it were?’ she asked hopefully.

      ‘I do, actually,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about it while I ate my sandwich.’

      ‘There, I knew your clever, artistic mind would come up with something!’

      We went through to the library where Mercy opened a drawer in a mahogany desk and pulled out a large manila envelope.

      ‘These are the original plans Randal had drawn up. He emailed me copies to Malawi.’

      She spread the papers and plans out on the desk top and I studied them. They were much as she’d already described, but with more detail.

      ‘Hmm … I think he was right about opening the mill to the public and his idea of a café on the mezzanine floor is inspired,’ I said.

      ‘I don’t see why anyone would come to an old mill,’ Mercy objected.

      ‘But in the last few years lots of old mills have opened as tourist attractions, usually with craft workshops and that kind of thing,’ I told her. ‘People will go anywhere for a day out, especially if there’s a café.’

      ‘So, you consider his ideas have some merit?’

      ‘Definitely, though I think he’d be missing a trick by replacing the cracker factory with more craft units or shops, because it could be the central attraction. Visitors would love to watch them being made and then have the opportunity to buy them right afterwards.’

      ‘But surely crackers are just a Christmas thing and visitors would be seasonal?’

      ‘Not at all – they’d come all the year round, especially if there was one of those Christmas shops too, selling not only the crackers but everything from baubles to fake trees.’

      ‘Well, I never!’ she said. ‘Christmas all year!’

      ‘The cracker factory hardly takes up half the mill floor, leaving plenty of room for a Christmas shop. And the customers could see down into the workshop from the café, if it’s on the mezzanine.’

      I sketched out a rough plan on a piece of notepaper. ‘See – the visitors come through the front door into the lobby, where they can pick up a free leaflet giving them information about the attractions on offer. You might have to upgrade the loos there; I don’t know what they’re like,’ I added. ‘You’ll certainly need a disabled one somewhere and a ramp up to the front door.’

      Mercy nodded, jotting it down. She’d pulled out a reporter’s notebook and appeared to have started a list.

      ‘While we’re on the subject of access, a small lift could be fitted to take customers up to the café, too – climbing all those stairs isn’t going to be for everybody.’

      ‘Very true, dear,’ she said, making another