Twelve Days of Christmas by Trisha Ashley Read Free Book Online

with details of jobs.
    ‘There’s never been anything of value to lock away in Old Place anyway,’ Sharon was saying scathingly, though I noticed a wistful look on her face like a child at a sweetshop window. ‘Though Jude’s that famous now, they’re saying that even his little drawings of horses for those weird sculptures of his can fetch hundreds of pounds.’ She nodded through the glass door. ‘And he just crumples them up and tosses them in that waste-paper basket!’
    ‘Well, that’s up to him, isn’t it? Presumably he wasn’t happy with them.’
    ‘You’d think he’d leave the basket for me to empty, but no, he takes them outside and puts them in the garden incinerator!’ She obviously bitterly regretted this potential source of income going up in flames.
    ‘That does seem a little excessive,’ I agreed, amused.
    Apart from a couple of china and linen cupboards, the only other door from the passage was to a little garden hall with French doors leading outside. The trug of garden tools on the bench looked as if they hadn’t been touched for half a century and were waiting for Sleeping Beauty to wake up, don the worn leather gauntlets, and start briskly hacking back the brambles.
    ‘Is that a walled garden out there?’ I asked, peering through the gathering gloom.
    ‘Yes, though no-one bothers with most of it since Mrs Martland died . . .’ She screwed up her face in recollection. ‘That would be ten years ago now, thereabouts.’
    ‘Is there a gardener?’
    ‘An old bloke called Henry comes and grows vegetables in part of it, though he’s supposed to have retired. He lives down in Little Mumming, in the almshouses – those three funny little cottages near the bridge.’
    ‘Oh yes, I noticed those. Victorian Gothic.’
    ‘I wouldn’t know, I hate old houses,’ she said, which I could tell by the state of this one.
    There was a little cloakroom off the hall, with a splendid Victorian blue and white porcelain toilet depicting Windsor Castle inside the bowl, and I was just thinking that peeing on one of the Queen’s residences must always have seemed a little lese-majesty when Sharon said impatiently, ‘Come on: I need to get off home,’ and gave me a dig in the back.
    We went upstairs by a grander flight of stairs than that in the sitting room, with a stairlift folded back against the wall.
    ‘That was put in for Jude’s dad,’ she said, hurrying me past a lot of not very good family portraits of fair, soulful women and dark, watchful men, when I would have lingered. ‘Six bedrooms if you count the old nursery and the little room off it, plus there’s two more in the staff wing.’
    She opened and closed doors, allowing me tantalising glimpses of faded grandeur, including one four-poster bed. The nursery, up a further stair, was lovely, with a white-painted wooden bed with a heart cut out in the headboard, a scrap-screen and a big rocking horse.
    ‘There are more rooms on this floor, but they’re shut up and not used any more. The heating doesn’t go up that far.’
    ‘Oh yes, I noticed there were radiators – all mod cons! I’m impressed.’
    ‘I wouldn’t get excited, it never gets hot enough to do more than keep the chill off the place.’ She clattered back down the stairs and hared off along the landing. ‘Two bathrooms, though Jude’s had an en suite shower put into his bedroom since he inherited.’
    ‘That isn’t bad for a house of this size,’ I said. ‘There’s the downstairs cloakroom, too.’
    ‘And a little bathroom in the staff wing, where you’re sleeping. This is the family wing, of course – your room’s in the other, where the old couple who used to look after the place lived.’
    Evidently house-sitters ranked with servants in Jude Martland’s eyes – but so long as I was warm and comfortable, I didn’t mind where my room was.
    The bedrooms either opened off the corridor, or the oakfloored balcony, where I stopped to gaze down at the huge