A Winter’s Tale (29 page)

‘But I hardly know you yet, Jack,’ I began, feeling rushed, flushed and confused.

He laid one finger over my lips. (His other hand was running lightly up and down my spine in a rather distracting way.) ‘Come on, Sophy, you know you feel just the way I do, admit it! And you said yourself that William should have left Winter’s End to me.’

‘Did I?’ I couldn’t remember saying that, but I suppose I might have done—
before
I came back and fell under the house’s spell again.

‘Yes you did, and all you have to do to make things right is sign the place over to me. All your problems will then be mine to resolve, with no need to turn the place into some kind of Shakespearean theme park. In fact, we won’t need to open to the public at all, this can just be our home.’

My legs might have gone a bit weak while he was kissing me, but my brain, such as it was, hadn’t entirely turned to mush. Sign over my inheritance? Cancel all my lovely, exciting plans?

At this not entirely inopportune moment the air stirred icily around me in a now-familiar way, and I heard a thready whisper: ‘
Don’t do it—Winter’s End belongs to you and only you.
’

I stared around wildly, but there was no sign of Alys.

‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Jack asked tenderly. ‘Are you shivering?’ He took off his jacket and slung it around my shoulders, the silk lining still warm from his body.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, wondering if this time I had only imagined those words of warning, that chilly presence? I shivered, but this time not from the thrill of Jack’s nearness. In fact, I discovered to my astonishment that although I found him very attractive, the idea of marrying him held no charm whatsoever—if that was what he (and not just Hebe) had in mind. I mean, even if I had been as mad
about him as he evidently thought I was, did I want to spend my life watching him forget my existence every time Mel Christopher, or any other beautiful woman, walked into the room? Or spend even another minute with his boring, hideous friends? I don’t
think
so.

Anyway, I was getting really excited about
my
plans for the estate!

I stole a glance at him: he was looking as icily angry as he had the first time we’d met, like an irate Lucifer who turned out to be my guardian angel instead, though actually Alys’s shade seems to have taken on that role now.

‘Jack, can’t you see that your solution would put
me
in the position you say you find unbearable?’ I pointed out gently.

Letting me go abruptly, he turned to stare out of the window.

‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ I said, miserably aware that I had led him on a bit…or maybe that should be a
lot
, ‘but that’s how I feel. I’m just being
honest
with you.’

Sophy Winter, now eligible for Slut of the Year.

To my relief, when he turned he was smiling again, albeit ruefully. ‘I’ll just have to change your mind then, won’t I? I expect people have been telling stories, prejudicing you against me, that’s what’s making you so cautious. But you
can
trust me—and once you really get to know me you’ll realise we both want the same thing for Winter’s End, and I hope we want each other too. Now, are you going to come and see me off?’

‘
Off?
I thought you were staying for lunch?’ I said, following him downstairs.

‘Afraid I can’t after all. I’m already packed and Jonah should have brought the car round to the front and put my bags into it by now. You’ll have to say goodbye to old Hebe for me.’

I fetched my duffel coat and gave him back his jacket
before we went outside, where the long, lean shape of his sports car was indeed sitting in front of the porch. Beyond it, Seth was leaning over with one large hand braced against a spouting dolphin, picking dead leaves out of the fountain.

There was no escaping Jack’s final, lingering kiss, though this time it did absolutely nothing for me, not even a slight tremble around the kneecaps. This might have had something to do with the fact that Seth watched our embrace rather sardonically—which I know because I kept my eyes open this time.

Still, Jack seemed satisfied enough with my wooden response and drove off, tooting his horn triumphantly. Maybe Obtuse and Optimist are his middle names—but then, he is warm, affectionate, tall, rich, handsome, charming and right out of my league, so why should it ever enter his head that I could refuse him anything he asked?

Chapter Nineteen: Suitable for Bedding

The baby is darker than the Wynters…but so am I, taking after my mother in such things. It was beyond disappointment to them that it was a female child, but already they are planning one day to marry her to her cousin and so the line will go on…

Another Wynter—I think often of my mother’s words and am comforted in my grief and guilt, for surely these things are ordained and the pattern cannot be changed?

From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1581

Seth had gone back to his leaf picking, but I walked round the knot until I was facing him. ‘Was any of that true, what Jack said about the roof?’

He straightened and rubbed his straight nose reflectively. ‘I don’t think so. The house is structurally sound, just shabby and neglected—a fact I seem not to have noticed until you came along. So maybe Ottie’s right about my being blinkered about the garden, after all—only it is so frustratingly close to completion!’

It was a partial capitulation, but I had more important things on my mind at the moment. ‘The house is in a worse state than you think: Jack just showed me a deathwatch beetle grub he found in an old book in the attic and he says it’s rife up there, plus wet rot, dry rot and goodness knows what else.’

‘Does he?’ Seth said sceptically. ‘Strange—I could count the number of times I’ve ever seen Jack voluntarily open a book on the fingers of one hand.’

‘He
said
he found the grub while he was collecting some of his belongings from the attic.’

‘You can take it from me, books weren’t part of them. Look, Sophy, perhaps I’m being a bit unfair to Jack, but I would tend to take anything he says with a pinch of salt. I know he can be very persuasive.’

‘I’m not so easily taken in,’ I said defensively, though I knew I had blushed. Maybe he would think it was the cold air making me pink-cheeked?

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Seth had turned and was looking thoughtfully at the neglected façade. ‘Sir William told me he wanted
you
to have the place, and Lucy after you. The house may be down at heel, grubby and shabby, but he wouldn’t have let it fall into total disrepair, because he loved it—he just loved the garden more.’

‘As you do.’

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

I frowned. ‘So, are you implying Jack brought the grub with him? But surely he wouldn’t do something like that just to scare me into selling Winter’s End to him, especially if he seems to think he can get it for nothing, just by—’ I stopped dead and this time went totally scarlet.

Seth raised one eyebrow. ‘Jonah tells me Jack took one of the Danse du Feu roses to give to you this morning—very romantic.’

‘The snitch.’

‘Come with me to the rose garden,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve been thinking about the Shakespeare angle and I think we could follow it through a bit there…It’s still a work in progress, as you can see. Once William had put in all those beds of shrub roses along the drive, he thought we might
as well go the whole hog and have a rose garden proper. This space wasn’t really doing anything.’

It wasn’t doing much now, either. It still looked rather bare and forlorn. ‘If it makes you feel any happier, I would much rather Jack had left the rose on the bush,’ I said. ‘It must have been the last flower left in the garden.’

‘Just about, though I’ve known the old moss roses to have the odd bud even at Christmas.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I just got some new rose catalogues and when I was flicking through I found a very attractive crimson William Shakespeare
and
there’s a Dark Lady, an Ophelia, a Thisbe, a Falstaff—lots of roses with Shakespeare connotations. And a Sophy’s Rose, too—described as suitable for bedding,’ he added gravely, though I was pretty sure he was laughing at me.

I looked at him suspiciously. ‘There aren’t any Sophys in Shakespeare, are there?’

‘Perhaps not, I can’t think of any—but it would look good in this back border.’

‘A Shakespeare rose garden would be lovely,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘He mentions musk roses too—we ought to have some of those.’

‘Yes, and now would be a good time to order new roses, ready for bare root planting.’

And mean yet more expense. Winter’s End seemed to need constant drip-feeding with money. ‘If you let me have a list of what you want to order, I’ll see what I can do,’ I conceded.

‘I’ve got some short Shakespeare quotes for the wall too. Ottie and I had a brainstorming session,’ he said. ‘Ottie says to tell you she will have them carved as a gift to you and Winter’s End.’

‘That’s very generous of her!’

‘Oh, you can’t fault her generosity and
she
seems to think it’s a good idea. But as soon as the engraving is done, I’ll
need
all
the gardeners back to get that wall rebuilt,’ he added firmly. ‘We can’t start on the last knot and the beds properly until then.’

‘I expect they’ll have finished most of the major tasks I wanted done by then anyway,’ I said. ‘After that I’ll just need them for odd jobs as they crop up.’

He was about to say something—and probably a fairly
terse
something—when a tall, stringy man with a camera in one hand walked through the arch.

‘Hello! I thought I heard voices. Would you by any chance be Sophy Winter?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, I am. But who—’

He whipped up the camera and took several shots in quick succession and then, as Seth started towards him, took to his heels and ran. A motorbike roared into life on the drive a second later.

‘Gone. He must have wheeled it up here, or we’d have heard him,’ Seth said, coming back. ‘You do realise what this means, don’t you?’

‘That you have pathetically desperate paparazzi in Lancashire?’

‘No, that it’s a slow news week in the
Sticklepond and District Gazette
, and you’re about to make the centre spread.’

After that, I made Seth go up to the attics with me to see the evidence of rot and infestation that Jack had pointed out, even though he protested that he was no expert at anything except knots.

‘
And
I was going to go back and change for lunch. Your aunt Hebe will give me the fishy eye if I turn up like this.’

He had a point. He was wearing the usual layers of jumpers that looked as if they had been ravaged by a giant moth and the outermost one was unravelling at the hem. But I dragged him up there anyway.

He walked after me through the attics in silence but, when I pressed him, said that it was odd the way all the places that showed signs of infestation were near a working light bulb. ‘And the woodworm holes are regular, almost as if they’ve been drilled. They’re all new too—there don’t seem to be any old ones nearby—and this powdering of sawdust underneath looks fresh.’

‘Jack said he came up here to get some of his old things, but everything is covered in thick, undisturbed dust, except for my belongings in the first room,’ I said reluctantly. It’s not that I
wanted
galloping woodworm, wet rot and death-watch beetle in the attics, it’s more that I didn’t want Jack to be proved to be so devious as to plant the evidence of them. ‘He was carrying a holdall when he came out too.’

‘To bring out the book in, naturally,’ Seth said drily. ‘I can’t see anything up here that looks as if it belongs to Jack, and if there are any more books, they’re packed away in boxes, not lying about.’

‘Yes, OK,’ I snapped. ‘I think I’ve got the message loud and clear! He
does
want me to sell Winter’s End to him, but you are wrong about his motives because he sees us running it together as a family home.’

‘I see,’ Seth said. ‘But there was no need to bite my nose off for pointing out the obvious. You made me come up here, after all!’

I knew it was unfair of me, but after all, he had made me wonder just how devious Jack was. I didn’t want to believe he was using his considerable amatory technique simply to get me to part with Winter’s End, even though I knew a man like him could have pretty well anyone he wanted…and probably had. No, I was sure Jack was sincere—but that wouldn’t stop the businessman in him trying to get it for less!

It hadn’t worked anyway—the merest suggestion that I
signed over Winter’s End and I went all Gollum, even without Alys putting her oar in. I thought we had reached an impasse in our relationship…

Seth and I were still glaring at each other when the gong rang, so that we arrived for Sunday lunch late, cross and cobwebby.