Kate Sedley - The Christmas Wassail

But it was the quantity of jewels adorning her skinny person that commanded attention. Rubies, sapphires and emeralds sparkled in the candlelight and turned her into a veritable rainbow of colour. Every arthritic finger and both thumbs displayed a magnificent ring of heavily chased gold supporting a gemstone the size of a walnut. Diamonds hung in clusters from her earlobes and encircled her neck and wrists, while the front of her silk gauze gown — most unsuitable for both her age and the winter weather — shimmered with silver medallions. If she had had a herald walking before her crying, ‘This is a woman of very great wealth and importance,’ her message could not have been more plainly delivered.

Her steward having conducted her to the head of the congregation, she ostentatiously ignored her brother and his family, taking up a position immediately opposite where she could look right through them as though they didn’t exist. Whispered details of this highly entertaining comedy were passed from front to back of the assembly and resulted in so much inattention that the priest was forced to reprimand us in no uncertain terms and to remind us that it was Our Lord’s Nativity, one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar.

Sir George, it was reported later, had turned scarlet with mortification and rage, and even, after the service, attempted to remonstrate with his sister. This had been a mistake, giving the lady a chance to show yet more disdain by informing him, through her steward, that she had no wish to bandy words with him.

‘Well, I did enjoy that,’ I remarked as we walked home to Small Street, taking Margaret Walker with us for her Christmas dinner. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

‘I wish I could believe you meant the service,’ Adela reproached me, shifting Luke from one arm to the other.

But Margaret only laughed and agreed with me that it had been worth walking the extra distance to St Mary’s for such a piece of unlooked-for entertainment.

‘Of course, Drusilla Marvell will never forgive her brother,’ she added with a chuckle. ‘If she disliked him before — and I may say that they never got on — she hates him now.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

My former mother-in-law laughed. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she promised.

She was as good as her word, but the excellence of the meal, and doing it justice, delayed the story for some while.

We started with plum porridge followed by the capon, roasted on a spit over the fire earlier that morning, between the Shepherds’ Mass and the Mass of the Divine Word, and kept hot in a box of warm hay. It was, admittedly, a very small bird, but Adela made it stretch amongst seven of us without making it too apparent that her portion was smaller than that of anyone else except Adam. Our son, who has always had an extremely sweet tooth, was far more interested in what was to follow, namely frumenty — he loved the spices and honey mixed with the wheat — and a plate of ‘Yule dolls’. He picked out all the currant ‘eyes’, ‘noses’ and ‘buttons’ before eating the little gingerbread figures themselves. A minced pie apiece rounded off the meal, the sweet and savoury combination of fruit and meat making the perfect ending to a repast which otherwise might have left a cloying taste in the mouth.

By this time the three older children were almost asleep, suffering from the effects of an exhausting morning and more food than they were used to, so Adela drove them all upstairs to take another much-needed rest. Even Adam went without a backward glance. She then put Luke, stuffed with plum porridge, down in the large rocking cradle which I had made for our younger son, and she and Margaret carried it into the parlour while I made the three of us a large jug of ‘lamb’s wool’. This, together with the necessary beakers, I took into the parlour after them, and we settled around a fire of logs and branches gathered by myself some days before from the many trees to be found on the downs above the city.

‘Now, Mother-in-law,’ I said, pouring out the ‘lamb’s wool’, ‘tell us about this quarrel between Dame Drusilla and Sir George.’

‘How do you know all these things, Cousin?’ Adela asked admiringly. She was sitting on the window seat, rocking the cradle with one foot and, when not drinking, keeping her hands busy mending a rent in one of Elizabeth’s gowns. (It has always intrigued me how women manage to do several different things at the same time.)

‘My dear child,’ Margaret laughed, ‘I’ve lived in Redcliffe all my life, as you very well know. You lived there yourself until you married that first husband of yours and went off to Hereford with him — something I never approved of, but we’ll say no more about that. You must know what a hotbed of gossip it is! You can’t sneeze without someone calling round to find out if you’re suffering from a rheum. And Drusilla Marvell has lived there longer than I have. In fact, she’s lived in that old house on the waterfront all her life. She was born there, as was her brother. And after he went away to London and then to fight in the French wars, and her parents died, she just stayed on. She’s a very rich woman, you know. Not only did she inherit money from her father, but an uncle — a brother of her mother’s, I believe — who had no children of his own and was very fond of Drusilla when she was young, left her all his fortune. She’s wealthier than Sir George. Who will get her money when she dies — and that can’t be far off, she’s eighty-five now — is a matter of great conjecture in Redcliffe. The rumour is that she favours Cyprian Marvell’s son, James. Certainly, he seems to be the only member of the family she has any time for.’

I immediately found myself thinking of Lady Marvell’s meeting with Briant of Dungarvon. Had she indeed been making arrangements to have her step-grandson abducted and sold into slavery, as I had conjectured, in the hope that with his disappearance her sister-in-law would be forced to leave her fortune elsewhere? But whatever had been her intention, it had gone awry.

I took a gulp of my ‘lamb’s wool’, Adela’s excellent pear and apple cider warming my throat and belly, and wiped away the froth from the roasted apple with the back of my hand.

I addressed Margaret again. ‘You said that Dame Drusilla and her brother never got on.’

She nodded. ‘That’s true. He’s a great deal younger than she is. She was twelve or thereabouts when George was born and had been the only child until then. But naturally the arrival of the much longed-for son very quickly relegated Drusilla to second place in her parents’ affections. Her resentment of him descended rapidly into dislike and, later, into something more akin to hatred.’

‘Natural enough,’ I said, a remark that earned Adela’s instant disapproval. She believed that you should never give in to the baser instincts of your nature.

Margaret, however, merely nodded. ‘Understandable, I agree. But then, of course, relations improved somewhat between them. When he was grown, George went away and was away for some years. When he eventually came back to Bristol, he was married to his first wife, Lydia Carey, and Cyprian had been born. They didn’t return to the family home on Redcliffe Wharf but settled outside the city in that big house in Clifton Manor, close to the great gorge.

‘Now if my memory serves me aright, old Brewer Marvell died the following year and his wife a few months later, leaving Drusilla the sole occupant of what, for some obscure reason, has always been known as Standard House. When I say “sole occupant”,’ she added, ‘I’m not including the army of servants who attend upon Drusilla. She likes to be pampered and to tyrannize over people.’

‘Why did she never marry?’ I asked. ‘I can’t imagine it was for lack of suitors. Not with a fortune the size of hers.’