Trisha Ashley - Wish Upon a Star

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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First Published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2013

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2013

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847562784

Ebook Edition Wish Upon A Star © 2013 ISBN: 9780007535156

Version: 2019-04-04

This book is dedicated to all my wonderful readers – my stars to steer by.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native

Chapter 1: A Star is Born

Chapter 2: The Night Watch

Chapter 3: Lardy Cake

Chapter 4: Christmas Pudding

Chapter 5: Falling Star

Chapter 6: Hasty Pudding

Jago

Chapter 7: The Cult of Perfection

Chapter 8: The Happy Macaroon

Jago

Chapter 9: The Blue Dog

Jago

Chapter 10: Sweet Perfection

Aimee

Chapter 11: Flaky

Chapter 12: Fruitful

Jago

Chapter 13: Sad Cake

Chapter 14: Stella’s Stars

Chapter 15: What the Dickens?

Jago

Chapter 16: Puffball

Chapter 17: Honeyed

Jago

Chapter 18: Pinker’s End

Chapter 19: Gone, but Not Forgotten

Chapter 20: The Proof of the Pudding

Jago

Chapter 21: Is There Honey Still for Tea?

Jago

Chapter 22: Princess Possibilities

Chapter 23: Mincemeat Mess

Jago

Chapter 24: Tart

Aimee

Chapter 25: Horse Feathers

Chapter 26: Jumbled

Aimee

Chapter 27: Nearer, My God, to Thee

Chapter 28: Taking Stock

Chapter 29: Nesting

Chapter 30: Plagued

Chapter 31: Cooking Up a Storm

Chapter 32: A Random Lot

Chapter 33: Up the Pole

Aimee

Chapter 34: Babes in the Wood

Chapter 35: Fêted

Aimee

Chapter 36: Surprise Package

Chapter 37: Nuts

Chapter 38: On the Edge

Jago

Chapter 39: To Infinity and Beyond

Jago

Chapter 40: Flying Pigs

Jago

Chapter 41: Boston Beans

Jago

Chapter 42: Piece of Cake

Chapter 43: Celestial Bliss

Recipes, Wish Upon a Star, Trisha Ashley

Acknowledgements

Read on for an exclusive extract of Trisha’s next novel Every Woman for Herself

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

It was early evening in the village of Sticklepond and the bar of the Falling Star was almost empty, apart from a couple of locals who’d dropped in on their way home from work, and the shoe salesman in the corner who had booked a room for the night and was now studying racing form in the paper as if his life depended on it.

As Florrie Snowball slapped a hot, limp, microwaved sausage roll and a pint of Middlemoss Brown Ale in front of Pete Ormerod, who farmed up by the edge of the Winter’s End estate, she said, ‘I hear there’s an Almond moved back into the village.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed, poking the middle of the sausage roll with the end of a gnarled finger as if unsure what might pop out. ‘News gets around fast.’

‘Someone saw her – there’s no mistaking an Almond, and anyway, we’ve seen Martha come and go over the years, right up till her mother died, haven’t we? Not that she didn’t keep herself to herself, just like her parents did.’

‘They had cause enough, didn’t they?’

‘I’m not one to think the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, poor innocent mites, and only us old ones remember the whole story now,’ Florrie snapped. ‘And anyway, Martha’s parents were no more than cousins, so it wasn’t really anything to do with them.’

‘They still felt the shame, though,’ Pete Ormerod said heavily, ‘and went off to Australia with the rest of the family, even if they were back within the year.’

‘Well, you did all right out of it, didn’t you?’ she pointed out tartly. ‘Buying Badger’s Bolt farm gave you twice as much land and they were in such a hurry to get away, I bet you paid less than it was worth.’

‘It was enough to buy them a sheep holding in Australia and that’s what they wanted – though the sheep were what Jacob couldn’t abide. But there was never a better cattle man than Jacob Almond and I was more than glad to give him his old job and cottage back.’

‘I always thought the whole clan of them upping sticks and emigrating was a bit of an over-reaction myself,’ Florrie said. ‘Came of them being Strange Baptists from that chapel that was over in Ormskirk, I expect. The young ones these days’d think nothing of what happened – they see worse on the soaps every night. So now Martha’s back living in the very same cottage she grew up in, it’s surely time to forgive and forget.’

‘Not exactly the same cottage,’ Pete said through a mouthful of sausage roll, ‘the last people who had it built a big garden room at the back with a bedroom over it and tarted the place up no end.’

‘Well, you should know, you were the one who sold it off to them in the first place. And it’s just as well it’s been done up, because it was no more than a hovel before, and after being married to that London doctor Martha must be used to something different – and come to think of it, she’s not an Almond now, she’s Martha Weston.’

‘She’ll always be an Almond as far as some of us are concerned, there’s no getting away from it,’ Pete said, shaking his head, and seeing he was set in that conviction she said no more, though she did severely admonish him for having the bad manners to talk with his mouth full, before leaving him to the rest of his sausage roll and pint.

It had been sheer serendipity that the house where she was born should have come up for sale just as Martha Weston had started her search for a new home. Now, unpacking books in the almost unrecognisable cottage, she neither knew nor cared whether the locals were talking about her or not – she was just glad to be back where she felt she belonged.

Although she didn’t know all the ins and outs of it, Martha was well aware that one of her relatives had somehow blotted his copybook and been expunged from the family records in the dim and distant past (‘Never mention Uncle Esau to your father,’ her mother had always said), an event that had precipitated the entire Almond clan taking flight like a flock of startled birds.