Trisha Ashley - A Winter’s Tale - A festive winter read from the bestselling Queen of Christmas romance

TRISHA ASHLEY

A Winter’s Tale

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.

AVON

A division of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2008

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2008

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847560148

Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007328918

Version: 2018-06-21

For Margaret James, a friend for all seasons.

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue-The Dream

Chapter One-There Must Be an Angel

Chapter Two-Distant Connections

Chapter Three-Diamond Cut

Chapter Four-The Moving Mollusc

Chapter Five-Pleached Walks

Chapter Six-Unravelled

Chapter Seven-Cold Embers

Chapter Eight-Sovereign Remedies

Chapter Nine-Lost in Translation

Chapter Ten-Clipped Edges

Chapter Eleven-O Mother, Where Art Thou?

Chapter Twelve-Foxed

Chapter Thirteen-Grave Affairs

Chapter Fourteen-Twisted Wires

Chapter Fifteen-Boxing

Chapter Sixteen-Polite Expressions

Chapter Seventeen-Pressed

Chapter Eighteen-Friendly Relations

Chapter Nineteen-Suitable for Bedding

Chapter Twenty-Having Kittens

Chapter Twenty-one-Ghost Lace

Chapter Twenty-two-On the Rails

Chapter Twenty-three-Lost Treasures

Chapter Twenty-four-Stunned

Chapter Twenty-five-Follies

Chapter Twenty-six-First Impressions

Chapter Twenty-seven-Infernal Knots

Chapter Twenty-eight-Vixens

Chapter Twenty-nine-Battle Positions

Chapter Thirty-Rival Attractions

Chapter Thirty-one-Lord of Misrule

Chapter Thirty-two-Touched

Chapter Thirty-three-Dodgy Dealings

Chapter Thirty-four-Revelations

Chapter Thirty-five-Much Ado

Chapter Thirty-six-Endpapers

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Mother, what did you foretell, when you held my hand so tightly and wept, then said that the future could not be altered and I must go to the manor of Wynter’s End in your stead?

From the journal of Alys Bezzard, 1580

No house as ancient as Winter’s End was ever entirely silent: even at eight years old, Sophy Winter knew that. Crouched on the floor of the gallery, she felt like Jonah sitting in the belly of the whale, surrounded by creaks and sighing, feeling, rather than hearing, the heavy heartbeat of a distant long-case clock and the sharply flatulent rattling of the water pipes.

She peered through the wooden banisters, down into the depths of the stone-flagged Great Hall where her grand—father’s King Charles spaniels lay in a tangled, snoring, comatose heap on a rag rug before the log fire.

Nothing stirred in the darker shadows beyond. Satisfied, she ran to the end of the gallery and climbed onto a curved stair rail that seemed to have been designed for little fingers to grip; then, clinging on for dear life, she slid with an exhilarating, rushing swoosh! of cold air, right to the bottom.

Slowing down was always tricky. Fetching up with a thump against a newel post bearing a carved cherub’s head, she lost her grip and would have fallen off, had she not been caught and rather roughly set on her feet.

In the ensuing silence, a moth-eaten stag’s head dropped off the wall and landed with a clatter, glassy eyes vacantly staring at the intricately plastered ceiling.

Sophy looked up and her impish, round-cheeked face, framed in dark curls, not unlike the carved cherub’s behind her, became instantly serious. Grandfather didn’t like her to use the front stairs, let alone slide down the banisters. In fact, Grandfather didn’t seem to like her at all, and it was somehow Mummy’s fault—and where was Mummy? If Sophy hadn’t been sitting on the gallery floor watching for her for so long, she wouldn’t have been tempted to slide down the banisters in the first place.

Grandfather stared back at her, ferocious bushy brows drawn together over a formidable nose and an arrested expression in his eyes. ‘A Pharamond, that’s who your father was,’ he said slowly, ‘from over Middlemoss way. Why didn’t I see that before? But which one…?’

Nervously Sophy began slowly to back away, ready to make a run for the safety of the kitchen wing.

‘Hebe!’ he shouted suddenly, making Sophy jump and all the spaniels start awake and rush over, yapping.

‘What are you bellowing for? You sound like a cross between the Last Trump and a cow in labour,’ Great-Aunt Hebe snapped, appearing suddenly round the carved screen. Her fine, pale, red-gold hair stood out around her head in a flossy halo and she brandished a large wooden spoon that dripped a glutinous splat onto the flagged floor. One of the spaniels licked it tentatively: you never knew quite what Hebe was cooking up.

Sophy gave a little nervous giggle—Grandfather was loud enough to wake the dead slumbering in the graveyard, and since that was her least favourite of Aunt Hebe’s biblical bedtime stories she found the idea slightly worrying…

‘Aunt Hebe,’ she said urgently, running to her and grabbing a handful of slightly tacky cotton apron, ‘the dead people won’t climb out and walk round the graveyard in their bones, will they?’

‘No, they’ll all wait for the end of the world,’ Hebe said. ‘It was just a figure of speech.’

She looked over her head at her brother. ‘What’s up?’

‘The child was sliding down the banisters again.’

‘Well, she is a child. You did it, I did it, Ottie did it…we all did it! Now, let me get back to my stillroom. Come on, Sophy, you can give me a hand.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Take a look at her and tell me which family round here has black, curly hair? I don’t know why I didn’t realise it before: she’s a Pharamond.’

‘What, from the Mosses?’ Hebe held Sophy away and stared at her. ‘What nonsense! There’s been the occasional dark-haired Winters ever since Alys Blezzard married into the family in the sixteenth century—and anyway, all the Pharamonds I’ve ever met have had dark blue eyes, not hazel, and narrow, aquiline noses. If anything, Sophy’s nose turns up.’