Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

The New Year’s Eve audience, well primed by a good roast lamb dinner and a drop or two of sherry, were prepared to watch three rank amateurs and one professional actor massacre scenes from the Bard with equanimity.

In fact, I wished I could have watched it instead of acted in it, because it must have been hilariously funny, what with me spending most of the time looking like a waif in Jude’s enormous greatcoat, Coco a skeletal Bride of Frankenstein and Jude, resigned but unable to resist slightly hamming it up, in his blue velvet cloak and imaginary moustache.

Michael played it straight, but gave a muted performance, probably to stop the rest of us looking quite so awful: but if so, it didn’t really work, especially in the parts that hinged on Sebastian and Viola looking identical: ‘An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures: which is Sebastian?’

You couldn’t have found two people more unlike than Michael and me if you tried, so I couldn’t blame the snort of laughter that came from Guy’s corner of the room at that point.

However, the rest of the audience applauded each scene enthusiastically, though that might have had something to do with the sherry.

Michael spoke his final lines very well, considering he had the distraction of Coco draped adoringly around him by this point, and then it was Jude’s turn to declare his love for me — such as it was:

‘Cesario, come — for so you shall be, while you are a man; but, when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.’

To my mind, that line’s about as romantic as Prince Charles saying, when asked if he was in love with Diana, ‘Yes — whatever love means,’ even if Jude did accompany the words with a look of smouldering promise. I think I may have underestimated his acting abilities as well as his artistic ones.

There was another round of applause and Old Nan dabbed her eyes with a pink tissue and said sentimentally that it was terribly moving and she loved a happy ending. ‘And I’ll knit you and Jude a nice Afghan for your wedding present,’ she declared, beaming at us.

‘We’re not really getting married, it was just in the play, Nan,’ I explained.

‘I don’t hold with all this living together out of wedlock,’ she said severely. ‘Don’t think you’re getting my Afghan until you tie the knot with this poor lass, Jude Martland!’

‘All right, Nan,’ he said. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘Interesting play, isn’t it?’ the vicar said, allowing Guy to refill his sherry glass. ‘Nothing is what it seems right until the end and it must have been even more confusing in Shakespeare’s day, when the female parts were played by boys.’

‘Yes, so a boy was playing a girl, pretending to be a boy!’

‘That’s right. It all harks back to mumming and ancient pagan cross-dressing fertility rituals, like the Man-Woman character at the Revels, as you will see.’

‘If I’m still here,’ I said. ‘It does seem to be slowly thawing, so I might have left.’

‘Of course you’ll be here,’ Old Nan snapped tetchily, waking suddenly from a half-doze in time to catch this. ‘Where else would you be?’

Quite possibly in a smart house in London cooking falafels, if Ellen got her way, I thought!

Guy ran Old Nan and Richard home again soon after that. To my surprise, no-one seemed interested in staying up until midnight to see the New Year in since, as Noël explained when I asked, Twelfth Night had always been Little Mumming’s night of transition from the old year to the new, and that was not likely ever to change.

Everyone went to bed except Jude, who followed me into the kitchen where I was about to wash the sherry glasses.

I thought he was going to let Merlin out and take a last look at the horses, but instead he came and turned me round by the shoulders, staring down at me as if my face was a slightly untrust-worthy map he was trying to read, to find a destination he was not sure he wanted to reach.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked uneasily.

‘It’s what Richard was saying: because you’re not really who you say you are either, are you, Holly?’

‘What do you mean? Of course I’m Holly Brown!’ I hedged.

‘Oh, I’m sure that’s your name , but I’ve suspected practically from the first moment I set eyes on you that you were related to us, probably on the wrong side of the blanket. Given Ned’s nature and the way you seemed to steer the conversation onto him at every opportunity, he seemed the likeliest candidate. Then when I saw that photograph of him on your bedside table, it all clicked into place and I realised that your grandmother must have been the—’

‘“Little mill girl” Noël told us about, that Ned got into trouble?’ I finished bitterly. ‘Yes, she was, but she wasn’t a mill girl, she was a nurse.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he apologised, though it was hardly his fault. ‘What happened to her?’

‘It’s all in her diaries, the ones I’ve been reading since I got here — how he seduced her and then, when she got pregnant, dumped her and ran off home. She found out he’d been engaged to someone else all the time,’ I told him, ‘and then her parents disowned her too, and she was so desperate she even thought about taking her own life.’

‘Oh, God, that’s terrible!’ he said.

‘Yes, but then the local Strange Baptist minister came to her rescue and married her — my grandfather.’

He ran a distracted hand through his dark hair, so that it stood on end. ‘I had no idea! It doesn’t reflect very well on my Uncle Ned — or my family — does it?’

‘No, nobody seemed to care what happened to her.’

‘Did she ever know he’d been killed?’

‘Yes, but only because she saw it in the local newspaper. It must have been a horrible way to find out.’

‘The family really forgot about her and the baby, they never offered her any money for support? I find that so hard to believe!’

‘So far as I’ve got in the journal, she’d heard nothing from them — and anyway, she wouldn’t have wanted their money even if she hadn’t married my grandfather. And if you think I came here hoping to ingratiate myself with the family to get some kind of financial gain out of the connection, then you’re quite wrong!’ I added indignantly.

‘The thought did cross my mind at first,’ he admitted, ‘but not for long. I mean, half the time you didn’t even seem to like us, especially Guy — which was when I twigged that he was supposed to be just like Ned and started to put two and two together.’

‘Believe it or not, I had no idea I was related to you, until I started to read Gran’s diaries.’

‘You mean, you’d never even heard of the Martlands before?’

‘Not until a couple of weeks before I came here.’ I described Gran’s last words. ‘Then Ellen told me the name of the family she wanted me to house-sit for and I thought it was just one of those strange coincidences: there seemed little chance your Martlands could have any connection to my gran. In fact, I was more than half-expecting the lost love of her life to have been one of the doctors at the hospital!’

‘I can see why you feel bitter about what happened, but Ned always sounded weak rather than bad, so perhaps if he hadn’t been killed, he would have supported her?’ he suggested.

‘I don’t think so and nor did Gran, or she wouldn’t have felt so abandoned that she thought of killing herself.’

‘Well, thank God she didn’t,’ he said and then added, frowning, ‘and I suppose this makes us cousins of a kind, though not first cousins, which is probably just as well. .’