Page 147 of One More Christmas at the Castle
‘No, though that might not stop him trying.’
Henry came back and said severely, ‘Stop distracting the staff, Xan!’
Xan put mugs of coffee in front of us, then looked dubiously down at the jeans he was wearing. ‘Perhaps I’d better change these for something a bit smarter. Sabine never expects anyone to dress up, even for dinner, but I feel I should make a bit of an effort on Christmas Day.’
‘Yes, we feel the same way, now we’re going to be eating our Christmas dinner with everyone else, but in our case it hadbetter be a quick change just before we start serving it,’ said Henry, who was energetically beating eggs in a large glass bowl.
‘Since I see from her hairstyle that Dido’s in Warrior Princess mode again, I’ll be interested to see what she changes into!’
‘Nothing exciting, and the only thing I’m going to do battle with is the turkey!’
When I suddenly remembered that Olive preferred cream in her morning coffee and took some into the morning room, I found everyone there, except Sophie, tucking in.
‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’ I said generally, and they all chorused greetings in return. Dom, I noticed, was wearing a particularly bright red Christmas jumper with a sparkly reindeer on the front, while Xan, in a soft, loose white open-necked shirt and with one dark lock of hair falling over his forehead, looked exactly like a romantic poet.
‘We’ll have the present opening at ten, in the Great Hall,’ Mrs Powys was decreeing. ‘And you and Henry must be there, too, Dido, even though I’m sure you’ll be very busy this morning. You can slip away for ten minutes.’
‘Of course you can,’ Nancy said, beaming at me. ‘I’ll put on that lovely CD of carols again, Sabine, while we open our presents. But first, right after breakfast, Dom and I are going to help Henry to whip round the bedrooms – and you know I love to be busy, Sabine,’ she added firmly, as Mrs Powys looked about to demur.
‘I could help, too, if you liked?’ Lucy surprisingly offered. Nancy thanked her, but said kindly that they could manage between them this morning and she should continue enjoying her holiday.
‘Shall I put on my Santa suit and hand out the presents?’ suggested Nigel eagerly.
‘Thank you, Nigel, but I don’t think we need trouble you,’ Mrs Powys said, and he looked disappointed for a moment.
Then he brightened again and said gaily, ‘Then Lucy and I will be two little elves and hand the presents out anyway, though of coursemygifts – and yours too, Olive – were edible or drinkable, so went straight to the kitchen.’
‘Everyone’s eating part ofyourgift this morning, Nigel,’ I pointed out. ‘The smoked salmon you brought.’
‘There are still loads of presents under the tree, many of them from me. I think I got carried away at the Christmas fair,’ Nancy confessed, twinkling. ‘So manyinterestingthings.’
Lucy looked gratified and I suspected that her presents to the others would also be more of the same – possibly her own pinked and tasselled bookmarks, or Daphne’s ghastly painted pebbles.
I left Henry in charge and hurried back to the kitchen to get the turkey into the oven.
First, I put a little stuffing under the loose skin of the breast and then laid fat, overlapping rashers of streaky bacon over it, before wrapping it in tinfoil.
When I’d slid it into the hot oven, I laid out a row of kitchen timers on the dresser, the first to be set being the chicken-shaped one for the turkey and then the last, shaped like a Christmas tree, would tell me when the pudding was reheated.
To get everything for each course to the table at once required meticulous planning and timing but I had a lot of experience to call on.
Henry, coming back with some empty serving dishes, said, ‘Sophie has only just put in an appearance and then immediately complained that there was nothing left on the hotplate and suggested you could cook her something fresh, Dido.’
‘In her dreams,’ I said, ticking ‘Put turkey in oven’ off this morning’s list.
‘That’s much what Mrs Powys told her,’ he said with a grin. ‘And that if she wanted hot food she should have been down earlier.’
‘I’ve never seen Sophie eat anything other than a bit of dry toast anyway,’ I said.
‘Me neither. I think she was simply being awkward. Simon had a huge plateful of cooked breakfast and offered to share, but she declined.’
‘Good, because he needs feeding up, poor man,’ I said. ‘I do like to see my food appreciated.’
‘It was. Even Mr Makepeace had a plateful. He said scrambled egg with smoked salmon was his favourite thing, especially when the salmon had been cut into snippets and cooked with the egg, in the way you do it.’
Henry made us both a couple of rounds of cheese on toast and then sat down to have his, with a pot of one of his strange herbal brews.
‘Step one is already accomplished,’ I said, standing up to eat mine. ‘Now I’ll tackle the vegetable mountain!’
