Page 35 of One More Christmas at the Castle
‘Let me know if there are any difficulties,’ she said, the tone of her voice making it clear that she wasn’t expecting any. ‘Andwhen Maria arrives, tell her to bring me a cup of coffee to the sitting room. I want a word with her before she takes her break until after the New Year.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Henry agreed. ‘She may have already arrived.’
‘Thank you,’ she said dismissively, the audience evidently at an end, and we escaped into the passage, where Plum had nosed his way out of the study and appeared to be waiting for us, our royal escort back to the kitchen.
9
Up the Garden Path
The baize-lined door to the kitchen was propped open with a flat, green glass doorstop that reminded me of a jellyfish and Maria was sitting at the table, dunking gingernuts into a mug of coffee. Plum made a beeline for her and sat by her feet, gazing hopefully up at her.
‘Are you back again?’ she said, breaking off a bit of biscuit for him. ‘He’s only just been in here with Xan –hewanted coffee, but he’s taken it back to the study with him.’
She looked at me over the rim of her mug. ‘He was already here when I arrived and he was using that coffee machine, which must be yours?’
‘It is, but it’s OK, I’ll simply add a couple of boxes of pods to the next supermarket order,’ I said. ‘By the way, Mrs Powys said she’d like you to take her some coffee to the sitting room, Maria, because she wants to see you before you take Christmas off. And since she likes milk in her coffee, why don’t we try her with one of thecafé au laitpods?’
‘We can try and I will blame you if she does not like it,’ she agreed, and when it was ready took it through, returning five minutes later, looking inscrutable.
‘She didn’t spit it out in disgust, then?’ Henry said with a grin, stirring the murky pink contents of his glass teapot with a spoon, so that a hibiscus flower swirled around like a sea creature.
Maria looked at it in a fascinated kind of way, then said, ‘No, she liked it! She told me it reminded her of the breakfast coffee they serve at cafés in France. But I would not try her with whatever you have in that teapot, Henry!’
‘Henry’s herbal teas are an acquired taste and most sane people don’t want to acquire it,’ I said.
‘Some of them are very good for your health,’ Henry protested. ‘Anyway, youlikemy Yogi liquorice tea!’
‘I can keep it down,’ I admitted. ‘I wouldn’t go further than that.’
Maria refused to try Henry’s hell-brew and my offer to make her another cup of coffee, and said, sitting down: ‘The Lady says she thinks you will cope very well with everything and I am not to worry over Christmas, but relax and rest until the New Year. And she gave me my Christmas bonus, so I did not like to say that it was all now getting too much for me and I wished to retire.’
‘It’s difficult,’ Henry said sympathetically, ‘but you’ll have to do what’s best for you and your husband.’
Maria brightened. ‘Andy will be coming home by ambulance after lunch, and I have been up since the early hours to make everything clean and nice for him. And tonight he will have his favourite dinner of haggis with neeps and tatties, followed by Bramley apple tart and custard.’
‘Lovely,’ said Henry kindly, though he’d once said he found the sight of a haggis almost as gross as a black pudding, and I can’t sayImuch fancied either, myself.
‘Last night, I went up and down in the new stairlift the Lady had put in, to make sure it was safe.’
‘I think they’re generally pretty reliable,’ said Henry. ‘If ever you have any kind of problem, day or night, do ring my mobile and I’ll be straight up there.’
‘You can have my number, too,’ I said.
‘Thank you both, that is a relief to me, because there is no one nearby to help me if anything happens. There is only old Ken in one of the cottages. He is a shepherd on a farm nearby, but the rheumatism is bad in his hands now. And the other two cottages are holiday homes and no one comes near them till spring.’
‘It is fairly remote here, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘It must be totally different in summer, with all the tourists and hikers.’
Henry had finished his tea and was now trying to poke the hibiscus flower out of the spout of the teapot, where it had wedged itself like a shy octopus.
Plum, having cadged one more bit of biscuit from me, had vanished, presumably back to his master in the study.
‘Time is getting on and I’m sure you need to get back home soon,’ I said to Maria. ‘Come on, you’d better show us the outbuilding now.’
So we donned our outdoor gear in the Garden Hall and stepped out into a bright, frosty morning.
‘This tub by the door is full of grit for the paving, if it should be slippery,’ Maria informed us. ‘And also, you do not want to fall off the slab bridge into the stream, if you are going across it to the herb garden for a bit of rosemary, or a bay leaf.’
‘Absolutely not,’ agreed Henry. ‘Just as well there’s only this area of stone paving and the bridge and then we’re back on to gravel again.’
