Page 53 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
Alongside the discarded paint cans she did find what she was looking for – a stack of half-rolls of old wallpaper. She grabbed the cleanest-looking one and headed to the Dower House to collect her pride and joy.
Jodie was well aware that adult colouring was thoroughly 2017 as an activity but, in her defence, she’d loved a colouring book before it was trendy and she had never wavered in her affections since. Her most adored possession, the first thing she’d packed when she ran away from Reading, before clothes or toiletries or the very swishy noise-cancelling headphones Gemma had bought her for Christmas two years ago, was her colouring pencils. She stroked the tin almost reverentially and hugged it to her body to carry back to the ballroom, where she rolled the wallpaper out on the floor, secured the corners with whatever came to hand and set about to draw some more.
She started with the parts of the castle she knew, and had already sketched in miniature on her notebook. On the wallpaper there was space for the land around them. She added in Adam’s garden and the Dower House to one side, the stables and pasture to the other, and the coach house and road leading up to the vehicle bridge. Then it struck her she could only draw in the ground floor of the actual buildings, so she created a box off to the side and redrew the outline of the castle to allow her to fill in the first floor.
And then she set out exploring the blank spaces on her hand-drawn map, a few rooms at a time, before coming back to her drawing and adding details, colouring in spaces to a key she created – yellow for bedrooms, blue for bathrooms, and then shades of red, pink and purple for the more ‘public’ parts of the castle where visitors and cookery school students came in. Then she added greenery to the outside space, before rolling up her paper, packing up her pencils and walking the short path to the walled garden. There she unfurled her work on a dry bench and filled in the locations of the greenhouses and individual beds, allowing herself to add in splashes of colour for the planting and even a slightly fanciful bumblebee hovering over the scene.
She didn’t stop until it started to get dark. Bella found her as she was making her way back to the Dower House. ‘Where have you been? I thought you were going to start on the ballroom.’
Damn. That was what she’d been going to do and then she’d needed to find out where the big double doors went, and then she’d thought that half an hour familiarising herself with the layout of the castle would be a good idea and then… and then she was in the walled garden adding shading to the neat little pencil outlines of countless worn red bricks. The real Gemma would have had a team of eight strong men clearing out the ballroom by now. ‘I’m sorry. I got a bit distracted.’
Bella grinned. ‘You weren’t the only one today.’
‘Oh sorry. How are you feeling?’
‘Weird. Good. Weird. Having a baby right now wasn’t the plan.’
‘But it’s good weird? What did Adam say?’
Bella pulled a face. ‘I think he was a bit in shock. Him and me both though.’ She finally noticed the roll of wallpaper under Jodie’s arm. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘It’s silly. I thought, you know, it can be a bit confusing learning your way around this place so I thought I’d draw myself a little map, and it sort of got out of hand.’
‘Show me?’
The sun was dipping behind the islands so Jodie carried her makeshift site map into the kitchen and unfurled it in front of Darcy, Flinty and Veronica, who were already ensconced in the kitchen. ‘Oh I say.’ Veronica placed the glasses that hung on a slim silver chain around her neck neatly onto the bridge of her nose. ‘You drew this?’
Jodie nodded. ‘I know I’ve got a million other things to do. I’m sorry.’
Veronica inspected the drawing. ‘It’s excellent.’
‘Oh look,’ Darcy squealed. ‘You’ve drawn Dipper in.’ She pointed at the brown Labrador padding happily across the courtyard.
Jodie couldn’t help but smile at the reaction. ‘And you’re on it.’ She pointed at the stables, where Darcy was leading her horse out to the paddock.
‘It’s brilliant.’ Darcy grinned.
‘It really is.’ Bella clapped her hands together. ‘Could you make something like this for visitors? Like a site map. We wouldn’t need the upstairs cos that’s private, right?’
The other women nodded.
‘I think that’s a marvellous idea,’ Veronica nodded.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Jodie slammed her mouth closed too late. She’d just called Veronica – Lady Veronica, the Dowager Baroness Lowbridge – stupid.
‘I’m sorry, dear?’
‘I didn’t mean you’re stupid. You’re not stupid, but I’m not an artist. You have to get a proper designer for stuff like that.’
‘I think, dear, that if Bella is in agreement and we pay you to create a drawing for us then you are very much a proper artist.’
‘Oh.’ Jodie dropped down onto a stool. ‘I guess so.’
‘It’s so good.’ Darcy was still in delight at the drawing of Lowbridge in front of her. ‘You never said you liked art.’
Jodie brightened up. ‘It was my favourite subject at school. I wanted to do it at university, but then…’ Then, exams and coursework had built up and organising it all had got on top of her, and Granddad had got ill around the same time, and…
‘Then you changed to business management?’ Veronica suggested.
