Page 11 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
There had been a long-standing private war between her friends and the head gardener’s kid, Isaac; mud flinging usually, occasionally moldy windfall apples, sometimes manure. He’d started it by chucking a clod of manure at the back of Nory’s head one day when she and her friends were truanting in the castle grounds. It had sailed right over the wall from the gardener’s cottage and smacked into her ponytail. The prefects in her dorm had called her shithead for months, and the ensuing aggressions between the gardener’s kid and her gang had been named “Turd Wars.”
She wondered if the old head gardener was still there; he was always nice to her when he’d visited the nursery and he’d never let on to her parents about the things she got up to at school, for which she was eternally grateful. Her mind drifted back to the gardener’s son. Issac had been a gangly, scowling sort of youth—onwhom she’d had a top-secret crush. He had dark skin like his father and the potential to be handsome, if he’d ever decided to cut the hair that fell in thick, greasy curtains across his face and stopped dressing like a Nirvana reject. He was older than her, the same age as her brother. Had he said his goodbyes to the castle and disappeared off to some far-flung destination, or was he, like her, bound by invisible threads that kept pulling him back into its orbit?
Her family still living and working down in the village of Hartmead meant Nory was a fairly frequent visitor to the area, unlike her friends, for whom this house party would be a trip down memory lane. But she hadn’t ventured up to the castle for a couple of years, and despite her initial reticence, she had to admit that she was looking forward to seeing it again.
To be staying as a guest was the kind of thing that child Nory had always dreamed about. She would get to sleep in one of the four-poster beds she used to sneak peeks at when the housekeepers were changing the sheets. And spend a week eating food that didn’t come in a foil tray. She would have access to the library! All those musty books without pictures she hadn’t appreciated when she was a kid were calling to her now. She bet there were some cracking first editions hiding in those shelves. And then there were the gardens, a world unto themselves, hidden gates in high walls which led to fanciful spaces where plants ruled and every season was allowed to shine. Yes, she was looking forward to going back.
Four
Ameerah pulled off the country lane they had been driving down for some half an hour—ten minutes of which was spent crawling behind a bouquet of pheasants running panicked along the center of the road—and passed the old gate house that marked the beginning of the castle’s drive.
After several twists and turns, which led them through a varied landscape of orchards and large open spaces with heavy-coated sheep roaming freely, they emerged from beneath the skeleton canopy of an avenue of lime trees. Robinwood Castle rose up before them like a mirage. Nory’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of it, and the sharp intakes of breath from both Ameerah and Dev showed that the feeling was unanimous.
“I’d forgotten how beautiful it was,” said Ameerah.
“I hadn’t,” replied Nory.
Her eyes roamed lovingly over the sand-colored stone, which was mottled with age and scarred by the many climbing plants that had tried to claim its walls through the decades. Chimneys cluttered the roof and the smoke spiraling out from them spoke of fires roaring in hearths within.
“I think I’ve been here before,” said Dev, squinting out of the back window.
“Wouldn’t you know if you’d been here before?” Nory asked. To her mind, Robinwood Castle was a place that, once visited, was never to be forgotten.
“I’ve been on a lot of photoshoots in places like this. After a while they begin to meld into each other. But I thought the landscaping looked familiar as we drove through. The glossies like an old building as a juxtaposition to the cutting-edge modernity of fashion.”
Each time Dev opened his mouth, he said something that endeared him to Nory a little bit more. He was impressive in such an unassuming way that she imagined he was constantly underrated. Nory eyed Ameerah, to find Ameerah’s expression mirroring her own curiosity, with something else mixed in. Concern? This man-Barbie was turning out to be dangerously insightful. He clearly had brains and wasn’t afraid to use them—not at all in keeping with Ameerah’s usual type. Earlier in the journey he’d let slip that he was starting an MA in environmental politics and Ameerah had almost lost control of the wheel.
The front walls of the castle were constructed around three square turrets, each containing large leaded casement windows, which glittered black and silver as the winter sun glinted off them. A row of gabled windows ran along the top of the building, once housing the many live-in staff.
They drove slowly down the last stretch of drive, taking in the splendor of the building. The oldest parts of the castle hailed from the medieval period, which were then added to and modified over the centuries as each owner made their mark for posterity. Wings were added and removed, either by design or natural disaster. The structure that greeted them now had not been touched, other than for preservation purposes, since the eighteenth century.
Ameerah pulled up outside the castle, and they climbed out of the car and stretched their legs. A man in a black suit—a butler no less—came out to greet them and told Ameerah that someone would be out in a moment to park her car and bring in their luggage. Nory had to tell her mouth to close itself; already, she was understanding that being a guest at Robinwood was going to be a very different experience from being an honorary staff member.
As they followed the butler through the iron-studded wooden doors, the sound of Jenna’s laugh drifted down into the entrance like an overexcited ghost.
The hall was as Nory remembered it. Above the pale gray wood paneling, rococo-style plasterworks curled along the tops of the walls and up into the ceiling. Chalky white clematis, honeysuckle, and impossibly rambling roses snaked round to form a frame for the semi-naked winged men and women painted in the clouds at the center. Back on the ground, the eye was drawn to the writhing Baroque staircase, which seemed to grow up out of the stone floor and sweep sinuously away, forking left and right at the first landing—Nory knew that each fork would split three times more before it reached the old servants’ quarters. For a relatively small castle, it packed a punch.
Fresh flowers had been woven between the balustrades—white and pale pink lisianthus, held in place by dark trailing ivy—and at the bottom of the staircase two plinths showcased enormous floral displays, which cascaded down to the smooth, gently undulated stone floor.No wonder Shelley was pulling extra shifts to get all this lot done, Nory thought. An enormous Christmas tree stood to one side of the staircase, reaching up through the stairwell to the floor above. It was decorated in a riot of red and gold baubles that glittered in the tree lights. A whole logspluttered in the giant fireplace as the flames slowly licked it clean, the warmth from it was like an embrace after the cold outside. The air was redolent with fresh pine and woodsmoke.
On either side of the staircase, two long corridors led down toward large stained-glass windows at the far ends, before turning left and right and continuing out of sight. Through several open doors along the passage, light spilled into the hall. It was from one of these open doors that Jenna’s laugh came again.
“If you would like to follow me, some of your friends are taking afternoon tea in the garden room,” said the butler with due sobriety.
They entered a sumptuously decorated room with three enormous bay windows looking out onto the formal gardens. Tiered cake stands brimming with scones and triangle sandwiches sat on round coffee tables beside china teapots. And beside them, Jenna and Pippa looked as though they were being gradually consumed by an enormous velvet sofa. The indentations of two further bottoms on the opposite sofa indicated that Charles and someone else—Nory hoped it wasn’t Guy, she hadn’t quite steeled herself for that meeting yet—had recently left the room.
“You’re here!” screeched Jenna, extricating herself from the voluminous cushions and hurling herself first at Ameerah and then at Nory, before holding out a slender hand to Dev and purring, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
Pippa raised her eyebrows and rose gracefully out of the sofa as though pushed by invisible hydraulics. She air-kissed each of them in turn and nodded a hello at Dev. After a spell apart, it always took Pippa a little while to ease back into being relaxed around them. Pippa Harrington wasn’t gushing or romantic by nature and liked to introduce herself by saying “I’m not a hugger.” It took her a long time to feel comfortable around people, butonce she chose you as a friend, you had a friend for life. Nory was one of the few people to have ever seen Pippa vulnerable, and Pippa was one of the few people Nory would call in a crisis.
Through a set of French doors, Nory could see the backs of Charles and Jeremy; they were leaning against a wall that overlooked the gardens, the smoke from Charles’s cigarette curling above his head, while the cloud from Jeremy’s vape covered them both like a rolling fog. Jeremy was on his phone.
“Charles hasn’t given up smoking, then?” Nory observed.
Jenna huffed. “He keeps pushing his end date back. Now he’s saying he’ll stop after the honeymoon. But of course that’s a cop-out too because we aren’t actually going on honeymoon until next year because of my filming commitments.”
“I can’t imagine Charles not smoking,” said Ameerah.
“Neither can he, that’s the problem.”
