Page 8 of Christmas Is All Around
“Because Tallulah wasn’t real,” Charlotte said curtly, and then turned and made her exit, ignoring the muffled profanity and unimpressed tutting behind her.
Once she made it downstairs, she paused to take a breath before plunging back into the madness; the crowds appeared to have split into various groups, with a lengthy, very noisy queue heavily dominated by young families stretching along the wall away from the fireplace, waiting to take photos with the costumed character of their choosing. Charlotte squinted and saw that Ava and Kit were standing in this line, Alice strapped to Ava’s chest and scowling heavilyat everyone around her. The brass band seemed to be preparing to launch into another set, and there were a number of people lined up for mince pies and mulled wine. John and Simone were nowhere in sight, but Charlotte gathered from the snippets of conversation she overheard that there were different activities in some of the rooms branching off from the main hall, and she assumed that was where they’d vanished to.
She hovered uneasily at the base of the staircase, finding the idea of plunging back into the crowds before her extremely unappealing; she also felt strangely visible after her encounter with the woman upstairs, though she knew that the internet was a strange, fragmented place, and that the viral article that had caused so much recent havoc in her life had probably gone entirely unnoticed by the vast majority of the population.
However, knowing that on a logical, academic level and making her body believe it were two different things entirely, and she thought she’d feel more at ease if she could just squirrel herself away in a corner until it was time to go home. She wound her way through the throngs of people, many of whom were looking distinctly rosy-cheeked (presumably from the mulled wine; it wasn’t actually that cold outside), aside from the parents of young children, who looked distinctly harried (as so often seemed to be the case).
She turned, scanning the room in search of somewhere a bit more private, before realizing that there was an alcove hidden away, almost out of sight, beneath the staircase she’d just descended. She darted across the room, and a quick glimpse within showed that it contained nothing except a single bench; a hallway led in one direction and vanished around a corner, and Charlotte presumed this had been designed as some sort of shortcut to be used by servants in the house’s earlier years. She sank down onto the bench gratefully.
Glancing through the doorway she’d just passed through, sherealized that this angle afforded her a good view of the room beyond, and particularly the Christmas tree. Without fully realizing what she was doing, she reached into her bag for the sketchbook and pouch of drawing pencils she always carried with her, just in case.
Her eyes fixed on the Christmas tree, Charlotte began to sketch. She drew quickly, in broad, loose strokes; she could feel her shoulders relaxing as she did so, and she slipped into the almost trancelike state that always seemed to descend upon her the second she put a pencil to paper. She wasn’t thinking about the weeks of forced Christmas cheer that awaited her; she wasn’t thinking about the fact that her parents hadn’t even thought to tell her that they had (once again) reconciled; she wasn’t thinking about the hordes of angry DMs that glared at her from her inbox every time she opened Instagram. She thought about nothing except the scrape of her pencil against paper, the weight of it in her hand, and the vision slowly forming on the page in front of her. She was so immersed that it took several seconds for the chanting to creep into her consciousness; by the time she registered what was happening, they were down to “… four, three, two, one!” and then, instantly, the tree she was staring at was ablaze with light.
And it was…
It was just aChristmas tree, for god’s sake, she thought irritably, listening to first the dramatic, collective indrawn breath, then the chorus of “oooooh,” and then the thunderous round of applause. You would think that none of these people had ever seen a Christmas tree before. It was one thing for the children, who hadn’t yet been jaded by too many years of bad Christmas movies and alarming January credit card bills. But for fully grown adults to stand there gaping at a fir tree bedecked with string lights, orange slices, and some admittedly lovely, vintage-looking glass ornaments—well, it was honestly ridiculous.
And yet, here she was, sketching it. And in spite of herself, she wasalready picturing how it would look in watercolors, with the white lights shining like stars against the darker green paint of the fir needles. The dark blue of the wallpaper would be a perfect backdrop; indeed, the moody hues of the room overall gave the tree and its surroundings a sort of classic, secular wintry vibe, one that she appreciated considerably more than multicolored lights and ornaments featuring Baby’s First Handprint. (Better, however, than the ones her mom had had made, featuring Ava’s and Charlotte’s first teeth!)
She worked herself into enough of a huff that she very nearly poked a hole through the page in her sketchbook, when—quite suddenly—there was a man standing in front of her. And he had the audacity to lookirritated, of all things.
He was also, she registered after a moment… part reindeer? He had a reindeer body with a human head?
“What the hell?” she wondered, not convinced she wasn’t hallucinating, and also wondering if the mulled wine had been spiked with something stronger. And then, mercifully, her brain caught up to her eyes, and she realized he was the person inside the reindeer costume she’d seen earlier—he’d just removed the headpiece, which he was currently carrying under his arm, like some sort of weird hunting trophy.
“What the hell?” he echoed, sounding extremely English and vaguely annoyed.
“Can I help you?” she asked, a bit coolly.
The man raised an eyebrow at her. “Good afternoon to you too.” The combination of an English accent, a deep voice, and the vaguely old-fashioned greeting made her fairly certain that, were Padma here in her place, she would actually combust on the spot.
Not to mention, Charlotte noted entirely unwillingly, the fact that he was dark-haired and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. (Charlotte had an extremely unfortunate weakness for bespectacled men.) And now, suddenly, he appeared to be… stripping?
“Um, hello?” She dropped her pencil and waved a hand. “I’m sitting here? Maybe find a bathroom?”
“I promise there will be no inappropriate nudity that might offend your delicate eyes,” he said shortly, which did nothing to convince Charlotte that hewasn’ta time traveler from the nineteenth century.
“Is there not anywhere else you can do this?” she asked. “I’m trying to hide.”
He laughed under his breath as he wriggled out of his reindeer suit; it was basically impossible to look dignified while doing this, but he somehow managed it, particularly once it was revealed that he was wearing an oxford shirt and plaid trousers underneath.
“Iwishthat I could hide right now,” he muttered, not entirely to her, and it was her turn to raise a brow.
“Did someone force you into that reindeer suit at gunpoint?” she asked. “Is this a hostage situation?”
“Pretty much,” he confirmed, doing his best to fold the reindeer suit neatly, though it was definitely not a garment that lent itself to retail-quality folding. He set it down next to Charlotte on the bench and then, disturbingly, rested the head atop it. He stepped back and looked at Charlotte somewhat expectantly.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked, glancing down at her half-finished sketch longingly.
“I wonder if I should be asking you that question,” he said slowly, something like amusement hinted at in the corners of his mouth. This, naturally, did not endear him to her. “You seem a bit… distressed.”
“I’m notdistressed,” she objected, then paused to consider. “Actually, if I decided to channel a BBC drama and tell you that Iwasdistressed, would you leave me alone?”
“Have we met before?”
“That seems highly unlikely.”
“It’s just that usually I make a decent enough first impression thatpeople wait until our second meeting before being this annoyed by me.” He adopted a wounded look. “Are you biased against reindeer?”
