Page 48 of The Secret Christmas Bookshop
‘Not yet,’ she admitted. ‘But we need to let them know soon, because it changes the logistics. We’ll need games for the green or the hall, rather than at Penny For Them, and whatever refreshments we serve will need to be in food trucks. There’s a lot to organize.’
‘It almost seems like we’re making everything harder by moving it,’ Harry said lightly.
‘But it’ll be more of a community event like this, rather than spread out along Perpendicular Street. We want everyone to be together.’
‘You sound like that old Prudential advert, but I get your point.’
‘Good.’ She smiled at him. ‘And the first easy win is lights. Where’s your person?’
‘On one of the business parks on the outskirts of Norwich. It’ll take about forty-five minutes.’ He switched on the radio, so low it was barely audible, but Sophie recognized the melody of ‘Last Christmas’ and was surprised all over again.
‘You don’t listen to farming radio?’
‘One goat doesn’t make me a farmer,’ he pointed out. ‘Felix is a boy, so he’s no good for milk and he’s not going in a stew anytime soon. I don’t farm anything.’
‘Birdie mentioned that he had a brother, Oliver.’
Harry swallowed, the bob of his Adam’s apple distinct in profile. ‘He died when he was a few months old.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘Where did they come from?’
Harry glanced at her, then turned back to the road. ‘Not soon after I’d moved back here, I went to buy cement from a builder’s yard about ten miles away. There was this scruffy farm next door – I only noticed because I could hear the goats. They were bleating constantly, so I followed the sound, and … they were so small, stuck in this cramped pen, squalid conditions. It was clear they were distressed.’
‘How awful,’ Sophie murmured.
‘I went and found the farmer – if you could call him that. He said male goats had no value, that he was waiting to take them to the abattoir, and I-I couldn’t let that happen.’ He shook his head. ‘I offered to buy them –demandedis probably more like it, actually – and the farmer was overjoyed, because he would have had to pay to have them killed. Instead, Felix and Oliver came back to Mistingham Manor with me.’
‘You named them?’
‘A bit different to Darkness and Terror,’ he said with a smile. ‘But Oliver was already ill, because of the conditions he’d been kept in. I took him to the vets, we tried everything, but he didn’t make it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Harry shrugged. ‘I still have Felix. I was worried, after he lost his brother, because they’re such sociable animals, but he’s a resilient little bugger and I suppose … that’s why I indulge him. The jumpers, the sentimentality – it must seem like madness.’
‘It doesn’t exactly fit your Dark Demon Lord persona.’
Harry laughed. ‘No. Felix is my weakness. I can’t help it.’
‘I doubt many people could,’ Sophie said.
‘You’re humouring me.’ He flipped the indicator and they turned onto a wide road with stark, grey-brown fields oneither side, the sky a liquid blue haze, mist hanging in clumps above the pared-back land. It was beautiful and wild, and it made Sophie’s breath catch. She wondered how different Cornwall would be.
‘I’m not humouring you,’ she told him. ‘It’s perfectly acceptable for a man who’s … how oldareyou?’ She’d guessed he was about her own age.
‘Forty-two,’ he admitted, his brows knitting together. ‘Forty-two years old, and I hardly have my life together.’
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You have your own house, which has to count for something.’
‘I inherited that, I very nearly lost it altogether, and it’s basically falling down.’
‘Youdidn’tlose it, and you’re fixing it.’
‘Trying to.’
‘Succeeding. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
‘Starting from scratch might be less hassle.’
