Free A Winter’s Tale by Trisha Ashley

had been sitting watching me, at my heels.
She looked at him with disfavour. ‘The dogs have never been allowed upstairs.’
‘But he’s so sad and lonely at the moment, Aunt Hebe. I’d really like to keep him with me.’
‘You can do as you wish, of course—for the present. Fill the house with dogs if you want to, though I expect Grace will complain about the hairs.’
‘I think one dog will do to be going on with, and he won’t shed so much hair once I have given him a good brushing.’ That was an experience neither of us was going to enjoy, because currently he was just one big tangled knot and a pair of bright eyes.
Following her through a door at the back of the gallery I found myself in the Long Room, which was exactly whatit said on the packet—a narrow, wooden-floored chamber running from one wing to the other, jutting out at the back of the house above the terraced gardens.
The wooden shutters were all partly closed over diamond-paned windows yellowed with grime, so that we walked in a soupy half-light past paintings so dirty it was hard to tell the subject matter. Even so, I noticed that nothing above shoulder height had been cleaned within living memory, and cobwebs formed tattered silk drapery across the ceiling. Some of them brushed Aunt Hebe’s head, but she seemed oblivious.
Lower down everything had been given a rough once-over, the legs of the furniture showing evidence of repeated violent batterings with a Hoover nozzle.
‘Grace surely can’t be the only cleaner?’ I said, itching to get my hands on a duster. ‘It must be too much for one person to cope with, especially since she’s getting on a bit.’
‘She does what she can, and my brother occasionally got a team in from an agency to give the place a good spring clean until a couple of years ago, when he said it had got too expensive. The Friends of Winter’s dust the Great Hall and the minstrels’ gallery when we open to the public. Those are the only parts of the house the visitors are allowed into, you know. It’s mainly the gardens they come to see.’
Clearly she’d never considered lifting a duster herself, and the house was desperate for some TLC. Poor tiny, ancient Grace could never hope to manage it all herself, for while the house was not some enormous mansion, it was low and rambling, with lots of panelling and wooden floors and ups and downs.
I was yearning to make a start on it…but maybe five minutes after I arrived wouldn’t be tactful. With an effort I managed to restrain myself, thinking it was ironic that I had spent all my life learning the art of cleaning other people’s stately piles, not knowing those skills would one day be necessary to transform my own. Again, I had thatstrange sense of fitting into some preordained pattern, the vital bit of missing jigsaw.
They say everyone has some skill or talent and mine just happens to be cleaning. Not romantic or exciting, perhaps, but there it is—and exactly what was needed here. Now a missionary fervour was invading my heart, filling me with the longing to convert the dirt.
As we walked along I noticed lighter patches on the walls where pictures had been removed—perhaps when Grandfather was searching for something to pay death duties with. How odd to think of him here, planning the implications of his impending death on the Inland Revenue, making sure everything was settled before I was even told he had gone.
‘Are the missing paintings still away being cleaned and valued?’ I asked.
‘No, they have been returned. They’re stacked in the Blue Bedroom waiting to be rehung.’
At the end we turned left past a suit of armour made for a short, fat gentleman and went through a door into the West Wing, down two steps, round a corner, and up one step to a passage.
‘This is the Blue Bedroom,’ Hebe said, indicating a door, ‘then my room and a bathroom. The Red Bedroom will be Jack’s when he arrives. Of course, he should have had my brother’s room, only,’