Free A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy

been to one. There was no honeymoon; the young couple were hard at work fixing up the hen runs and the new milking shed. Three cows had already been bought at the cattle market and were grazing in the fields. Stone Cottage would supply its own milk for the guests as well as yogurt and even organic butter. There was a great deal to be done.
    Carmel helped Chicky to go through colour schemes for the bedrooms. She had a good eye and discovered where to source materials. She was deeply cynical about the expensive advice and taste of some of the interior designers they met along the way.
    ‘Honestly, Chicky, they don’t know any more than we do. Less, in fact, because you remember this house as it used to be. They’re just trying to stamp their own image on the place.’
    But Chicky said that they were spending so much already, the cost of an interior designer wouldn’t make that huge a difference. At least they would know if they were going in the right direction.
    Chicky’s niece Orla wasn’t sure but agreed. Give the designers a crack at it. Orla had come back from London after talking to Chicky again. She had committed to be on Chicky’s team a few weeks ago.
    ‘I couldn’t come back to Stoneybridge now,’ Orla had said, ‘not after London, and my mother is driving me mad. Chicky, can I stay here with you in Stone House? There’s plenty of room.’
    ‘No, I’ve done enough to annoy the family in the past. I’m not going to be accused of hijacking you now. Just go home and sleep at your mother’s house.’
    ‘I can’t do it. She’s on my case all the time: why didn’t I get engaged to a banker like Brigid O’Hara did? What was I doing in London that I didn’t meet some thick-as-a-plank rich boy like Brigid did?’
    ‘I don’t want Kathleen on my case, either. Stick it out, Orla. And if you do decide to come and work with me, we’ll find you a place of your own. There’s a lot of falling-down cottages here. We can do one up.’
    ‘That would mean saying I’m going to stay in Stoneybridge for ever.’
    ‘No it wouldn’t. We can always rent it or sell it afterwards. I’d give you great training. You’ll cook like a dream when I’m finished with you. But don’t stay here in this house. You need to be able to shake a place off at the end of the working day.’
    ‘You’re a miracle, that’s what you are.’
    ‘No, I’m just very experienced,’ Chicky had said and the decision had been made.
    Rigger and Carmel, determined to prove themselves in front of everyone, worked all their waking hours to turn their plans into reality. Rigger wanted to do deliveries to faraway farms up near Rocky Ridge, but Carmel warned that her cousins who ran the local grocery shops would resent this and claim that Rigger and Carmel were taking the bread from their mouths. So instead they made marmalades and jams and found attractive little jars for them with Stone Cottage painted on each one.
    Like Chicky had done already, they had to look for business without alienating the shopkeepers who made their living around the area. They must try to provide a new service rather than replace existing ones.
    Soon the hotels and tourist shops were buying from them and asking for more.
    Carmel found some old cookbooks and learned to make chutneys, pickles and a particularly good carrageen moss made from the local red-brown seaweed that washed up on their shores. Chicky remembered that back when she was young people had made it as a dull milky pudding but Carmel’s was a different dish altogether. With eggs and lemon and sugar it was as light as a feather, and she served it with a whipped cream laced with Irish whiskey.
    Miss Queenie was very interested in the new baby, and she was the first to hear when Carmel and Rigger came back stunned from the hospital where they had learned that it was not going to be one baby but twins.
    Dr Dai Morgan, a Welshman who had been taken on as a locum in Stoneybridge nearly thirty years before,