“You know how much the village businesses rely on the custom they get at the Christmas market.”
I did know, but only because I’d heard it from her. I’d never actually seen Christmas in Snowsly with my own eyes. Since I was eighteen years old, I’d always spent the holiday season on the beach or by the pool, somewhere far away from the madness of Christmas. It was ludicrous how people abandoned their sanity in December, pretending they were having such a marvelous time. And why? No one had ever adequately explained it to me. I much preferred the reality of a margarita by the pool, guaranteed sunshine, and no mention of the festive season.
“I’m sure everyone will be just fine. Do you want me to send someone up?”
“No, Sebastian.” I could count on one hand the number of times Granny seemed to lose patience with me, and based on her exasperated sigh, this was one of them. “Everyone won’t be fine and no, I don’t want you to send any of your poor staff up who, no doubt, have their own Christmas crises to deal with. I need you to come up and help. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
I sighed. I wasn’t going to say no to her. I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Granny. It was just that if the powers of hell had devised a bespoke way of torturing me, making me go to Snowsly to organize Christmas was about as bad as it could get. I’d take having my fingernails ripped out, being forced to cross a crocodile-infested river, or even flying economy before I’d endure a Christmas in England. Especially a Christmas in Snowsly. There was nowhere more festive.
The car wound its way up and down hills, through the narrow, winding roads that joined each small village and hamlet of the Cotswolds in a lumpy web of picturesque England. Nothing and no one traveled anywhere quickly around here.
The roads had been designed for horses, not cars, and so at least half of any journey between villages was spent with two wheels in a ditch, waiting for an oncoming car to tentatively inch forward, the centimeter of space between cars the difference between onward travel and an insurance claim. In summer the roads were long, green tunnels, made of the branches of the trees on each side interlocking above as if joining hands in some kind of three-hundred-year-old country dance. The sides of the tree-tunnels were lined with hedgerows, bursting with nuts, berries, and the animals that feasted on them. At the end of each tunnel waited the reward of a guaranteed spectacular view of farm or woodland. Some vistas stretched across to the distant blue-grey shadows of the Malvern Hills.
Now, in the throes of winter, the hedgerows were bare and the branches of the trees stretched across the road like skeletons, trying unsuccessfully to block out the white winter sky.
The next pretty village looked a lot like the last—the inevitable bright red postbox somewhere in the center, contrasting with the local yellow Cotswold stone walls and higgledy-piggledy houses from every era of the last thousand years. The pub. The church. The dog walker, wrapped up from head to foot in wool and tweed. And the hint here and there that we were in the month of madness—wreaths on doors, lights around windows, decorated trees in front gardens. Insanity.
It had been a long time since I’d made it to this part of the world, but I found I still knew it as well as my bedroom ceiling. For the last decade or so, I’d sent my driver to bring Granny to London to stay with me. It saved me time and she enjoyed the break. I didn’t often leave London, unless it was to go abroad. What was the point? London had everything I needed. The recruitment business I’d worked tirelessly to create. The penthouse that overlooked the Thames. The life I’d built for myself.
Being back in the Cotswolds was like stepping back into my childhood. I’d spent every summer navigating the hills that surrounded Snowsly. Foraging in the hedgerows, getting lost in the maize fields, being a kid with no worries. Every summer. Every Easter. Every school holiday.
Except Christmas.
“This is it, Bradley,” I said to the driver as we turned into High Street. Snowsly was one of the bigger villages in the Cotswolds. As well as the obligatory pub—two, in fact—and post box, it had a number of shops located around the village green, all popular with tourists and locals alike. Tea rooms that opened for breakfast and lunch only, a restaurant. And the Manor.
“The Manor is right at the top of the hill,” I said to Bradley.
Granny bought the Manor before my grandfather died and before I was born. It had been a number of years since she actively ran it. I convinced her she needed a manager in the place a few years before. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have her nose in most things. And it didn’t mean she wasn’t still running the village. Granny couldn’t sit back. I’d gotten the trait from her.