The Christmas Rose

The Shortest Days

The greenhouse lamp had burned all through the longest night of the year, and Dilys Ashcroft, awake before it, lay in the cold half of the bed and thought that grief and midwinter were the same country: a place where the light goes early, and you keep one small flame alive because you cannot yet bear the dark to be complete.

She could see the lamp from where she lay, a soft amber smudge at the bottom of the garden, doubled in the black windowpane. It had a job to do. Below its glow, in the lean-to Hugh had built the second spring they were married and re-glazed the year before he died, the tender things were waiting out the frost: the lemon verbena that smelled of childhood if you so much as breathed on it, the streptocarpus, the pelargoniums he had bullied through nine winters and would not, on principle, let die. Twelve degrees of frost had been forecast for the night, the hardest in a decade, and Dilys had gone down at eleven in her coat over her nightdress to check the heater and had stood a while among the sleeping leaves with her breath smoking, because it was warmer there, and because the plants did not expect her to be anyone in particular.

She got up when she could no longer pretend she was going to sleep again. The bedroom was arctic. She dressed fast, the way you learn to in an old stone house, and did not look at the wardrobe where, on the top shelf, the box of Christmas decorations sat under its film of a year's dust. She had not opened it last Christmas. She was fairly sure she was not going to open it this one. There was a particular tissue-wrapped weight inside — a robin of blown glass, chipped on the tail, that Hugh's mother had hung on Hugh's cradle and that Hugh had hung, every single year of their marriage, on whatever they had by way of a tree, muttering the same small blasphemy when the wire hook slipped — and Dilys had decided, in the calm way one decides the unbearable things, that she would rather leave the box shut than take the robin out and have no one to hand it to.

Downstairs the range was in, thank God, and the kitchen held the ghost of last night's warmth. Wellington was stretched the whole length of the hearthrug with the boneless abandon of a creature who has decided the day may begin without him. He opened one amber eye, considered her, and shut it again.

"Good morning to you too," said Dilys.

He was Hugh's dog. That was the plain fact of him, the way the lamp was a plain fact and the frost was a plain fact. A grey lurcher of great length and no dignity, leggy and mournful and gloriously disobedient, bred for a speed he now deployed almost exclusively toward unattended mince pies. He had grieved harder than she had, that first spring — had lain at the foot of the stairs and refused his food and looked at the door — and it had been Welly, in the end, more than any doctor or any well-meaning neighbour, who had walked her back into the mornings, because a dog must be let out and fed and shouted at, and there is no arguing with that, no bargaining, no lying in the cold half of the bed a moment past the hour he has decided upon.

She let him into the garden and stood on the step while he investigated the iron ground with disgust. The world had gone white and hard and beautiful in the night. Every twig of the old apple was furred with rime; the water butt wore a lid of ice she would have to break; the last few sodden leaves in the border had been frozen where they lay, gilded and stiff, small monuments to the autumn. And there, along the shady foot of the wall where nothing else would live, the Christmas roses were opening — three, four, six of them, low white cups on their sappy stems, unhurried, unbothered, holding their bland gold faces up out of a bed of ruin as if December were the most natural month in the world to bloom.

Helleborus niger. Bloom of the dead season. Hugh had teased her for loving them — such plain flowers, he said, such a fuss over a plain white flower — and she had told him what she told anyone who would stand still for it, that there was nothing plain about a plant that could hold its heart's blood liquid at twelve degrees of frost when every other green thing had signed its own death warrant back in October. Reckless things. Brave things. Poisonous, of course, root and leaf, which she did not usually lead with. She bent and touched one cool sepal with a bare finger and thought, not for the first time this winter, that she understood them better than she understood most people.

Welly came back in and demanded breakfast in the manner of a dog who has never once been fed. She fed him. She made tea and drank it standing up, and ate nothing, and told herself she would eat something later, which was the same lie she had told herself yesterday. Then, because the church flowers would not do themselves and because Miriam had asked whether she was managing and Dilys could not bear a second visit to establish that she was, she put on Hugh's old shooting coat, which still smelled faintly of him if she was foolish enough to press her face to the collar, and clipped the lead on the dog, and went down into the village.

Little Hemlock lay in the fold of the valley below her, and Dilys stopped at the turn of the lane, as she always did, to look at it — and this morning it took her breath a little, iron-frosted and glittering and so pretty it was almost an insult. The loveliest village in the county, the guidebooks said, and named, with the flat obliviousness of a very old place, after the deadliest weed in the hedge. Nobody local thought twice about it. Nobody paused, ladling their soup, at the notion of living somewhere christened for a poison that stops the breath. Smoke stood straight up from a hundred chimneys into a sky the colour of skimmed milk. The pond by the green had frozen at the edges and steamed, faintly, at its dark centre where the mallards patrolled a shrinking territory. The hollies along the churchyard wall were berried a red so violent it looked painted on. And in every border she passed going down — the doctor's old garden, the Pyke sisters', the strip by the war memorial — the same white cups, the Christmas roses, opening bare and lovely and out of season, like guests arriving in their best at a party that had not yet begun, or had ended long ago.

Above the whole of it, on the shoulder of the hill, stood Hemlock Manor, honey-stoned and beautiful and, everyone knew, quietly bleeding money, its long roofline set against the white sky, and below its windows the black skeleton of the walled garden — the derelict glasshouse, the espaliers gone to wild wands, the whole four acres of it standing gaunt and frostbitten and, this morning, unaccountably grim, like something waiting.

St. Anselm's clock struck the half as she came down onto the green, and the thousand-year yew stood black and enormous over the lych-gate, holding its own shadow close, and the day began, as her days always began now, to come at her.

It came first as Sadie Bunce, flinging open the door of the Green Man to shake a mat and letting out a gust of the fugged, hoppy, wood-smoke warmth of the place, the whole village parliament already convened inside at half past nine. "Morning, Dilys love! You coming to the carols? You're coming to the carols. Clemency's got you down for a reading, I heard her say so." And, before Dilys could form the shape of a no: "Terrible about the Glebe, isn't it. That Prosser was up there again Tuesday with his little machine on the tripod, measuring. Bold as you like. Freddie Quennell wants his head examined, is what our Norman says—" and then the phone went inside and Sadie was gone in a swirl of apron, the door swinging shut on the warmth and the talk.

It came as Clemency Odell, the vicar, striding across the green with a clipboard and the wild eye of a woman running six parishes and a carol rota on four hours' sleep, who caught Dilys by the sleeve and said "Bless you, you're an answer to prayer, could you do the pedestal by the font, only Marion's got Views about the greenery and I simply haven't the — no, Reg, the crib goes by the pulpit, we discussed this—" and was gone too, towed off across the frost by a churchwarden and a plywood donkey.

It came as Clive Sowerby at the allotment gate, planted foursquare in his terrible woollen hat, who had been lying in wait, Dilys was fairly sure, for the first competent gardener to pass. "Now then. You'll want to see these before the fayre." These were his Christmas roses, and they were, Dilys conceded with the professional honesty that had cost her friendships, magnificent — a great cool drift of them under the north wall, whiter and larger and more numerous than anyone else's in the village, and Clive knew it. "Nobody touches 'em for the show, mind. Judged already, far as I'm concerned." He beamed at them, then remembered himself and scowled at her. "Grand poison, that, o' course. My gran'd never have 'em in the house. Said they'd stop your heart soon as look at you." He said it comfortably, the way country people said such things, the folk-knowledge and the flower-love sitting side by side in him without the least friction, and Dilys, who knew precisely and to the milligram how right his grandmother had been, said only that they were a credit to him, and moved on.

She very nearly got as far as the shop.

"Dilys. There you are." Judith Netherwood came out of the village hall at a diagonal, a woman built for interception, sixty-six and upright as a ruler and carrying a document wallet clasped to her bosom like a shield. Secretary of the History Society; retired schoolmistress; keeper of every date and name and birth and shame in three parishes, and the sort of person whose approach made grown men remember appointments. "I've been meaning to catch you. The exhibition — Hemlock Through the Years — it's the centrepiece of the fayre this year, I've quite outdone myself, and I want the old families properly represented. Now. Hugh's people." She said Hugh's name the way she said everything, briskly, as a matter of record, and Dilys took the small blow of it without showing it. "The Ashcrofts were here before the Quennells fell on hard times, weren't they. You'll have photographs. Groups, weddings, the practice, that sort of thing. I'll want to borrow, not keep — I copy everything now, digital, no excuses — and I'll want them by the twenty-second."

"I'll see what I have," said Dilys, which was neither yes nor no and which Judy, correctly, filed as yes.

"Good." And then Judy did the thing she could never resist, the small self-pleasing tilt of the chin, the lowered voice that was not lowered nearly enough. "You'll want to come and see it, in any case. I've turned up one or two things this year, going through the old drawers at the parish office, that are going to surprise a good many people in this village. A good many." Her pale eyes were bright with it. "People think they know where they came from. People think they know their neighbours." She patted the wallet, once, as if it were a well-behaved animal. "Some records were never meant to stay in the dark, that's my view. Truth's a duty, Dilys, whatever it costs. I've always said so."

"I'm sure you have," said Dilys.

"Sixteenth," said Judy, and marched off toward the hall, upright and alone, the wallet clasped tight, a woman going out to do a hard and thankless thing for a village that had never once thanked her for it — and Dilys watched her go with something she was surprised to find was closer to pity than dislike, and could not have said why.

The shop, at last. She wanted only stamps and a tin of the soup she kept meaning to eat. What she got, in the doorway, was Ambrose Cardew.

They arrived at the narrow door from opposite sides at precisely the same moment, and both stopped, and there was one of those small frozen negotiations, and Ambrose Cardew — sixty-seven if he was a day, tall and stooped and dressed with the deliberate crossness of a man who has decided the world may take him as it finds him — said, "Well, are you coming or going," in a tone that suggested she had personally engineered the collision to inconvenience him.

"Good morning to you too," said Dilys, for the second time that day, and went in first.

He had been a Home Office pathologist, before; she had learned that much over the strange business of the autumn, learned it and a good deal else, and had formed the private opinion that Ambrose Cardew was the rudest intelligent man she had ever met and possibly the loneliest, and that the two facts were not unrelated. His wife had been dead four years. He bought, she noticed, one small loaf, a quarter of good coffee, and a single lamb chop, and paid for them with the exact change counted out with the terrible precision of a man who eats alone and has stopped pretending otherwise, and something in the meanness of the little heap of food on the counter went through her more sharply than any kindness could have done.

Outside, she turned up the lane for home, and he turned the same way, and for a dozen paces neither of them acknowledged that they were walking together.

"That Netherwood woman had you cornered," he said at last, to the middle distance.

"She wants Hugh's photographs. For her exhibition."

"Hm." A long pause, three frozen ruts. "Ghastation. All that raking-over. Leave the dead alone, that's my view, and I've seen more of them than most." Another pause. "She'll come to grief, that one. You can't go about a place that size telling everyone the truth about themselves. It isn't done. It isn't survivable." He said it with the flat certainty he brought to everything, and Dilys thought no more of it than that it was a sour man being sour, and would remember it later with a coldness the frost could not account for.

At the fork by the old forge he stopped. His own house lay the other way, up the steep pitch toward the woods. He looked, briefly, as though he might say something civil, and visibly thought better of it. "You'll freeze, standing about," he said instead, which was, she understood, the nearest Ambrose Cardew came to mind how you go, and stumped off up his hill without a backward glance, and Dilys found she was very slightly warmer than she had been, and could not for the life of her have said why that should be either.

She would do the church flowers, she decided, climbing. The pedestal by the font. That much she owed Clemency and the season. And then she would go home to her lamp and her heater and her sleeping plants and shut the door on the whole glittering, kindly, smothering business of a village Christmas, and get through it the way she got through everything now, quietly, alone, one small flame kept burning against the dark. She had it all arranged. She had almost persuaded herself.

"You'll come up to the manor, of course," said Marion Kettleby, materialising from the church porch with an armful of ivy and the settled authority of a woman who has never in her life been told no and does not propose to start now, buttoning Dilys into the Christmas she had meant to spend alone, "everyone comes to the manor," — and Dilys, who had planned to say no, found she had said yes again, the way she said yes to everything now, and walked home through the ringing frost past the white Christmas roses nodding in the borders, lovely and bare and blooming, as they only ever did, out of ground that everything else had given up for dead.

Hemlock Through the Years

There is no institution on earth so ferociously peaceful as an English village fayre in Advent, and Little Hemlock brought to it the concentrated goodwill of people who have twelve months of grievances to be seen rising above.

Dilys had meant only to deliver the church flowers. She had said so twice on the doorstep of Foxglove Cottage, aloud, to Wellington, who had watched her with the mournful patience of a dog who knew that flowers meant the car and the car meant, more often than not, being left in it. She had the greenery across the back seat — holly cut hard against the frost, its berries the one loud colour in a bleached-out garden; ivy; a bundle of pale hellebore leaves for the font that she'd thought better of and left in the boot. In and out. That was the plan. She was very good, this winter, at plans that lasted as far as the door.

The village hall took her in the way a warm room takes a cold hand: all at once, and with a small shock of pins and needles. Paper chains sagged from every beam, looped and re-looped by the Brownies into geometry no adult would have permitted, and among them hung a single defiant banner — HEMLOCK CHRISTMAS FAYRE, the E a shade too small because someone had run out of wall. The brass band had wedged itself under the stage and was doing something to In the Bleak Midwinter that Gustav Holst would have wished to be consulted about; the euphonium in particular held opinions of its own, and expressed them a half-beat behind everyone else, like a man arriving late to an argument and shouting anyway. It was, Dilys thought, standing in the doorway with her arms full of holly, entirely awful, and it went straight through her chest like a hot drink.

She had not expected that.

The heat of the place — the tea urn steaming, two hundred wet wool coats, a paraffin heater doing its illegal best in the corner — closed over her, and the smell of it was mince pies and mulled wine and damp and, under all of it, the particular green sweetness of Charity Enys's stall, which was the busiest thing in the room. Dilys had come to give holly to a church. She had not come to be glad. But there was Enid Purslowe on the tombola, calling numbers with a colour in her face she had not had in thirty years of marriage; there was little Jamie from the choir wearing a paper crown at a rakish angle and eating a mince pie he plainly had not paid for; there were three generations of the Fettiplace family arguing amiably over a raffle whose top prize, a goose, sat glassy-eyed and enormous in a wicker basket on the stage, regarding the proceedings without enthusiasm. Somebody thrust a programme into her hand. Somebody else took the holly out of her arms with a "Ooh, Dilys, isn't that lovely, that'll do the lych-gate a treat," and she was in, and the door swung shut behind her on the ringing cold, and she was — she noticed it the way you notice you have stopped limping — almost enjoying herself.

The cake table stood at the room's dead centre, and it was, as it was every year, a diplomatic instrument of great subtlety. Marion Kettleby presided over it the way a general presides over ground she has fought for. The Victoria sponges were arranged in a strict order of merit visible only to the initiated: Marion's own, of course, at the front, then a descending hierarchy of allegiances and slights that could be read, by anyone fluent, as a full account of who was speaking to whom that December. The Purslowe fruitcake had been moved, Dilys observed, to a position of some honour near the till — Enid was in favour this year — while a shop-bought Battenberg belonging to someone who had crossed Marion over the flower rota had been exiled to the shadow of the urn, where nobody could reach it without asking. It was warfare conducted entirely in sponge, and it was merciless.

"Dilys." Marion's greeting had the clipped quality of a woman guarding a position. "You'll take a slice. The lemon drizzle. Not the coffee, the coffee is Deirdre's." A world of history in the name. "How are you keeping."

It was not a question, and Dilys, who had learned this winter that "how are you keeping" required only the correct noise in reply and never the truth, made the noise. Marion's eyes were already elsewhere, sighting down the length of the hall to the far wall, where a run of pinboards had been set up beneath a hand-lettered sign, and where Judith Netherwood stood among her photographs like a verger among relics.

"Her," said Marion, and put down the cake knife with more care than it deserved.

You could not miss Judy. She had dressed for the occasion in a good tweed skirt and a brooch shaped like an open book, and she stood square in front of her exhibition — HEMLOCK THROUGH THE YEARS, the lettering rather better than the banner's — with the air of a woman who had assembled the past personally and would take questions on it. The pinboards marched the length of the wall: the village school in stiff Edwardian rows; the Green Man before it lost its thatch; a charabanc outing to Weston in which every single face wore the expression of a person being photographed against their will; harvests, jubilees, floods, a whole century of Little Hemlock behaving itself for the camera. Judy moved along the boards adjusting a corner here, a caption there, and holding forth to anyone within range, and several who had tried to get out of range.

"That is not nineteen fifty-two," she was saying, to a Fettiplace who had ventured an opinion, "that is nineteen fifty-one, the Coronation mug in the child's hand notwithstanding, because that is the old pump, which was taken out in the spring of fifty-two, and I have the parish minute that says so." She said it kindly. That was the thing about Judy that Dilys had never quite got used to: the corrections came out gentle, almost sorrowful, the way a good teacher hands back a poor exercise, and they were no less crushing for it. "One likes to be accurate," Judy added, to the room in general. "Nobody else will be, once we're gone."

She caught sight of Dilys and her face did a complicated thing — not warmth, Judy did not do warmth, but a kind of recognition, one serious person to another. "Mrs Ashcroft. You'll appreciate this, at least. Half of them don't know a daffodil from a dinner plate." She lowered her voice, which in Judy meant she raised it very slightly and leaned in. "I've a surprise this year. My star exhibit. I shan't show it till the manor party — it wants the right audience — but I will tell you it's going to put a cat among some very old pigeons." Her eyes were bright and hard and pleased. "Some people in this village have been let alone with their stories for far too long. It isn't kind, letting people believe things that aren't so. It only ever ends worse."

"Does it," said Dilys.

"It always does," said Judy, with tremendous satisfaction, and turned to correct someone else.

Dilys did not, then, ask what she meant. She would think about that, afterwards, a great deal.

She had drifted — the fayre drifted you, that was its method — down toward the exhibition's far end, where a smaller board stood a little apart, curtained with a strip of green crepe that Judy plainly meant to twitch back at the dramatic moment. But it had slipped, or a child had had at it, and a corner of the board showed: a photograph, larger than the rest and browner, of ground Dilys knew. The manor's walled garden, though younger by fifty years — the glasshouse whole and glinting, the espaliers trained tight and living against brick that was now black and bare. A knot of garden staff stood along the water-meadow in the flat light of some lost summer, aprons and caps and rolled shirtsleeves, and among them two children in white, unmistakably Quennell, squinting into the future. Judy came bustling, saw the slipped curtain, and instead of covering it turned the board so the reverse showed, where a caption card was pinned, and above it, in faded ink on the photograph's own back, a name.

"Denny Rooke," Judy read out, to no one and everyone, tasting it. "Under-gardener. Gone to Canada, they said. Nineteen sixty-one." She tapped the print. "Though there's a figure been torn out of it, do you see, just here — somebody didn't want remembering — and I mean to find out who, before I'm—"

"That will do, Judith."

Lady Estelle Quennell had come up the hall unnoticed, imperious and shabby in a coat that had been very good in 1975, and she was looking at the brown photograph the way a person looks at a snake in a drawer. The colour had gone out of her face entirely; it left her powder standing on the skin like frost. For a moment nobody said anything at all, and the euphonium, mercifully, chose that moment to fall silent.

"An interesting period piece," said Lady Estelle, in a voice scraped clean of everything. "I'm sure. Good afternoon." And she turned and swept out through the crowd, which parted for her from long habit, and the cold air came in when the door opened and shut, and Judy watched her go with an expression Dilys could not like — not malice, quite. Something worse. The pleasure of a hound that has found the scent.

Over in the corner by the fire buckets, two men had their heads together. Freddie Quennell, pink and genial and looking as though his collar were too tight, and a younger man in a very good overcoat that had never seen a village hall before — Prosser, the Thornfield Homes man, back again, with a folder under his arm and a way of glancing round the room and pricing it. Sadie Bunce, ferrying a tray of mince pies past them, slowed to a professional dawdle, and Dilys, close enough, heard the word pre-application and the word February and Freddie saying, too heartily, "Well, nothing's signed, nothing's signed," which in Dilys's forty years of experience of village life was precisely what people said when a thing was as good as signed. The Glebe Field. The water-meadow. The very ground in Judy's photograph, wanting a date on it, and now it had one.

She would have stood and thought about that too, but Charity Enys reached out and caught her by the sleeve, and it was like being caught by summer.

"Dilys Ashcroft. Come here to me, out of that draught." The stall behind her was a small paradise of glass and colour — cordials ruby and amber, syrups the black-red of hedgerow autumns, herbal teas in twists of paper, tonic in stubby bottles with hand-inked labels, a comb of honey glistening in a dish, and everywhere, over the steaming cups she ladled out free to all comers, a single flower floating: a sprig of rosemary here, a nasturtium saved from the frost, a curl of orange peel cut like a blossom, a pretty small thing set on the surface of each so it came to you looking like a gift and not a drink. Charity herself was broad and warm and floury-armed, her grey hair coming down, a woman built for feeding people, and the queue at her stall never got shorter because nobody who reached the front wanted to leave. "Now. I've had my eye out for you." She was already reaching under the trestle. "Don't you say no."

The bottle she pressed into Dilys's hands was warm from standing near the urn. Widow's Winter Tonic, the label said, in Charity's round hand. "Rosehip and hawthorn and a little of this and that," Charity said, and her voice dropped, and the whole loud hall seemed to draw back from them a step. "It's a hard time of year to be the one that's left, my love. I know it. I lost my own — oh, years back now, another life — and I'll tell you the winters were the worst of it, the coming home to the one cup. You take that of a night. It won't mend it. Nothing mends it. But it warms the part of you the fire can't get to." She patted Dilys's hand, and there was nothing in the touch but kindness, and Dilys, who had all winter kept herself at a careful distance from kindness precisely because it undid her, felt her eyes sting and was furious about it.

"Where did you learn all this?" she said, to steady herself, one plantswoman reaching for the safe ground of the other's craft. "The tinctures — the steeping — that's not cookery, that's a proper stillroom. Did you train, or—"

"Oh," said Charity, and smiled, and turned to ladle a cup for a waiting child, and the smile was as warm as ever but the turning was very smooth, "here and there. You pick it up. An old lady I did for, once, years ago — she knew all the old country things, and I sat at her elbow, and it stuck." She handed the cup down. "Some of us just have the hands for it. You'll have hands yourself, I'd say, with all your flowers." And that was all; the door had shut on that as neatly as it had shut behind Lady Estelle, and with as little noise, and Dilys — who noticed, it was her curse and her gift to notice — noticed that a woman who would tell you unasked about her dead husband and your own grief in the same breath had said here and there about the one subject a craftswoman usually could not be stopped talking about.

Nearby, Clive Sowerby had set out his contribution to the horticultural glory of Little Hemlock: a jam jar. In it, water clouding slightly, stood three white Christmas roses, and Clive stood over them the way the goose stood over the raffle, monumentally, radiating a satisfaction that dared you to place your own beside it. "Best in the valley," he informed the middle distance. "Frost don't touch 'em. Everything else give up dead and these come up laughing." Helleborus niger, Dilys thought, looking at the nodding white sepals that the world insisted on calling petals, the golden boss of stamens, the whole improbable clean cold beauty of the thing — up out of iron ground in the killing dark, when the entire garden had lain down and quit. Lovely. And she thought, with the automatic double vision of forty years, of the black roots under Clive's border, and what lived in them, and how you'd know a poisoned heart from a failed one if you were ever fool enough to have to.

Judy's voice cut across the hall. She had cornered Marion at the cake table — or Marion had failed to escape her — and the two of them stood squared off over the Victoria sponges with a stillness that made people nearby find sudden business elsewhere.

"—and I have had it appraised, Marion," Judy was saying, gentle as ever, deadly as ever. "By Kingsbourne. The loving-cup. Your seventeenth-century treasure. It is Victorian. Eighteen-sixties, at the earliest. The society's newsletter goes out in January, and I do think the membership are owed the truth, don't you, after paying to insure a—"

"You," said Marion Kettleby, and her voice came out white and shaking and much too loud, so that the euphonium's neighbour actually stopped playing, "are a poisonous, interfering old woman, and one of these days somebody is going to wring that interfering neck of yours, and I shall bring them a cake." She was gripping the cake knife. She put it down as though it had bitten her, and walked stiffly toward the tea urn, and the hall went carefully, roaringly back to its noise, and Judy stood among her photographs and smiled her small satisfied smile as though the whole thing had proved a point.

Someone touched Dilys's elbow — a lighter touch, a reluctant one. Dr Ambrose Cardew stood there in his good grey overcoat looking as though the fayre were a diagnosis he had been given and did not like, and in his hand, held slightly behind him as if it were evidence, was a jar of Charity's honey.

"Ashcroft," he said, with the air of a man caught. "I—" He glanced at the honey and appeared to resent it. "The woman's honey is remarkably good," he said, defensively, "and I have a cough. That is all. Don't look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you like anything," said Dilys, who was, and who found — another small shock, like the warmth of the room — that she was smiling, a real one, the first in some days.

"You are looking at me precisely like something," said Ambrose, and retreated with his honey into the crowd, prickly and pink about the ears, and Dilys watched him go and thought that it was a strange winter that could make a mince pie feel like a lifeline and a bad-tempered pathologist buying honey feel like the funniest thing she had seen in a year.

At the cordial stall the queue had thinned for a moment, and Judy Netherwood came to the front of it, refusing with a small crisp shake of the head the ladle of steaming mulled wine that Charity offered first out of habit. "No, no — you know I don't, dear, never touch it, not with my heart the way it is and these tablets." She said it comfortably; her fussy teetotal ritual was old news, a thing the village wore like the weather. Charity was already reaching for a different jug, a smaller one kept apart at the back.

"'Course you don't, my love, and here's yours — I made it up special, your own, like always." She poured it into a cup that Dilys understood, from the ease of it, to be understood between them as Judy's — no mulled wine, no wassail, her own hot spiced apple cordial from her own jug — and set upon the steaming surface, with the small deft flourish of a woman who did it to every special cup, a single pale flower to float there, pretty as a gift.

And a small boy — Jamie, the paper crown, the stolen mince pie — reached past all of it, up toward the bright jar of white roses on Clive's table, because he was nine and they were pretty and within reach.

"Don't you touch those, my love," said Charity Enys, drawing the child gently back from Clive Sowerby's jar of white Christmas roses, "pretty as they are — those'll stop your heart," and she laughed, and gave him a barley sugar, and turned back to her steaming cordials with a flower to float on each; and Dilys, who had spent forty years knowing exactly which lovely things would stop a heart, thought only how nice it was that somebody else in Little Hemlock knew it too.