A Casterglass Christmas

  A Casterglass Christmas

  A Keeping Up with the Penryns Romance

  Kate Hewitt

  A Casterglass Christmas

  Copyright© 2021 Kate Hewitt

  EPUB Edition

  The Tule Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Publication by Tule Publishing 2021

  Cover design by Rhian

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-954894-63-1

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  Dedication

  Dedicated to Rachel and Sophie, my Cumbrian friends! Love you!

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Keeping Up with the Penryns series

  More books by Kate Hewitt

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  With every book I write, I must thank the wonderful Tule editorial team, including my editor Sinclair, copyeditor Helena, and proofreader Marlene who all help to make my books the best they can be. Also thanks to the Tule team that helps to get my books out into the world, including Meghan, Jane, Maggie, Cyndi and Nikki. And special thanks to my readers, who have loved my Cumbrian-set books and asked for more! Lastly, thanks to all the friends I’ve made when I lived in Cumbria—you were like family when I lived there! Thank you for making it such a special place.

  Chapter One

  “Mum, there’s no signal!”

  Sixteen-year-old Poppy waved her phone in Althea’s face as she turned onto the sweeping drive, its extensive gardens now shrouded in darkness—and sleeting, icy rain. Christmas in Cumbria. Very merry.

  “Poppy, I’m trying to drive.”

  “There’s no signal,” her daughter shrieked again, as if Althea hadn’t heard her the first thirty-two times she’d mentioned it since they’d turned off the M6 and entered the Land that Time Forgot.

  “Poppy, please.” Althea tried to keep her voice light even as she gritted her teeth. Part of her disaster recovery plan was, for some reason, to speak musically rather than maniacally, and also not to throw things. A low bar, perhaps, but at least it meant she was succeeding at something. “Besides, we’re just about there. You can use the Wi-Fi once we’re inside.”

  “Casterglass has crap Wi-Fi—you know that.” Poppy flung her phone on top of her leather bag—Prada, only the best for her daughter, naturally—in the footwell and folded her arms mutinously, which was, Althea thought, a pointless gesture. She already knew her daughter didn’t want to come to Casterglass for Christmas. She’d made that abundantly clear when she’d talked about the parties she’d miss, the revision she needed to do—as if—and the fact that Casterglass was not even in the middle of nowhere, but on its farthest edge. On the last point, Althea had to agree with her.

  Over the last twenty years of her unfortunately regrettable marriage Althea had visited her family home only sporadically, even as she’d recalled it with affection, at least mostly. It hadn’t helped that her soon-to-be-ex-husband Jasper had never wanted to come. He’d always liked the idea of her home being a castle and her father a baron, but not the somewhat less than sparkling reality.

  “Where is it, Mum?” Twelve-year-old Tobias, morose and mostly silent in the back seat for the entire six hours’ drive from London, now peered through the rain-streaked window for a glimpse of his ancestral home—Casterglass Castle, family seat of the Penryns since 1277.

  “Around the corner, sweetheart.” The Land Rover was heading up the drive at a crawl, the rain lashing the car in a way that felt like a personal attack. Everything was dark, rainswept, romantic in a Wuthering Heights sort of way, which was exactly not Althea’s mood. As far as she was concerned, she’d sworn off romance forever, and definitely brooding heroes. Besides, she’d take a holiday on Turks and Caicos to Cumbria any day. However. Needs must.

  “Here we are,” she sang out, as musical as ever. All she needed was a piano accompaniment and a microphone. Poppy groaned, more of a huff really, as if six hours of complaining had finally taken the wind out of her determinedly bolshie sails, but Tobias, bless him, had pressed his nose to the window as Casterglass Castle loomed out of the darkness like something from a low-budget drama, the kind of thing you’d see at ten p.m. on BBC Two—an adaptation of one of the lesser known Jane Austen novels, or Anne Brontë, perhaps.

  Althea had stuck more to Jilly Cooper and Marian Keyes, but she thought that’s what it looked like. Home, in all of its musty, dank, crumbling glory, against a stormy night sky.

  “Well, let’s go say hello,” she said, her melody faltering slightly as she opened the door of the car and a sheet of rain blew in, soaking her thoroughly. Typical Cumbrian weather, but it was still a shock every time.

  “Why are there no lights on?” Poppy asked, an uncharacteristic waver of uncertainty in her voice, for the hulk of grey stone was looking particularly forbidding on this rainy night, its bleak Norman frontage like a blank face, the narrow arrow-slit windows resembling hostile, squinty eyes.

  “There will be lights on in the back,” Althea promised, a bit too gaily. Dread was pooling like sludge in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, she always managed to forget how coming home made her feel, until she was walking up to the door. A combination of affection and foreboding, having no idea what state the house would be in, or what sort of reception she might get, or how she could make any of it better.

  “When were we last here?” she asked her children, who both gave her blank looks. Long enough that they didn’t remember.

  “Grandad’s birthday,” Poppy said sullenly, after a moment. She was clutching her phone to her chest like a security blanket. She’d been texting furiously for most of the car trip, no doubt reading and responding to all the messages about the parties she would now miss, because her mean old mother had decided to hightail it home when her philandering husband had finally philandered too far. “But you and Tobias came by yourselves after that,” Poppy added.

  “I think I was ten?” Tobias suggested hesitantly, swiping his dark eye-hiding fringe away from his face.

  “Ah yes, I remember.” It had been after one of Jasper’s more obvious affairs; Althea had been too humiliated to weather it like the kind of storm they were currently in, and had gone and hid instead. Eventually, as usual, things had blown over, or at least everyone had pretended that they had.

  On that occasion Poppy had point-blank refused to go with her, and Ben, now at university, had been on a school ski trip, so it had just been her and Tobias, rattling around Casterglass’s many rooms with her parents. Tobias had, she recalled, bonded a bit with her younger sister Persephone, who had only been twenty at the time and had spent her whole life at Casterglass. Born when Althea had already escaped to university, her youngest sister remained a somewhat uneasy enigma to her.

  Well, here they were, about to have a happy family reunion. Or not. Taking a deep breath, Althea tried the handle of the front door, a mammoth, rusted iron ring that looked like it should belong on the wall of a dungeon, complete with accompanying skeletal hand.

  “It usually just takes a bit of twisting…” she told her waiting—and wet—children a bit breathlessly, only to have the rusted hunk of iron fall off right in her hand. With an exclamation of shock, she dropped it, narrowly and thankfully missing her foot. It clunked on the stone steps and then rolled off into the darkness. “Oh…well,” she said a bit lamely, and received another huff from Poppy in return.

  “Is there another door?” Tobias asked.

  “Oh, there’s loads of doors!” Althea’s voice was going from musical to manic. She swiped her wet hair out of her face as she surveyed the terrain. The castle’s normally manicured lawns—admittedly she tried to come to Cumbria in summer, when they were verdant and lush—looked decidedly less than well kept. The lawn was tufty and muddy and not something she wanted to slog through, but she had no choice because the door she knew would be open, to the kitchen, was around the side.
r />   “Come on,” she called to her brood like they were Cub Scouts on a camping trip. “We’ll go round the side.”

  Althea tried to ignore the squelching under her black suede Ted Baker boots as she made her way around Casterglass’s forbidding front to the Victorian addition in the back that was far friendlier, and where the rooms the family actually used were. A light shone out of the sitting room that boasted a stunning vista of the purple-fringed fells, and the sight of that little, ember-like glow amidst all the darkness heartened her.

  She hadn’t told her parents about leaving Jasper, or was it Jasper who had left her? A bit of both, she supposed, but frankly she wasn’t even sure how much they would care, although perhaps that was being a bit too mean. Just because your parents were a bit scatty and eccentric didn’t mean they were actually indifferent. Did it?

  “Come on,” she told her two children who were lagging behind, and she headed for the kitchen door. Its handle turned easily enough, and Althea breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the kitchen, the comforting rumbling of an Aga like a soundtrack to the room as well as her childhood. In the gloom lit only by the moonlight outside, filtering from behind the storm clouds, she saw everything exactly as it had always been: the battered red Aga along one wall, the rectangular table of scarred oak seating twelve taking up one end of a room the size of a basketball court, or at least half of one. Several Welsh dressers lined another wall, filled with dusty Willow Ware. On the other end of the kitchen there was a sofa and several squashy armchairs, every one of them piled with old newspapers and magazines.

  “What is that smell?” Poppy exclaimed in disgust as she stepped into the kitchen behind Althea. “It’s absolutely rank.”

  Althea took a sniff, and then wished she hadn’t. The usual musty, dusty smell of home had definitely been dialled up a notch or five. And knowing her family, it could be originating from anything or anywhere.

  “I’m not sure,” she hedged as she put down her bag by the door. “Maybe some milk’s gone off.”

  “Or a whole cow.” Poppy shuddered as she looked around the room. “This looks like something from an episode of Hoarders.”

  Althea let out a slightly strangled laugh. The kitchen was the most comfortable and normal room in the entire castle. Wait until her daughter caught sight of the library with its many tottering stacks, or the ballroom with its army of mannequins from her mother’s brief bout with dressmaking, or the armoury, which had eight centuries of rusty shields stacked like dustbin lids. And those were the more manageable parts of a castle that had eight hundred years of history, and even more junk.

  “Let’s see if we can find Granny and Grandad,” she said in a faux-cheerful voice. She’d emailed to say she was coming, but with her parents that didn’t mean anything. If they’d even checked their email, which they still considered new technology, they had most likely forgotten about her message by now.

  Quietly she crept through the castle, her two children in tow, down a narrow corridor that led from the warren of rooms that made up the erstwhile servants’ quarters, to the rooms that Althea had always considered most liveable—a sitting room, her father’s study, and half a dozen bedrooms squashed above. This was the only part of the castle that had a chance of being somewhat warm, for a few hours at least after the heating had been cranked up to full blast. The rest of the castle was freezing even in the middle of summer—a Cumbrian summer, which wasn’t saying much. If the thermometer registered twelve degrees in July the locals considered it ‘red-hot’.

  Why had she come back here again? Oh, right, because she’d had no other options. Good to remember.

  “Here we are.” Althea pushed open the door to the sitting room, a room decorated in varying shades of 1970s browns, with throws and pillows in several violent combinations of orange plaid. Her parents didn’t do redecorating. The best part of the room was the deep window seat overlooking the stupendous view, which of course couldn’t be seen at night during a rainstorm.

  Now rain pelted the glass like bullets, and the howling wind made the panes flex in a way Althea remembered from her childhood but which made both her children take an instinctive step backwards, as if afraid the windows might explode on impact. Which, fair enough, they might. Althea recalled more than one winter storm growing up that had resulted in shattered glass. The room was disappointingly empty, despite the homely light Althea had seen from outside, and she turned back to the door, uncertain which part of the castle to try next.

  “Where is everyone?” Poppy asked, and her daughter’s usually aggressive attitude faltered for a moment, filling Althea with a sudden rush of maternal feeling. Poppy had been rather hard work these last few years, obsessed with social media and her group of pouty, twig-like friends, and completely dismissive of everything and anyone else. Althea suspected she was at fault for letting too much slide over the years, but that knowledge didn’t make dealing with her daughter any easier.

  “They’ll be around somewhere,” she said now, as brightly as she could.

  “They knew we were coming, right?”

  “Yes, of course.” This, Althea knew, sounded somewhat unconvincing. What she really meant was—I think they knew at one point, but they’ve most certainly forgotten.

  “Darling!” The plummily enthusiastic yet decidedly vague tones of her mother—so familiar from her childhood—had Althea turning to see her wafting down the hall wearing something in a garish shade of pink that was a cross between a muumuu and a toga.

  “Mummy.” Yes, she, a forty-one-year-old, soon-to-be-divorced woman of the world, called her mother Mummy. Because she was pseudo-aristocratic, and that was what you did, even when you were old enough to be drawing a pension.

  Her mother air-kissed both her cheeks without managing to make any actual contact before she stepped back, blinking owlishly at the three of them. She had two pairs of glasses perched on top of her head, another pair that she was actually wearing, and she sported a long necklace of what looked like bottle caps that reached down to her navel. “Was it today you were coming? It must have been. I’m sorry, I haven’t done a thing about your rooms. I was finishing a chapter on Catullus…”

  “We can do it, don’t worry.” Her mother’s response was entirely expected. Having gained her PhD in Classics from Oxford in her twenties, she had spent the last thirty years writing books that could be used as doorstops but were in fact the primary texts of obscure postgraduate courses and could not be found on Amazon, never mind in an actual bookshop. She didn’t make much money off them, but she certainly loved her work.

  “Hi, Granny,” Tobias offered uncertainly as Violet Penryn, Lady of Casterglass, turned to him with an abstracted smile.

  “Oh, hmm, yes? So lovely to see you again, my dear.” She patted Tobias awkwardly on the shoulder before she continued drifting down the hall. “Have you eaten? I’m sure we can rustle something up…”

  Poppy threw Althea a dark look, no doubt thinking of the smell emanating from the kitchen, and she gave her a reassuring smile in return that had no basis in reality. The thought of her mother rustling up anything in the kitchen was terrifying in the extreme.

  Her mother was, Althea knew, what in another time would have been called an original. Nowadays people would just call her weird, and that was if they were feeling generous.

  The daughter of a (very) mildly famous archaeologist who had been widowed when Violet was a child and died before Althea was born, Violet had spent most of her childhood on a dig in Persia.

  “Persia?” Althea had once asked uncertainly, during one of her mother’s dreamy recollections of foraging for skulls and brushing off mosaics in some oasis-filled desert. “Didn’t Persia stop being a country, like, a hundred years ago?”

  “Oh no,” her mother had replied with a vague smile, “it was definitely Persia.”

  Sometimes Althea wondered if her mother had made it all up, and had actually grown up in a council house in Birmingham. If so, kudos to her for carrying on the charade for so long, and so convincingly. Her mother’s mask hadn’t slipped once.