Mistletoe Mother

‘You’re not caving in at the first hurdle,’ he told himself fiercely. ‘The others might have been half joking when they sent you here, but you’re the only one who really knows how much you need to get your head together. Now, think, man. Why didn’t the key work? Perhaps the door’s warped, or something. Small wonder if this weather is par for the time of year.’

As he bent down to deposit his ungainly burden before trying again, he suddenly realised that he was still talking to himself and grimaced. Was this a new habit? Surely the isolation wasn’t getting to him already.

As he straightened up to try the key again, the increasingly vicious wind caught the end of his scarf and flipped it right across his face just as the door swung silently open in front of him. He blinked as light and warmth spilled over him like some unearthly benediction and suddenly realised that he had an unexpected welcoming committee.

‘How far have you got, then?’

Ella bent awkwardly towards the hearth to lift the corner of the tea towel and peered at the rising dough underneath it with a satisfied smile.

The bread wouldn’t be ready to go into the oven for another twenty minutes or so. Just enough time to get the fire going so that the oven would be hot enough to make a crusty top on each loaf. ‘Just the way you taught me, Granny,’ she murmured as she set the timer, feeling as ever that her grandmother’s spirit would never really leave the cottage she’d loved so much. ‘Put the bread in first, when the oven’s hottest, then pastry, then cakes as the temperature slowly falls.’

Later, she would be putting in a casserole to simmer slowly overnight, but her supper tonight was going to be at least one steaming bowl of home-made leek and potato soup with a couple of slices of hot, freshly baked bread. ‘If I can get the fire hot enough, that is,’ she grumbled as she lowered herself heavily to her knees and reached for a handful of kindling. ‘I’m moving even slower than Granny did, and she was eighty years old and riddled with arthritis.’

After the last seven or eight months, the whole baking process was almost second nature now—lighting a fire in the old-fashioned cloam oven from the briskly burning embers of the open hearth, then raking out the fire when the oven reached the right temperature to bake the bread.

Her father had wanted to replace the centuries-old hearth with a modern cooker to make his mother’s life a little easier but she’d stubbornly clung to the methods she’d grown up with. In spite of the effort involved, Ella could understand the attraction of the old ways, especially on such a cold day.

The fire was blazing brightly in the depths when she shut the oven door and sat back on her heels, glad that her grandmother had resisted. It might be old-fashioned, but the wide fireplace with the cloam oven built into the wall of one side of it was certainly the most appropriate for this sort of weather.

‘Not only does it keep me warm but I can use it for cooking my food, too, and all without worrying about power cuts or running out of gas bottles.’

The swiftly running stream that hurried past the back of the cottage provided her water, via the totally modern tanks and pipes at one end of the tiny loft. Granny had been easily persuaded that there was no good reason to carry buckets of water or make trips to the ‘privy’ when she could have the labour-saving convenience of running water and an inside bathroom.

At the same time, the force of the stream on its downward rush had been unobtrusively utilised to provide all the power she needed for lighting and a fridge. In a really bitter winter the volume of water might be diminished by ice, but so far the little diesel generator hidden away in one of the outhouses as an emergency backup hadn’t been needed at all.

Anyway, she preferred the oil lamps her grandmother had once relied on, and she had a plentiful supply of candles. There was plenty of wood split for burning, with several days’ worth neatly piled beside the fire and even a stack of peat if she got desperate.

Real pioneer stuff, as her sister Sophia was prone to tease, her pretty face screwed up in an expression of mock disgust as she examined her neatly manicured nails.

And it was just teasing, Ella knew with a renewed surge of gratitude for Sophia’s generosity. They’d both loved their visits to the little cottage and had revelled in the freedom to roam far and wide no matter what time of year they’d come. It seemed almost impossible that they would never again hear the soft burr of Granny’s voice as she bade them come in for their tea, or the stories she would tell of the creatures that shared the glen with her.

It had been her bequest to the two of them that they should share the cottage between them and it had been Sophia’s idea that Ella should stay here until she decided what direction her life was going to take.

She’d originally offered to sell the cottage so that Ella could use the money to live on, only admitting how much she’d hated the thought of losing it when Ella had turned the idea down without a second thought.

Staying here had been the best solution all round. She had chickens for eggs and she’d become almost self-sufficient once she’d got the vegetable garden going. As for the rest, it hadn’t taken long to dust off her grandmother’s spinning wheel so that she had goods to sell or barter in the way of isolated rural communities for the other things she needed.

Her thoughts were wandering happily over the little successes that had helped to bring her out of the depression that had driven her here when a sound outside the front of the cottage drew her attention.

A car? She began the struggle to get to her feet. ‘If that’s Malcolm coming to check up on me again I shall give him a piece of my mind. I told him I had plenty of everything and he shouldn’t be driving around when the weather’s like this. Doesn’t he realise that Morag worries about him?’

She used the arm of the chair to heave herself upright and stood puffing for a moment while she listened to the sound of thuds and bumps in the little porch. She hardly needed more food and she had enough wood stacked within easy reach to last for a couple of months at least. She even had a source of fresh milk, delivered daily to the end of the track by one of the MacLain lads on his way into the village. Anything else she needed, including help, she just had to lift the phone to find any number of people willing to offer, such was her grandmother’s legacy within the tiny community.

The only thing she hadn’t got—and that Malcolm couldn’t deliver—was some extra energy.

‘Oh, I’ll be so glad when I’ve lost some of this weight,’ she grumbled as she waddled towards the door. ‘The next three weeks can’t go fast enough. I can’t wait to see my feet again—no offence, baby!’ she added as she slid a hand under the voluminous hand-knitted jumper which had once been her father’s and patted the taut mound of her belly.

For a moment it almost sounded as if someone was trying to use a key in the lock, but before she could think anything of it she was distracted by a hefty kick against her hand.

‘So, you want to get out, do you? If you take my advice, you’ll wait until the weather’s a bit better, or at least until daylight,’ she murmured fondly as she reached out to slide the old-fashioned bolt aside, her other hand reaching for the light switch that was almost never used. ‘We don’t want to make Malcolm do too many trips in the snow.’

She pulled the door open and was momentarily blinded by a flurry of whirling snowflakes before she realised that, whoever he was, the man on her doorstep wasn’t sixty-four-year-old Malcolm.

For just a moment the reflexes she’d honed when she’d lived in the city nearly had her slamming the door in the stranger’s face. Then common sense stayed her hand.

Whoever he was, and whatever had brought him to her door, he needed help to find his way back to the road, although how he could possibly have mistaken her little track for the properly surfaced glen road she had no idea.

‘Are you lost?’ she asked, and had to suppress a smile when she heard echoes of her grandmother’s accent in her voice. When she’d lived in the city all those years, during her training, her own accent had almost disappeared. Until this moment she hadn’t realised that it had returned stronger than ever.

She shivered as the wind forced its way through the narrow gap between door and jamb, glad of her thick jumper and the fact that she wasn’t out in that awful weather.

As her visitor fought to subdue the ends of his scarf the light over his head suddenly illuminated a head of thick dark hair, tousled by the wind in spite of the neatness of the style and dotted with glittering shards of ice. He blinked to rid sinfully long lashes of the latest sprinkling of snowflakes and revealed eyes the colour of burnished steel.

‘If this isn’t Buchanan’s Croft, I am lost,’ her visitor said wryly.

Every hair went up on the back of Ella’s neck when she heard that all-too-familiar voice and she had an awful sinking feeling inside her that wasn’t helped by the vigorous football match being enacted inside her.

‘And why would you be looking for the Buchanan’s Croft?’ she asked, copying his ‘foreign’ pronunciation of the name as she had to raise her voice over the rising sound of the wind. She had a dreadful feeling as the scene played out in front of her eyes that her peaceful existence was just about to shatter beyond repair. This was all of her worst nightmares come to life and she would far rather have shouted at him to go away than hold a polite conversation on her doorstep.

‘Because I’m supposed to be staying at the croft for the next two weeks and I seem to have been delivered to the wrong place.’ He was searching his pockets as though trying to find something. ‘Is it far away?’

‘Staying?’ she squeaked as the situation just got worse and worse. ‘But…’

‘Ah! Here it is!’ he exclaimed as he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of an inside pocket. ‘There’s the address, right there.’

He held the pale blue slip towards her and she leant forward to look at it.

Her gasp as she recognised the handwriting in the distinctive violet ink echoed his exclamation when she was clearly illuminated for the first time.

‘Sophia!’ she hissed, and didn’t know whether to burst into maniacal laughter or floods of tears when she realised what her sister had done.

‘Ella?’ he exclaimed, clearly shocked. ‘Ella Buchan? What are you doing here?’

‘What am I doing here?’ she repeated. ‘I live here, Seth. This is the Buchan’s Croft—’ she stressed the correct pronunciation ‘—and since Sophia married in March, I am the last remaining Buchan.’

Ella stepped back into the cottage, opening the door wider to invite him into the warmth. There was no point in leaving him standing on the doorstep any longer, not now that she knew her wretched sister had deliberately sent Seth up to see her.

She should have expected Sophia to find some means of having her own way. All their lives she had been pulling rank as the older sister and the fact that she was now a married woman didn’t seem to have made any difference—probably made things worse, in fact.

‘But…How long have you been living here? No one seemed to know where you’d gone. Where are you working now?’ The questions were tumbling out of him without giving her a chance to reply, but at least they were telling her that Sophia hadn’t primed him before he’d come up here.

If she’d thought about it logically, she’d have realised that her sister was far too Machiavellian to have done that. All she’d needed to do had been to set the scene by sending Seth up to see her. That would guarantee that little sister Ella had to ‘sort her life out’ just as Sophia had been advising her for months.

Seth was standing there with his coat and scarf still on but apparently totally unaware of his surroundings, his eyes riveted to her face almost as if he was expecting her to disappear at any moment.

A sudden sharp ring took Ella by surprise. For a moment she couldn’t think what it was, then remembered the bread dough waiting to be cooked.

‘Excuse me but I’ve got to see to that,’ she said as she hastily turned towards the fireplace. If she was lucky she could get her brain to work in the few moments the task would take.