Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(24)
When old Mrs Morton’s rheumatoid fingers eased up for the first time in months after she’d tried Evie’s Better Than a Holiday Noodle Soup, she left five knitted Christmas jumpers inside the old copper pot. Evie, Emma, Dot, Aggie and Uncle Joe wore them every year at Christmas after that.
But there was a darker side too, which she found out soon enough when she saw Janice Honeymoon hand over a set of earrings that had once belonged to her grandmother after she asked for a recipe to help save her marriage. When Janice had left, she asked Evie, ‘But why did you take the earrings when they meant so much to her – surely, we could have just helped her? It’s a bit mean.’
Evie looked at her sadly. ‘If only it worked that way. But there’s a cost to what we do, for making our recipes. A sacrifice that needs to be paid.’ If Emma was surprised at this, it was nothing compared to her shock when she watched Evie plant the earrings at dusk, beneath the cucumber frame.
‘If you dig just a little in the garden of Hope Cottage you’ll find the others too,’ Evie went on. ‘Tokens from a lover, cherished keepsakes, treasured heirlooms – not all of them would be worth something out in the world, but here they are all the same. They’re precious because of what they meant to the owner. Aggie says it helps the garden to bloom, but all I know is that it helps the recipes. Without this price, this sacrifice, they don’t often work.’
Few in Whistling would ever have believed that that was where all their offerings ended up, that they weren’t all lining some treasure chest somewhere.
‘It’s the price we pay in order to do what we do. We can’t use them – if we do, well, it just doesn’t go so well for us. It changes the effect, poisons it – and us, somehow,’ Evie explained. ‘There have been a few Halloways, in the past, who tried it and found that out the hard way. I don’t blame them exactly – it can be hard our way of life, and it can seem like an easy solution to use them, but it’s anything but.’
They never accepted cash. Even if it was sent after a recipe worked, it was returned with a polite though firm refusal. In time Emma would begin to wish that they would take money; ticket stubs and perfume didn’t mend the leak in the roof or keep the woodburner going. There were other costs too; besides their twice-mended linens and their faded dresses, there were the whispers that followed them everywhere they went, and the stares, and the rumours too.
It was on her first day at the Whistling Infant Academy that she discovered, like many Halloways before her, that she’d also inherited the old feud between the three oldest families in Whistling. No recipe in The Book had been able to change the fact that an Allen never spoke to a Halloway if they could help it, just like a Lea would cross the street before they would ever stand next to someone who came from Hope Cottage. Or that a Halloway would make a recipe for anyone, anyone at all, unless that someone was an Allen or a Lea.
The Leas thought the Halloways were witches; the Allens thought the Halloways were expensive frauds. There wasn’t a week that went by when the vicar, John Lea, like his father and his father before him, didn’t deliver a sermon to encourage his delegation not to seek a solution from the faded blue door of Hope Cottage.
Just as there wasn’t a day that went by that Janet Allen didn’t judge the people who went to the Halloways for help as blind fools. No one seemed to remember that once, long ago, they had all been friends.
It was Stella Lea, a girl with pale blonde hair in two long plaits and very serious, dark eyes, who conveyed a rather rudimentary version of this to Mrs Prudney, Emma’s new teacher, who hadn’t lived in the village long and therefore had no idea herself just what she was asking when she requested that she take a seat next to Emma on Emma’s first day. And Stella refused and matter-of-factly said, ‘Leas are never friends with Halloways, that’s what Mummy said.’ She crossed her arms. ‘So, no.’
Emma had gone home hurt, confused and embarrassed at being singled out, but most of all unable to explain what had happened, though Evie soon guessed. By that evening Dot, who’d never met a rumour she didn’t like to share, confirmed it.
Her round face was splotchy and red from her anger. ‘It was that Stella Lea – refused to sit next to her in class.’
‘You’ll make other friends, don’t you worry,’ said Evie – calmly, but her ears had turned pink in ire despite her consoling tone.
‘You wouldn’t want an Allen or a Lea as a friend in any case – they’re all idiots,’ said Agatha, who wasn’t the type to ever mince words.
Even Uncle Joe was there, Dot’s husband, a shy quiet man who generally liked to stay out of the way. But he had a fondness for the little girl with sad eyes and had come to offer some silent sympathy and an awkward pat on her head, before he retreated fast to the living room with the latest Whistling News and its crossword puzzle.
‘Well, I’m sorry but I couldn’t stand by and just take that. I walked past Netta Lea outside the Brimbles’ store,’ said Dot with a sniff. ‘Stella’s mother,’ she explained for Emma’s benefit. ‘I called her name, and when she turned I pointed at her, then drew three circles in the air, very slow-like, while I muttered, “Wisha washa wisha”, giving her a very hard stare while I did,’ she went on, pushing up her jam-jar glasses. Dot’s lips twitched. ‘I made her think I cursed her.’