Page 22 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm (Highland Cookery School #2)

Pavel offered Bella his congratulations, promised faithfully not to say anything to Adam until she’d spoken to him, and headed back out towards the coach house.

He stopped by the door to check nobody was watching before going inside.

Youngest Strachan, Strach, would be joining him tomorrow for a few days so they’d get into the bigger jobs and try to speed through the most urgent decorating then.

Pavel figured that if Tom got the job at McKenzie’s he’d be able to use the money from that to pay Strach for his time.

That plan pleased him – if he was going to take money from John McKenzie he might as well redirect some of it to Lowbridge to level the playing field a touch.

He was collecting a new tap for the second bathroom from his van when Jill came out. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ He leaned against the van, holding the tap awkwardly behind him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’ He angled the tap back into the van. ‘Just checking I’ve got everything for my next job.’

‘Right. So Saturday still OK?’

‘Yep. Yep. That’s what we said.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘Yep.’

She took a step towards him. Jill always hugged goodbye. And hello. And often several more times mid-conversation. Today she stopped, patted him tentatively on the arm, and stepped away. ‘I’ll see you then then.’

He was still by the van when he heard a new set of footsteps behind him.

‘Oh. Sorry.’ Gemma Bryant was walking towards him, phone in one hand, Post-it note stuck to the other. ‘Bella’s on the phone to Adam, and Darcy and Flinty are halfway to redecorating the nursery already.’

‘So you’re hiding?’

She shook her head and then stopped. ‘Not hiding. Just, it’s a lot of noise, you know? So I thought I’d look round out here.’ She nodded towards the coach house. ‘See if I could get some pictures for the website. For the whole indoor fancy glamping thing.’

Pavel shook his head. ‘I could do that for you.’

Gemma frowned. ‘It’s fine. I can do it.’

Obviously she could. ‘It’s just, it’s a mess in there at the moment.’

‘Right. Then I can see what needs clearing.’

‘No.’ He moved to stand in front of the coach house door. ‘It’s not safe.’

‘I promise not to turn any lights on.’

She was right in front of him now. He was physically blocking her path. If she took another step forward they’d be touching. That thought sat in his head for a moment. Pavel stood aside, and let her squeeze past.

She made her way straight through the first door on the ground floor, and into a half-painted bathroom. She stopped. ‘I didn’t think they were doing any work out here.’

Pavel ran through his options. He could lie, pretend that there was some sort of stealth decorator working on the coach house that none of them knew anything about. That sounded ridiculous, and also, he realised, wasn’t even a lie. Honesty then. ‘They don’t know I am.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Adam and Bel can’t afford the work, so I’m doing what I can myself. As a surprise for them.’

Jodie didn’t know how to respond. ‘That’s… that’s so kind.’

‘It’s fine. I like being useful.’

‘That must be a good feeling.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just tend to cause problems.’

Pavel looked at her for a moment, long enough that she had to pull her gaze away. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘I…’ What was she thinking? She wasn’t. That was the problem.

She wasn’t thinking like Gemma. She needed to keep her guard up, especially, it seemed, around Pavel Stone.

‘I just meant you’re useful with practical stuff, aren’t you?

What I do’s more…’ What was the word? Probably if she had a clearer idea of what it was Gemma supposedly did, she’d be able to describe it more clearly. ‘Anyway. I should get back.’

‘Don’t tell them, will you?’ Pavel asked. ‘About the work. I don’t want a big fuss, especially now they’ve got a baby to think about as well.’

‘Won’t they notice your van’s still here at some point?’

Pavel nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Yeah. I guess I’ll get what I need out, drive it home and walk back over. I hadn’t thought of that.’

She grinned. ‘Clearly subterfuge is not in your blood.’

‘But it is in yours?’

‘What? No. I’m not… I didn’t… Straight as a die, me.

Is that the phrase?’ It didn’t sound right.

A die was cubed, not a straight line. ‘Dead honest and everything.’ Finally she caught his expression, the little half-smile that pulled at his lips and broke the tough-guy exterior.

‘Fine,’ she muttered. ‘I won’t say anything.

If there’s anything I can do to help though? ’

‘If I need any more advice on the cloak-and-dagger stuff you’re the first person I’ll call.’

She headed out of the coach house and back to the castle. She definitely had an ongoing urge to lick one of his forearms, but it was getting harder to pretend that was all it was. The beautiful beefcake had the audacity to be amazingly kind as well.

But he was dating the friendly vicar, and Jodie couldn’t tangle the web she was weaving any further than she already had.

The only approach to Pavel Stone was to keep a distance.

And the best way to do that was to fill her racing brain with something else.

Instead of heading back to the yellow room, or into the kitchen – where she guessed everyone would be gathered – she made her way down the side corridor and towards the door to the ballroom.

This was the job she’d been putting off.

This was her white whale. This was the broken shower curtain in her flat in Reading that she’d ignored for a year but on a grand, grand scale.

The mistake she was making was to think about sorting out the ballroom like a Jodie rather than like a Gemma.

Gemma would not be freaked out by the scale of the task.

Gemma would power in there, get everyone on side and have the place shipshape in no time.

She’d probably even sing a cheerful song while she was doing it.

Jodie’s imaginary Gemma was morphing day by day into a Julie Andrews character. Maybe she could skip the cheerful song.

Jodie pushed open the door. The key, her mother used to say, was to break things down into little jobs.

Rather than try to eat the whole elephant you focused on just the trunk.

Like with a roast dinner – carrots first, then half a Yorkshire pudding, then peas, then meat and stuffing, and then the rest of the Yorkshire pudding.

One thing at a time so you knew where you were.

She looked around the ballroom. She could picture what it could be.

You’d put the band at the end nearest where she was standing, and open up the double doors at the other end that led to where exactly?

Although she understood the basic shape of the courtyard and the outbuildings, the precise geography of the interior of the castle still eluded Jodie.

She collected her notebook from the kitchen and drew a square to represent the basic layout of the main building around the courtyard, and marked the kitchen where she was standing, and the hallway that led to the small dining room, the main stairwell and then on towards the yellow and blue rooms and the estate office.

By that point she could already see the problem.

There was no way on earth her plan was going to be big enough.

That was OK. She knew exactly where to look for a suitably massive piece of paper. There was decorating stuff in the small hall. Now where on earth was the small hall? Flinty bustled into the kitchen at the right moment. ‘Cup of tea, love?’

‘No thank you. Erm, do you know where the small hall is?’

‘Past the ballroom, same side of the corridor.’

The room, which judging from the stack of paint cans and folded ladder in the corner was the small hall, would have challenged anybody’s understanding of the word small.

It was smaller than the ballroom, but it was like describing the Earth as ‘just a small planet’.

Possibly true by comparison with the rest of the universe, but only really a useful description for people who’d grown up on Jupiter.

Alongside the discarded paint cans she did find what she was looking for – a stack of half-rolls of old wallpaper. She grabbed the cleanest-looking one and headed to the Dower House to collect her pride and joy.

Jodie was well aware that adult colouring was thoroughly 2017 as an activity but, in her defence, she’d loved a colouring book before it was trendy and she had never wavered in her affections since.

Her most adored possession, the first thing she’d packed when she ran away from Reading, before clothes or toiletries or the very swishy noise-cancelling headphones Gemma had bought her for Christmas two years ago, was her colouring pencils.

She stroked the tin almost reverentially and hugged it to her body to carry back to the ballroom, where she rolled the wallpaper out on the floor, secured the corners with whatever came to hand and set about to draw some more.

She started with the parts of the castle she knew, and had already sketched in miniature on her notebook.

On the wallpaper there was space for the land around them.

She added in Adam’s garden and the Dower House to one side, the stables and pasture to the other, and the coach house and road leading up to the vehicle bridge.

Then it struck her she could only draw in the ground floor of the actual buildings, so she created a box off to the side and redrew the outline of the castle to allow her to fill in the first floor.

And then she set out exploring the blank spaces on her hand-drawn map, a few rooms at a time, before coming back to her drawing and adding details, colouring in spaces to a key she created – yellow for bedrooms, blue for bathrooms, and then shades of red, pink and purple for the more ‘public’ parts of the castle where visitors and cookery school students came in.

Then she added greenery to the outside space, before rolling up her paper, packing up her pencils and walking the short path to the walled garden.

There she unfurled her work on a dry bench and filled in the locations of the greenhouses and individual beds, allowing herself to add in splashes of colour for the planting and even a slightly fanciful bumblebee hovering over the scene.

She didn’t stop until it started to get dark. Bella found her as she was making her way back to the Dower House. ‘Where have you been? I thought you were going to start on the ballroom.’

Damn. That was what she’d been going to do and then she’d needed to find out where the big double doors went, and then she’d thought that half an hour familiarising herself with the layout of the castle would be a good idea and then…

and then she was in the walled garden adding shading to the neat little pencil outlines of countless worn red bricks.

The real Gemma would have had a team of eight strong men clearing out the ballroom by now. ‘I’m sorry. I got a bit distracted.’

Bella grinned. ‘You weren’t the only one today.’

‘Oh sorry. How are you feeling?’

‘Weird. Good. Weird. Having a baby right now wasn’t the plan.’

‘But it’s good weird? What did Adam say?’

Bella pulled a face. ‘I think he was a bit in shock. Him and me both though.’ She finally noticed the roll of wallpaper under Jodie’s arm. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘It’s silly. I thought, you know, it can be a bit confusing learning your way around this place so I thought I’d draw myself a little map, and it sort of got out of hand.’

‘Show me?’

The sun was dipping behind the islands so Jodie carried her makeshift site map into the kitchen and unfurled it in front of Darcy, Flinty and Veronica, who were already ensconced in the kitchen.

‘Oh I say.’ Veronica placed the glasses that hung on a slim silver chain around her neck neatly onto the bridge of her nose. ‘You drew this?’

Jodie nodded. ‘I know I’ve got a million other things to do. I’m sorry.’

Veronica inspected the drawing. ‘It’s excellent.’

‘Oh look,’ Darcy squealed. ‘You’ve drawn Dipper in.’ She pointed at the brown Labrador padding happily across the courtyard.

Jodie couldn’t help but smile at the reaction. ‘And you’re on it.’ She pointed at the stables, where Darcy was leading her horse out to the paddock.

‘It’s brilliant.’ Darcy grinned.

‘It really is.’ Bella clapped her hands together. ‘Could you make something like this for visitors? Like a site map. We wouldn’t need the upstairs cos that’s private, right?’

The other women nodded.

‘I think that’s a marvellous idea,’ Veronica nodded.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Jodie slammed her mouth closed too late. She’d just called Veronica – Lady Veronica, the Dowager Baroness Lowbridge – stupid.

‘I’m sorry, dear?’

‘I didn’t mean you’re stupid. You’re not stupid, but I’m not an artist. You have to get a proper designer for stuff like that.’

‘I think, dear, that if Bella is in agreement and we pay you to create a drawing for us then you are very much a proper artist.’

‘Oh.’ Jodie dropped down onto a stool. ‘I guess so.’

‘It’s so good.’ Darcy was still in delight at the drawing of Lowbridge in front of her. ‘You never said you liked art.’

Jodie brightened up. ‘It was my favourite subject at school. I wanted to do it at university, but then…’ Then, exams and coursework had built up and organising it all had got on top of her, and Granddad had got ill around the same time, and…

‘Then you changed to business management?’ Veronica suggested.

What? Of course she had. Or rather Gemma had. Gemma who would have laughed at the idea of studying something as frivolous as art. ‘Yes. That’s right. Seemed more sensible for careers and things.’

‘You will draw a visitor map for us though, won’t you?’ Bella was beaming. ‘It would be so great, for the cookery school packs, and if we’re going to open to the public for castle tours at some point.’

‘If you think I’m good enough.’

‘Seriously,’ Bella tapped the roll of discarded wallpaper in front of them, ‘anything half as good as this would be incredible.’

‘Another thing to pay you for,’ Veronica added. ‘Did you ever find your National Insurance number?’

Jodie shook her head. ‘Slipped my mind. Sorry.’