Page 6 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

Bella

Bella stared out of the workshop window as she sipped her first coffee of the day.

The pine workbench that ran below the window was old and scarred after a century of service.

It was littered with cutting tools, large reels of ribbon, the glue gun responsible for continuously coating the finger pads of the Hallow-Hart women with boiling glue—rendering them almost impervious to heat—and finally several piles of the stiff patterned papers that made up the body of the crackers.

Her hands worked almost of their own accord as she looked out over the Atlantic Ocean, watching the pale winter sun glint in citrine sparkles over the waves.

She let her fingers dance over the papers and settled on the winter botanicals print, one of Aunt Cam’s designs created using the linocut printing technique.

Bella laid the thick paper with its intricate color-printed carvings of acorns, rose hips, and mistletoe face down on the bench and placed a piece of thin card the same size, with vertical lines scored across it, over the top of it.

She secured the cracker snap with two dobs from the glue gun and then, watching out of the window as a pair of seagulls fought mid-flight over a piece of food, reached for Granny Hazel’s heavy ceramic rolling pin.

Many cylindrical objects had been experimented with down the years for their cracker rolling capabilities, but none compared to Granny Hazel’s rolling pin.

Thanks to the power of the World Wide Web, they had been able to source several identical vintage rolling pins for posterity.

She curled the papers around it and sealed them with a line of hot glue before slipping the rolling pin out, the stiff paper allowing the cracker to hold its form.

She looked down briefly and chose a pretty rock crystal bracelet made by Eadie, who ran the bakery in town, and inserted it into the cavity of the cracker along with her card (should the recipient of the gift wish to order more of Eadie’s jewelry).

To that she added a humorous printed limerick and a paper crown in the same winter botanicals design as the cracker itself.

Then she snipped two precise lengths of thick grosgrain ribbon in holly green and tied one around each end of the cracker before executing two perfect bows.

The finished cracker was nestled into its cardboard box—the exterior and interior both printed with a Hallow-Hart design—and Bella began assembling another.

The orders for the big stores had been fulfilled and sent off in August but the online orders were still trickling in and would continue to arrive until Hallow-Hart’s last day for shipping on December twentieth.

And of course, there was the Christmas market.

People came back year after year to visit the Hallow-Hart stall, and Bella always made sure there were a few bespoke designs for the market.

Her fingers hovered above the little box of handmade gifts and settled on an exquisitely carved wooden egg cup, whittled by Meg from the Coffee Cup Café, which she popped into the cracker cavity.

She felt at sixes and sevens with herself this morning.

Fred would be moving in today and she knew this would be a big change for her.

It was a painful dent in her daughter’s pride to have to ask for help, especially from Bella.

She wanted to be Fred’s rock. Her safe harbor.

But she feared that, as usual, her daughter would regard her as a torpedo intent on sinking her.

When Fred was a baby, Bella—still a child herself—consoled herself on those long nights spent pacing the floor with her colicky infant that one day they would be the best of friends.

Surely, she had thought, with such a small age gap between them they couldn’t help but be as close as sisters.

She had not foreseen that Fred would resent her young mother and find everything about her parenting severely wanting.

As she smoothed out a rectangle of paper in a ditsy print of snowdrops on a dark green background—all the papers for Hallow-Hart crackers were designed in-house—another feeling swept over her.

This one was part heart-stopping anticipation and part a yearning so strong it made it difficult to take a full breath.

It was the same sensation she’d had every year for the last thirty-five years, and she welcomed and dreaded it equally.

Liam would arrive with the Christmas market and leave when it left, heading back to his life in Windermere, and even though he hadn’t been hers for more than three decades, she loved him as much now as she had that first Christmas.

They’d met at the market when she was a pregnant teenager and he was a carpenter’s apprentice, and though the chemistry between them was instant she’d shown uncharacteristic restraint, the bump beneath her jumper a constant reminder that she’d been burned before.

The following year, with a baby in tow, they’d shared the first of many kisses, and upon his return the Christmas after that—when she was eighteen—they’d made their romance official.

But all good things come to an end. Try as she might, she had never found anyone to match him—and she had really, really tried.

Her industrious approach to dating was one of the many things that her daughter found wanting in her.

With hindsight, she could have taken things a little slower, not jumped in quite so quickly with every guy who offered her a wink and a promise, and saved herself a lot of grief.

She’d kissed a lot of handsome princes who’d turned out to be frogs.

But she’d been young, and dealing with things she hadn’t known how to process, and she’d reacted by pinning her fragile hopes on anyone who showed her the affection she craved.

Before too long, picking the wrong guy became her default.

Aunt Cam sauntered into view wearing a thick paisley dressing gown and Wellington boots.

Her wild hair was still tucked inside her silk sleep turban and her breath clouded the cold morning air before her.

A wicker basket hung from her forearm, and she carried a pair of pruning shears in her other hand.

She bent to pluck some fennel and laid it in her basket before disappearing into one of the greenhouses whose panes were still covered over with Jack Frost’s ice paintings of swirling leaves.

Further down the garden, smoke rose out of the chimney of the aunts’ cottage.

They had renovated one of the old stone buildings and it was now a snug one-story dwelling they’d moved into when the stairs in Hallow House had become too much for Aunt Aggie’s knees.

Bella was happy that they’d ended up spending just as much time in the main house as they ever had.

And now Fred was moving home, bringing all of them together again, at least for a little while; Fred had made it very clear that it was a temporary arrangement.

She hoped that being home might help her daughter regain some of the spark she’d lost during her relationship with Tim. Not that she would ever tell her that.

As Bella began to assemble another cracker, Aunt Cam emerged from the glasshouse, her basket filled with tender herbs and plants that wouldn’t survive the Scottish winter outdoors.

She spied Bella and waved, wending her way around the vegetable patches to the workshop.

The door opened and Cam entered, bringing with her the fresh scent of snipped foliage and sea salt.

“Good morning to you, Bella-boo!” she trilled. She rested her basket on an old trestle table, pulled a scraggy armchair over to the wood burner, and sat warming her hands near the fire.

Cam had moved to Britain from Jamaica in the 1950s to be with Aggie, and though she’d never lost her accent it had acquired more than a hint of Scottish twang in the years since.

“Morning.” Bella eyed the contents of the basket: fennel, peppermint, dandelion and chamomile. “Is Aggie okay?”

Cam tutted. “She was scoffing cheesy chips last night. You know your aunt, never one to let a little thing like lactose intolerance come between her and a dairy-fest.”

“Ah, I see.”

“I’ll make her a tisane to help settle her stomach. She’ll be right as rain by first cocktails.”

Since reaching their eighties, the aunts measured time by cocktails.

“So, are you ready to receive our new resident?” Cam asked, crossing the room and pouring herself a mug of coffee from the pot. She had a round, kind face, a smile that could light up a room, and wide, dark brown eyes that had the power to see through bullshit in less than half a minute.

Bella snipped a length of red ribbon from a reel the size of a dinner plate.

“I am. Although I’m not so sure Fred is ready for us.”

“Oh, she’s always a bit prickly when she first gets home. She’ll soon settle.” Cam flumped back down into her chair by the wood burner.

“Hmm,” Bella returned.

“There’s something else.” Her aunt pinned her with a stare. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing, just thinking what a big adjustment it will be for her.”

“No. That’s not it,” Aunt Cam mused. “You’ve been thinking about Liam, haven’t you?”

Bella shook her head, smiling. How does she do that?

“The air around you is different when you think about him.” Cam waved her arm around Bella’s outline, as though to encompass her aura.

“He’ll be here tomorrow,” Bella said.

“And you’re wondering if it’s too soon and too late.”

“I wish I didn’t wonder at all. It’s ridiculous.”

“Love has a way of enduring. You know, it’s a full moon this weekend—a perfect time, if one were so inclined, to manifest a heart’s desire.”

“He might not even want me after all this time.”

“Or he might.”

“He loved Claire so much.”

“As he should, she was his wife. They had a wonderful life together. But a person can have more than one great love in a lifetime…” She left a beat. “Look at you, you’ve loved plenty!”