Christmas at Whitefriars: A Novella Read online

  Christmas at Whitefriars: A Novella

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright 2019, Elizabeth Camden and Dorothy Mays

  ISBN: 978-1-7332225-8-7

  Cover Design by Damonza.com

  Contents

  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

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Yorkshire, England

  1912

  “Are you sure you want me to do this?” Nick asked as he prepared to fuse the pipe joints. “As soon as I solder this pipe in, there’s no turning back. The tower will get hot water, and your washroom gets nothing. We can’t heat both.”

  Was there anything on earth more delightful than a long, hot bath?

  Mary Beckwith was thirty-one years old but had never had the joy of simply turning on a spigot to indulge in a piping hot bath. Many people probably thought growing up in an actual castle must be the epitome of luxury, but the truth was that castles were drafty, hard to renovate, and lacked the amenities 1912 had to offer. Of all the inconveniences at the Whitefriars castle, the lack of modern plumbing had always been the biggest discomfort.

  Nine years ago, Whitefriars had a huge infusion of American cash to begin repairing centuries of decay. After refurbishing the roof, the first thing Mary ordered was running water and modern drainage. She got the plumbing installed, but the American money ran out before a heating system for the water could be added. Soon that would change. She sat on a padded stool from the mid-Tudor era and handed tools to her brother-in-law as he clanged a pipe connecting the hot water boiler.

  Mary bit her lip. How long had she dreamed of the decadence of a long, hot bath in her own washroom? No more lugging buckets of steaming water to the clawfoot tub to make the icy water tepid. She’d hoped those days were coming to an end, but the boiler she’d purchased for Whitefriars wasn’t large enough to heat the water for all the rooms. That meant the kitchen and the tower would get hot water, while she would have to wait for next year’s infusion of American cash to heat her own washroom.

  “Send it to the tower,” she said a little reluctantly.

  She could do without hot water, but the tower rooms couldn’t, for rich tourists expected hot water. Their first guests would be arriving in February, and the brochure promised modern amenities.

  “You’re a good egg,” Nick said as he pumped oil into a handheld blow torch. She wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by “a good egg,” but given the approval in his voice, she assumed it was an American expression for something positive. She and Nick came from different worlds. Nine years ago, her brother moved to America and married Nick’s sister, a woman from a family of plumbers. Sir Colin Beckwith had lived in New York ever since, but he visited Whitefriars often, along with his wife, children, and in-laws. Nick tinkered with the castle’s plumbing whenever he came, and Mary happily accepted his help updating the castle’s rudimentary water system.

  All over England there were estates with the same problems. Decaying roofs, massive repair bills, and crippling taxes. Heating a castle cost a fortune, and living in one often required chipping away a thin film of ice that formed in the washbasin overnight. The installation of running water, especially hot running water, was no easy task.

  The moment Nick proclaimed the boiler ready, she raced to the kitchen, eager to try it out. She breathed a sigh of pleasure when stepping inside, for the kitchen was always the warmest room in the entire castle. There was an ancient brick fireplace on one wall of the kitchen, but after the renovation it also featured a modern cast-iron stove, a marble-topped counter for food preparation, and a white porcelain sink. She turned the spigot and listened to the hiss and bubble of water as it travelled through the copper pipes.

  Nick entered a few moments later, standing in the stone archway leading to the kitchen. “You’ll need to give it twenty or thirty minutes for the water to get good and hot,” he cautioned. “And it will heat faster if you don’t run the water.”

  She twisted the spigot closed. “I shall stand here in anticipation,” she teased. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment all my life and don’t mind waiting.”

  Colin strode into the room, his cheeks still red from the December chill, but his blond hair was as perfectly groomed as always. He’d just come from the tower to inspect the newly delivered bed frame, wardrobe, and end tables.

  “I don’t like the furniture you bought,” he said.

  Her face fell. “Why not?” She’d spent a fortune on the brass headboard with darling little filigree pineapples topping each of the spindles. It would never rot or suffer from burrowing insects.

  “It’s too new and shiny,” he said as he grabbed the kettle to begin preparing tea. “People don’t rent a castle for new things.”

  “I could hardly use what was in there,” she defended. The tower roof had been failing for decades, bats inhabited the chimney, and white scale bloomed on the stone walls. For decades they had been using the tower to store obsolete farm equipment and broken furniture. She dragged it all outside and held a huge bonfire down by the stream to purge it all.

  The three-story tower had the most potential for being transformed into a charming retreat. Its isolation from the rest of the castle gave it the privacy long-term guests would love. Rich tourists could come for between one and three months, idling in the country, taking long walks, hunting, fishing, or simply enjoying the chance to live in a real castle. The tower overlooked miles of rolling countryside and Mary personally made new curtains for all the windows. Other tasks she had to hire out, and she spent a small fortune to plaster the walls, install new tile floors, a modern washroom, and brand-new furniture.

  Except now Colin found fault with the furniture she’d purchased.

  “Scuff it up a little,” he suggested. “Maybe a little sandpaper or a few dings with a hammer. You need to aim for that whiff of seventeenth-century charm in everything.”

  “The tower had the whiff of medieval black mold,” she said. “I wanted everything new.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Colin said as he took a china cup from the shelf. “You need to scuff up the furniture or replace it with real antiques.”

  “Are you serious?” It was hard to tell when Colin was joking. His aristocratic formality sometimes made him seem like he’d been born wearing that starched collar. She was comfortable on the farm, even though it meant counting the number of goats born each season and digging muck out of the irrigation lines. The fact that Colin abandoned her and Whitefriars when he married and settled in America?

  Well… she didn’t mind. Not too much, anyway. And right now she needed his insight. Colin lived in Manhattan and mingled with the type of freshly minted millionaires she would depend on to make a go of this renovation. He understood them far better than she.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Why do you think the Wootens wanted to partner with us to begin with? It wasn’t for my good looks.”

  The Wootens were the American family who paid them a fortune to license the Whitefriars name and image. All over the world, millions of people bought overpriced jars of jam, sauces, and baked goods that carried an engraving of the Whitefriars castle on the label. It lent immediate prestige to a mass-produced product, and the Wootens paid well for it. She’d never met old Mr. Wooten or his son, but she’d played along with the illusion that the Americ
an products had some sort of affiliation with the estate. No one ever looked too closely, for which she was grateful. She gladly cashed the licensing fees and applied the revenue toward the never-ending checklist of improvements for the castle.

  “Let’s go to the tower and you can tell me what I should have bought,” Mary said, trying to mask the stress in her voice. The furniture was bought and paid for, and it seemed odd to deliberately damage it, but Colin understood rich Americans better than she. They left the untouched tea cooling on the table as they crossed through the great hall and down the east wing toward the tower.

  She loved this walk. This part of the castle dated to 1388, the same year The Canterbury Tales had been written. The stone floors had been polished smooth by five centuries of foot traffic, and she liked to imagine the countless generations of Beckwiths before her. Those people survived the War of the Roses and lived through the crucible of Cromwell and the civil wars.

  Colin stopped her in the middle of the great hall. “Why is the post stacking up on the front table?”

  A glance at the table in the entryway showed the last four deliveries from New York, gathering dust while Mary had been getting the house up to snuff for the Christmas holidays. Colin brought his wife Lucy and their two toddlers, along with Lucy’s brother and his family. She was proud of the progress she’d made at Whitefriars and wanted them to see it at its best, leaving her no time to review the dreary paperwork from New York.

  “It’s nothing,” she replied. “Everett Wooten bombards me with the financial reports every week. I don’t know why he bothers. A quarterly report would be fine.”

  Colin paused. “Are you sure? There’s quite a stack here.”

  He wandered to the hall table, his footsteps echoing on the stone tiles. The great hall hadn’t needed much modification. The ceiling soared high and was covered by the original hand-hewn timbers that lent a warm, gothic appeal to the space. Each end of the great hall had an immense fireplace, though they rarely used them except on formal occasions.

  Colin’s expression turned into a frown as he flipped through the stacks of accumulated letters. She tried to hide her impatience, for time was growing short if she was to make major alterations in the tower before February. The weekly reports from America were always so routine and she had more important things to do than jump when they arrived.

  “I refuse to get swept up into the whirlwind of Everett’s insanity,” she said. “I wrote him long ago that I pay little attention to his weekly sales statistics.”

  She had nine years of correspondence with Everett Wooten, the son of the company’s owner. They got along smashingly well, even though they’d never met. While he was easy to deal with on paper, she sensed he might be unendurable in person, for his pedantic nature rang through his letters like the clarion blast of a trumpet. She once asked him why he insisted on sending weekly reports since he knew she rarely read them.

  Complacency breeds failure, he wrote back in reply. Weekly reports are a company’s lifeblood.

  As frustrating as his nitpicky ways were, she couldn’t complain about how helpful he’d been over the years. In truth, she’d leaned on him too much in keeping Whitefriars afloat. When their wheat fields suffered from waterlogged soil, he recommended a drainage technique that could easily be implemented. When she worried about falling grain prices, he recommended foreign markets where she’d get a better price.

  “Truly, there’s no need to review the reports,” she said. “While I’m glad Everett’s products are selling well, I can’t be bothered with a blizzard of paperwork.”

  “Are the products selling well?”

  She shrugged. “I assume so. It seems like he’s always on a quest to bombard another market or saturate the world with Whitefriars labels.” The British army could learn a thing or two about world domination from the systematic way Everett planned his campaigns.

  She turned curious eyes to Colin. “You’ve met him. What do you think of him?” Mary had never travelled farther than London, so Colin handled all the face-to-face interaction with the Wootens.

  “He’s an odd one,” Colin finally said.

  “What does ‘an odd one’ mean?”

  “He’s very formal, all business, no chitchat. Ever,” Colin replied. “He has an obsessive need to control things. But he’s got his quirks, and they’re odd.”

  “Such as?”

  Colin set the envelopes back on the table. “Rumor has it that he has peculiar food preferences. On any given day, Everett Wooten eats only one color. Green, for example. He’ll eat only green vegetables, green apples, lime sherbet, spinach soup, that sort of thing. Then a day of yellow food, then orange food.”

  She stifled a laugh. “How does one eat only orange food?”

  Colin shrugged. “I have no idea. He’s got five or six colors, and he eats them in the exact same order, week in, week out. Or at least… that’s the rumor. Having met him, it wouldn’t surprise me. Look, are you certain those envelopes are of no concern? Everett Wooten is not a person you want to alienate.”

  “Trust me, they are only boring weekly revenue reports. If you need help falling asleep tonight, you have my blessing to take them upstairs and read to your heart’s content. They are more effective than any sleeping tonic.”

  She led the way out of the great hall and down a long corridor toward the tower. They passed numerous locked doors, for most of the rooms hadn’t yet been renovated. The barren, stone rooms were a little depressing, but slowly she was finding the money to renovate more and more of the castle. For now, the long corridor and the locked rooms had an unexpected benefit of creating a sense of privacy for the guests who would soon be staying in the tower.

  She unlocked the heavy oak door and lifted the latch, pleased at how easily it glided open without the hint of a squeak. Removing the rust and oiling the hinges had been done with her own two hands, and she was proud of it. She stepped inside, breathing deeply of the scent of lemon wax on the newly restored wooden window casements.

  She watched Colin’s face as he scanned the ground-floor room. Surely he couldn’t find fault in the entry room, could he? In addition to the restored floors, the room had been re-plastered and painted, but the old diamond-paned windows were still the same. Some of their best antique furniture had been used to create a cozy sitting area in this ground room of the three-story tower.

  “Good work on the tapestries,” Colin said approvingly, for they were also originals she managed to salvage through a painstaking process of cleaning and restoration. It might have been easier to buy new, but these originally came from a convent in Spain. They’d been brought home by an ancestor who’d rescued them from a fire during the Peninsular War. How could she let them go because of a little moth damage? During long winter nights she’d carefully stitched the threadbare patches, then reinforced the back of the tapestry with cotton supports. Now they warmed the otherwise cold and echoey room.

  Colin wiggled the edge of the tapestry. “This is the kind of feeling you need to aim for. Old, but clean. I can see a little wear along the edges, but people will forgive you that.”

  “If they want old, I should have kept the hot water for myself and put a slop bucket and washbasin in here.”

  Colin flashed her a wink. “All bets are off when it comes to plumbing. They’ll want the best when it comes to that.”

  He headed over to the newly constructed washroom on the main floor. It was her greatest achievement. An interior wall of matching plaster created a private room that had a toilet, washstand, and an actual shower. A shower!

  “Shall we test the hot water?” she asked. “Nick says it should be warm by now.”

  She held her breath as she turned the spigot. It took a moment of gurgling and hissing before a blast of icy water came forth. She almost pulled her fingers away, but after a moment the water warmed, then grew hot.

  “Hot water!” she cried out and impulsively hugged Colin. He laughed, even though he enjoyed hot water all the tim
e in his fancy Manhattan apartment. Oh, how she was going to love this! She would come over and take a hot shower this very night.

  A winding staircase curved around the interior of the tower and took them to the second floor with its additional parlor and an eating area. The top floor had two compact bedrooms and a spectacular view of the entire estate, nine hundred rolling acres of farmland, meadows, and forests. With no leaves on the trees it was easy to see the silvery stream snaking through the property. Perfect for fishing. Her brochure boasted of the hiking, hunting, and fishing available at Whitefriars. It was about the only entertainment she could offer, for they were an hour from the attractions in the city of York.

  Colin tapped the shiny brass bedpost with his fingernails, making a pinging sound. “This is what the tourists don’t want,” he said. “It looks brand new, like it just came from Harrods.”

  That was because it did. She lifted her chin, trying not to be hurt by the look of distaste on Colin’s face. Did he have any idea how hard she’d been slaving away over this castle while he lived in the lap of luxury in Manhattan? Couldn’t he at least say the bedroom looked nice? Its view of the countryside was possibly the best in all of Yorkshire. There wasn’t a trace of mold or a speck of limescale. She would love to stay in a room this fresh and pretty, and all Colin could do was gripe about the brass bed.

  Well. She wouldn’t let it annoy her. She looked forward to these two-week Christmas reunions all year. Tonight they would have a feast, full of laughter and conversation. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known her brother was a fussy stickler for detail.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t go check those letters from Wooten?” Colin asked as he peered out the top window. “They could be important.”

  “Very well, let’s go.” The sooner they could dispose of those weekly reports, the sooner she could get down to planning the evening’s dinner.

  ***

  They weren’t weekly reports.

  Colin wanted to take them back to the library to give them a good look, and he waited until he was seated at the immense desk to open them. Mary watched the color drain from Colin’s face as he read the first page from the stack of papers he pulled from the envelope.