---

It was the week before Emma’s first Christmas at Hope Cottage. Bing Crosby was singing ‘Winter Wonderland’ on the old wireless. Snow fell on the cobble path outside, covering the rolling green hills in a blanket of white and topping the roofs of the cottages. There were Christmas wreaths on the pastel-coloured doors that lined the high street and twinkling lights on all the garden walls and streetlights.

Inside the cottage, Evie was dusting flour like fairy dust onto the large wooden table, and Emma was separating eggs into a bowl.

In the corner, by the hearth, was the enormous tree Harrison Brimble had brought them the week before, and Ada Stone had made the willow wreath that twinkled with fairy lights and cranberries on the outside of their front door; it had been hung just beneath the cat-shaped knocker.

That’s how it worked during Christmas at Hope Cottage, Emma was finding; people showed their appreciation for what the Halloways did throughout the year, with small gifts and tokens – though sometimes, as in the case of their enormous tree, not so small.

The range hadn’t stopped all week, keeping the windows steamed up. Today the air was full of the scent of cinnamon from the spiced cake Dot and Aggie were mixing on the table, adding in the spices and currants as they consulted The Book.

‘That’s a lot of mixture,’ said Emma, staring at the enormous cream mixing bowl the size of a trough.

‘Well, it needs to be – it’s for the whole village.’

‘Everyone?’ asked Emma in surprise.

‘Yes. It’s the one time of year we make something for everyone in the village,’ said Evie. ‘It’s our way of helping to bring some good into people’s homes during this time.’

‘And everyone gets a piece – even…?’

‘Everyone,’ said Evie, not mentioning the Allens or the Leas.

‘They won’t eat it anyway,’ said Dot, who knew exactly who Emma meant.

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, an Allen will never take a crumb of food from us ever again,’ said Dot. ‘Not after—’

‘What?’ asked Emma. ‘Evie said that it was a recipe that went wrong, many years ago.’

‘Oh, it did. It went about as wrong as a thing could go, really.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it was a long time ago, during your great-grandmother’s time – Christmas time too, I believe, when Geoff Allen came to Grace Halloway for help during a desperate time in their lives.’

‘It was their business, wasn’t it?’ asked Dot.

Evie nodded. ‘Yes, the Allen Printworks, the Allens used to own one of the largest printing companies in the country. It had been in the family for many years, only their son John had a bit of a gambling problem, and had got himself into some trouble. They were in danger of losing everything to his debts when they sought out Hope Cottage, looking for a recipe that would help change their situation.’

‘What happened?’ asked Emma.

‘Well, it’s hard to say really. Sometimes, even though we try our best, things go wrong, and well, that one did. The Allens lost their business, they reopened it some years later, but it was a good, hard slog to do that and they never forgave us for what they went through – the price Grace Halloway charged was most of their savings.’

‘No,’ breathed Emma.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘But why money – it’s not what you usually take,’ said Emma, horrified.

Evie shook her head and corrected her. ‘We take what is valued most. It’s not about what is important out in the world, but what matters most to the person looking for change, you see? For Geoff Allen nothing was as precious as money.’

‘But I mean – it was all they had! Couldn’t Grace Halloway have just given it back to them, if it hadn’t worked anyway?’

Evie shook her head. ‘She couldn’t, even if she wanted to – you know that’s not the way it works.’

Dot made a strange sound.

They all turned to look at her.

She shrugged. ‘Well, the rumour went that there was another reason she wouldn’t have been able to…’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Emma.

‘Because somebody had already dug it up.’

Emma gasped.

‘We don’t know if that’s really true,’ said Evie, dusting the flour off her hands and putting the cake in to bake in the old range. Afterwards it would rest in the tins for a week before they began the next stage of the recipe.

‘Margaret said she looked and couldn’t find any—’ started Aggie.

Emma looked up at the mention of her mother’s name, saw Evie shoot her sister a warning look, and before she could ask any more they’d sent her on an errand to the Brimbles’ store.

---

The weeks leading up to Christmas were the busiest time at Hope Cottage. Every morning there were new faces at the door, and new recipes to be made.

‘Why is it so much busier lately?’ asked Emma, as their fourth caller for the day left the kitchen. Mrs Watson, with tears in her eyes, wishing to repair her bond with her estranged sister of some thirty years.

‘I think it’s because when things slow down during this time of the year, you get a chance to look at your life and what’s important,’ said Dot. ‘And what’s not.’

‘Like?’

‘A silly grudge.’

Emma nodded. That made sense.

‘Personally, I blame all those Christmas films,’ said Aggie, who had her feet up on the kitchen table, her face tired, flour in her short dark hair.

‘There’s so much pressure this time of the year on families – and, well, if yours isn’t getting along too well, or you haven’t got one, it can be hard.’

Emma looked away. It was a year since she’d lost her parents, and it had been hard. Evie, and her aunts, had come to mean so much to her in the space of a year, but it didn’t change the fact that this would be the first Christmas she had had without her mother and father, and lately she was missing them even more than ever.

Evie saw her face, and played with her hair. ‘It’s okay to miss them.’

Emma nodded; she could taste the tears in her throat. ‘Oh lass,’ said Aggie getting of the chair and coming over to give her a hug. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to make you sad,’ she said as Dot shot her sister an angry look.

Emma wiped her eyes. ‘No, it’s okay,’ she said, and sniffed. ‘I think it makes me feel better knowing that I’m not the only one,’ she went on, thinking of all the people who came here looking for something to help them too.

‘No,’ said Evie, simply, stroking her hair. ‘You’re definitely not alone.’

---

As the years passed, Emma collected stories about her parents the way some people collect photographs, storing them carefully in her mind so that later she could take them out, and mull them over while the rest of the cottage was asleep, wondering if she was more like her mother or her father.

She’d learned from Evie that her mum had been fiery, with a quick temper. ‘She wasn’t a chatterer, you know, like some girls,’ she said, pausing as she kneaded dough one clear day in spring, while she and her sisters made lavender biscuits for Tom Harvey, Uncle Joe’s partner at the used car dealership, who was struggling to sleep lately. ‘She used words sparingly, even as a child, as if words cost money. But she was quick to stand up for what was right, and didn’t back down for anyone, regardless of age or size, or…’

‘Common sense,’ agreed Aggie, her feet up on the table, slurping a coffee, her head buried in a book from Dot’s secret library.

‘Why?’ asked Emma.

‘Well,’ said Dot. ‘When your mam was about your age now, nine, she broke into a neighbour’s back garden – Clifford Hobb – to rescue Gizmo. He was a rather sad, lonely Alsatian who was tied up to the fence outside, even during the worst of the winter. The owner kept him as a guard dog, you see, didn’t really think of him as an animal with feelings and needs.’

‘Oh no!’ exclaimed Emma. She was a huge animal lover.

‘Well that’s what she thought, too. When she heard about poor Gizmo, all she said was “Tisn’t right” and when she heard his cries on the way home from school, soon after, she decided that enough was enough, and she hopped the fence, and broke him out.’

‘What, really?’ exclaimed Emma, mouth open in surprise.

‘Yep,’ said Evie. ‘Took him home with her. Our eyes nearly popped out of our skulls when she brought him inside, poor thing. See, his owner ran the old metalworks factory, Hobb’s Steelco, before it closed down. Kept a fair few of the villagers in work at the time, so none of them were willing to risk his wrath and report the treatment of the dog.’

‘But that’s unfair – that shouldn’t have meant he just got away with it!’ exclaimed Emma.

‘That’s what your mother thought too,’ said Aggie.

‘We’d reported him though,’ said Dot.

‘Not that anything was done,’ Aggie said, and sniffed.

‘He’d been tipped off by someone, and took the dog inside the day someone came by for an inspection, and we were told it must have been a false alarm,’ agreed Evie.

‘My foot,’ huffed Aggie.

‘So, what happened after she brought him home – was he cross?’ asked Emma.

‘Furious,’ said Evie.

‘See, she left a note, telling him exactly what she’d done.’

Emma’s eyes bulged at her mother’s daring. Perhaps that had been her way of sticking up for what was right as an adult.

‘She also told him that she was going to be keeping Gizmo from then on if he didn’t want to treat his dog better.’

Emma shook her head in amazement. ‘What did he do?’

‘Well, he came here, mad as hell. We were ready to box him ourselves, obviously not about to let him intimidate her, but somehow she made him listen and in the end he agreed to let her keep the dog.’

Aggie grinned, ‘Well, he was furious, of course, but he couldn’t very well threaten a nine-year-old girl, so he left it.’

Emma liked thinking of the brave young girl who hopped fences and saved animals. It was hard though to reconcile her with the image of the woman who was always busy in her home office, typing away on her computer, and whose life was strictly regimented, with appointed mealtimes and play dates. She supposed that growing up changed people.

It was harder to collect stories about her father because they didn’t know that much about him, but she’d pressed for as much as she could.

‘Well, what I can tell you straight off the bat is that he was handsome, and Scottish,’ said Dot one bright, cold morning in late October as she sat next to Pennywort, a mug of spiced pumpkin coffee in her hands – a Halloway tradition that had begun shortly after they visited America in the autumn for the first time, and came home with a pile of new recipes, inspired by their travels. Emma especially liked the Plucky Pumpkin Pie and Get up and Go Gumbo.

Dot’s eyes were vague, lost in thought. ‘He was a stranger to Whistling, so I suppose to your mam he would have seemed exotic.’

‘He had really beautiful eyes too – sort of a—’ she began.

‘Sea-green colour,’ said Emma, remembering, and having to swallow the lump of sadness that the image caused.

‘He had a good sense of humour though. When they first got together she was always laughing,’ remembered Evie.

Later she found a surprising source, who told her many more stories about her father. Her Uncle Joe, who had employed her father at the used car dealership when her parents had just met.

‘He’d come to visit his friend Gordon for the summer. Liam and he had been to school together before Gordon moved to Whistling as a lad. Well, from what I can remember, he took one look at your mother and decided to extend his stay, got himself a job, here,’ said Uncle Joe, one afternoon when Dot had sent her past to drop off some papers that he needed. They got to chatting, after he offered her a cuppa. ‘The job came with a room – just above the shop, so to your dad it was perfect, I suppose, just what he needed.’

After that, Emma popped in more regularly to visit her uncle and to hear more about her dad. He’d show her the new cars that had come in for sale, and she’d sit in his small back office, which had a view of the high street, and they’d chat.

‘He was a good man, hard worker too. He was studying part-time, something to do with management, marketing, that sort of thing, I think. Good head on his shoulders, but he wasn’t all work, you know? He was funny too, could be a bit of a practical joker at times.

‘On my birthday, the year he worked for us, he took the liberty of breaking into my computer and changing everything to extra-large font, and he and one of the sales guys put up a rail all around the office, just in case I fell. I was only fifty-nine!’

Though, of course, that sounded ancient to nine-year-old Emma, but it helped her to remember some of the practical jokes her father used to play at home when she was growing up.

Like the time he switched the containers of the ready-made meals her mother ordered – for jelly beans, chocolate cake and marshmallows – and how her mother had opened some of them and laughed till tears leaked out of her eyes. The two of them had seemed to hold hands and giggle for a long time after that.

Or the time he’d come home with three pairs of funny slippers for each of them, just out of the blue one winter’s day. Hers were large green monster claws, his were red dragons with ridges on the back and a tail, and her mother’s had been a smiley shark, because that’s what he sometimes called her when she was sorting out people’s finances, ‘Sharky’.

Lots of his jokes weren’t wildly hysterical, but they never needed to be; they were dad jokes, and she missed them, and when she chatted to Uncle Joe, it felt like he wasn’t gone or forgotten.

‘Did I tell you about the time he wrapped up everything in my office in newspaper?’ he told her one day after school.

‘Everything?’ Emma said with a laugh, picturing the scene.

‘Every last little thing. The computer. The phone. My mug, the chair, the walls, the wheels on the chair…’

---

By the time Emma was ten, she could spot wild garlic at a hundred paces, and knew nineteen different varieties of poisonous mushroom just from their scent alone, yet she still hadn’t found a way to convince Mrs Allen that she and Jack could be friends.

By the time she was eleven she’d started making some of the simpler recipes from The Book. But she was impatient to do more; she wanted to be the one to say the words, stir in the bits of hope, so Evie would set her to work on mincing herbs. ‘You’ll get there, but it’s important that we get the basics right first,’ she said, peeling a potato, the skin a perfect spiral falling onto the worn table.

It wasn’t long though before she decided to try making a recipe from The Book by herself, when she was alone at the cottage while everyone was over at Dot’s playing cards. Her aim was simple: to mend the feud with the Allens, a noble, if rather self-serving, pursuit. But though she worked hard, using a complicated recipe that spoke of mending fences and healing rifts, and she sacrificed her favourite box of pencils under the mulberry bush, there was still nothing she could do to get an Allen to accept food from a Halloway.

‘Are you mad, Jack?’ said Stella Lea, her dark eyes nearly popping out of her skull in utter horror, knocking the slice of carrot cake out of Emma’s hands.

‘Hey!’ Emma cried in protest.

‘Do you want to be poisoned, or worse cursed?’ said Stella, ignoring Emma. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

Jack looked startled. ‘Um – well,’ he said, staring at the slice of cake on the ground, a small flicker of fear in his eyes.

Emma felt a small stab of guilt, which she squashed. It was for everyone’s good, she told herself. ‘It’s just cake,’ she said, face reddening slightly from the lie, as Stella marched away.

‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about – here, have another slice,’ said Emma, holding out her lunchbox to Jack.

‘Why do you want me to have it?’ he asked, a slight trace of suspicion in his voice.

Emma blinked. ‘I just thought you’d like some – you don’t think I’d do anything bad to it, do you?’

He stared at her for a few seconds, then looked away. ‘Course not – um, I’m not hungry, but thanks though, see you,’ he said, beating a hasty retreat.

Emma felt like crying. All she wanted to do was help.

‘Well, what did you expect?’ said Maggie, who’d witnessed the whole thing. ‘I mean he is an Allen – you know they’re a bit funny about…’

‘What?’

‘Well, about your family – the food they make, you know.’

‘I know, but I was hoping…’

Maggie gave her a look. ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said Emma. ‘There’s no point if he won’t even try something I’ve made.’

It was a pity, she thought, when Evie found out, not because she was punished – she wasn’t; Evie knew her disappointment was punishment enough – it was a pity because it just might have worked.

Emma had got good at sensing what someone needed just by looking at them. A drop of the shoulders, a downcast head, would benefit from a recipe designed to ward off melancholy. Someone with holes in their clothes and dust lining their pockets would be wise to try one that brought about some luck.

Emma went to sleep dreaming about the recipes in The Book, and woke up excited to see which ones they would make that day. In her notebook, which was now full of sketches and observations and imaginary recipes of her own, she doodled future ideas, which very often included one to change an Allen’s mind. Never dreaming that one day, there’d come a time when she wouldn’t want anything to do with The Book, when she would begin to blame it for everything that went wrong.