Page 83 of One More Christmas at the Castle
‘Well, that’s an opinion you certainly share with Sabine,’ Xan said, though I thought it was possibly theonly thing we had in common … except, I supposed, I’d grown to love the Castle, too, especially the older, original part of it. I’d had that strange, instant feeling of connection with it the moment I’d arrived. Perhaps I’d lived there in a past life? If so, I was probably a scullery maid, or something like that. Maybe the cook …
Henry was already in the kitchen when we got back, sitting at the table with his notebook and the magazine with the article on Christmas garlands open before him.
He said he’d managed to drag the trees into one of the outbuildings until wanted.
‘And I went back to the attic, because I was sure I’d seen a couple of those old-style metal stands for them. You know, the kind you clamp the trunks into. One of them is huge.’
‘Good. For that monster tree you chose, you’ll need it.’
‘Mrs Powys told me there was a round green mat that always went under the tree to protect the mosaic, but I remembered that was in one of the boxes of baubles.’
‘Haven’t the moths got at it?’ I asked.
‘No, it was layered with lavender. It’s made of hairy green material, like the baize on the kitchen door.’
‘Probably the same thing,’ I suggested. ‘Now, can you move that magazine and your notebook up to the other end of the table? I want to make a start on lunch.’
‘OK,’ he said obligingly, shifting them. ‘I’ve borrowed this magazine and the article has some really original ideas for making wreaths, swags and garlands on the grand scale, which is what we need.’
‘Yes, you’re right. But I suppose you shouldn’t put them uptoosoon, or they’ll dry out.’
‘They’ll take me a while to make anyway, though I’ve got everything I need now, except the actual foliage. I’ll probably make them at the weekend. It’ll be fun.’
‘We should be able to find enough greenery on the estate for them, though probably not mistletoe.’
‘There’s some quite realistic fake mistletoe in one of the boxes that’ll do,’ he said. ‘Safer than the real thing, when there’s a greedy little dog about, too.’
‘Good thinking, because he’d eat anything,’ I agreed.
I began making the Christmas cake right after lunch. The dried fruit that had been soaking up the dark rum was shiny and plump.
I turned the oven on to warm up, then greased a very large cake tin, before also lining it with greaseproof paper. It was the kind of tin with a loose base, which makes it so much easier later to get the cake out.
After that I hauled out a mixing bowl big enough to take a bath in, and assembled all the other ingredients around it: flour, spices, butter, eggs, treacle, slivered almonds and halved, jewel-bright glacé cherries.
Then I lightly beat the eggs and then the butter. There’s a lot of beating and mixing involved in a fruit cake and it can be rather tiring on the arms, even when it isn’t the size of this one.
I’d got to the stage of adding the dried fruit, which made the mix much heavier, and was beginning to flag a little when Xan wandered into the kitchen, empty coffee mug in hand, with Plum hard on his heels.
‘I used to come in here when I was a schoolboy, if Mrs Hill was baking a cake, and steal raisins,’ he said. ‘She always let me scrape out the mixing bowl afterwards, too.’
‘I’ll let you scrape out this one, if you give me a hand with the mixing,’ I cunningly offered.
‘It’s a deal!’ He took the big wooden spoon from my hand and began to turn the mixture over. ‘This is going to be a monster of a cake!’
‘I know, but there’ll be quite a lot of people to eat it,’ I pointed out. ‘It keeps very well too, so there’s always something to slice at.’
When it was ready, he held the bowl so I could spoon the mixture into the tin and smooth the top.
Then I held the oven door open, while he slid it on to the baking tray on the middle rack.
‘There, that’s it for a couple of hours,’ I said, ‘though I’ll check it halfway, to make sure the edges aren’t catching, and put a tinfoil cap over the tin if they look as if they might.’
‘How will you know when it’s cooked all the way through?’
‘Well, I just … will,’ I said, starting to clear away all the bowls and utensils I’d used. ‘But you can stick a skewer in the middle and if it comes out clean, then that means it’s baked.’
When I looked up, he really was sitting at the table with a dessertspoon, scraping out the last of the cake mix and eating it.
