Page 5 of Christmas Is All Around
“Coming!” Kit called back, and Ava poured hot water from the electric kettle over a tea bag in a mug, looking unconcerned.
“Didn’t Kit do all the feeds last night, too?” Charlotte asked, impressed by whatever witchcraft Ava had mastered to bend her husband to her will.
“Only because it’s a weekend,” Ava explained. “I do them on Sunday through Thursday nights, since he has to work weekdays and I don’t, at the moment. Or any days,” she added wryly. Ava had wrapped up her last show, at a theater in Richmond, when she was six months pregnant, and had not returned to acting since. Charlotte was uncertain how long of a maternity leave she planned, though she supposed that living in a country that didn’t expect mothers to waddle from the delivery room straight back to the office likely made the urge to return to work considerably less pressing. Plus, Kit was an architect—and if their flat, full of vintage furniture and expensive rugs, was anything to judge by, a successful one—so there was likely no urgency to Ava’s search for her next role.
“Anyway—Calloway. The house is called Eden Priory—it’s in Hampshire, outside some quaint little village.” Ava sighed happily, sipping her tea and completely ignoring the frankly horrifying screeching now emanating from the nursery and Kit’s attempts at singing some sort of soothing lullaby to calm the baby. “It should be a scenic drive. We can admire all the handsome farmers.”
“Please stop, I beg you,” Charlotte said. “You’re starting to sound like Mom.” Last year, while Charlotte and Ava were spendingChristmas together, their mother was romancing an inappropriately young Spanish sailing instructor.
Ava scowled and pulled a box of muesli from the pantry. Charlotte rose to fix her own breakfast.
“Calloway,” she said dreamily as she poured some muesli into a bowl, then went to the fridge for yogurt. “Have you seen his wallpaper patterns? They’re incredible.”
Charlotte’s own artwork leaned heavily toward patterns and details—lots of twining vines and roses and the like; her bestselling print series ever had depicted various citrus fruits surrounded by cleverly arranged leaves and blossoms—and she’d always loved Calloway’s work, even though he had never been as famous as William Morris and some of the other leading artists of that movement.
She supposed that she could brave a bit of Christmas cheer for the sake ofart. And, besides, an afternoon in the countryside would be a perfect excuse to ignore her phone, and the DMs she continued to be flooded with each time she checked Instagram. (She’d turned off notifications days ago, but the knowledge that the messages were piling in, regardless of whether she checked them every five minutes or not, was not soothing.)
All she wanted was a single afternoon in which she didn’t have to think aboutChristmas, Trulyand her current status as a minor internet villain. And while a Christmas-themed activity wouldn’t have been her top choice, at this point… she’d take it.
The drive from London to Eden Priory was as scenic as Ava had promised; once they left the motorway, they traveled down a series of winding country lanes through a landscape of gently rolling green hills and bucolic villages. John was at the wheel, exclaiming in delight each time a new Christmas song came on the radio, and Charlottekept her gaze fixed out the back seat window as they snaked their way through the village closest to Eden Priory—it was, ridiculously, called Upper Larkspur, and featured a tiny, two-platform train station, a couple of pubs, a few small shops, a church, and a number of thatched-roof cottages. Charlotte was not generally charmed by things that could be classified as “cute,” but even she recognized that this was, basically, the romantic ideal of a quaint English village.
Eden Priory itself was just outside the village proper, down a long driveway lined by thick clusters of trees forming a canopy overhead that must have been stunning in the summertime, though now, in late November, the branches were nearly bare. After a couple of minutes, however, the trees cleared and the house suddenly came into view, perched on a hillside they were now inching their way up, surrounded by woodland. There was an ornamental lake on one side of the house and, just at the edge of the woodland, a folly. The house itself was a romantically ramshackle stone building that looked as though it had been cobbled together over the course of several decades—or possibly a few centuries. As soon as she saw the house, however, Charlotte felt the strangest niggling at the edge of her mind, like she was seeing a vaguely familiar face that she couldn’t quite place.
“Does this look familiar to you?” she asked Ava in an undertone as they climbed out of the car with John, who was whistling cheerfully. A sectioned-off portion at the bottom of the lawn had been marked for parking, and they waited patiently as Kit and his mother emerged from the other car and attempted to extract Alice from her complicated-looking car seat.
“What do you mean?” Ava asked distractedly, holding out the baby carrier for Kit to wrestle Alice into, an ambitious operation that seemed to require both of their full attention.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said, but quickly realized that Ava wasn’t listening. She frowned slightly as they approached the long gravel pathleading up to the front door, wondering where she could possibly have previously seen this house. It sported a dramatic turret, rising above the gables of the roof. Where had she seen that turret before? Probably in some period drama about pale women who took long walks and the brooding men who loved them. Not her favorite genre of movie, but Padma adored them, and so Charlotte had watched her fair share. She pulled out her phone to take a photo to send Padma later.
They found themselves plunged into a cheerful flurry of activity as soon as they entered the front doors and paid the entrance fee to the smiling, albeit slightly harried-looking woman about Charlotte’s age who was running the front desk, dressed in a Victorian-era gown that Charlotte was almost certain was supposed to be a reference to something. There were hordes of people wandering around, a brass band offering renditions of Christmas carols in one corner, and a station selling mulled wine and mince pies set up along one wall. The room they found themselves in was enormous, featuring a soaring, timbered ceiling and a floor done in black-and-white tile that clicked satisfyingly under Charlotte’s heeled boots as she made her way through the crowds. A sign at the base of the staircase noted that Christian Calloway’s descendants still lived in the house, but that select rooms were open to the public with decor that had been preserved to offer visitors a glimpse into what the house would have looked like during Calloway’s lifetime. She turned in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings, and her gaze landed on the unlit Christmas tree occupying much of one wall.
She froze.
And suddenly realized, with unfortunate clarity, why this house looked so familiar.
There was a swear from behind her, and Charlotte realized that she’d stopped in her tracks so suddenly that Ava had nearly walked directly into her.
“What is wrong with you?” Ava asked, irritation creeping into her voice, though Charlotte charitably decided not to take offense at this, given that Ava was currently having her hair tugged by her spawn. Charlotte already knew from experience that Alice had an astonishingly firm grip.
“Oh my god,” Charlotte said, still not moving, staring ahead of her at the Christmas tree with something akin to horror. It was so obvious. The dark blue wallpaper. The worn, ancient-looking chaise directly to the right of the tree; the impressive marble fireplace beyond it. Even the ornamental china dogs that graced the mantel. Was this what post-traumatic flashbacks felt like?
“What?” Ava asked, more sharply this time. “Are you having a stroke?”
“I wish,” Charlotte said fervently, tearing her eyes from the scene before her at last and turning to face her sister. “Ava, this is the house where they filmed Pip’s scenes inChristmas, Truly.”
Pip had been the counterpart to Charlotte’s character, Tallulah; where she was the lonely daughter of a workaholic single dad on the Upper East Side who spent long evenings sitting in her bedroom window seat, writing letters to the English pen pal she’d been assigned through some sort of program at her elementary school, he was the lonely son of a single mother in a literal English manor, who alternated between staring wistfully out of his turret (sheknewthat turret looked familiar!) and sitting on a fabulous chaise by a large fireplace, writing letters by the light of the Christmas tree.
Ava blinked, then burst into laughter.
“Oh my god,” she cackled. “I promise I didn’t know.”
Charlotte shot her a filthy look.
“Very convincing,” she said darkly. “I really appreciate the empathy, by the way. Nice to rely on family.”
This sent Ava into another round of cackles, at which point Kitmaterialized, looking politely puzzled, and Ava managed to explain the situation to him, which set her off laughing yet again.
Kit squinted at the tree, and then his expression brightened.
