Page 42 of Christmas Is All Around
Charlotte eyed the now-empty paper cup of takeaway coffee she’d bought before leaving London, wishing she’d rationed it better. She was fairly certain they were going to be here for a while.
“A three-hour tour,” she sang, two hours later. “Athreeeee-hourrrrrrr touuuuuuuur.”
“It was less than two hours, you psychopath,” he said through gritted teeth as they—at long last—continued their journey down the country lane. It had taken a long—long—longtime for a shepherd to materialize—one who had not seemed terribly contrite about the fact that his entire flock had made a break for it, and then congregated on a road, stopping all traffic in either direction. “And we’d have been better off abandoning the car and walking the rest of the way to the village.”
“Not in these shoes,” Charlotte said, nodding at the heeled leather booties she’d found in a vintage store in New York, which were not remotely suited to country walks down muddy lanes that must contain, at this point, a metric ton of sheep shit.
“Well, thank god your shoes were preserved. Perhaps I would have been wiser to fashion some sort of sedan chair for you out of branches from a tree, so that you might be carried to your destination?”
“When would you have had the time, though? You were very busy doing your little cell phone signal rain dance.”
Said dance had primarily involved him circling the car several times, waving his phone in the air and muttering darkly to himself, and at one point growing so desperate as to climb atop a stone wall and come perilously close to toppling over the other side into the muddy field below. Charlotte had laughed herself sick when he’dstalked back to the car, jaw set, and had to rather forcefully shove a sheep aside to open the driver’s-side door.
Charlotte, all in all, was growing rather fond of the English countryside.
All this meant, however, that it was nearly dark by the time they made their way into the charming village of Lower Hankering.
“Well, this is nauseating,” she said, staring out the window as Graham somehow maneuvered the car into a parking space that barely looked large enough to fit a toy pedal car like the one she’d loved when she was four. The village high street, where they currently found themselves, was a narrow, winding road flanked on either side by an assortment of half-timbered buildings with steeply angled roofs. Now, at dusk, it was lit with a cozy glow from a number of the windows, and there were holiday lights strung along the eaves, greenery adorning the occasional lamppost. “How do placeslooklike this? It’s absurd. I feel like I’m about to get murdered in an Agatha Christie novel.”
“A delightful prospect,” Graham agreed. He turned the car off. “Shall we go draw your cottage?”
“Yes,” she said. “If we hurry, we can get there before I lose the light entirely.” They were already pushing it; the sun had just set, and the light of dusk was rapidly fading.
He looked skeptically out the window and sighed wearily, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I think you should draw it in full daylight.”
“Oh, okay, what a helpful suggestion, Apollo. If you could just bring the sun back at”—she checked her phone—“four o’clock in England in December, that would be great.”
“We could stay the night,” he said, nodding; following his gaze, she realized that they’d parked directly opposite an establishment that bore the sort of swinging sign she associated with Disney World(except considerably less terrifying and nightmarish), which read,THE DUKE OF YORK * INN AND PUB * FINE CASK ALES * EN SUITE ROOMS.
“What is it with this country’s obsession with advertising the presence of bathrooms on all their hotel listings?” she wondered aloud.
“If you’d spent your childhood staying in Victorian-era bed-and-breakfasts with a single bathroom for every floor of the building, you’d understand,” he said darkly. “Listen, I’m hungry, and tired of sitting in this goddamn car, and don’t feel like facing the drive back to town tonight. Why don’t we just stay? You can visit the cottage in the morning and make your sketch and then we’ll be on the road back to London before lunch.”
“Well,” Charlotte said slowly, considering. She was starving, it had been a long, annoying afternoon, and the Duke of York looked extremely cozy, like something out of an Anglophile’s fantasies of a countryside visit.
“Fine,” she said shortly, opening the car door. “But if they only have one bed, all bets are off. I am not romance novel–ing this shit.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There were two beds, at least—but there was only one room.
“How is this even possible?” Charlotte asked incredulously as they unlocked the door and stared, unimpressed, at the two twin beds that beckoned them.
“It’s Christmas in England—peak season for a bunch of tourists trying to live out theirDownton Abbeyfantasies,” Graham said grimly, ushering her into the room with a hand at the small of her back so that he could close the door behind her. “We’re lucky there’s a room available at all.”
She sighed dramatically, flinging her purse down onto one of the beds. There was nothing to unpack, of course—she hadn’t packed anything, not having expected to be gone for more than an afternoon.
“I’m going to run to the shop down the street and get toiletries,” Graham said, hands in his coat pockets. “Do you need anything else?”
She shook her head, already internally grimacing at the thought of how she’d look the following morning, in today’s clothing, sans makeup. As soon as he had vanished out the door, she sank down onto the bed, pulled her phone from her bag, fired off a quick text to Ava, and then texted Padma.
Charlotte: tl;dr but there was a sheep traffic jam and now I’m spending the night with Graham, in a hotel room, in a quaint English village
Padma:…..
Padma: With only one bed?????
Charlotte: No there are two
