Exclusive Excerpt from The Snow Birds

 Today I'm sharing with you a small excerpt from my new Christmas novella, The Snow Birds. Enjoy!

*

Twelve Days Before Christmas.

 

“Damnable…arse!”

She had seen that man before and, yes, of course she knew who he was. But it startled her to see him through the window of the antique shop; his rugged, wonky-nosed, distinctive profile coming into view as she frantically rubbed a clear patch with her gloved hand.

Her heart was beating very fast. She thought it meant to fly up through her throat and out of her mouth, following the unladylike curse that had previously shot out of her and briefly misted the window in front of her face.

Hazard Deverell was stealing her snow birds.

Well, they were not officially hers. Not anymore. But she had been saving her coins for a great many months in anticipation of retrieving the item. Every Tuesday she walked by this shop window and looked in to be certain that her mother’s charming jewelry box with the chirping, mechanical snow birds was still there, and on this morning, when she saw the empty spot in the window, she panicked.

Thus came the “Damnable…arse!” repeated several times in quick succession, exhaled with such fury that it had completely fogged over the window pane.

Now, belatedly realizing that she had spoken out loud and in public, she held that breath and stared, in mute fury, through the freshly wiped glass, while the shopkeeper wrapped her snow birds in brown paper and string.

 

*

 

When Hazard came out of the shop with his parcel he almost stumbled over the small, drab woman standing there with tears in her eyes and a vexed line across her brow.

“Pardon me, ma’am.” He tipped his hat to her, remembering his manners.

She looked as if she might scream and that holding it in was taking several years off her life.

When she stepped to the side, he did the same, and then they both repeated the motion, as if attached to each other by invisible thread that jerked them back and forth like puppets in a macabre dance. They couldn’t get out of each other’s way.

“Are you quite well, ma’am?” He squinted down at that maudlin face. “Do you require assistance?”

“Excuse me!” she exclaimed, trying again to escape, while he blocked the path with his instinctive boxer’s stance.

“Wait a minute, ma’am. I know you, don’t I?”

“Most certainly not,” she snapped, as if he suggested something improper. 

And then it burst out of him on a startled breath. “The disappointed gravestone angel!”

She opened her mouth, but closed it again immediately and made an odd, muffled sound. Her damp, flint-colored eyes sparked with a quick flame of anger, before she cast her gaze hastily upon the ground, bit her lip, spun around, and walked away.

Peculiar creature.

It had taken a moment to recognize the woman, because he only ever saw her in the churchyard at Hunsford Green, and from a distance. Today, almost falling over her outside Crayle’s Antiques and Collectibles in Woodheath, she was out of her usual place. The unexpected proximity was a jolt to his nerves, like waking to find a statue standing beside his bed, staring down at him with stony eyes, after somebody had carried it indoors overnight as a prank.

He watched her hurrying away from him along the icy pavement. She looked back over her shoulder, just once, and then quickened her pace again until she was almost running, but not quite. Well, he mused, she definitely had feet that knew how to move of their own accord, so she was not made of marble or granite, as he had once imagined.

But the anger on her face today, outside the antiques shop, suggested a deeply personal animosity to which he took considerable exception. It was one thing to be a private, reserved sort of woman, reluctant to acknowledge a stranger in the graveyard, but it was quite another to be rude, churlish and hate a person to whom one had not even been introduced.

 Hazard decided he was distinctly put out and could not rest until he had made her smile. Once and for all.

So, even though his head told him he had other things to do and that he was simply making trouble for himself, his feet followed her onto the omnibus, intent on finding out exactly what he had done to make her despise him with such wordless intensity. To make her explain herself and why she was trying to haunt his every thought.

She certainly looked as if she had something to get off her chest, and he knew how women held grudges. In a way, he might even be doing her a favor.

* 

Brimming with stifled, angry thoughts and surging waves of grief, Tuppence Sparrow was unaware of that shadow trailing after her feet like a stray pup following a butcher’s cart. It was not until she arrived home, took off her coat and hat, washed her hands, put on her apron, and walked out into her father’s shop to find Hazard Deverell standing there that she realized she’d been followed all the way from Woodheath high street back to her home in Hunsford Green.

His presence seemed to fill the shop, squeezing out all the other customers, who became nothing but melted blobs of butter in her sight. He stared at her, looking curiously smug. As if he thought he had her cornered.

He must believe he’s a real person, she mused. Poor, stupid thing.

Look at him, standing there, all proud of himself and arrogant! And with that parcel tucked under his arm. Her mother’s lovely snow birds, stolen away by a man who could not possibly appreciate their beauty, or the many memories they held for her within the musical notes of their merry chirping dance.

Her eyes watered again as she bit the inside of her cheek.

She set her face with as much nonchalance as she could muster and quickly got on with the business of serving customers in her father’s confectionary shop.

“About time too,” her step-mother grumbled. “Where have you been all afternoon? How long does it take to leave a bunch of heather on a grave?”

The woman had no idea that she had gone into Woodheath on the omnibus that day, of course. “Where’s father?”

“Upstairs having a kip. Had one of his turns again. And there you were, off gallivanting. Some daughter you are. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“I’ll take over now, Maud, if you need a rest. Go and make a cup of tea for yourself and father. I’ll manage here.”

Her step-mother did not need to be urged twice. She abandoned a customer in the midst of serving and marched off through the curtain. “Tea! As If I have time to sit about with my feet up sipping tea.”

Tuppence worried about her father and his “turns”. He was understandably tired. For many years he had kept the business going with the help— which varied in usefulness— of all his daughters, but none of the other girls took much pleasure in serving customers, or in making fudge and toffee. Their father’s remarriage was the final straw. One by one they left to start new lives and families. Only the middle daughter, Tuppence, stayed behind, not having enough gumption to take flight from the Sparrow’s nest.

Since her father had begun to retreat more and more from the shop and took to slyly escaping, as much as he could, to The Cock and Bull Inn on the corner, his remaining daughter had taken over much of the work herself, rising early and staying up late to keep the shelves and jars well stocked. She was also very much the creative force, coming up with many new flavors and shapes of confectionary to tempt customers in.

“You’re my right-hand girl, Tuppence,” her father had said.

To which her step-mother huffed, “’Tis just as well she does something to earn her keep around here.”

Both her presence and her occasional absence were equally resented by Maud. Indeed, Tuppence couldn’t seem to get her presence quite right.

Now creatures that must have escaped from her imaginary other lives were stepping out into this one. It could only spell trouble.

Or, in this case, Hazard. In every possible way.

 

*

 

The first time she saw him, he was standing at a grave, just a few rows away from her mother’s. Immediately she thought that he possessed a dented sort of handsomeness, one of which he was probably all too well aware. He moved with a commanding confidence, as if he never had a doubt or a regret. He was a giant of a man who seized life with both hands, never feared anything, never really felt thwarted or left wanting for anything, because he had it all without trying. All that she had decided about him within the first five minutes, sketching for him a history and a present that seemed to suit his looks. As for his future, that she did not dare imagine.

She did not believe in the idea of a destiny. In Tuppence’s opinion— which was never sought— a person was born and then they died. Whatever happened in between was entirely reliant on accidental circumstances and their own stupidity.

Which probably explained why she had never ventured more than a few miles from her home and satisfied any other urges from the safety of her imagination.

Once the man had left the churchyard, she wandered over to read the inscription on the grave at which he had stood for so long.

 

Lily Rose Deverell

Beloved Wife and Mother

Forever now an Angel

1857-1882

 

And then she not only had a name for him, but all her ideas about the man were confirmed.

Lily Rose Parker had once been a star of the music hall; a celebrated beauty, famous for flying across the stage while she sang, apparently wearing angel’s wings and very little else. Tuppence and her sisters had read about her in the newspaper, although they never went to the theatre to see such an exhibition for themselves. Then, one day, the actress married Hazard Deverell. That was in the newspaper too and increased Lily Rose’s notoriety, for his name was just as infamous as her scantily clad performances. The woman must have courted trouble deliberately, Tuppence thought.

“Isn’t he that prizefighter?” one of her sisters had exclaimed as they all leaned over the newspaper. “Our Tuppence used to cut his picture out of magazines.”

“She always had the strangest fascination for the lives of people she would never meet,” her other sister chimed in, teasing. “Especially if they were very wicked.”

Hazard Deverell had been in the newspaper for various exploits, including a naked swim in the Serpentine after a disastrously unlucky hand of poker; beating a man almost senseless for insulting his grandmother, and showing his buttocks to the Countess of Beddingham, after she called him an “uncouth American upstart”.

Tuppence had collected all the clippings about him, not really having a reason why, but simply wanting to have some part of all that excitement, which she would surely never know in real life.

So all these years later, Tuppence had no intention of telling her sisters that she had seen the man in person, there in Hunsford Green, in the very same graveyard where their mother was buried. They would laugh and shake their heads. Or else they would be concerned for her state of mind, which was worse.

They would know it had to be all in her head, as, indeed, she did too.

But when he appeared in the churchyard, his hair was lengthier and had more of a curl to it than she had previously imagined in her daydreams, and his skin was darker than she would have expected, hinting at something exotic in his blood. Not quite a gentleman but dressed as one. Underneath the fine, gold embroidered waistcoat and silk ascot, there was an extraordinary male animal, escaped from a circus or the zoological gardens.

He always placed a bunch of expensive hothouse flowers on his wife’s grave and threw away the dead, dried sprigs. All Tuppence had for her mother was some heather, which she grew in a pot on her windowsill, the contents of her purse not running to the cost of florist-bought blooms. Especially while she was saving her pennies to buy back her mother’s snow bird jewelry box and all those memories it contained for her.

She had noticed that, in addition to the flowers, he always put seed down for the birds too. Perhaps that is what first prompted her curiosity and made her watch, very cautiously, from the corner of her eye. From all that she had read, he wasn’t the sort of man to bother about little birds.

The second time she saw Hazard Deverell standing by his wife’s headstone, he had tipped his hat and wished her a good day. Tuppence looked over her shoulder, assuming there was somebody else at whom he spoke. But there was only her.

“Good day,” he repeated cheerily.

Why on earth would he want to speak to her? Perhaps he mistook her for somebody else. It was most improper for a strange man to address a lady he didn’t know.

Clearly, he had not heard from her step-mother that she was a great lump of a girl who stole fudge when nobody was watching. He did not know that she lived in imaginary worlds just to keep herself from committing violent, desperate acts, as befitted plain spinsters of a certain age, temperament and situation.

He must not know that she was practically engaged to Horace Pinchbeck and not a hussy who spoke to utter strangers in graveyards.

He was a man who, according to stories she’d read, had once entered a party with three women on his arms. And left it with an additional two. A man at whom a scandalous fille de joie had thrown her stockings, so that he was obliged to complete a boxing match with the silk-trimmed articles draped over his head. He won, incidentally, which suggested he was accustomed to the inconvenience.

She would not encourage him in whatever mischief he sought to embroil her.

Tuppence Sparrow had problems enough already, without adding Hazard Deverell to them. But he, it seemed, was determined.

 

****

Read on in The Snow Birds, available now as an ebook from all the best online stores and in print from Amazon in your country.