A Christmas Cracker

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A Christmas Cracker Page 9

by Trisha Ashley


  Mercy nodded, jotting it down. She’d pulled out a reporter’s notebook and appeared to have started a list.

  ‘While we’re on the subject of access, a small lift could be fitted to take customers up to the café, too – climbing all those stairs isn’t going to be for everybody.’

  ‘Very true, dear,’ she said, making another note. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘They enter the main floor of the mill down a central walkway, with the Christmas shop to the right, and the cracker factory to the left, which will be divided off by some kind of partition, either waist-high or with viewing windows, to keep the visitors from getting underfoot.’

  ‘Good thinking. Health and Safety would probably have something to say about that.’

  ‘Health and Safety are likely to have a lot to say on all kinds of things,’ I said. ‘Anyway, they walk down past the cracker making, and then enter the middle of the storeroom through doors at the back.’

  I drew a quick sketch. ‘See, the first storeroom’s door can be blocked off, so it’s only accessible from the cracker workshop. Then I suggest you turn the other two into a museum dedicated to the history of Marwood’s Magical Crackers, including the Quaker connection and any bits of interesting family history.’

  ‘A museum?’ Mercy exclaimed. ‘Well, that sounds very exciting, and Silas would be a great help with the research.’

  ‘I’m sure there’ll be lots of interesting things in the stockrooms to go on display, but we’ll need information boards and perhaps blown-up photographs of the family and the mill.’

  She nodded, making another note. ‘What do we do with our visitors next?’

  ‘They’ll exit the museum here,’ I explained, making a cross on my sketch, ‘which takes them right into the big Christmas shop. They’ll need to go through it to get to the café and other attractions, giving them lots of opportunity to spend some money on the way.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ she enthused. ‘And it looks as if the ground floor shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange, so that Randal can busy himself with the more difficult task of creating the café and developing the rest of the buildings as craft workshops. And of course, one of those will be reserved for you, if you should like it,’ she added kindly.

  ‘I’d love a workshop of my own,’ I agreed, though clearly this was not going to happen overnight.

  She pored over my rough plan for a moment. ‘So, except that they would lose part of the old storage area, which actually they never seem to use, things wouldn’t be much different for the staff?’

  ‘Not in terms of the layout,’ I agreed. ‘But there would have to be some major change in what they produce. They’re currently making only two kinds of cheap crackers, when the market has changed, grown and become way more sophisticated. Crackers have now become a luxury essential and a plastic joke nose or bracelet wrapped in a tissue paper hat isn’t going to cut the mustard any more.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for it, because clearly I haven’t kept my eye on the market as I should have,’ Mercy confessed. ‘I do always celebrate Christmas in the traditional fashion, because my husband’s family did, even though many Quakers don’t go in for all the trimmings.’

  ‘I think you could look at some of the ancient crackers in the storeroom for inspiration and do a retro luxury range not that dissimilar to the family crackers they’re making now, but much improved in quality, especially the gifts. You could call them Victoriana Crackers and charge a lot. In fact, the key thing we need to do is improve the quality all round and charge much more. Take the Magical Crackers – it’s a great idea, it just needs updating for the modern market.’

  ‘Improve the quality and charge much more? But won’t we sell less?’

  ‘I don’t see how you could sell much less,’ I said frankly. ‘People expect to pay quite a bit for unusual or luxury crackers these days, even though it’s such an ephemeral thing.’

  ‘If you say so – but getting the workers to understand that might be a challenge,’ Mercy said.

  ‘For it to work they’d need to be totally onside. And once we’d got them brought up to speed, there’s a whole new area of cracker making to explore, for weddings and Easter, for example.’

  ‘Crackers at weddings? Really?’ Mercy’s brown eyes opened wide. ‘How surprising! But if being willing to adapt to new ideas means that the factory will stay open and they can keep their jobs, I expect they’ll come round to it.’

  ‘I think they’d not only keep their jobs, but you might end up having to employ more cracker makers.’

  ‘I knew you were just the person to come up with the fresh new ideas we needed,’ she said, patting my arm as if I’d been a really good dog.

  ‘I hope your nephew thinks so, too,’ I said wryly.

  ‘I don’t see why he shouldn’t, because you’ve retained most of his suggestions about the craft workshops and the café.’

  ‘Yes, and there can still be a gallery selling the craftwork made in the workshops in the second phase of the development.’

  ‘Including yours, my dear. You will have to choose which workshop you’d like when you’ve had time to have a better look around.’

  ‘I’ve always managed so far with just a cutting mat and a sharp knife, but it would be lovely to have more room. Sometimes I have bigger ideas …’ I added. In my head, my papercuts often spilled out of their frames and took three-dimensional forms.

  I don’t think Mercy had been listening for she was study-ing her list and my plan.

  ‘I think if we all worked really hard, we could complete the ground floor conversion of the mill and even open the café long before Christmas,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you could, providing you get the necessary permissions for change of use and everything else. I’ve no idea what you need to open a café,’ I added.

  ‘Well, that would be Randal’s baby,’ she said cheerfully. ‘He said he wanted to resign from his job as soon as possible and manage the mill complex full time, so it would give him a challenge.’

  She pondered for a minute. ‘I know you said people would buy crackers and Christmas decorations all year round, but it’s bound to boom just before Christmas itself, isn’t it? That would show Randal we were on to a winner!’

  ‘Definitely. But the mill would be open every day, all year round.’

  ‘I don’t think it should open on Sundays,’ she said dubiously. ‘And with everyone in the cracker factory used to working from February to November, weekdays only, I’m not sure what they’ll make of that idea.’

  ‘All those details can be worked out later,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps at weekends there could just be a couple of demonstration cracker-making sessions. We can find ways around things.’

  ‘I’ve just remembered something else, too: all my employees spend Christmas and New Year in a hotel in Blackpool together,’ she said. ‘It’s an annual tradition that I pay for and they love it. They usually go the day before Christmas Eve.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem, because the mill could close from lunchtime that day till the New Year.’

  ‘As long as everyone’s happy,’ she said. ‘Could you put your suggestions on the computer for me and print them out? I’ll call a meeting of everyone tomorrow at ten in the morning at the mill and we’ll tell them all about it. Dorrie’s daughter, Arlene, will be there then, too.’

  Time had sneaked silently past us again. We discovered Silas in the great hall, the gas logs lit, fast asleep with the newspaper spread over his stomach and his rimless glasses down his nose. Pye was sitting on the chair opposite, his tail neatly disposed around his feet and his eyes tracking something on the other side of the room, though when I turned to see what it was, there was nothing there …

  Weird.

  ‘Must be time for tea,’ Mercy said, and together we made sandwiches and cut a fruitcake. Silas woke up when Mercy dragged a Benares brass table near him and put his teacup down on it with a rattle.

  While we ate, Mercy tol
d him at length about our ideas.

  ‘You’ve more sense than you look like you have,’ he said to me with cautious approval after she’d finished. ‘If you can get the workforce on-side and that boy to change his ideas, it could work.’

  ‘I don’t think you can call Randal a boy any more, Silas, he must be thirty-seven by now,’ Mercy objected.

  ‘He looked sick as a dog after that cruise he’d been on, when he got food poisoning. But he was off somewhere else exotic almost straight away.’

  ‘Yes, he’s constantly being sent abroad – it’s the nature of his job – but he hopes to be able to visit us next week to discuss his plans … and now we’ll have some of our own to counter with!’ she said gaily. ‘Now, Silas, Tabby will need lots of help with the history of the Marwoods, the mill and the crackers.’

  ‘“The Marwoods, the Mill and the Crackers” would make a really good name for the museum,’ I suggested.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Silas said grudgingly, but I could see he was interested in the idea.

  I only hoped Mercy was right about this unknown nephew, too, especially since he seemed to be thinking of packing in his job in London and moving here permanently. If he turned out to be the Grinch, we’d be in deep trouble!

  Chapter 13: Sleeping Beauty

  Q:What do snowmen wear on their heads?

  A:Ice caps!

  After tea, Silas retreated to his rooms and I went into the library to type up my ideas on the computer. Then I checked my emails, which was something I hadn’t done since before I went to prison.

  It was all spam of one kind or another, except for a very sweet email from Robbie and his wife, dating back to last December and saying they’d just found out what was happening and where was I? Was I all right? Could they help in any way? There was a picture of the new baby, too.

  I really should get engaged again, so I could be jilted a third time and make it a hat trick …

  I answered that one, thanking them and saying I was fine and settling into a new home and job, but I kept it short and didn’t give them my address – I don’t want to be the old hanger-on at the coat-tails of their marital happiness.

  Then I emailed Emma, giving her the Mote Farm phone number and saying I could ring her if it was OK, meaning of course if Dismal Desmond had gone away again.

  She emailed right back to say it was OK, so I rang her on the library extension.

  ‘Des has gone back to Dubai already – they seem to like him over there, for some reason. I’m glad someone does, because I’ve had quite enough of him,’ she said.

  ‘Like that, is it?’

  ‘He’s talking about us all going with him if he can get a longer contract, but I don’t want to. Having him home even for a week or two is bad enough, because he wants to know practically every breath I take when I’m out of the house and I even found him snooping in my phone bills. I think he needs a psychiatrist, but he flew off the handle when I suggested it. Still, never mind me for the moment: how was the journey there and what are the place and the job like?’

  I told her how I’d rescued Pye and that I seemed to have caught Jeremy and Kate in a compromising situation. ‘I definitely interrupted something, but whether they were having an affair all along, or it’s only just started, I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, if she wanted Jeremy for herself that explains why she told that investigator about you, and lied at the trial,’ Emma said.

  ‘It was a pretty nasty way to go about it, though. When Jeremy and I got together she wasn’t very friendly, because she was used to being the centre of both his and Luke’s attention – they always seemed to think she was wonderful, though I could never understand why. But they still carried on adoring her, so she learned to suffer me. In fact, I thought she quite liked me, but evidently not.’

  ‘Two-faced cow,’ said Emma. I’d once invited her and Desmond (before he got jealous of even her female friends), and Luke and Kate to have dinner with me and Jeremy, and though it had been all right, it hadn’t been so much fun that we’d been tempted to repeat it. Mind you, since Emma was a qualified nursery teacher, at least they hadn’t been able to sneer at her lack of higher education, like they tried to do with me.

  ‘So, what’s the set-up like there?’ she asked.

  ‘Weird. I’m officially Mercy’s PA, though I think I’ll be more of a Girl Friday, and I’ve got a sweet little bedroom and tiny sitting room suite behind the kitchen in one wing, where the housekeeper used to live in Victorian times.’

  ‘One of the wings?’ Emma repeated. ‘How many are there? Didn’t she tell you it wasn’t a big house?’

  ‘I think her idea of a big house is different from mine, though it’s not a huge stately home like Chatsworth or somewhere. But it’s large enough to have two wings and a ton of bedrooms, a huge drawing room, a library, an orangery … And it’s on a sort of little island, surrounded by the moat, with ducks.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that sounds just like your average two-bed semi next door,’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘It’s quite homely, really, and I’ve got the run of the house, just like I was a member of the family. I can’t leave the place between seven at night and seven in the morning, though, because of the tag. I’m a sort of part-time Sleeping Beauty.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about the tag,’ she admitted. ‘How do they know where you are?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but I’m certainly not going to test it out, because I’d get sent straight back to prison to serve the rest of my sentence.’

  ‘No, it’s definitely not worth it. Tell me more about the house and the job.’

  ‘Mercy’s older brother, Silas, lives in the other wing. He’s a bit reclusive and dour, but he’s going to help me with some research I have to do. And there’s a nephew who comes to stay when he wants to – which is probably going to be some time next week.’

  ‘Have you seen this cracker factory she wanted you to help with yet?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s really a small cracker workshop in a big, empty old mill. There are only a handful of elderly people working there now, making the most boring, old-fashioned cheap crackers you’ve ever seen – and guess what, it turns out they’re all ex-prisoners, like me.’

  ‘Really? How odd!’

  ‘I think employing ex-cons is something the Quakers have traditionally done, but these were the last ones and have all stayed on, even though they’re the wrong side of seventy. They only work from ten till four on weekdays and live in little grace-and-favour terraced houses, so I can see why they were happy to keep going indefinitely.’

  ‘But you said Mercy wanted you to come up with some new ideas for the factory?’

  ‘Yes, because Randal, the nephew, had plans to transform the mill into a tourist venue and shut down the cracker making.’

  ‘I take it your employer wasn’t too keen on that idea?’

  ‘No, though his plans did have some good points, like a café and craft workshops in the outbuilding. But I could see straight away that opening the cracker making to the public, with a museum about its history and a Christmas shop, would really pull visitors in. I do love Christmas shops.’

  ‘So do I, and it all sounds fascinating,’ Emma said. ‘Perhaps a bit later, when you’ve settled in, I could come over and see it?’

  ‘I’m sure Mercy wouldn’t mind. She’s putting me on her insurance so I can borrow her car, so I might be able to drive somewhere to meet you and Marco for a day out, too. I don’t want to presume too much, too soon, though, and also I need some practice first, because I haven’t driven for ages.’

  ‘It’ll soon come back to you and you might be able to buy a car of your own eventually, when you get paid.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m getting that much, because I’m living in. Mercy would have let me have one of the terraced cottages, but they’re all occupied. And Jeremy made her pay for storing my boxes while I was inside when she collected them, so I have to refund that before I do anything else.’


  ‘What a cheapskate!’ she said, then added, ‘But it would be nice to have a place of your own, wouldn’t it? Perhaps one of those cottages will come free soon.’

  ‘I don’t think I want one of the oldies to pop their clogs just so I can get their cottage,’ I said. ‘I’m OK where I am for the present, and Pye is happy as a pig in clover. Mercy’s going to give me one of the craft workshops when the mill’s been developed, though, but I’ll have free time to do my own work till then. I’m going to start sending stuff out to the greetings card manufacturers again.’

  ‘I think it all sounds riveting and it makes me wish Marco and I could have a fresh start somewhere else, too, without Des. Who’d have thought he’d have turned out like this? And if he thinks I’m now going to be interrogated on Skype every night, he’s got another thing coming!’

  ‘How long did you say he’d gone for this time?’

  ‘Three months, and I can’t even go out to visit, because luckily he’s staying in a house with a lot of other single men. I’ve decided to give him an ultimatum when he gets back: either he comes with me to Relate and gets help for his jealousy and anger issues, or I want a divorce.’

  ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m very sorry it’s come to this.’

  ‘My own fault for rushing into marrying him. I was in a bad place, but it was still stupid. But I’m entitled to a life of my own, to see my friends … or the ones he hasn’t managed to alienate.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, any more than you abandoned me when all the fraud stuff blew up.’

  ‘He told me you were a criminal and I should have nothing more to do with you, so I said if you were a criminal, I was Titania, Queen of the Fairies.’

  ‘You’re small, but not that small,’ I said. ‘No wings, either.’

 

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