by Jude Knight
"Read the letter, Tad. Em and I shall go and fetch your lunch."
He was sitting with one hand on the package, the other holding the letter, when she returned with Bessie the maid trundling a tea trolley with a sumptuous lunch of sandwiches, cakes, and Christmas treats like sweet mince pies. The trolley barely fit into the corner beside Lottie's accustomed chair.
His daughter threw herself towards him, taking her mother by surprise, and he dropped the letter to catch her. "Careful, Emmeline."
"I will pour the tea, Bessie. Thank you," his wife said, but as soon as the maid left, she crouched on the floor at Tad's feet. "Are you well, my dear? Is it your Father?"
"He has been gone three months, Lottie. It will seem odd for a while to see the Barnsley crest on a letter that is not castigating me for some childhood mischief. Six is the Earl now. I cannot grieve for my father, but I can pray for him, the sour old reprobate. And I will, Lottie."
She put a hand on his. "I will too, Tad. I do. Do you regret it? Staying dead? Staying here?"
"Regret it?" His melancholy dissipated as if it had never been. "Regret our comfortable home, our summer garden, the friends we are making, the best little book shop in all of New Zealand? Would I trade all of that, beloved, and likely you as well, for the false friends of Society, manners and artifice, and a cold draughty mansion that eats money like horses eat hay? It took a volcano to show me what I wanted, but I'm not letting it go now I know what it is to have it." He leaned forward to kiss her, pressing a protesting baby between them.
"Let Six have Barnsley, poor fool. He wanted it and has a stout son to leave it to. You and I and Em have all the power and position we need, and one another beside. And I have a present to unwrap when I get home from the book shop tonight."
Lottie's eyes slid to the huge gaudy box, but Tad laughed and pulled at her neat bodice instead. "Not that one, Lottie. Make sure Em is in bed, and Bertha is on duty, for your husband wants his Christmas present."
Lottie's lips curved in the smile that promised a wonderful evening. "Christmas presents come but once a year, Tad. I can assure you; I am not Christmas."
"Thank God, for that, my love. Thank God for that."
* * *
THE END
Part III
A Family Christmas
Previously published in Christmas Babies on Main Street.
She’s hiding out. He’s coming home. And there’ll be storms for Christmas.
Kirilee is on the run, in disguise, out of touch, and eating for two. Rural New Zealand has taken this Boston girl some getting used to, but her husband’s family and her new community have accepted her into their hearts. Just as well, since she’s facing Christmas and the birth of her baby without the man who wed her and sent her into hiding. What will he think when he comes home and discovers he’s a father?
Trevor is heading home for Christmas, after three years undercover, investigating a global criminal organization. He hasn’t spoken to his sister and grandfather since the case began. He hasn’t spoken to Kirilee, his target’s sister, since the day nearly nine months ago he married her and helped her escape. Will she want to stay married? And if so, will he?
In the heart of a storm, two people from different worlds question what divides and what unites them.
1
Old Trev told Kirilee that choosing the Christmas tree together was a family tradition, and she was family, so she was coming to help. The early summer sun had baked the hilltop tracks hard, so they’d be able to get right to the top, just above the valley with the best size of tree. She wouldn’t have to walk far, he said. They’d find one close to the ute, his New Zealand name for the small farm trucks that she called pickups.
Lee didn’t want to move. The wide verandas kept the house cool, open doors and windows catching every elusive breeze. But there was no arguing with family tradition, and Old Trevor Greenshaw had changed his mind about her family status months ago. She could date his change from jailor of his grandson’s witness to protector of his grandson’s wife. It was the day she and Cheryl had arrived back from Palmy with the news that Jason had given her an unexpected passenger before packing her off to his family farm.
She curved a protective hand over her bulge.
To Old Trev, the baby made her family, and she was coming to choose the Christmas tree.
What Jason would feel about it, not even his sister Cheryl could guess. No. Not Jason. That was his undercover name. Young Trevor. Trevor Greenshaw the Second, and whether that meant their marriage was legal, who knew? The name on the marriage license was Jason Winterleaf, same as the name on his passport and his driver’s license. And an old high school Facebook page, and other electronic trails her brother Bernard had traced, taking delight in showing her some revealing photos with previous girlfriends.
All fictional, apparently, for Trevor Greenshaw had grown up on this farm up in the remote Rangitikei country, three hours over dusty tortuous roads to the nearest decent-sized town. Whoever had invented the history had done a good enough job to fool Bernard.
She lumbered out to the ute, and clambered up, shifting over to let Old Trev in beside her. He grumbled about Cheryl driving, as he always did, though the doctor had put him off the road five years ago. “I know every inch of this farm, girl, and could drive it with my eyes closed.”
“You would be, too,” Cheryl retorted. “As good as, and you’re not doing it with your great grandson in the ute.”
Cheryl and Old Trev were sure the baby was a boy, but both women had agreed not to ask the technician who did the ultrasound. They’d wait to be surprised.
Trevor would be surprised, when he turned up to find her big as a hippopotamus and twice as ungainly, or cuddling a baby in her arms, or running around after a toddler, for crying out loud! On a hill farm! Kirilee Pritchard, who was born to be a city girl, and was good at it. She had grown up in a Boston condominium, never held down so much as a summer job, completed her Masters in Business Administration at Bentley and gone straight to work for the worldwide enterprise headed by her much older brother. She’d walked into a job as personal assistant to one of the Vice Presidents running a North American subsidiary of Pritchard Corporation. She’d been on a fast track from her first day in the firm, headed for the global team as soon as she’d proved herself a little. Never one of the gang. Always set apart. Always dressed perfectly, behaving perfectly, proving herself so she could join her brother’s global team.
No wonder Bernard hadn’t found her since Trevor’s colleagues had spirited her away. Even if he saw her with his own eyes, in her jeans, gumboots, and loose cotton shirt, he wouldn’t believe this was his little sister.
Trevor would surely be home for Christmas, his sister Cheryl said, though with a little frown that hinted she didn’t believe it.
Lee had a false history too, or so Cheryl had told her. Leigh Greenshaw. Came here on a student visa ten years ago, and stayed for love of a farm boy turned cop she met at Massey University in Palmerston North, which the locals all called Palmy.
Lee hadn’t seen her online identity. She followed the rules and stayed off the Internet, resisting the temptation to contact people she knew for fear that Bernard would track her down and take out his anger on her, Cheryl, Old Trev and the baby.
Any hint that she was alive, and he wouldn’t stop until he found her.
She shivered at the thought, and Cheryl asked if she was too cold, which made Lee laugh.
“With my internal radiator? Is it always this hot in New Zealand at Christmas?”
“Nope,” Old Trev told her, and he and Cheryl chorused, “sometimes it snows!”
They’d been telling her that all December, and that the hottest month was usually February. Then one or the other would glance anxiously at the steep hillsides, where the green was fading to brown as the grass dried, and say, “We need that rain they keep promising us.”
Apart from a few isolated falls in November, the clouds that showed up on the evening
weather report continued to slide around this small patch of rural New Zealand, carrying their precious burden to other, more fortunate, farmers. In four weeks, the rain gauges hadn’t collected more than a trickle, and down in the tiny settlement at the mouth of the valley, talk at the general store, the club house, and the school gate was all of grass condition and stock levels.
“At least it’ll be fine for the Mangatehapu Christmas Fair,” Cheryl said. She had taken to heart the midwife’s command to keep Lee cheerful. Lee wished she wouldn’t. Family shared one another’s burdens, and she’d feel more a part of the family if Cheryl shared her worries about the weather.
She didn’t point that out. It was hard to shake a lifetime habit, and she had never wanted to rock the boat. Even if that particular habit had brought her here, to the Rangitikei, clambering out of a ute on a bare mountain-top, large as a beached whale.
The flight back from Perth was a private charter, coppers from across the world drawn together in celebration of the bust of a lifetime. Some had to be rolled off the plane to catch their connecting flights in Sydney, but Trevor walked. He had a harder head than most, and had, besides, perfected the art of drinking less than people thought.
But he’d drunk enough to be off his game, or maybe he’d not had enough sleep. Thirty-two hours comatose in a stretch after the final arrests had left him even more tired.
He had less than thirty minutes to catch the Christchurch-bound jet that would take him the next leg of his journey, and he only made it because he was met at the gate by Colin Bryne, the Sydney-based detective who had drawn the whole operation together. Colin’s badge got them past the queues and cleared Customs faster than even his New Zealand passport. His own, at last. His own face staring back at him with his own name under it.
And that was the greatest part of his unease. For three years, Trevor Greenshaw had hidden deep within Jason Winterleaf, a conniving shyster with a heart of stone and a greed for empire. Jason Winterleaf, who climbed rapidly from obscurity to become chief security adviser to international financier—and money launderer and people and drug trafficker—Bernard Pritchard. For most of the last year, Jason had been Pritchard’s most trusted aide. And his brother-in-law, which was a tangle still to be unravelled.
Trevor was free to be himself again, but he wouldn’t shake the last vestiges of Jason off until he got home to Mangatehapu, where his first job would be telling Pritchard’s sweet naïve little sister that her brother was dead, his fortune confiscated in half a dozen countries, and his empire in ruins. She would be pleased, he hoped. She had run when she realized what her brother was. But she was still destitute and alone, and Trevor’s responsibility.
Colin Byrne shook the Kiwi cop’s hand one more time and stood to watch him go, running to catch the plane that would take him home. He hoped the guy had good people back home, who would give him lots of love and enough space to move back into his own skin.
Deep undercover for three years? It was enough to haunt anyone, and Colin had worked with enough of the man’s kind to recognize the ghosts moving in the back of the Kiwi’s dark eyes.
Home and family would help. And time.
At that thought, he slapped his pocket and swore. He’d forgotten to give Greenshaw the package of emails and cards sent from Greenshaw’s family and kept until the investigation was over. He leaned forward on the balls of his feet, ready to pursue the man. But they’d been holding the plane for this one passenger. Colin would never get through security in time. He’d have to send it on.
He walked away, shaking his head, disappointed in himself for denying a colleague the comfort of news from home.
2
Cheryl told Lee and Old Trev to stay put on the track, and Lee did, but Old Trev scoffed, and clambered down the hillside to help her cut the tree they’d chosen. They wrestled it into the back of the ute and carried it in triumph down the hill, while Old Trev and Cheryl sang parodies of Christmas carols: the tunes familiar but the words silly and new to her: While Shepherds Washed Their Socks by Night, and We Three Hoons of Palmerston Are.
After a cup of tea back at the house, they wrestled the tree into a bucket of damp sand, sitting ready in the corner of the big sitting room. Cheryl shifted the bucket a half circle and then back a quarter until Lee and Old Trev agreed that the young pine looked even on all sides. It was full and bushy, though floppy and ragged to her North American eyes, with branches arching downward apart from the one grand leader that almost scrapped the plaster ceiling ten foot above the floor.
“You young ones finish it off,” Old Trev commanded. “I’m going to take a bit of a sit down.”
He wandered away to the screened end of the veranda where a comfortable recliner waited. Not to sleep, he would have told them, but to check out the back of his eyelids, as he did every afternoon.
Cheryl fetched a short wooden stepladder, and Lee carried over the first of the boxes of decorations. They all had stories, Cheryl had told her, and each member of the family added at least one new one a year. Old Trev whittled his. He carved one each year, delicate wooden snowflakes all in different woods, oiled and waxed till they shone.
Lee and Cheryl had purchased a decoration each in Palmy at Lee’s most recent ante-natal scan. Cheryl’s was a Santa on water skis, and Lee found a medallion of a Madonna and Child. She had bought the matching St Joseph to put up for Trevor, so he’d have a part of the tradition even if he wasn’t home in time, then hidden it for fear Cheryl would think Lee was putting herself, Trevor, and the baby into the centre of the Christmas story.
They were certainly no Holy Family, though Lee had been roped into the pageant planned for the Christmas Fair, which was happening tomorrow. As Elizabeth, though. Mary’s very pregnant cousin, though she was no more a saint than she was a virgin. Nearly everyone who lived in the village or the surrounding area was in the pageant. With Cheryl’s acceptance, the whole community had embraced her as one of their own, unlike when she first arrived.
She remembered that nightmare journey in flashes, half out of her mind on fear and exhaustion. She retained a vague impression of a succession of provincial air fields linked by long frantic drives along anonymous country roads, at each stop changing from one pair of escorts to another.
All of a type, the men and women alike. Silent, contained, confident people who seemed physically too large for the space they took up, each movement not a threat, but a warning that a threat would be contained.
Bernard kept security men around him, mostly ex-military, but these were not security men. They lacked the emptiness that Lee sensed in the men who protected her at Bernard’s orders and would have as coldly killed her when those orders changed. These men and women looked at Lee and saw a person. Police officers. The New Zealand kind didn’t wear guns, and most of those she met on this nightmare trip didn’t wear uniform. But they were all police.
By the end of the long day, she’d caught several hours sleep, slumped uncomfortably in one plane or car after another. This last flight she shared with a man who did not introduce himself, but who told her she was being protected as a witness in the investigation into her brother. He gave her several documents to sign, waiting patiently while she read them. She promised not to discuss her brother or the investigation. She promised not to disclose her true identity. She promised not to contact anyone from her former life. No public photographs. No internet access. No cards or letters. She read on, two pages, and then the third.
“What will happen to me?” she asked.
“We will keep you safe until you are in no further danger, and after that you will be free to go. At some point, you will be interviewed, perhaps more than once. You are not a person of interest, Miss Pritchard. Winterleaf has convinced us of your essential innocence. But you do have knowledge that will help us stop Pritchard Corporation and all its satellites. In particular, we have questions about your very interesting report on your brother’s finances.”
The report she had nearly died for.
The man pointed at the places she was to sign, and she did as she was told, then he sat back and opened a book, leaving her to her thoughts.
She peered out the window as the plane came into land. Some sort of military airbase. The man with the papers stayed on the plane. An uncommunicative escort led her down the steps and to two more large looming men, alert and ready. “Mrs Greenshaw?” said one. “I’m Kev, and this is Sid. We’re your next ride.”
Greenshaw was the ninth name she’d had since she woke that morning. She had started the day as Kirilee Pritchard, become Kirilee Winterleaf by mid-morning, and taken on an identity she no longer remembered when she fled her new husband before noon. She had been given a different name on flight papers at every tiny air field. She supposed she would answer to Mrs Greenshaw until someone gave her an alternative.
The drive went on for what seemed like hours, on roads that climbed up and down steep cliffs and wound in and out of hills. It was full dark when the headlights caught the words Mangatehapu Primary School on a sign
“Be there soon,” Sid, who was driving, said over his shoulder. “Do they know she’s coming, Kev? They might be out.”
“I dropped Cheryl a bell,” Kev told him, “phoned her, I mean, Mrs Greenshaw.” He had kind eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled at Lee. “You’ll be pleased to be home.”
Lee shook her head, but admitted, “I’d be pleased to stay in one place for a while. How long? Do you know?”
“Not above forty-five minutes,” Sid assured her, while Kev said, at the same time, “No idea, Mrs Greenshaw. Could be months. They don’t tell us their little secrets, the undercover guys. But you’ll be safe on the farm. Cheryl will look after you. She’s solid, is Cheryl. And it’s a nice community, if I do say so myself.”