A December to Remember
Jenny Bayliss
For my siblings, Lindsay and Simon, without whom I would be lost. Love you xx
Prologue
Five Years Ago
Augustus Balthazar North chuckled to himself as he plucked the tiny, feathered cuckoo from the mechanism in the old clock and, using sticky tack, stuck a small wooden Monopoly house in its place. He closed the clock and stood back, satisfied.
“And that’s the last one hidden,” he said to his curiosity shop. “It’s down to you now to keep them safe.”
As though in answer, all forty clocks on the wall began to chime. Three sonorous tolls marked the lateness of the hour, and the moon peered in through the window for good measure. Artemis rubbed herself against the old man’s ankles, her long bouffant tail curling around one leg, then the other. Augustus smiled and looked down at her.
“That goes for you too, my faithful friend. And take good care of yourself while you’re at it, though I know you will.”
Artemis mewed and favored him with a long slow blink in response. She was a puffball of black fur with a circle of white around each eye as though she were wearing spectacles. She moved with the unhurried elegance and quiet intelligence of a feline librarian. Artemis belonged only to the curiosity shop, though she was fed and pampered by everyone in Rowan Thorp.
North Novelties & Curios had been passed down through the North family ever since Patience North had had the land put in trust for her by her father ahead of a promise of marriage, which never came to pass. Exasperated by her unwillingness to take a husband and her unfathomable yearning for independence—and secretly impressed by her tenacity—her father allowed her to open the shop in 1740. It was indeed a curious shop, packed to the rafters with miscellanea, trinkets, and bric-a-brac that time had rendered antique.
The shop smelled like old books, leather, woodsmoke, and the heady scent of incense sticks, which had seeped into the very fabric of the building.
Every inch of wall that wasn’t covered in display cabinets was hung with oil paintings or clocks: ornately carved Viennese pendulum clocks, old railway station clocks from India and Baltimore, and dainty hand-painted French enamelware clocks on long decorative chains. The paintings were an eclectic mix of Turner-like landscapes, flouncing Renaissance figures, and austere still lifes in the style of the Old Masters, which for all anyone knew may have been the real McCoy.
The shelves that housed the shop’s treasures were practically their own ecosystem. The curious flora and fauna of antiquities seemed to have grown organically down the centuries; it was hard to decipher, for example, where the black pearls began and the Georgian sugar tongs ended. The shop gave the impression of a place that had been carefully and haphazardly curated by a mischievous poltergeist, and who was to say that it hadn’t been?
The shop was lit by wall sconces and lamps dotted about, which bathed everything in a warm golden glow.
“Ah, how I love you,” Augustus cooed to his shop. “And I’ll miss you. But I have kept my other mistress waiting far too long!” He winked, and the shop seemed to sigh in response.
The clocks struck the quarter hour; time he was off. The open road was calling him to it as it so often did, and as always, he was powerless to resist. He took one last look around at his beloved curiosities. “Look after my girls.” He waggled a warning finger. “They will need you, mark my words.”
The old man pulled the door closed on the shop and locked it. Then he made his way slowly up the dark street to the solicitors’ office of Steele & Brannigan. An owl hooted. It was a clear night, the first hint of winter just discernible by the peppermint freshness in the air.
“Just in the nick of time.”
Augustus checked the seal on the thick brown envelope and posted his final instructions through the letterbox. “There,” he said. “That’s everything.”
As he strolled back the way he had come, he made sure to soak in the little high street, the home of his forebears, and commit it to memory. He glanced up at the darkened windows above the greengrocer’s and acknowledged his wistfulness tinged with regret, or it may have merely been the steak and kidney pudding he’d had for supper repeating on him. He was what he was, and he was too old to fight against it now.
He climbed into his trusty, crusty camper van, which had seen almost as many years as he had, and pulled slowly out of the village, following once more the siren call of fresh fields and far-off mountain roads waiting for him.
1
Present Day
Maggie, Simone, and Star’s father had died as he’d always wanted to: quietly and without ceremony, in his beaten-up van in the middle of a forest in the Italian Alps. His age, like the rest of him, had always been an enigma, though it surprised nobody to learn that he had died just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday; Augustus was one of those curious beings who seemed always to have been old and yet equally never to have aged.
In a handwritten note found tucked into his breast pocket, Augustus had bid farewell to his three estranged daughters and assured them that he had enjoyed a long and happy life, the memories of which he would carry with him into the next world.
The very existence of the note had broken Star’s heart. Maggie, the eldest of the three, had called her discordant sisters as soon as she’d received the news of their father’s passing.
“But that means he knew he was going to die,” Star, the youngest, had sobbed over the phone.
Maggie, who as firstborn was unwillingly cast in the role of materfamilias, tried her hardest to push conviction into her voice. “Not necessarily. He might have carried it around in his pocket for years, just in case,” she soothed.
“Dad never planned a thing in his life.” Star sniffed loudly. “He was a free spirit. No, he knew he was going to die, I know it. It’s too sad. I can’t think about it.”
Simone, the middle of the North sisters, had been less demonstrative in her grief upon receiving Maggie’s phone call, but Maggie could hear the shake in her voice.
“Was he—was he alone? When it happened?” Simone had asked.
“I believe so, yes. But the doctor I spoke to assured me that he died peacefully in his sleep. That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it?” It was hard to put a positive spin on the death of a parent, even one who had been absent for most of their lives, but she was giving it her best shot.
“I suppose so,” Simone had said. “I mean, I know we weren’t close for the last twenty-odd years, but even someone as careless with people as he was ought not to die alone . . .”
“He wanted it that way. No fuss. Just him and the mountains.”
Though it was the truth, saying the words didn’t bring Maggie peace.
* * *